here it is

AO (68) autumn 2012

Concern with economic inequality is making a modest political comeback. Barrack Obama has made it a recurrent feature in his speeches, while Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has copped flak for saying he is more concerned with the broad middle class than the very rich or very poor.

Fuelling these concerns is a mass of evidence about growing economic inequality in the last couple of decades. One should not be surprised that disparities between rich and poor have widened. Capitalism reproduces and intensifies inequalities, as those with wealth pursue further capital accumulation while those at the other extreme often remain trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty.

Historically, what has kept these relentlessly unequalising tendencies in check has been the roles played by trade unions and redistributive governments.

But unions now cover only a small minority of workers, while governments coming under the influence of neo-liberalism have reduced, if not completely abandoned, their attempts to close the gap through income redistribution.

So the share of national income captured by the owners of capital has increased while workers’ share has fallen. And welfare state provisions face recurrent threats from the implementation of neo-liberal policies.

A progressive tax system has been a particular casualty. In the United States, for example, much publicity has been given to the statement by multi-billionaire warren Buffett that he currently pays a lower rate of tax than does his secretary. This evident tax injustice is easily explicable.

The tax on income from capital gains is usually less than on income from labour, while the wealthy make greater use of tax minimisation schemes. But Buffett’s statement has had political impact because of his popular image as an ethically concerned wealthy citizen. It signals a sound, popular basis for Barrack Obama’s rhetoric and for his proposal that millionaires should always pay at least an overall average tax rate.

Winner-take-all politics, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2010), explores how the failings of the political system created the problems in the US case. The authors are political scientists from highly prestigious universities, Yale and UC Berkeley.

They review ‘the transformation of American governance over the last generation’, showing how both Republican and Democratic administrations have presided over arrangements that have facilitated growing inequalities.

They use the term ‘winner-take-all politics’ to show how the political pull of America’s super-rich has swamped any residual concerns with equity, social cohesion and progressive redistribution.

They call it a ‘thirty-year war’ and show the daunting nature of the challenge with which Obama – or any committed successor – would have to grapple if any practical effect is to be given to more egalitarian principles.

First and foremost, the book shows the fabulous gains that the super-rich have made in recent decades.Read the full book review here

http://evatt.org.au/news/winner-take-all-politics.html

US labor against war

Review by Howard Guille

This is the second book of Humphrey McQueen’s research into builders’ labourers and their unions.

Read it, as the author says, with the earlier volume ‘Framework of Flesh: Builders’ labourers battle for health and safety.

This book is a history of builders’ labourers and their work from colonialisation onwards. More especially, it is an account of the formation and operation of the Australian Building Labourers’ Federation from 1910 to the amalgamation of its residual bits into the CFMEU in 1991.

The book cannot be summarised in a review that is two words for each of the years McQueen covers.

One impressive aspect is the weight given to the outlying states as well as to Victoria and New South Wales. Another is the section on the ‘money flow’ within unions; put plainly, a union will fold if it fails to collect and bank members’ dues. McQueen also looks past ‘a cult of individuals in the Jack and Norm show’ (p12). Even so, his account of the genesis of green bans and his analysis of the conflicts between Norm Gallagher and Jack Mundey will raise controversy.

McQueen tells how workers tried to control what was happening to them – in practice, what bosses were trying to do to them – in the face of economic and social forces and changing technology.

There are fascinating insights – for example, other things being equal, concrete gave labourers’ opportunities and increased their relative power and work value but scissors lifts reduced them. He makes subtle use of Marxist political economy weaving ideas of surplus value, socially necessary labour and the like into understanding the actual economic forces pressing on workers.

Unionised labourers fought with trades, with judges, arbitration commissioners and other unions as well as with bosses.

The Arbitration system was a site for almost constant contest about which union covered which jobs and how these fitted into award coverage – for example was a plasterers’ labourer a trades’ assistant or a labourer; is a bridge or a communications tower a ‘building’. There was, especially in Queensland, an incessant coverage battle with the AWU. This went beyond the Builders’ Labourers and was a general fight from 1915 to 1996 between the AWU as Labor Government ally and the unions affiliated with the Trades and Labour Council. This was reprised after 1989 with Goss ALP Government.

I finished reading the book just as Alan Joyce gave Qantas shareholders ‘certainty’ by grounding the entire fleet of planes. The Qantas dispute and media shrieking about unions came after a period of ‘official quiet’ about industrial disputation that McQueen’s book helps to put into perspective. Disputes fell off in 1990s and 2000s apart from a few unions including the CFMEU, CEPU (ETU) and NTEU that adopted disciplined pattern bargaining. This has a clear lineage from the Victorian Building Industry Agreement of the 1950s onwards led, as McQueen documents, by the Builders’ Labourers. This was ‘collective bargaining’ on an industry basis designed by unions. It is far cry from today’s ‘enterprise bargaining’ designed by the Business Council of Australia and their legal and academic advisers as a second best if individual contracts could not be achieved.

McQueen says his book is about ‘defeats as well as victories, drunks and thieves as well as militants and revolutionaries’.

More importantly, as he says, it shows ‘why a union should be a school for the working class’ (p11).

