Lead article
May, 1999

Labor revolt and solidarity greet automation's 50th exploitative year

by Andy Phillips, Co-author of THE COAL MINER'S GENERAL STRIKE OF 1949-50 AND THE BIRTH OF MARXIST-HUMANISM IN THE U.S.

Detroit-Longshoremen shut down ports along the entire west coast April 24 in solidarity with U.S. political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. On that day, they led a march by thousands in San Francisco demanding a new trial for him. These events, a week before May 1, came the closest as any to the spirit of May Day in the U.S. this year.

At the same time the cause for Mumia finds a solid grounding in the political consciousness of labor, a further challenge emerged naturally from their demand: Where is labor's support for Mumia in Philadelphia where Mumia was seized, tried, and sentenced to death?

Both the new political consciousness and the tasks remaining present something of what's new in labor in 1999. The globalization of production, the rise of service industries, and deepening of economic and social crises comprise the context for the rise of new voices among workers, as well as new contradictions.

NEW INDUSTRIES, NEW MILITANCY

The growth of the service industry has exposed new kinds of alienation and given rise to new militancy. Often the positions are filled by immigrants and women who bring activist attitudes with them. Most recently 73,000 health care workers in California joined the Service Employees union, the biggest union victory since the birth of industrial unionism in the U.S. when autoworkers in Flint, Mich. conducted a new kind of strike, the sit-down.

In the transportation industry, 19,000 United Airlines workers signed with the Machinists Union. Northwest Airlines employees also won important gains, as did Philadelphia transit workers and GM workers in Ohio and Michigan.

The nation's clear and expanding gap between rich and poor has inspired new alliances. Students are increasingly participating in campaigns to organize university employees, as well as participating in organizing Chicago home health care workers and building national support for California Strawberry workers.

At more than 30 universities, students have forced administrators to assure that any item for sale carrying a school logos is produced by workers at a living wage and in safe conditions, targetting Third World sweatshops. Student employees themselves have organized and struck at public institutions across the nation.

Among the most promising developments is in the deep South, where in the early l990s Black women workers at the Delta Pride catfish operations in Mississippi vowed to end plantation conditions and carry union organization to other workers in the region-and to complete what the Civil Rights Movement left unfinished.

In fact, unresolved conflicts have continued to this moment, the most formidable being a question posed 50 years ago: What kind of labor should a human being do?

NEW STAGES OF PRODUCTION, REVOLT

That question was raised in the heat of an historical general strike. The strike erupted against the effects of automation where it was first introduced into the labor process, the coal fields of West Virginia and Kentucky. The weight of new laws against labor organization and of company violence and even of out-of-step union leaders could not suppress, and indeed inspired, such questioning.

A frightened Congress passed the Taft-Hartley slave labor act in l947 to cripple labor power in the wake of the near general strikes that swept the nation in major industries. In both 1947 and '48 when the miners went on strike President Truman invoked Taft-Hartley against them, declaring a national emergency that resulted in throwing Mineworkers union President John L. Lewis into prison and fining the union millions of dollars for breaking the law.

In l949 Lewis changed his tactics, ordering a three-day workweek and selective regional strikes to deplete coal reserves and avoid Taft-Hartley, since no national emergency could be declared. After six months of reduced work weeks, in-again out-again work periods and on-again off-again contract talks, miners in northern West Virginia refused Lewis' order to return to work in January of l950.

After a series of mass rank-and-file meetings, a rank-and-file organization created by the miners through which they reached decisions and carried them out themselves took control of the strike away from Lewis.

In the following month-and-a-half, against the opposition of Lewis and the union bureaucracy, the press, courts, police, coal operators and President Truman, the miners accomplished the following: They established committees to spread the strike nationally, closing all union and non-union mines; enlisted students who sent letters to national labor organizations to solicit aid; set up a Miners Relief Committee and sent striking miners to speak to local unions in the East and Midwest, forging links of solidarity with steel, rubber, and auto workers, resulting in financial aid as well as truckloads of food and clothing; established and operated food and clothing distribution centers; discovered a way to protect Lewis, the union and miners from the Taft-Hartley act (since a law could not be passed against an individual, each miner took it upon himself to stay out);and forced the operators to negotiate a contract.

The March 3 contract won wage and benefit improvements, but not what the miners wanted. They knew automation, in the form of a truck-size instrument called "the continuous miner," would further dehumanize working conditions, reduce the work force, and hurt and maim miners. They called it a "man-killer." Their frame of reference was their lives, not a contract.

On the minds of many was that question: What kind of labor should a human being do? Before, it had been: What should be the fruits of one's labor? translated into wages and benefits. It renewed the vision of putting an end to the division between mental and manual labor itself, the hallmark of capitalist production which Karl Marx described over a hundred years ago.

A Marxist theoretician, Raya Dunayevskaya, who stayed with a mining family during the strike, caught the significance of what the miners had brought onto the historic stage, seeing the todayness of Marx's philosophy in their actions. She posited their practice as a form of theory itself. Connecting Marx's philosophy with today's labor consciousness called for a new philosophy, Marxist-Humanism, which was to become the basis for a new type of revolutionary organization, News and Letters Committees.

