UNITED STATES Interview with Kim Moody Labor Notes, now in its eighth year, is the voice of the independent labor movement in the United States. This monthly newsletter, a round-up of union and labor news contributed by union activists from all over the country, is dedicated to the goal stated in its slogan: "Let's put the movement back in the labor movement!"
Kim Moody, a full-time member of the Labor Notes staff, has been with the magazine since its inception. He is also Executive Director of the Labour Education and Research Project, which publishes Labor Notes.
The following interview was conducted in Chicago at the founding conference of the new revolutionary socialist organization, Solidarity.
Question. What do you see as the major trends in the US labor movement today? Are there some positive developments or just deterioration?
Answer. I think that the major obvious trend in the US labor movement in the last decade has been its decline as an organized force in American society. You can see this both in the decline of membership in the unions, particularly in some of the traditional areas of strength such as basic industry. You can see this in the declining political influence of the unions in American politics, in the Democratic Party and in American life in general.
Most recently, in the last six years, you can see it in the general trend for unions to give back many of the things that they had won in the period of the post-war social compact, in particular since the Chrysler settlement in 1979, when the United Auto Workers (UAW) as part of the bail-out plan gave the corporation major wage concessions. Since that time there has been a growing wave of concessions that, while it began in some of the more competitive and troubled industries, has really spread throughout industry and across most union and occupational lines.
This wave has had a tendency to change somewhat. In the earlier years concessions tended to be in the form of wage cuts, whereas now there is more emphasis on those kinds of contract concessions that increase competition among groups of workers. For example, a very popular employer demand of the last two years has been the two-tier wage system whereby new employees are paid less than the older employees. This is extremely popular for the obvious reason that it both divides young workers from older workers and saves the corporation a lot of money.
There have also been concessions on working conditions, which in some industries virtually allow plants within the same company, doing the same work, to bid for the work against each other. These are plants organized by the same unions, and they are bidding against each other over how many working conditions they can give away and how much new productivity they can promise the employer. This was implemented in the Ford Motor Company a few years ago and now it's becoming more common.
What has been given away in these concessions is not just a certain amount of money; they do not represent just a transfer of wealth to capital, although that is there too. What has been given away are a lot of the traditional mechanisms of solidarity that kept workers from competing with each other. For example, it is not just the size of a wage cut that the employers are concerned with. What they want is to be able to eliminate wage standardization. A frequently made demand of employers, although still a hard one to win is the kind of settlements that tie wages to the performance of the corporation, whether that's through stock ownership or some direct scheme that ties wages to profitability. This is harder to do, because it goes quite against the grain of even the bureaucratic institutions that we have here.
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As the unorganized working class, which is an ever-increasing majority, sees the unions giving everything away, it of course becomes more and more difficult for the unions to organize it. There are exceptions, but by and large the labor movement continues to stagnate.
Unlike Europe, there is no independent political organization or expres sion of labor. Consequently, as the labor movement becomes weaker, its ability to bargain becomes weaker, its ability to bargain within the context of American legislative politics nationally, but also at the state and local levels, has declined. In fact, if you look at the record, US labor has not won a significant legislative gain in decades. And now it is not even considered possible to propose a serious piece of legislation, with the sole exception of laws establishing protectionism, which is the major political fall-back policy of the leadership of the AFL-CIO. These leaders used to be for things like health insurance and full employment. Now their major political role is to promote protectionism.
Q. Can you describe for us some of the positive trends in the US labor movement today?
A. To begin with a little background, in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was something of a rank-and-file revolt throughout many of the unions in many industries. There was a lot of industrial unrest, symbolized at the time by the wildcat strikes at the Lordstown General Motors auto plant. There were national wildcats among truckers and postal workers and strike movements in the coalfields. It was a period of significant labor upheaval on the economic front. There was not a big political dimension to it, but it was quite militant.
The recession of the mid-1970s killed that militancy. And the ranks really did not have a chance to recover from that recession because it was followed by all those trends that we now associate with global crisis such as mergers and acquisitions, whereby your employer might change several times in a period of a few years. We can see this in the meat-packing industry and many other industries where the corporations became more aggressively international, the export of capital more important, particularly to the Third World, and competition sharper than it had been in the 1960s. So there was no chance for the rank and file to regain the confidence that it had acquired as a result of the post-war boom.