The book should be compulsory reading for new and old union officers and organisers: it will certainly challenge them to decide whether they are workers representatives or ‘workplace relations practioneers’.

This review appears in the magazine Australian Options no 67

Also posted on the new Evatt website
http://evatt.org.au/news/reviving-strike.html

joe hill

This has something for everyone – if you know the bush, it will appeal to you, if you work in the oil industry, there is something in it for you too, if you have a sense of humour – well, it might test it a little. If you are not an Australian, then you may need an Aussie to explain it to you.

New addition:
I have been informed that this copy of this poem has been posted without credit to the author Grahame Watt. The correct title of the poem is actually ‘Poor ‘Ol Grandad’ and the poem was written and published in his book of the same name, ‘Poor Old Grandad’ released in 2001. He has released a total of 3 books and a CD and can be emailed directly at skewiff80@npes.net.au.

‘Poor Old Granddad’

Poor old Granddad’s passed away, cut off in his prime,

He never had a day off crook – gone before his time,

We found him in the dunny, collapsed there on the seat,

A startled look upon his face, his trousers around his feet,

The doctor said his heart was good – fit as any trout,

The Constable he had his say, ‘foul play’ was not ruled out.

There were theories at the inquest of snakebite without trace,

Of redbacks quietly creeping and death from outer space,

No-one had a clue at all – the judge was in some doubt,

When Dad was called to have his say as to how it came about,

‘I reckon I can clear it up,’ said Dad with trembling breath,

‘You see it’s quite a story – but it could explain his death.’

‘This here exploration mob had been looking at our soil,

And they reckoned that our farm was just the place to look for oil.

So they came and put a bore down and said they’d make some trials,

They drilled a hole as deep as hell, they said about three miles!

Well, they never found a trace of oil and off they went, post haste.

But I couldn’t see a hole like that go to flamin’ waste,

So I moved the dunny over it – a real smart move I thought -

I’d never have to dig again – I’d never be ‘caught short’.

The day I moved the dunny, it looked a proper sight,

But I didn’t dream poor Granddad would pass away that night,

Now I reckon what has happened – poor Granddad didn’t know,

The dunny was re-located when that night he had to go.

And you’ll probably be wondering how poor Granddad did his dash–

Well, he always used to hold his breath

Until he heard the splash!!

End
Jim says:
it dropped into my inbox
but the author is anonymous
but it feels to me like its come out
of the anti fracking struggle

Jim Sharp writes daily and sends me his gems.
For those who do not know Jim Sharp the poet
get his book Leftside
and read more here
http://www.surplusvalue.org.au/Leftside.html

I urge debate on reviving the strike.

Joe Burns has a stimulating analysis and conclusion in his book ‘Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America.’

Australia’s labour relations system differs historically and institutionally from the US, but working people experience the same repression of strikes and the decline of the strike.

Our corporate and state rulers dominate the labour law system, and as in the US, deny workers and their unions any effective right to strike.

PM Gillard’s regime the ‘Fair Work Act’ retains the ‘Work Choices’ excessive legalistic penalising of strikes and the Building Industry Act (2005) with the ABCC severely threatens and penalises building and construction workers organising. (See my arguments on this blog put in search the right to strike.)

After reading this book, the same the arguments apply – that unions have to revive the strike weapon.

As in the US, with our near disappearance of strike struggle, the task is how this revival is to be done – a serious challenge for Australian unionists in this era of capitalist instability, corporate attack, a likely Abbott government and the Occupy Wall Street movements.

Burns argues that the US working class became more powerful by winning strikes.

“By wielding the threat of a powerful, production halting strike, trade unionists forged a better way of life for millions of working class Americans during the roughly fifty year period from 1930 though 1980. …The strike is by far the most important source of union power…Collective bargaining made little sense unless it was backed by the threat of a strike that halted production.”

Citing US labour relations scholars, union strike struggles improved workers’ lives.

Burns relates the history of union leader militancy, solidarity and secondary boycott strikes, industry-wide and pattern bargaining strikes, mass pickets to stop ‘replacement workers’, sit-down strikes and occupations – all crippling economically the corporations and forcing management to negotiate until union demands are met.

Union militancy in the 1930s organised strikes in response to the serious class war from management. Unions defeated employer solidarity and the law. Radical actions ensured wage increases and standardisation and with some worker control against management authoritarianism.

From the 1980’s, again with capital’s fierce attack on unionism, the retreat from these strike tactics means unions are weaker. The employers’ counter offensive cut wages and conditions.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in the early 1990s, unions need

“their only true weapon—the right to strike. Without that weapon, organized labour in America will soon cease to exist.” (p20)

The US system, like Australia, allows only a limited lawful strike, orders return to work and enforces legal penalties against industrial action deemed “unlawful.”

In the US arbitrators and judges interpret labour laws within the acceptably narrow ‘free market’ enterprise bargaining to ensure that withdrawing your labour is risky and largely ineffective. Corporate lawyers for the employers with the state’s legal forces attack the strikers and their unions.

Burns gives a key illustration with the legal restrictions on the picket line.

This is ineffective with strikers walking around with placards, while watching scabs walk through taking their jobs.

Pickets are supposed to block all access for the strike to win. Judges deem the effective picket line ‘unlawful’. Legal decisions enforce for the employer the right to use ‘replacement labour’, scabs.

