 |
| Associated Industries wanted to portray organized labor as hostile to American values. This advertisement appeared on November 1, 1919 in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and was intended to take advantage of heightened patriotic feeling in advance of Armistice Day. It's a fascinating document that shows that the right wing attack on the agency shop has a lineage going back a century to the ultimately successful attempt to destroy the closed shop. |
Note: We are responding here to a series of comments to
Frank Brenner’s article,
Reply to Commenters
A few points in response to the comments;
A couple of the commenters (Anonymous and Christie)
have made the essential point about this contemptible position of the SEP. The
Janus decision is above all else an attack on the collective bargaining rights
of ALL workers, not just a crimp in the finances of the union bureaucracy. By
endorsing this decision the SEP has gone over to the side of Right to Work and
of the cabal of reactionary ideologues and billionaires like the Koch brothers
who organized the campaign to push the Janus case to the Supreme Court. Eric
London ignores these issues and the political context of the Janus case; the
Koch brothers don’t even rate a mention in his several lengthy comments. As has
been pointed out, the SEP position amounts to a classic case of throwing out
the baby (the democratic rights of workers to organize collectively) with the
bathwater (the union bureaucracy). It also amounts to crossing a class line by
supporting a major legal attack on working class rights. As I argued in my
post, on the basis of this position the SEP is now an openly anti-working class
organization.
I think it's important, however, to underscore that the
SEP did not arrive at this position by accident or that it represents a sudden
departure. Go back to what Alex and I wrote in 2007, in particular to our
analysis of North's lecture, Marxism and the Trade Unions, and you’ll see that
the groundwork for this betrayal was already there. North starts out with a
correct assessment that globalization has brought about a severe degeneration
of the labor movement but he then takes what is essentially a conjunctural
crisis and inflates it into a supposedly universal truth. The problem isn’t
just unions in the era of globalization; the problem is the VERY FORM of unions
themselves. “The organic development of trade unionism,” he declares,
“proceeds, not in the direction of socialism, but in opposition to it.” This
thesis is concocted out of a travesty of dialectics, and to say the least, it
is sharply at odds with the attitude Marxists have traditionally taken towards
unions.
A further point worth noting: the reactionary
implications of this thesis apply not just to unions. As we pointed out, it can
be wielded to renounce “any formation of the working class that arises
SPONTANEOUSLY WITHIN CAPITALISM”. Precisely because of their spontaneous
character, such formations will start out by accepting the limits of capitalism
and seek to bargain for better conditions within the system: for example, a
factory committee will seek to be a militant and honest alternative to the
official union or else (in a non-union plant) try to establish itself as a
union. And to the extent that these committees remain bound by spontaneity –
i.e. to the extent that they remain cut off from a revolutionary socialist
perspective – then it is certainly true that their ‘organic’ development will
ultimately be in a reactionary direction [as North claims]. But one might as
well say the same thing about spontaneous consciousness as such: it is
bourgeois consciousness, as Lenin informed us long ago. But this is hardly the
end of the matter as far as Marxists are concerned: formations like factory
committees are also BATTLEGROUNDS IN THE STRUGGLE FOR SOCIALIST CONSCIOUSNESS.
But this is what North’s ‘formalism’ deliberately obscures.”
This explains a glaring incongruity in SEP propaganda.
Every article on labor issues ends with a call for the formation of “rank and
file committees” as an alternative to the unions - and yet despite issuing
these calls now for upwards of 13 years, there isn’t a single example they can
point to of the formation of such a committee. So this is nothing more than
empty rhetoric, a fig leaf to cover up the SEP’s long record of abstentionism
with regard to the struggles of the working class.
But the truth is that even if such committees emerged -
as they well might in this period - the SEP’s sectarian politics will be
instinctively hostile to them. And North’s thesis will serve to rationalize
that hostility, since after all; the “organic development” of any spontaneous
movement of the working class within capitalism will be “not in the direction
of socialism, but in opposition to it.” You get a foretaste of this hostility
in the disgusting way the SEP has reacted to #MeToo, with North and company’s
willful blindness to the social scourge of sexual abuse, including as it
affects working class women.