Then came the concessions, in auto in particular, in the wake of the 14
• NOTES
310.00 YEA
Let's Put the Movement Back in the Labor Movement"
Hormel Union Vows to Resist Despite
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APRIL 1988
International's Order to End Strike
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Pages 8. 7.49 on the locals executive sin theme and mend fences SIE 90 i bargaining posture nd fences with Scaril the Internatonal unton empt at comoration Hormelwants P9 Hormet did refected the local's at to stop is pb amnesis demands and agree to return to work tie do so Hormel promises only to plair strikers on a preterennal ind unanimousiv. a re the strike and bos resolsed in file surt turing hist for recall strike sanction angered and unified P.9 The Internationals withdrawal STRIKE TO CONTINUE of federal court. to quarter in Wast call on the labor the strike Some observ On March 16 al a meeung auended tional to respe members main on srike the umion pased almos Campbell Signs Co With Midwest Fart 500 at the 1300 P Yers who retrust laws. FLOC miner FLOCI signed 4 agreement with Campbell Soup Com many and 1g0hiw and Michigan farms the tarm Labor Organizing Com hy Thanne Feeiey three way position econom process corpoi mary IN The signing marks the farm story that farmworkers, • have negotiased Cam wear 1979 recession which I described earlier. What has happened, I think, in the last two or three years is that there has been something of a change in consciousness among certain sections of the organized working class. People who have experienced concessions already in the unionized sector have seen that they do not save jobs, they do not save plant closings, that despite promises to regain these things automatically through the next contract negotiations, they don't get them back, that far from stopping the employers' demands for concessions, once you grant them the employers only come back for more. And seeing all of this a certain resistance, a certain cynicism about the meaning of the concessions - a feeling of being taken to the cleaners and getting nothing out of it - has begun to grow.
There has also been something of an economic recovery in the last two or three years - it's quite anemic, of course, and by no means permanent -but it has helped stabilize the econo . my enough that people have felt that they could fight back. That, combined with their experience with the concessions, has meant that they have in fact started to fight back. There has been a whole series of rather hardfought strikes beginning perhaps with Phelps Dodge, moving through the AT Massey strike in the coal fields, the Wheeling-Pittsburgh steel strike, the General Dynamics strike in Detroit and the Watsonville strike in California. There have been a whole series in the local in trusteeship. the continuation of placing the Guyette said. "We are asking the test in announcing the Local Pay Press. (continued on page 14) p.g President Jim slution to continue the strike. oanner CFCW head. against the CFCW in angton. D.C.. and to The local also In This Issue: 2.3 movement to sland by Air Wars. demands by TWA Chairman Cart Flight attendants strike over nworkers ntract nd to these decisions by ers expect the Interna Icamn that they take greater con Philippine Labor. 8-9 cessions than other TWA ers rect concessions at Easier. and the artine is sold to the indus try's barracuda. Frank Lorenzo. Meanwhile. Machinists re work. on the usher hand, took the are under pines, out reporter discusses the two main Phrippine labor ledera Just back from the PhIlip c conscraints the large ins set. bell product over the pas seven that the growen aton not he initial contract establishes union mounted The union targeted the and paid union represen each boycott individual food of Blue Cross tions proaches io the economic coste in that country launch a campaign to organize Blue Cross ciancal workers The AFL CIO and their unions dittering and nine are about 16 at- 10
For wage. insurance once resolu- of of struggles including some with companies that are not financially sound, where basically the workers sme." Most of these strikes have lost in "This is the time to draw the the sense that they have not been able to defeat the concessions completely. Some of them - for example, the AP Parts strike in Toledo, Ohio -were able to minimize the losses.
Yet it is interesting that people don't always view these strikes as defeats. In this day and age if you don't lose your job, if the plant wasn't closed down and the union isn't decertified that's almost a victory. If we go out on strike and at least come back with what we had before, it's not altogether a loss. We did say "no" and perhaps the employers will think twice before they come back again. So there has been a sense that it was the time to draw the line.
Now, the struggle that has caught people's attention on a national scale is the meatpackers strike in Austin, Minnesota, against the Hormel Company. (1) The strike by Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) is the first struggle of this sort in a long time that has really captured the imagination of a lot of union activists. Help has come from all over the country. In Detroit, for example, a group of workers at Hygrade, a Detroit-based meat-packing company which had had
1. See Roger Horowitz, "Strike by Local P-9 stirs US labor," 'International Viewpoint', No. 96, April 7, 1986. viewpoint, No, 96, April 7, 1986.
International Viewpoint 5 May 1986
a strike earlier this year and lost fairly disasterously, are out there at their own plant collecting something like a thousand dollars a month for P.9. This has been going on in a lot of other local unions. A big Oscar Mayer [another large meatpacking company] local in Madison, Wisconsin, which is basically a conservative local, had a sort of shake-up of its leadership as a result of the P-9 strike and the polarization it has created particularly in some meatpacking locals. They have been sending tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of people up to Minnesota. And of course in the immediate area P-9 is getting a lot of support - more than I've seen in any other strike in a long time. There have been rallies all around the country. In New York just a couple of weeks ago there was a rally of 1,500 people in support of P-9. In Detroit we had one of 500 or • 600, 200 to 300 people in Cleveland and many other rallies around the country.
