News and Letters Editorial June 1998

THE STATE'S HAND IN TEAMSTER VOTE

Despite the powerful forces arrayed against them, U.S. workers continue to battle. That the rank and file is eager to get organized and to support an aggressive leadership was dramatically demonstrated by the successful Teamsters' strike against UPS last year under the leadership of Ron Carey. That victory inspired workers in other industries, aching to confront management to resolve long-standing health, safety, production and wage issues.

The UPS victory, however, set off alarm signals in corporate board rooms across the nation as well as in Congress. Furthermore, Carey and his top aides opened the door to hostile forces by misappropriating union funds during Carey' s re-election campaign against James Hoffa Jr. whose candidacy represents a return to paternal and business unionism. Anger over conditions at UPS, often as horrific as before the strike, and inside locals where reform has not come, have opened the door further.

HANDING UNION TO HOFFA

Findings of misappropriation of funds and perjury resulted in the nullification of the 1996 election won by Carey over Hoffa, and the disqualification of Carey to run in the rerun election slated for this fall or whenever Congress okays funding. Many predict Hoffa will win over his opponent, Tom Leedham, head of Teamsters' warehouse division, even though candidates supporting Hoffa were decisively defeated in recent elections held in large Teamster locals in the midwest and south.

A subsequent investigation of Hoffa' s campaign revealed that he too was guilty of misappropriation of funds and perjury, precisely the same charges brought against Carey, but Hoffa was not disqualified from running. Clearly, a different standard was used for Carey.

This tilt toward the more pliant alternative follows a pattern of government efforts to stifle labor militancy. Measures proposed in Congress and at least five state legislatures and referendums would require union members to give written consent each year for the use of union funds in political election campaigns. This is shaping up as a major political battle in California where it has been submitted as a referendum, Proposition 226.

LAWS TO BEAT DOWN LABOR

The battle arsenal of capital is also stocked with many legal weapons developed since the near-general strike right after World War II. The l947 Taft-Hartley Act, the McCarran Act, and the national transportation act are major measures designed to club militancy into submission. Today, as conditions for poor and working families worsen, anti-immigration laws drive undocumented workers further underground, welfare reform laws force mostly women on assistance into minimum or sub-minimum wage jobs, and the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) encourages outsourcing of jobs.

While the frantic pace of megamergers in telecommunications, banking, and industry trumpet the triumph of the so-called free market, behind the scenes stands the silent partner, the state. One reporter had it right when analyzing the mammoth $40 billion merger of what is now called DaimlerChrysler. Peter Passell suggested that the Daimler-Chrysler deal may be a " model for global capitalism" as a study of " just how ' free' free markets really are," and pointed out that " Hitler, Eisenhower, Adenauer, Carter, all figure in any honest history" of this biggest industrial merger ever (NEW YORK TIMES, May 10, 1998).

Rationalization of the economy, always state-assisted, carries two features, layoffs and speed-up. Furthermore in the 1990s, reorganization follows global lines. In the case of DaimlerChrysler, the relatively higher standard of living of German workers will fall to that of their North American counterparts, and both will approach that of cheap, Third World assemblers. Globalization exacerbates already existing pressures to lower the cost of labor in the aggregate. Already the average minimum wage worker is not a teenager, but someone who provides more than half a family' s weekly earnings. Today' s minimum wage, when adjusted for inflation, is actually much less than a minimum wage worker made 30 years ago.

That' s not to say growing dissatisfaction among workers in other industries isn' t erupting. Mississippi catfish processors have walked out over company abuses and union neglect (a first). Northwest Airlines machinists have staged a slowdown. Budweiser workers have authorized a strike. Postal workers scheduled a one-day informational picket. Non-unionized McDonald' s workers in Ohio struck (also a first) over employee harassment. And the three-year Detroit newspaper strike-lockout continues.

These actions are taking place throughout the nation every day, but we usually don' t hear about them due to the conspiracy by the mass media to ignore working class actions. This makes a newspaper like NEWS & LETTERS all the more important, for workers speak here in their own words about their own struggles which sound all the louder when raised in the context of a philosophy of revolution.

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