In past strikes, winning meant defying anti-strike laws and judicial injunctions.

Despite the strengths of today’s union leaders, Burns argues they do not use the strike to seriously challenge employer power – stopping production and work is a fringe idea.

Young radical union organizers today organize social campaigns and get community support, but are not allowed to win a strike.

Earlier, industry or pattern bargaining with mass strike pressure to make labour costs uniform was achieved. But this is union bargaining is also ‘unlawful’ and not attempted today (same as in Australia).

The extreme T-party Republican and corporate agenda in 2011 passed legislation where the public service unions are denied the right for collective bargaining. (Put Wisconsin in this blog search to see the mass resistance).

The union song “Solidarity Forever” is indeed just a song.

“Solidarity is the heart and soul of unionism—the only force capable of confronting power and privilege in society. To revive unionism, we must recover labour’s long-lost tools of workplace-based solidarity.

Today, union activists join each other’s picket lines and hold fundraisers for striking workers. While important, these acts of solidarity are largely conducted away from the workplace.

In contrast, labour’s traditional forms of workplace-based solidarity allowed workers to join across employers and even industries to confront bosses. Such tactics included secondary strikes and industry-wide strikes.

What’s a secondary strike? Say workers at a small auto parts plant in Indiana walked out. If they enlisted the support of the Teamsters to refuse to transport the parts, the United Auto Workers to refuse to assemble a car with the parts, and employees of car dealerships to refuse to sell the cars, their power would be multiplied. The original strike would be a primary strike and the others would all be secondary strikes.

In the past, solidarity tactics allowed workers to hit employers at multiple points in the production and distribution chain. By impeding the flow of supplies into a plant, unions pressured the employer to settle a strike or recognize the union. Similarly, secondary boycotts pressured retailers to stop selling struck goods.

Solidarity tactics expanded the site of the conflict, allowing workers to confront employers as a class.” Burns in Labor Notes -http://www.labornotes.org/2010/10/secondary-strikes-are-primary-labor-revival

Burns documents how the US judicial system outlawed the secondary and solidarity strike.

“At a deeper level, modern labour law forces unions to bargain with individual employers rather than establish standards on an industry basis.”

Australia’s outlawing of secondary boycotts began in the 1970′s through trade practices law and ending in WorkChoices and FWA and has weakened union solidarity actions.

As I have a law degree, I learnt from Burns’ recounting of the history of the US labour legislation, the judicial cases against basic union principles and judicial injunctions against unions’ industrial action.

The US restrictive labour law legal control over labour shows how difficult it has been and is for unionists unionizing – let alone organizing a successful strike. Years of courts penalizing strikers are the history.

But Burns makes this telling point.

“To be clear, the downfall of solidarity cannot be attributed solely to legal factors. Unions willingly agreed to no-strike clauses.

Over the years, many focused on just the needs of their own members, failing to embrace a social unionism that looked out for the interests of all workers. In the 1980s and afterwards, unions often failed to defend their pattern agreements, allowing special deals for particular “troubled” employers until the pattern was no more. And union officials all too often squashed rank-and-file attempts to join together across bargaining units, even at the same employer.”

What has occurred with current union leaders is an abandonment of the practice of the strike and class politics, although e.g. the AFL-CIO is strong rhetorically. The labour movement is trapped in business unionism and social unionism.

Burns looks at inadequate union alternatives to the strike in chapter 4.

“With the production-halting strike becoming a relic of the past, union activists of the last 20 years have had to turn to other mechanisms to try to pressure employers during collective bargaining. Thus, we have seen the rise of strike “alternatives” such as the one-day publicity strike, the corporate campaign and the inside strategy.

Each strategy, while supposedly an attempt to revive trade unionism, instead adheres to a system that has been established over the past 75 years to guarantee labour’s failure.

Without the traditional tactics of solidarity and stopping production behind them, none of these strategies had proven powerful enough to make an employer suffer economically.

In many ways, these strategies are a reflection of the current state of the labour movement.

Rather than putting forth bold ideas calculated to challenge the current system of labour relations in this country, contemporary trade unionists have instead adopted a philosophy of pragmatism, of making do with what the existing system offers, instead of trying to break free of that system, as traditional trade unionists once did. (p71)”

“Nonetheless, in recognizing the limitations of these tactics, we must still acknowledge how creative and refreshing they have been in an era of union busting and decline. They have kept alive the fighting spirit in the labour movement, particularly in situations where a traditional strike would have meant crushing defeat.”

One-day publicity strikes.

“In a one-day publicity strike, the union informs management that its workers will be going on strike, but will return to work in 24 hours. Due to the short duration of the ‘strike’ and the advance notification of the return to work, there is no opportunity for the employer to permanently replace the strikers.

However, due to their limited timeframe, one-day strikes have little impact on the operations of a company. Since the union announces its intention to strike in advance, the employer is typically able to make alternate arrangements to cover the work for the day that the workers are on strike.

The main goal of the one-day publicity strike is, as the name implies, publicity, as the union tries to bring public and media attention to the grievances of its workers. Consequently, one-day publicity strikes have generally been used against employers who are susceptible to public pressure. Frequent targets have included hospitals, universities and public employers.(p72)”

The one-day protest strike strong in the public sector became the only strike action for many US unions, with some gains, but where anti-union employers survive, as the economic pressure is not enough.

