Workingman's Dilemma

"WORKER'S OF THE WORLD, G'NIGHT?"

For virtually all of my adult life, I have been an uncompromising advocate of organized labor. And the reason for that has nothing to do with the fact that my father was a proud, dues-paying member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters throughout the last twenty years of his life in the workforce. (In fact, I never really understood or cared about labor - management issues during my father's Teamster days.) No, my position is more deeply rooted in principle.

Ours is, of course, a capitalist society; and I can imagine only two scenarios in which capitalism would not naturally degenerate into a most abhorrent form of wage-slavery. Scenario #1 would have the human race somehow becoming infected with a contagious and incurable benevolence, aggravated by an attending altruism. Yes, the SCIENCE FICTION scenario! Even the most contagious and incurable strains of religious fervor have been disappointingly free of these two "conditions." When was the last time you saw anyone stand up and identify himself / herself specifically as a Christian in order to demand better working conditions or better employment benefits, or to criticize the materialism, the economic injustice, the deprivation of dignity and self-determination in so many parts of the workforce, both here in the U.S. and out there in the world? Hasn't it been your experience that when someone insists on injecting their religion into a discussion of "social ills," it's almost invariably to discuss one of the so-called "pelvic" issues, like abortion, homosexuality, or birth control?

So much for Scenario #1. That leaves Scenario #2 -- the strong organization of labor. What distinguishes a capitalist society from, say, either a socialist one or a communist one? It is this: In a capitalist society, the means of production -- the factories, the businesses, the outfits whereby goods are produced and services provided, and wherein most of the population that makes a living makes its living -- are privately owned, while in the socialist and the communist systems they are, respectively, state-owned and communally owned (i.e., owned by the workers themselves). Private ownership of the means of production -- that's where the danger lies. Think about it: If a company is privately owned, there is only so much room for government regulation on behalf of the workers and their needs. That's not to say that there's NO room for such state intervention, only that the room for such is necessarily minimal, since greater and greater governmental regulation eventually becomes nationalization of business and industry -- and the de facto obliteration of private ownership. (I'm reminded of a humorous anecdote related by the late American philosopher, Norman Malcolm, about the late Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. While out for a walk together, Wittgenstein decided to make Malcolm a gift of each tree they passed, on the condition that Malcolm not cut the tree down or do anything else to interfere with the previous owner's intentions regarding the tree! That is, Malcolm was to assume owndership of the trees, but only in a way that was completely indistinguishable from non-ownership. There's something similarly incoherent about the idea of privately-owned, but completely state-controlled industry.)

What, then, is there to ensure that workers are not exploited as much as these minimal restrictions and mandates will allow? If a company's principal motive is the maximazation of profit, and if health benefits, family leave prerogatives, and DECENT wages are just so many ways to cut into a company's profits, then it is reasonable to expect that no company will ever offer such worker-benefits unless something makes it in the company's interest to offer them. That's where organized labor comes in. A workforce organized behind a small and centralized leadership can, when the leaders deem it in the best overall interest of the workers collectively, shut down the shop -- STRIKE! What happens during a successful strike, one wherein picket-lines are respected and would-be scabs made to respect them? The company's profits become NIL! The bosses, who typically neither produce a good nor provide a service, find themselves reduced almost to the same conditions of the workers -- $0 income! Of course, they're usually in better circumstances to begin with, sitting on a huge cusion of discretionary funds, but they can't maintain their upper-class lifestyle for very long if a full strike of the company is allowed to continue for too long. And thus it becomes in the interest of the company to take VERY seriously the needs and the demands and the complaints of the workers who generate the company's wealth! LO! The workers now have some leverage, some power of self-determination: the company MUST capitulate eventually, if the strike is not in any way BUSTED. (And, though I generally disapprove of violence, I think I might be willing to "excuse" a little good old-fashioned head-busting, if it's only to ensure that there's neither any union-busting nor any strike-busting.)

It is as a means to such leverage and such worker-empowerment that I support the strong organization of labor.

Feeling as strongly as I do on this matter, I find myself genuinely of two minds regarding the recent defection of four unions (including the formidable and sizeable Teamsters) from the once mighty union of unions of unions -- the AFL-CIO. From what I've read and heard, the leadership of the defecting unions is critical of the course that has long been charted by the leadership of the AFL-CIO, concentrating more on the cultivation of political alliances than on the building of union-membership. And here is the Workingman's Dilemma: Since there is no true power in numbers unless the numbers are unified and organized, the strength and effectiveness of organized labor depends crucially upon those two things -- large union-rolls and effective centralized leadership. The defecting unions are sacrificing the latter in order to pursue the former, while the old AFL-CIO seems to have been neglecting the former in order to enhance the latter.

I have no doubt that, in the short run, this is bad for organized labor. Entrenched positions on both sides are likely, at least in the immediate future, to overlook the best overall interests of the working class in order to avoid "losing face" and yielding to their "opponents" within organized labor. The AFL-CIO recently passed a resolution to boost organizing activity, but the dissident unions have deemed this move "too little, too late." Emerging out of this is a new force in organized labor, the Coalition to Win, a union of unions whose membership already includes some AFL-CIO members and now includes the four defecting unions as well; but, for the present, this coalition is, at best, only a serious RIVAL of the still considerable AFL-CIO -- we can hardly expect the AFL-CIO leadership simply to allow itself to be folded into the new emerging Coalition to Win. And so for now organized labor is fractured, fragmented, disorganized, weakened.

My hope is that the turmoil is something more on the order of "growing pains," a necessary but uncomfortable stage in the emergence of a revitalized movement to enhance simultaneously, and in a coherent fashion, BOTH of the elements crucial to worker empowerment -- healthy numbers AND effective and well-motivated leadership.