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NEWS & LETTERS, October - November 2008
Relentless revolt
Detroit--There are thousands of strikes every year, ranging from the couple of hundred Bronx nursing home employees who go out on strike to get a union, the 27,000 Boeing workers out on strike for increased wages and benefits, West Coast dock workers on strike against the war, the coal miners on strike against unsafe working conditions, to the individual office computer operator who "accidentally" hits the wrong key that erases a whole day, or week, of work that has to be redone.
In a strike situation management has public relations personnel always available to present the company's point of view, which is usually the same as that of the corporate media, while the views of workers are seldom accurately reported. If rank-and-file workers are interviewed, reports are highly selective. Out of ten workers interviewed, nine may be in favor of the strike, and one against it. But when the report appears in the press, there is one voice for and one voice against the strike--all in the name of balance, of course. That is why there is a healthy distrust by workers of the media, especially during a strike.
STRIKES UNDERCOUNTED
There is no way to know the number of strikes that occur each year in the U.S. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, however, there were 21 strikes last year, involving 189,000 workers, compared with 20 strikes in the previous year involving 70,000 workers. But the BLS only counts those work stoppages or lockouts involving 1,000 or more workers, which means, of course, that the vast majority of strikes are never recorded or reported.
The lowest number of recorded strikes, 14, occurred in 2003. A big turning point was 1982, the first time that the number of strikes dropped below 100. Large-scale strikes have been decreasing ever since. It was a period when the workers were rejecting concessionary contracts and demanding that they be renegotiated, a period when the labor bureaucracy that was preaching cooperation with management began to adopt the point of view of not what the workers wanted, but how many concessions would they be willing to accept.
In short, it ushered in the open opposition of the labor bureaucracy to the rank and file, all sung to the refrain that "We're all in the same boat." And what workers knew from bitter experience was that when they were in the unemployment lines, they didn't see any company executives there with them.
And this goes to the heart of the question of strikes, because workers know that they are the ones who create all of the huge profits of the corporations, and that those profits come out of their blood, sweat and tears.
These are all expressions of revolt, revolt against the dehumanizing and alienating labor they must perform that oppresses them and ruthlessly discards them as obsolete things determined by this capitalist system of economics. This is not determined by the greed and cold-hearted nature of the capitalist (although those traits can be present), it is determined by the dead factors of production, and those factors are most powerfully reflected by the bottom line of the financial balance sheet, the profit.
Capital has but one function, and that is to reproduce itself as rapidly as possible by juggling all of the economic factors. The needs and aspirations of individual human beings are totally absent, which is why workers are instinctively in a state of continuous, daily revolt against this system--they must revolt to preserve their own humanity.
The contradictions and crises of this system are manifest in many ways, and at no time more starkly than today. The unemployment rate is at 6.1% nationally, with more than 760,000 jobs lost since the first of the year alone, and sure to grow with the financial crisis we face.
--Andy Phillips
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