“…The one-day strike supplies the illusion of struggle, distracting from the real problems facing the labour movement, which is the lack of an effective traditional strike. (p73)”

Working to rule keeps within employer boundaries and has limited success. On the job go-slows or the ceaseless rolling intermittent strikes, in and then out and return and effective bans – again made illegal -. has greater force.

Union strategists for decades use anti-corporate campaigns, with a range of community and public lobbying tactics to pressure the employers and governments. Despite some wins, they are not as effective as the strike weapon.

Burns while accepting the organising strength of social unionism with union/community coalitions, union media and public pressure with successes, argues such a strategy, without the strike, has not seen the union renewal promised.

“Social unionism is not a replacement for direct struggle against employers. In social unionism, the strike is abandoned, and in the process, the central role of workers at the point of production is lost.

Although appearing progressive, social unionism in fact represents a shift in power from workers to union officials and non-profit staff…social unionists also sidestep the key economic concerns that must be at the centre of labour’s revival, namely that any trade union strategy must be capable of redistributing wealth and power. Organization and community ties alone do not lead to power. (p81)”

Burns’ criticism is levelled not only at the conservative and right wing ‘business unionism’ leaders but the left unionists and progressive labour academics.

The debate for strengthening unions relies on union democracy where union members control the union and engage in the militant strike struggle. Burns takes us through key examples of past successful strikes with members’ democratic control.

Chapter 5 “Why organizing cannot solve the Labor crisis” is important for the debate on new strategies.

Despite union leaders successfully shifting resources to organizing the un–unionized sectors from the 1990s until now, Burns argues overall this strategy has failed to revive unions.

“In fact, the idea that the labour movement can resolve its crisis simply by adding new members – without a powerful strike in place – actually constitutes one of the greatest theoretical impediments to union revival (p95).”

Burns does not reject the practice of increasing union density and organizing in the industry of competitors. He argues it is not sufficient without the effective industry or pattern-bargaining strike and the ability to have sufficient power at work to force the collective agreement.

Unions may succeed at times with skilled or professional workers able to control the supply of labour. But with the low levels of unionization continuing, union leaders – and I was one of them – just advocating organizing the unorganized is not good enough.

Even when union density increases, the power to beat the employer does not necessarily follow. In the US, the labour laws allow aggressive employers to wage successful anti-unionizing drives and to defeat union elections. In Australia employers similarly have many legal weapons to defeat unionism.

Burns argues that even with the proposed labour law reform in ‘The Employee Free Choice Act’ making it easier for workers to unionise and bargain, such a reform is not sufficient for revival.

In any event, President Obama – despite promising unionists – failed to even look like delivering.

Burns gives historical examples of militant strikes that had surges in workers joining unions. In 2011 during the Wisconsin struggles many workers joined unions.

Burns criticizes the organizing model goal of union reformers as “abandoning the goal of creating the type of labour movement capable of transforming society (p113).”

I will not here go through the details in Chapter 6 of the US system of labour control.

The corporate lawyers and judges have indeed worked remorselessly to limit unions’ ability to have workers organize and win.

I add that Australia’s former arbitration system and now Fair Work Australia has pro-management ideology designed to make unlawful the strike and impose penalties (see this blog).

Today union leaders do not risk defying judicial injunctions against strike activity because of the penalties.

But union leaders did so before – with some wins and some serious defeats depending on the contested conflict.

The details are instructive but the conclusion critical – rejecting the whole labour control system is necessary.

“Trade unionists need to envision a world where labour’s conception of striking prevails over that of management. Otherwise, labour can construct a solidarity grounded in weakness.”

Today with the power of giant US multi-national corporations unions not only have to develop the ability to take strike action locally and nationally but internationally.

International strike action is done but is limited to day protest stoppages or across some regions cross-border industrial action collective agreements. In response international labour solidarity has to challenge corporate power, and with the strike organized across countries.

Chapter 7 has a valuable articulation of the principles of labour rights.

“Labour must develop a working class perspective that establishes a set of principles that clearly justify the refusal to follow unjust and illegitimate restrictions on the right to strike. (p137) …it was labour’s agitation and the open and principled defiance of judicial orders, that won workers the right to strike and stop production.”

Unionists use other key principles to argue the case – such as
“labour is not a commodity”,
“labour creates wealth”,
“the right to strike is a basic freedom that distinguishes us from the slave or bonded labour” and
the progressive principles from socialists and those activists with a class analysis. These principles not only are returning, but have to predominate over management ideology labour relations.

The US constantly ignores international rights’ standards and so international labour rights from the ILO, but is not taken up by Burns. In Australia we agreed to the ILO workers’ rights on the right to strike, but where in reality our FWA breaches such accepted ILO international standards.

Burns argues a labour movement in the US is possible in chapter 8 if we learn lessons.

Chapter 9 is “Where do we go from here?”

“After watching the labour movement—and the strike—wither over the past 30 years, trade unionists today need to answer several big questions if they wish to revitalize unions in this country. How should the labour movement deal with the current system of labour control? How should human labour be treated in relationship to capital? How can workers act as a class to advance their common interests?

