May, 2006

The Future of Labor

A glimpse at the future facing the American working class is indeed frightening. The constant improvement of machinery, which once gave American workers an edge over the rest of the world, is today forcing them into greater, more intractable poverty. Electronic, wage-less production and globalization is forcing the American worker to join in the international "race to the bottom." The former bastions of high-wage, unionized work forces such as Detroit, Cleveland or Akron now have unemployment stabilizing around 10 percent--equal to Europe. There is no need here to go into the statistics that have been published over and over. There is a need to analyze them.

The unions are the biggest, most influential organizations of the labor movement. Yet in this time of peril, the unions, crippled, divided and shrinking, seem unable to even address their threatened destruction. What went wrong and what must be done? While we cannot here make a detailed, in-depth analysis of this crisis, we will point to the salient features. Nothing "just happens." Everything happens within a context and has a history. Nothing can be understood without understanding that context and history.

The development of computers and their application to communications and production created the shift from industrial wage-labor production to electronic wage-less production and to globalization. It is the principal content of our time. It is the overarching process that determines all others.

As national commodity markets gave way to globalization, so did the labor market. The outflow of production to low-wage areas and the inflow of labor to high wage areas is the process of equalization or globalization. This process is creating a new sector of the working class. This new sector--or new class--is marked by its racial, national and economic instability. This new class is becoming the center of gravity of the workers just as the industrial workers replaced the manufacturing workers under different circumstances. As the world's wealth and poverty polarize, as water, health care and all the necessities of life become privatized, this new class is more and more forced into a position of antagonism to the system of private property, the privately owned, socially necessary means of production and life. This process cannot be stopped, and as with plants and animals in the ever-changing natural world, social organizations, including the unions, must change with the changing environment or perish.

Why are American unions having such a difficult time dealing with such obvious changes? In short, the answer is anti-communism and racism. The two are tightly intertwined in our country. At the beginning of the Cold War, anti-Sovietism, a political concept, was quickly transformed into anti-communism, which is an economic concept. In other words, the workers were taught to oppose communism as an economic system. Communism is simply a system of common ownership of the means of production. Any dictionary will define these concepts. Anti-communism became the ideological underpinning of the unions and eliminated any chance of political independence. The expanding military contracts were the cash cow that paid a section of the unionized workers very well for their anti-communism. Meanwhile, the anti-Black position of a major section of the unions guaranteed that a sufficient number of white workers, especially in the skilled trades, would stabilize their high wages and employment at the expense of the rest of the working class. This tied them more tightly to the interests of the employers than those of the unorganized. What was the result? Anti-communism tied the unions to the Democratic Party, and racism guaranteed the inability and unwillingness to organize the South, which was a political and economic reserve of the ruling class. These chickens have come home to roost.

The days of American unions acting like exclusive clubs in bed with the political representatives of the ruling class are all over. The choice is clear--join with the workers of the world, especially the workers in South and Central America, or perish. The move of industry into the low-wage, non-union South was the first step in globalization. Today the South is the only area in the country where industry is growing and it is the gateway to the unions and workers in the low-wage areas of the world. The first step is Organize the South! This cannot be done without renouncing all manifestations of racism within the unions, which are close to 30 percent Black. It cannot be done without an uncompromising battle against Southern racism.

To do any of this, the workers must renounce the anti-communism that prevents them from becoming class conscious. They must break with the political Tweedle-dum of the ruling class and strive to create a political party that represents their class interests.

The American workers are close to the fork in the road. Will we sink deeper and deeper into poverty, mysticism, ignorance and unending war, or will we boldly step forward to meet this challenge and open the path to a new and bright future for humanity? It is up to you.