All of this is taking place in spite of the fact that P-9's international union has explicitly opposed the strike from the beginning. And now, more recently, it has desanctioned the strike, which means that it is no longer an official strike and P-9 does not get strike benefits from the union any more. It is completely on its own now.
Not only that, but the AFL-CIO Executive Council, which is the highest body of the federation, in what I think is almost an unprecedented action, has taken a position in support of the UFCW international against Local P-9 in its strike and has helped to circulate the document put out by the international union attacking P-9 in polemical terms -again something very unusual in the American labor movement. Usually these kinds of disputes are handled bureaucratically, quietly and in-house. This one is being handled publicly for everyone to see. An international vice president was sent onto national TV to debate Jim Guyette, the president of P-9, a debate in which Guyette came across as a perfectly sincere allAmerican guy and the man from the international came across as a usedcar salesman.
This kind of debate has turned up the heat a little in terms of the discussion in the labor movement. It's too soon to say what that will amount to, but there is definitely a lot of anger about the AFL-CIO's action against P-9.
So, I think that these kinds of strikes, even when they don't win, even when they lose fairly significantly, represent an important development. Even those who have lost, or gotten just a draw, who are not
International Viewpoint 5 May 1986 demoralized and out of the picture, see themselves very much as part of this movement against concessions. There has been a rise in a sort of solidarity consciousness among some locals, which is new for this country. It's not class consciousness, but it is a new broader kind of consciousness.
Q. Can you tell us something about Labor Notes and the role you envision for it in this period of possibly rising consciousness?
A. A few of us started Labor Notes in 1979, just before the concessions trend hit the labor movement here in the United States. But it was a time when it was apparent that the decline in the labor movement was becoming serious and that there was a need for an independent strong voice to present a counter-conception of unionism, a counter-conception of direction for the labor movement.
Labor Notes was seen at that time as specifically speaking to, and in a certain sense, for, the rank and file of the unions. It was not seen as being part of a particular political current, because in the US labor movement at that time there were no apparent political currents on the left or even any particularly militant currents. But we did see certain kinds of rank-and-file movements and groupings in a number of unions such as the TDU (Teamsters for a Democratic Union), the people who came out of the Sadlowski campaign in the Steelworkers, (2) the people who were trying to continue the democratic tradition in the Mine Workers and other unionists of that sort. Also in 1978, when the miners had their 110-day strike, there was a fair amount of solidarity work in support of that strike, which was something relatively new at the time. It was on a much smaller scale than anything that we are talking about today in terms of P-9 but it was real.
Some of us saw this as a positive sign, but we also saw the need for a publication that would begin to reinforce these trends. Just a few months after we had started Labor Notes the concession trend hit and our work became focused around that and around opposition to what is called here the non-adversarial orientation of unionism - that is, the tendency of the union leadership to try to create cooperative forms: labormanagement consultations, Quality of Work Life (QWL), etc., programs designed to tie the consciousness of the workers to the prospects of the corporations and to create "enterprise consciousness" rather than class, or trade-union, consciousness. We saw the concessions as being just a different form of the "carrot and the stick" tactic, the concessions being the stick and the QWL's being the carrot.
In getting the publication out we discovered that there was in fact a milieu of trade-union activists around the country who shared our concerns, at least in a general way. This was by no means a milieu limited to political leftists who were and are still a very small, marginal part of the US labor movement. It did include many of them as well, but it was broader than that, and still is.
Once we became aware of this milieu we saw the function of Labor Notes as trying to cohere it, to give it more of a sense of its own identity, to make itself-conscious, and therefore, more organized and more effecin its attempt to turn the labor movement in a different direction.
To implement that, we have held national conferences time. We've had three of them, each of which have drawn 600 to 700 people - about twice what we expected. They have been a bigger success than we had imagined, and they have become a popular thing in this labor milieu. Each conference has had a theme. The last one, for example, was on how to build solidarity work - broadly conceived, not just the technical question of bringing different unions together or raising money or mass picketing, but questions of crossing racial or sexual barriers, of class and hooking up with communities. The one before that, in 1983, was on the question of concessions itself.
I believe we were the first group to make the concessions phenomenon an issue in the labor movement. The labor bureaucracy has to this very day denied that the concessions trend is anything of any significance or impor ance or new or permanent or anything. Every year they predict that the last concession has been made. We said: "No, the concessions are a phenomenon that are part of the crisis that is going to be around for quite a while. It will not go away because the forces that are bearing on the employers are global and real. And labor has to develop new strategies to address that fact."