What are the best forms of organization to carry on the fight for workers’ rights? And finally, what is the role of the strike?

The answers—or non-answers—to these fundamental questions will shape labour’s future in America.”(171)

“To point the labour movement in a new direction will require a large group of people willing to challenge the status quo, people who have the ideas, organizational skills and self-confidence to give voice to a workers’ movement capable of transforming America.

This will have to start with the activists in the movement—shop floor militants, progressive union staffers and officers, worker centres’ activists, and friendly academics.

However, the debate over the future of trade unionism must grow beyond this committed, but small group if the there is to be a true labour revival in this country.

So how does one build such a trend? Again, we can learn from labour history.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, the labour movement was stuck in a narrow form of craft unionism that was unable to win gains from employers. Craft unionists viewed only skilled workers as deserving of union representation, and they rejected attempts to organize all workers into one union.

However, a counter current developed that argued that industrial unionism was the road forward for the labour movement. This trend toward industrial unionism was driven by the political left of the era (socialists, anarchists and communists), who had a program that, although varying in its approaches, shared one guiding principle: the strength of the overall trade union movement.

Eventually, the years of agitation paid off as the idea of industrial unionism gained popularity, first at a grassroots level, and then broadly within the entire working class. Thus, when the economic crisis of the 1930s hit, workers were ready to embrace a new form of unionism…

The task today is to build such a broad-based understanding within the labour movement of the need to change the present system.

How can this be done? During the decades-long push to establish industrial unionism in the first half of the twentieth century, industrial union activists repeatedly raised their issues at union conventions.

Following their historical lead, trade unionists today could adopt the position that the system of labour control is illegitimate, and support efforts to break free from it. Just as it was once official AFL policy to disobey injunctions, trade unionists today could debate whether or not to comply with the different facets of the system of labour control.

No matter the issues, reviving the strike — and by extension, the labour movement — will require a single-minded focus by trade unionists.

Right now, the left wing of the labour movement lacks a common agenda, as it advances a hodge-podge of ideas of what it will take to save unionism in this country. If one agrees with the analysis in this book, then the one unifying factor that can achieve the myriad goals of the labour movement is the revival of the effective, production-halting strike. This must become labour’s primary focus.

Additionally, if trade unionists ever decide to embrace a new militancy in order to smash the system of labour control, they will need the support of their union brothers and sisters.

Historian Nelson Lichtenstein, in the conclusion of his influential history of the labour movement, ‘State of the Union’, lists the failure to support militancy as one of the major weaknesses of the modern labour movement. Discussing what the movement needs to succeed, Lichtenstein writes,

‘The first is militancy. The union movement needs more of it, but even more important, American labour, as a whole needs to stand behind those exemplary instances of class combat when and if they occur. The 1980s were a tragic decade for unions, not because workers did not fight, but where labour did take a stand…their struggles were both physically isolated and ideologically devalued.
Instead of being engulfed in the solidarity of their fellow trade unionists, workers today who choose to fight back often do so on lonely picket lines, with little support from the official labour movement. Without a broad trend that promotes effective tactics, striking workers are not exposed to ideas that can help them win strikes, nor are they supported when they engage in militancy.”

While the strike might seem like a relic of the past too much of the contemporary labour movement, as labour historian Peter Rachleff writes,

“it would be a mistake to leap to the conclusion that strikes are on their way to the dustbin of history. As long as the capitalist economy rests on the employment and exploitation of labour, the organized withdrawal of labour is bound to remain a central expression of working class protest and power.”

If working people are to regain power and transform the US and Australia, the strike has to be revived.

I see more clearly past faults in my union practice.

In this era of strikes in Europe and countries against austerity cutbacks on workers and strikes against dictators, reviving the strike debate is critical.

Here is more

http://prospect.org/article/struck-out

The blog also promotes Joe Burns book, published by IG Publishing in May 2011, Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America.

See my earlier post recommending this book and lessons for Australian unionists.

http://igpub.com/reviving-the-strike/

SECONDARY STRIKES ARE PRIMARY TO LABOR’S REVIVAL
Joe Burns November 4, 2010

Solidarity is the heart and soul of unionism—the only force capable of confronting power and privilege in society.

To revive unionism, we must recover labor’s long-lost tools of workplace-based solidarity.

Today, union activists join each other’s picket lines and hold fundraisers for striking workers.

While important, these acts of solidarity are largely conducted away from the workplace.

In contrast, labor’s traditional forms of workplace-based solidarity allowed workers to join across employers and even industries to confront bosses. Such tactics included secondary strikes and industry-wide strikes.

What’s a secondary strike? Say workers at a small auto parts plant in Indiana walked out.

If they enlisted the support of the Teamsters to refuse to transport the parts, the United Auto Workers to refuse to assemble a car with the parts, and employees of car dealerships to refuse to sell the cars, their power would be multiplied. The original strike would be a primary strike and the others would all be secondary strikes.

In the past, solidarity tactics allowed workers to hit employers at multiple points in the production and distribution chain.

By impeding the flow of supplies into a plant, unions pressured the employer to settle a strike or recognize the union.

Similarly, secondary boycotts pressured retailers to stop selling struck goods.