CONTRADICTIONS WON'T GO AWAY

The ramifications of automation and the contradictions of capitalist society have only grown. The miners' fears of automation came true, with employment in coal slashed from 500,000 in the mid-'50s to less than 100,000 today, with the same effects in other industries as automation swept through them.

Labor productivity has increased under the whip of technology, layoffs and unpaid labor time done by more and more workers and consumers. Technology has succeeded in transferring labor time from workers to consumers, nowhere more frustratingly clear than in voice mail. It is nearly impossible to talk to a human being at a company or city office. Callers are routed through a maze of time-consuming push-button directions-all at the consumers' time and with the loss of jobs.

Other unpaid time runs from factories where workers do set up and clean up on their own time, to office workers who start an hour early and take work home in what is becoming a 12-hour workday, but are paid for eight hours. These unpaid hours amount to billions in extra profits-and affect productivity measurements.

Every worker knows that employers implement new technology to lower labor costs, driving down wages and throwing people out of work. While national unemployment is at a low 4.2%, not included in the data are those who have dropped out of the job market, who have two or more jobs, or are in the military or in prison. And in inner cities, unemployment often exceeds 50%.

Cheapened imports from Asia, Latin America and Russia and reduced exports to these economically devastated countries have decimated U.S. agriculture, textile and steel industries, with steel employment now at 170,000, down from 500,000.

Since the first strike against automation revealed divergent class interests between workers and the labor bureaucracy, the divisions have widened. Thanks to concessionary contracts, workers face two or more tier wages, team work schemes where workers criticize and discipline each other, interplant competition for jobs, loss of seniority protections, ignored health and work grievances, forced overtime when others are laid off, and unbridled technological changes and outsourcing that lead to inhuman speed-up, injury, and plant closings.

In strikes and lock-outs over the last decade and a half at Hormel, Caterpillar, Staley, Firestone and the Detroit newspapers, rank-and-filers were eager to shut down these operations immediately, but were overruled by their union leaderships that insisted on "legal" tactics, even as the corporations brought in replacement workers and stalled negotiations in the courts.

Finally the role of racism in diverting from the roots of unemployment and poverty in capitalism itself continually escapes the union bureaucracy. When workers reported anti-Black graffiti spray-painted in the bathroom of an auto plant in suburban Detroit, they were ignored by both the company and union until the incident was publicized by a reporter. Only then did they condemn the racist act and threaten disciplinary action.

STRUGGLES ON THE HORIZON

That's not to say that workers, in unions and outside, have stood still even as globalization and technology have socialized labor in terms of '90s issues. As with service work, confrontations in old-line industries like auto reveal new alienations and revolts. Recent strikes at GM's Buick complex and in Flint, Mich., challenged inhuman demands of massive overtime which was to lay the ground for corporate restructuring, meant to ultimately cut jobs.

On the immediate horizon are the UAW-Big Three negotiations which begin in June on contracts expiring Sept. 1. Talks will cover 220.000 GM employees, 101,000 at Ford and 78,000 at DaimlerChrysler. Job security, and especially outsourcing-another word for runaway shops-tops the agenda, with forced overtime also high on the workers' priority list.

The main focus is on GM, which has divested itself of its Delphi parts unit under contract with the UAW. By getting rid of its parts plants, GM hopes to cut worker wages and benefits from $20-25 per hour with good benefits to $10-15 per hour that non-union suppliers pay without benefits. Ford and DaimlerChrysler long ago got rid of most of their parts plants.

More ominous however is the concept and practice of modular production, wherein suppliers produce parts and deliver assembled units to be installed on the production line. Some have already started to do this, and the logic of this development is seen in a Volkswagen plant in Resende, Brazil, where parts producers and line production work side by side, but in separate demarcated areas.

The modules include whole wheels, full axle components, a combined transmission and suspension unit and a cabin, chassis and engine unit. The modules, delivered to the production line, are quickly installed by a drastically reduced line force. It's not hard to picture production quotas set by union workers competing against non-union workers toiling under one roof.

Right now, Ford and GM are both constructing similar modular plants designed to produce low-cost cars next year. GM was negotiating with three UAW locals for modular agreements, including the Spring Hill, Tenn. Saturn plant, but the UAW stopped this to deal with the explosive issue in the national contract. They are looking over their shoulders at a recent revolt in the Spring Hill UAW local which tossed out the local's founding leadership and with it, a separate, productivity-based union contract.

As Karl Marx emphasized over and over again, capital has but one function, and that is to reproduce itself, regardless of the consequences. That has not changed in a hundred years, nor in 50. Marx first spelled out this process. Coal miners experienced it anew when automation was born, and Marxist-Humanism restated the problem for this age. Once the socially necessary labor time required to produce a product is established, every producer must meet it-or revolt.

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