We also try to give an international dimension to all of these conferences, particularly the ones on concessions and solidarity, although it is hard to do that in practice. It generally is done through speakers. We've had representatives from the ANC (African National Congress) in
2. Ed Sadlowski, in 1977 the candidate for president of the United Steelworkers of America, headed a militant slate called Steelworkers Fight Back. They challenged the bureaucracy's list on the issues of union democracy and opposition to the union leadership's class collabontionism, and succeeded in winning 42 per cent of the vote.
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South Africa, from the trade unions in El Salvador, Brazil and other Latin American countries. Usually there are Europeans present. But, for the most part, conferences are based on US and Canadian participants. We have a fairly substantial Canadian circulation and input into our conferences. For example, during the concessions conference, the strike occurred at the Chrysler plant in Windsor, Ontario. The conference voted to take up a collection and send a delegation across the river to demonstrate solidarity.
We are now thinking about another conference. While we do not have the details worked out yet, it will obviously focus on the resistance that has grown to concessions and to other kinds of attacks on the working class. It will focus around the political questions that have been raised as a result of this tremendous attack by the labor bureaucracy on P-9 on the one hand, and the significant response in support of P-9 from the rank and file and local level of the labor movement on the other hand. We will try to design a conference that will help to give these struggles a little more coherence than they have had, to make them more aware of themselves as a national phenomenon. We will hope in that way to move the struggle a little bit forward.
Our conferences are not just organized by the staff. We get together a committee of trade-union people from the Detroit area, people from different industries, shop-floor people -I'm not talking about officials necessarily. They become the conference organizing committee; they help design the program. Of course, the staff is involved too. We feel that in this way there is more of a dialogue between people actually engaging in 16 these struggles and ourselves. That has been the method of the last three and undoubtedly will be of the next one as well.
Q. What is the circulation of Labor Notes? And what sections of the industrial working class account for most of the circulation? A. The paid circulation of Labor Notes is now about 5,000. We reach about 65 unions, but our greatest strength has been in the traditional industrial unions - the Auto Workers, the Steelworkers, the Teamsters, the Electrical Workers. In the last three or four years we have increased both our circulation and network among service employee unions as well. We have always had some participation from those unions but it has grown a lot recently. Q. What has been the participation of women either from the traditional industrial sectors or now from the service industries in your conferences? A. We always try to make it a point to maximize the participation of women both as speakers and as participants. We don't invite the participants. We invite the speakers, and the workshop leaders and participants are those who show up. It is hard for me to say exactly. I can't say that it is 50 per cent women. It is more like one-third. One of the problems with this has been that in the early years of the concessions fight, the resistance was largely in the traditional industries like steel, coal mining, and so forth, where there are women, but very few of them. And of course as layoffs and restructuring hit, a lot of those women were driven out of those industries. So there was a tendency in the earlier conferences for them to be heavily male.
In terms of national minority participation, there too we made it a conscious effort, and I think things have improved. At the last two conferences we had officially organized Black caucuses, and at the last conference the Black caucus became an ongoing group called the Black Rank-and-File Exchange, which helps us determine policy. It's quite small -I don't want to exaggerate this - as is our staff, but it has been an impor tant development for us. The assessment of Black participation at the last conference was basically pretty positive.
This is less true in terms of Hispanics, though we now have a number of Hispanic labor activists who are working with us. I think this is due to where we are regionally. Our conferences are always in Detroit, which is not a large Hispanic area. It would be somewhat different if they were held in New York, Los Angeles or even Chicago, for that matter. It is true that the largest single group that comes to our conferences is from Detroit. We will get 100 people from the UAW. Q. You mentioned having had a representative of South Africa. What has been the response among the labor activists here to the struggles in South Africa and to what is going on now in the development of the South African trade-union movement? PA. We have covered South Africa fairly consistently for the past few years. In fact, we make a point of international coverage - the Philippines, Central America, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa are places that we attempt to cover regularly. The South African issue has of course, become a very big one with the movement for disinvestment. The labor movement has officially endorsed this movement and its position. It is increasingly true that references to South Africa come up again and again in rank-and-file situations. People understand the role of their own corporations in South Africa. It has come up in the P-9 strike that Hormel is taking money out of Minnesota and putting it in South Africa. The political link has been made and is evident to the workers. When coal miners at AT Massey, which has large South African holdings, went out on strike, they went so far as to hire a South African to work among their membership to dramatize this issue and to organize a campaign around it with a South African trade unionist as a speaker. And most recently Shell Oil has been officially boycotted by the AFL-CIO. This did not start at the top, but rather came out of that particular struggle as well.
International Viewpoint 5 May 198E