A last point: I said in my post that socialists
intervene in unions to the extent that members of those unions retain important
gains that still need to be defended. The Janus decision is a dangerous attack
on those gains, but SEP supporters like London deny such gains even exist,
which is a big part of how they justify endorsing the Supreme Court’s union-busting.
In one of the points in his legal brief-type indictment of my post, London asks
rhetorically: “What are the rights and gains workers have won in the last 40
years due to the struggles led by unions?” He obviously feels that the answer
is self-evident, but what the question actually demonstrates is how out of
touch he and his party are with the working class.
One of the comments mentioned Bureau of Labor
Statistics about the advantages of having a union compared to not having one.
Here are some specific figures from those stats:
The wage premium for union work was 26 percent as of
2015, which means that unionized workers made on average 26 percent more than
non-unionized workers for the same type of work. This wage premium was more
pronounced for women and minorities. Female union members earned 33 percent
more than their non-union counterparts. Hispanics doing full-time work earned
on average 47 more in a union than out of it, and African-Americans earned 30
percent more.
The gap between union and non-union work is also
evident in access to benefits. 94 percent of unionized workers have a pension,
compared to 64 percent of non-union workers. For medical plans, the numbers are
95 percent compared to 68 percent. For paid sick leave, it’s 85 percent
compared to 62 percent. For life insurance, it’s 86 percent compared to 56
percent.
Of course these numbers only paint a very general
picture and they don’t disclose the deprivations that four decades of
corporatist ‘business unionism’ have inflicted on union members. In particular
statistical averages gloss over bureaucratic crimes like two-tier wage systems.
Nonetheless, these numbers are not nothing. Especially in public sector unions,
and especially in blue states like New York and California, these numbers
reflect important gains that millions of workers have managed to preserve. They
represent the difference between a minimally decent standard of living and
perpetual drudgery. Which is why the Right to Work forces have been so
persistent in their efforts to outlaw the agency shop and break up this last
remaining stronghold of unionization. The SEP may not recognize the existence
of these gains, but the Koch brothers certainly do.
A party so blithely indifferent to what matters to
workers is one whose politics have gone off the deep end. The scratch of
sectarianism has become gangrenous. The SEP is an organization that has gone
over to the side of the enemies of the working class.
Frank Brenner
Reply to Eric London
Mr. London asks 10 questions that are
either beside the point or are variations of a “When did you stop beating your
wife?” type question. For instance, take this one,
The SEP calls for the formation of rank and file committees
in the
work place, totally independent of the union. Why do you oppose this
policy?
work place, totally independent of the union. Why do you oppose this
policy?
We never said we opposed the slogan for
rank and file committees. In fact we raised it even before the SEP did in the
course of our critique of their conduct during the New York Transit Workers
strike of 2005. What we opposed is the SEP’s use of this slogan as a subterfuge
for their real position, which is indifference and hostility to the existing
struggles of the working class, struggles which they contrast unfavorably to an
idealized working class that exists only in their imagination.
I would like to ask Mr. London a couple of
questions:
Do you maintain that workers are better off without
being represented by a union than when they are unionized?
If so how do you account for the big difference in
wages and benefits of workers in Right To Work states to workers who at least
have the protection of a union contract?