Solidarity tactics expanded the site of the conflict, allowing workers to confront employers as a class. Many of the strikes we know from history, like the 1912 Lawrence Bread and Roses textile workers’ strike or the huge postwar steel strikes, are great and historic precisely because they involved tens of thousands of workers across entire industries.

More recently, the UPS strike of 1997 involved 200,000 Teamster drivers and loaders and captured the imagination of union and non-union alike.

OUTLAWING SOLIDARITY

From the earliest days of unions, workers understood the need to unite with others in their industry to seek common standards.

Otherwise, workers winning wage increases at one company would be undercut by other companies that failed to match the raises.
Thus in the 1940s through the 1970s, unions negotiated industry-wide or pattern agreements, at times covering hundreds of thousands of workers.

Along with this broad scope of bargaining came major confrontations between workers and employers.

But in the 1980s, in the face of a deep recession and a legal system hostile to solidarity, and with unions failing to mount effective strikes, the patterns and therefore union standards began to crumble. As this publication argued earlier this year, “After a 30-year employer onslaught, national patterns have been largely devastated or have become top-down conduits for concessions.”

Today, the most powerful forms of solidarity are outlawed.

Secondary strikes and workers’ refusal to handle goods from struck plants were banned by the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. The Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959 closed a loophole unions had used in the 1950s, in which the union would negotiate “hot cargo clauses” where the employer agreed not to use struck goods.

At a deeper level, modern labor law forces unions to bargain with individual employers rather than establish standards on an industry basis. Over the decades since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, the Supreme Court tightened the noose on industry-wide tactics.

The court allowed employers to unilaterally opt out of multi-employer bargaining and made it an unfair labor practice for a union to insist on such bargaining.

So by the 1980s, employers wishing to break free from pattern agreements had the law on their side.

To be clear, the downfall of solidarity cannot be attributed solely to legal factors.

Unions willingly agreed to no-strike clauses.

Over the years, many focused on just the needs of their own members, failing to embrace a social unionism that looked out for the interests of all workers.

In the 1980s and afterwards, unions often failed to defend their pattern agreements, allowing special deals for particular “troubled” employers until the pattern was no more.

And union officials all too often squashed rank-and-file attempts to join together across bargaining units, even at the same employer. So, for example, striking meatpackers at Hormel in the mid-1980s were attacked by the United Food and Commercial Workers International for attempting to expand picket lines beyond the Austin, Minnesota, plant.

GOING AFTER THE BIG GUYS

The best current demonstration of the power of secondary activity comes from farmworkers. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida forced Taco Bell and other huge corporations to increase pay for tomato pickers in their supply chains.

Rather than target the subcontracting growers, CIW pressured the major corporations that purchase the farm produce—companies whose financial interest in the dispute is relatively indirect.

CIW’s work shows the power of an industry-wide approach. Targeting individual growers would not have succeeded, because a grower paying higher wages would not have been able to get Taco Bell to buy its products.

CIW mirrored SEIU’s successful Justice for Janitors campaigns of the 1990s, which made life difficult for all levels of the contracting chain, including the end-users of janitorial services as well as workers’ immediate employers, and sought industry-wide agreements in a city.

For almost 30 years, most union activists have tried to ignore the fact that restrictions on solidarity hamstring our movement. We’ve been told that organizing new members and conducting corporate campaigns can revive the labor movement. It’s not working.

REDISCOVERING POWER

Last month, rank-and-file longshore workers provided a rare example of workplace-based solidarity in action.

Fresh Del Monte Produce transferred work from a union pier in Philadelphia to a non-union facility, threatening 300 longshore jobs.

To spread their fight to a much bigger site, rank-and-file workers from Philadelphia set up picket lines at the major New York/New Jersey ports. Workers there honored the picket lines for two days—despite an injunction from a federal judge and the opposition of their international union.

After two days, Del Monte promised to negotiate and workers pulled the picket lines.

Workers rediscovered a real sense of collective power, but anemic follow-through from the International means the Philadelphia local is looking at a long fight to win back their work.

Still, workplace-based solidarity and expanding the dispute were crucial. The Philly workers pulled their natural allies, other longshore workers concerned about non-union ports, into the dispute. They made other corporations—all those trying to ship goods into New York or New Jersey—feel pain as well, by tying up shipping for two days.

Longshore workers occupy a strategic spot in the U.S. economy. Their struggle illustrates why workplace-based solidarity is outlawed—precisely because it is so effective.
Reviving solidarity will not be easy. Labor law forbids it. It goes against a union culture based on bargaining with individual employers. Reviving solidarity will require new ways of thinking and, perhaps, new forms of workers organization.

But the labor movement has little choice. As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka noted in the early 1990s, unions need “their only true weapon—the right to strike. Without that weapon, organized labor in America will soon cease to exist.”

Buy and read this book.

See further reviews below.

http://www.revivingthestrike.org/2010/11/secondary-strikes-are-primary-to-labors.html#more

Read further ‘Where do we go from here’
by Joe Burns.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/7346/reviving_the_strike_where_do_we_go_from_here_part_4/

Review by Chris White (appears in Options 66)

In this era of the new world capitalist system crisis, Hobsbawm’s sparkling style and incisive analysis in ‘How to Change the World’ shows that Marx is still a thinker for this century and for mobilising social forces.

