Open Mic Section

Dan La Botz* discusses public workers’ struggles in the US and the potential to develop a ‘new’ workers movement.

A new American workers Movement has Begun in Africa

Thousands of workers demonstrated in Madison, Wisconsin on February 15th and 16th to protest plans by the state’s Republican Governor, Scott Walker, to remove public workers’ union rights. Walker attempted to divide public workers by excluding police and firefighters from his anti-union law. The media also worked to divide public from private sector workers. Yet, both firemen and private sector workers joined public workers in one of the largest workers demonstrations in the United States in decades.

Not What We Expected

Many of us, had expected a rank-and-file workers movement to arise out of shop floor struggles in industrial workplaces and fights for union democracy. While that perspective still has much validity, the new movement that is arising is focusing on political and programmatic issues usually taken up by political parties such as workers right collective bargaining, the state budget priorities, and the tax system which funds the budget. The new labor movement began in the public sector and is about how class struggle finds a voice through political programme. This has implications for relations between the organised labor movement and the Democratic Party, especially since Democrats like Barack Obama demand that public employees give up wages, benefits, conditions and rights.

Not Your Grandfather’s Working Class

We have, for decades thought of the working class as being railroad, mine and mill workers, who produced the wealth of this nation in the first factories opened in the Northeast in the 1790s. Industrial workers have declined as a percentage of the population since the 1920s. By the 1980s the decline of industrial workers as a proportion of the wage earning class was dramatic. In the old days, skilled workers, almost all white men, came as immigrants from Western and Northern Europe, while the unskilled industrial workers were immigrants from South and Eastern Europe, whites from Appalachia, and African Americans from the South’s plantations. While most of those industrial workers were male, millions of women toiled in textile mills, garment shops, and other workplaces. Those workers created the Knights of Labor in 1869, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886, and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905. Finally, in the great labor upsurge in the 1930s they won the legal right to organize with he Wagner Act of 1935 and built the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO).

The Rise of the Public Employees

The post-world war II period saw the expansion of government as millions found jobs in sanitation, the water works; as teachers, social workers, public health nurses, and college professors. Another labor upsurge in the 1960s and 1970s led to the rapid growth of public employee unions: the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA), the American A New American Workers Movement Has Begun in Africa Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE). These public workers were more racially diverse than many of the private sector unions, made up of white, African American, and Latino workers, of men and many women. Public employees in the 1960s and 70s won the rights to union recognition, collective bargaining, and the strike – through hundreds of strikes held during those 20 years. The most famous of these strikes, was the AFSCME Local 1733 strike by African American sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of the civil rights movement, was helping the striking workers when he was assassinated.

Unions at a Turning Point

Today the labor movement is at a turning point public worker unions have come under attack from US employers, political parties, and government at all levels. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, confirms that only 12% of all workers are unionized, with only 7% in the private sector. In the public sector, the unions represent 36% of all workers, and the number is higher among teachers. Public employees, now find themselves on the front-line of the labor movement, as Republican and Democratic party governors and local officials want to strip workers of their rights.

What Movement Can We Expect?

We learn from history that when masses of workers move into motion, as they have now begun to do, political consciousness grows and changes rapidly. Workers who today simply fight to defend their union rights will, if they succeed, fight to expand their rights, to improve their working conditions and standard of living. Most importantly, workers will fight to expand their power.

Secondly, when workers discover the strategy and tactics of their movement, this quickly spreads to other workers in society. When the rubber workers in Akron, Ohio discovered the sit-down strike in 1936, it quickly spread to the auto industry leading to the great strikes of 1937-38. Remarkably, the sit-down strike spread to such unlikely workers as the “shop girls” of department stores. During the 1950s and early 1960s, African American civil rights activists rediscovered the power of the sitdown, transforming it into the sit-in in lunch counters, bus stations, and other private and public places across the South. Today public workers in Wisconsin are in search of strategies and tactics that can defend their rights, and they are using the mass rally and the camp out at the capital. When they discover or rediscover the strategy and tactics that work, those will spread to other public workers – and the private sector.

The separation between the economic and the political struggle is artificial. Industrial workers’ struggles for higher wages in the 1930s became transformed into a struggle for the recognition of unions and labor legislation on the right to organize. Today, there is a political fight in Wisconsin,to defend public employees’ right to a labor union, to bargain collectively and to enjoy the right to strike. This will become a struggle for health and pension benefits.

A Political Alternative

A labor movement will arise, of new, younger leaders who will either force union officials to fight or push them aside. Such a movement will change the unions – often changing the leadership and the very institutions themselves. The industrial workers movement in the 1930s broke the old AFL to create the new CIO. But, whether the new labor movement will have the power to put forward a political alternative, and force the Democratic Party to give up its conservative budget, tax and labor policies, or seek another vehicle, remains to be seen. Wisconsin has a long history of political groupings of considerable influence to the left of the Democratic Party. The Socialist Party held power in Milwaukee in the 1960s, the Farmer-Labor Party was once a power in the state, Progressive Dane (county) thrived a couple of decades ago, and the Wisconsin Green Party has over twenty elected officials throughout the state. While this doesn’t mean workers’ political power, the presence of such political alternatives is indicative of a more tolerant and experimental attitude within the state. Historically, US workers have never created a workers’ party of any power. Today, with the Democrats lowering taxes for therich, cutting budgets, and retrenching public employees, this may produce a political alternative. The task at the moment is to defend public services and public employees unions and their rights, but this itself leads to political confrontation.