The position of the SEP/WSWS defended by
Mr. London has been a long time coming, evolving over the past 25 years as
Frank has mentioned. The WSWS
unqualified labelling of all unions as “reactionary” in 1993 opened the door to
what was later enshrined as a policy of abstentionism when it came to struggles
of the working class. This was further
solidified by a talk given by David North in 1998 where he made the claim that
the very form of a union guarantees that it will have a reactionary content.[1] We analyzed the philosophical muddle North created to justify this position in
our document ‘Marxism Without its Head or its Heart’ back in 2007. [2]
The logical conclusion of this drift over
the past years is now evident in the celebration of the WSWS over the Janus
decision. The Janus decision must be
understood in its historical context. It
is a landmark legal decision that puts shackles on the efforts of public
employee unions to survive. It is a
direct descendant of the infamous Taft Hartley Act of 1947 which made the
closed shop illegal in the United States and placed massive restrictions on the
ability of unions to take actions in defense of its members, including severely
limiting the right to strike. The agency
shop was a compromise that survived after the closed shop was declared illegal. With the agency shop state and local
government employees were charged a fee whether they were members of the union
or not in return for the union representing them in collective bargaining
agreements. Now that last vestige of
legal protection for unions is gone.
Mr. London’s argument focuses on the
automatic dues checkoff as providing a mechanism that lets the union
bureaucracy escape accountability to its members. But Mr. London misses the
bigger issue here which is that it is inconceivable that any membership
organization can survive in this day and age without some kind of automatic
dues paying system. This is the 21st
century and the time is long past when it was possible for shop stewards to
collect dues from their members by walking around the shop floor and listening
to every individual grievance. You
cannot force unions to be accountable to their members by restricting them to the
methods and technology of the early 20th century, long before online banking
and Internet transactions were possible. Not to mention that today’s “shop floor” is
likely to be a virtual “shop floor” in a rented office space many miles away
from the headquarters of the agency the worker is logging into. It’s an
absurdity. To force unions to be
accountable to its members is a political question, not a technical one.
Furthermore, as much as we may oppose the
actions of the labor bureaucracy you cannot fight their influence by starving
the unions. And to cheer on a legal
action imposed on the unions by the bourgeois state that cripples the unions is
a betrayal of class solidarity.
Mr. London raises the SEP’s slogan of “rank
and file committees” as evidence that the SEP is not anti-working class, just
anti-union. Again, this specious argument is a reflection of the sectarian
mindset that dreams of an idealized working class which it then contrasts to
the actual working class who come with all the baggage of a class divorced from
socialist politics for three generations, including those messy unions.
The SEP’s supposed campaign for rank and
file committees is a complete fraud meant to deflect criticism for their
abandonment of the working class. In the
13 years during which they have raised this slogan, we have yet to see evidence
of a single rank and file committee emerging anywhere.
In reply to Anonymous, who pointed out
quite correctly that in years past the WSWS claimed to oppose Right to Work
laws, London finds a distinction between RTW laws and the dues checkoff
system. He quotes from an article from
2015,
“Republican-backed right-to-work laws are
anti-worker and aimed at blocking any collective resistance to the
corporations. That being said, workers have every reason to stop paying the UAW
for the “privilege” of being sold out.” [3]
But what this statement elides is the
difference between a rank and file revolt from below and a state-imposed
mandate that encourages the more backward workers to leave the union. Right to work laws have as their primary
goal the elimination of the automatic dues checkoff and that in turn is a key
part of a strategy to break the back of the last bastion of unionized workers
in the U.S., the public employee unions.
Saying you oppose RTW but support its result makes no logical sense. The
logical conclusion was indeed finally drawn by the SEP/WSWS with its June 28
article on the Janus decision. You will not find a single statement in that
article opposing RTW.
An Anonymous commenter on our article hit
the nail on the head when he or she wrote,
“In the Janus case in particular, the
process and context matters. Even if we accept the very dubious argument that
banning the agency shop is a good thing for the working class, it was achieved
not by an initiative and activism by the workers from below but via a legal
case brought by corporate-financed right-wing activists and endorsed by the
most reactionary wing of the capitalist Supreme Court. You don't need to be an
apologist for the union bureaucracy to oppose textbook union-busting from
above, which Janus was a clear example of.”