Hobsbawm, the 94-year-old author of 16 books, tells of the specific interest in Marx and Engels-Marxism in the historical context and in the development of ideas.

On the cover is Che as well as a Soviet marching image.

Hobsbawm’s essays can be studied separately for appreciating the impact of Marx from the 1840’s, with the Communist Manifesto to Capital and through the last century – and seeing why again people are taking Marx seriously.

The essays go from chapter one on the relevance of Marx today to chapter 16 on the history of the labour movement, mainly European since the 1890’s, called ‘Marx and Labour: the Long Century’.

Finding out more about Marx and Engels and their writings and politics ranges from Engels’ ‘The Conditions of the Working Class in England’ to why Marx’s ‘Grundrisse’ is his ‘thought at its richest’.

Hobsbawm writes at times provocatively on pre-Marxist socialism and on ‘Marx on pre-Capitalist Formations’.

His sweep covers Marxism from 1880 to 1914 and the Victorian critics of that era; the era of anti-fascism; a new essay on the significance of Gramsci’s contribution to political analysis; essays on the ‘Influence of Marxism 1945-1983’; and Marxism in recession 1983-2000 and up until today.

In the 60’s and 70’s, as radical University students and later militant unionists, we were introduced to the young Marx, then moved onto Marx’s economic writings and his analysis of capital’s drive for accumulation and then crisis.

With today’s international class struggles deepening, the 1848 cry of ‘Workers of the World, Unite’ does seem to have renewed meaning.

One chapter in the book focuses on Gramsci and I found this particularly pertinent.

We became Gramsci followers in the 1970’s and began waging counter-hegemonic political struggle, working for change. We read Gramsci on ‘works councils’, which is not discussed in Hobsbawm’s essay. Rather, Hobsbawm focuses on Gramsci’s contribution to Marxism’s political theory. The specific historical context is WW1 and the 1920’s and then Gramsci as the leader of the Italian Communist Party.

Gramsci, says Hobsbawm, was on ‘about two different sets of political problems: strategy and the nature of socialist societies’ (p320).

As a ‘political theorist, he regards politics as an “autonomous activity”. Politics for him is the core not only of the strategy of winning socialism, but of socialism itself’ (p321).

It is the centred human activity, the means by which the single consciousness is brought into contact with the social and natural world in all its forms’ (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks).

Gramsci’s notion of ‘hegemony’ is well-known, showing how the ruling class derives authority by consent of the citizens.

Hegemony is the political ideology and moral leadership by the ruling elite factions, accepted into the dominant culture. Capitalist hegemony is achieved by conscious political action and organisation by capitalist interests with the State.

For Gramsci socialism is not just socialisation in the economic sense but in the political and sociological sense.

As Hobsbawm says, it is: ‘what has been called the process of forming habits in collective man which will make social behaviour automatic, and eliminate the need for an external apparatus to impose norms; automatic but also conscious’ (p322).

The strategic challenge is to work out how the working class, which is at present ‘subaltern’, may be able to become politically hegemonic. How are we to have the subaltern working class capable of hegemony, ‘believe in itself as a potential ruling class and be credible…?’ (p324).

Political action is praxis – theory and practice. As Hobsbawm writes ‘understanding the world and changing it are one’ (p322).

Gramsci saw the role of the party – the modern Prince – as a source of strength in a permanent organised working class mass movement. The organic relationships between the working class party and the working class is critical; as is the role of intellectuals (p328).

Workers often are not struggling as a class, so Gramsci started with considering the state of organisation, not with a notional class fight. He avoided the constant mobilising of small left groups rather than the building of the mass workers’ movement. It should not just be a war of position.

Hobsbawm, as a quality historian of Europe, a British Communist Party player and in his life stories, provides political debate in his tales of Marx and Marxism. Get this as hardback for your libraries and for yourself the paperback.

Elliott Johnston has passed away. He is a working class hero.I was not able to attend the public celebration of his life in Elder Hall, Adelaide.

You can get some idea of Elliott Johnston for those who did not know him in this
book just published, ‘Red Silk’ by Penelope Debelle (Wakefield Press 2011).

‘Elliott and Elizabeth Johnston became Communists in 1941 and he resigned only
to join the South Australian Supreme Court Bench.

His appointment as Queen’s Counsel by the Dunstan Government – after his
controversial rejection by the former government of Steele Hall – was the
highest public office attained by a Communist in Australia.

In 1991 he made his national mark as head of the Royal Commission into
Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

From extensive discussions with Elliott Johnston and access to his private
papers and documents, Penelope Debelle has compiled the biography of a committed
intellectual who studied at Chairman Mao’s international Communist school,
visited Soviet Russia before and after the fall of Stalin, and sat a few feet
from Pablo Picasso at the 1950 Peace Congress in Warsaw.

As the dream of Communism faded, Elliott held onto his faith.

He used the law to improve the rights of injured workers by pursuing compensation cases through the courts, setting new standards for employer responsibility and winning the
respect of the profession as an outstanding criminal lawyer.