Finally, I want to comment on
Mr. London’s use of the “free speech” argument to defend the WSWS position in
support of the Janus decision. London writes,
“Why should workers not have the right to withhold dues from the union
if they are dissatisfied with the policies and performance of the
organization?”
if they are dissatisfied with the policies and performance of the
organization?”
This argument is no different
than the one voiced in the majority opinion of the Janus case written by
Justice Alito. He wrote that the collection of agency fees,
“…violates the free speech rights of
non-members by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of
substantial public concern.”
Justice Kagan, in her
dissenting opinion, referred to the majority opinion as an example of “Weaponizing the First Amendment” and she
was absolutely right to do so. In recent
years right wing forces have been using “free speech” arguments as a bludgeon
against the working class, a phenomenon recently noted in an article in the New
York Times. [4]
The right of free speech is a
philosophical and legal maxim that has a long history. Its origins go back to
the 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose essay On
Liberty has been cited by both liberals and reactionaries over the
years. The “free speech” argument has
been used to justify the “right” of scabs to sabotage strikes. It has also been used to justify the right of
racists and fascists to spread their poison. It is thus not surprising that it
played a prominent role in the arguments before the Supreme Court to justify
the campaign of extreme right enemies of the working class to place legal shackles on their right to organize.
The principle of free speech,
as developed by Mill, is based on the myth of the atomistic individual in
bourgeois society. And that society in
which this individual is supposed to exist is a legal fiction - a society shorn
of class divisions. While the right to voice opinions and express them publicly
is an essential part of any form of democratic society, when that right is
deemed to be absolute, as it is by right wing “free speech” advocates, then it
comes into direct conflict with other rights.
The necessity to limit this “absolute right” is often recognized in law
by citing the example of someone who yells “Fire” in a crowded theater.
But what about the scab? Does
the principle of class solidarity not also have a claim on our conduct? Although this principle has absolutely no
recognition in bourgeois law, it is inconceivable that the working class can
defend itself, let alone go on the offensive, without it. It is no problem for
right wing advocates of “free speech” to defend scabs and fascists since they do
not recognize the right of the working class to defend itself. Any organization based on class solidarity
understands this principle implicitly. It is incumbent on any such organization
to impose some sort of discipline on its more backward members; otherwise you
would have to argue that scabs have just as much right to break a strike as
militants do to engage in them. And indeed this is exactly what right wing
anti-union forces argue, while at the same time hypocritically engaging in
actions that would prevent militants from exercising their right to strike.
The real political forces
behind the arcane legal arguments in the Janus vs AFSCME case were recently
exposed in an article in The Intercept,
which cited an umbrella organization, the State Policy Network, as coordinating
the actions of all the right wing anti-union groups in the country.
State Policy Network member think tanks generally do not disclose
their donors. Several are generously funded by foundations controlled by
billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch. The Texas Public Policy
Foundation, the State Policy Network affiliate in Texas,
inadvertently revealed its donor list several
years ago. The donor list included foundation grants from the Koch Industries,
AT&T, Verizon, Altia, Geo Group, Exxon Mobil, Coca-Cola, Blue Cross Blue
Shield of Texas, and the Claude Lambe Charitable Foundation, a nonprofit
controlled by the Kochs, among others. State Policy Network refers to its
donors as “investors.”
The post-Janus effort to decimate unions features specially tailored
opt-out campaigns taking aim at organized University of California employees; teachers unions in
Tulsa, Oklahoma; and AFSCME Council 2, which includes sewer
district, county, and librarian workers throughout the state of Washington;
among other public sector unions. [5]
These are the forces the WSWS finds itself in
agreement with.
For all their left bluster, the WSWS may as well be
joining with the Koch brothers in dancing on Joe Hill’s grave.
Alex Steiner
[2] Marxism Without
its Head or its Heart, Chapter 5, Marxism and the Unions: the Evolution
of a Correct Analysis: http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch05.pdf,
pages 129-132.