From extracts in the Introduction.
‘On any view, Elliot was and is a complex character: a lifetime Communist, but
not an ideologue; a critical thinker who, at times, was naively optimistic about
the political cause he espoused, a person who believed that there could and
should be a better political system, but who was prepared to work within the
current system and, even, accept some of its privileges and honours.

Above all, however, he believed in equal justice.

That belief sustained his professional life and, perhaps, goes some way to
explaining his political beliefs.

This book is not simply an account of Elliott Johnston, the lawyer. It is also an account of a student radical who, even then,
would put his belief in freedom of thought and speech above his personal interests, a Communist warrior whose ideas and principles
were not well understood even by his comrades.

It is the story of a husband separated from his young wife, Elizabeth, during the
Second World War and later while he was a student in China, a wife whose beliefs, integrity and industry matched his own and
with whom he had a long and loving relationship.

The backdrop to all of this is a fascinating picture of Adelaide life and society,
particularly student life in the late 1930s when Elliott’s fellow students included Max Harris and others associated with the Angry
Penguins, as well as Fin Crisp who, with Elliott’s help, founded the National Union of Australian University Students. Equally fasci-
nating is the account of the privileged circumstances of Elizabeth’s
family, the Teesdale Smiths.

What comes through this account of Elliott Johnston’s life is his complete and unswerving commitment to improving the lives
of others, both by political means and practical assistance. This
practical assistance was not confined to his work as a lawyer.

For example, when stationed in New Guinea during the Second World War, Elliott ran literacy classes to help other soldiers write letters home.

However, it was as a practising lawyer that this aspect of his character came to the fore, fighting workplace injury cases and
representing ordinary men and women whose ability to pay his legal fees was never an issue.

He also appeared in complex criminal
cases, both for the defence and the prosecution. Elliott was a skilled
advocate and his courtesy and charm won him many friends and
admirers within the legal profession. One such admirer was Chief Justice Bray, who provoked considerable controversy when he nominated Elliott for silk in 1969.

The controversy surrounding the appointment of a member of the Communist Party as Queen’s Counsel delayed Elliott’s appointment until 1970, when he became Australia’s first Communist silk – the ‘Red Silk’.

He remained an active member of the Communist Party until his appointment to the
Supreme Court of South Australia in 1983 – the first openly avowed Communist to be
appointed to a superior Court in Australia.

Being ‘a first’ of anything nearly always involves difficulties,
especially in the Law, which remains an essentially conservative
profession, and was even more so in the 1970s and 1980s.

At the very least, being ‘a first’ usually involves a higher level of scrutiny
than would otherwise be the case.

Elliott seems not to have been confronted with many difficulties, either as the
first Communist Queen’s Counsel or as the first avowed Communist appointed to
the Supreme Court of South Australia.

Perhaps, in part, that was because of his social connections through Prince
Alfred College and the Teesdale Smiths. Certainly, it was partly due to his
courtesy, charm, integrity and professionalism. It was also due in part to the
South Australian legal profession, which boasted a progressive, independent and
outstanding Chief Justice in the person of Sir John Bray and which produced
Australia’s first female Queen’s Counsel in the person of Roma Mitchell, who
later became the first woman to be appointed to an Australian Supreme Court.
Certainly, I have always found the South Australian legal profession to be
open-minded, progressive and tolerant. I suspect Elliott’s professional life
might have been more difficult and more controversial in any other state.

Elliott’s commitment to equal justice has been and continues to be an inspiration to many, including those who had the privilege
of working with him before his appointment to the Bench.

That commitment underscores his work on the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody following his retirement from the
Supreme Court. His commitment to equal justice for Indigenous Australians has a long history, including as first Chairperson of
the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement.

Despite Elliott’s work on the Royal Commission, equal justice remains elusive
for many Indigenous Australians.

It is to be hoped that, sooner rather than
later, the recommendations of the Royal Commission become established both in
law and in fact. That would be a fitting tribute to the work of Elliott
Johnston, a good man and a great Australian.’
by Mary Gaudron.

Red Silk places on record Elliott’s personal involvement in international events that took place more than half a century ago. The
Depression shaped his Communism but he was equally committed to the great cause of peace. His presence at the 1950 Peace Congress
in Sheffield, which moved to Warsaw after the Attlee Government
prevented some delegates from entering the country, place him in
an incredible moment in world history. Pablo Picasso was there, and Elliott sat a few feet from him. He returned from Warsaw through
Stalinist Russia at the invitation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Five years later he went to the People’s Republic of China for 18 months to study Communism as a guest of Chairman
Mao Tse-tung, returning again through Russia.

Elliott’s personal recollections, combined with the historical record, memoirs and
reports from the time, provided the basis for writing about these
events.
(I am indebted, with a healthy dose of irony, to ASIO for their diligence in bringing to my attention articles from sources as
diverse as On Dit and Truth.)

Elliott’s commitment to Communism ran parallel to his practice of the law. For many people their co-existence in one man was at
best perplexing, at worst something to be feared.

Even those close to Elliott were not entirely sure how a man of such
intelligence could remain a follower of Communism after the horrors committed in
its name. I was unsure how the two could be reconciled. Part of the book’s
purpose, then, was to make sense of a life that seemed riven by fundamental
contradictions. ‘