The Cause of Labor IS the Hope of the World

Book Review - How Working People Can Regain Power
and Transform America by Joe Burns 

by Susan Rosenthal

June 25, 2012

http://susanrosenthal.com/articles/fighting-to-win

BOOK REVIEW: Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can
Regain Power and Transform America, by Joe Burns (2011)

This exciting little book begins with a bang. Reviving the
Strike reminds us that class war shaped industrial America, as
organized workers challenged capitalism and transformed
themselves and society in the process.

Burns argues that workers' only real bargaining power is their
ability to stop production. And to do this, workers must fight
as a class. These two unavoidable facts gave birth to
solidarity pickets, secondary strikes and boycotts that
involved whole communities, regions, states, and ultimately
the nation.

Class solidarity meant that no scabs were allowed to cross
picket lines, and no company was allowed to use struck goods
or parts. Holding firm meant fighting pitched battles with
hired thugs, professional strikebreakers and scabs. When class
solidarity was solid, workers could not be defeated. Everyone
understood that, even politicians.

During the late 1890s and early 1900s, class solidarity gained
workers real social power in the workplace and in society.

However, capitalism cannot function unless it subordinates
workers, so the employers closed ranks and built their own
class solidarity backed by the power of the State.

In Chapter 3, Burns explains how American workers were legally
stripped of their right to fight effectively.

    "This did not occur overnight, but was the result of a
    complicated, decades-log legislative and legal assault by
    employers against the foundations of unionism. The
    outlawing of solidarity began with the passage of the
    National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935, became
    explicit with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947,
    and was furthered along by Supreme Court decisions in the
    1960s."

The employers could use Congress and the judiciary against
workers because the capitalist State always has, and always
will, serve the capitalist class. The result:

    "In 1952, there were 470 major strikes (those of more than
    1,000 workers) involving 2,746,000 workers. By contrast,
    in 2008, there were only 15 major work stoppages,
    involving 72,000 workers...In 1952, almost 49 million days
    were lost due to work stoppages; in 2008, the number of
    days lost was starkly lower - less than 2 million."

Burns links the social gains of the postwar period with the
use of the economic strike, and their subsequent loss to its
abandonment. 

The Union Bureaucracy

Employers could not have defeated the working class without
the support of the union bureaucracy.

According to Burns' research, all traditional trade unionists,
radical and conservative alike, understood that an effective
strike had to stop production. However, by the 1980s, most
union officials had adopted "a management-inspired view" of
striking, where workers abide by the law, rely primarily on
moral pressure, and are easily defeated.

In Chapter's 4 and 5, Burns reviews how unions have failed to
create viable alternatives to the economic strike.

    "Each strategy [the publicity strike, the corporate
    campaign and the inside 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 labor's failure...Without the traditional
    tactics of solidarity and stopping production behind them,
    none of these strategies have proven powerful enough to
    make an employer suffer economically."

According to Burns, less effective forms of struggle reflect a
weak labor movement that functions within the existing system
"instead of trying to breaking free of that system, as
traditional unionists once did." At the same time, non-
workplace strategies to win social gains lack the power to
redistribute wealth from the employers to the working class.
As a result, workers continue to lose ground.

Chapter 5 explains that campaigns to increase union density by
"organizing the unorganized" fail for the simple reason that
workers have no interest in joining weak unions that can't put
more bread on the table.

Burns doesn't explicitly state why union bureaucrats would
rather do anything but revive the economic strike. However, he
does describe the bureaucracy as a structure apart from the
working class and with a separate interest - preserving
itself. Breaking laws would bring fines that would deplete
union funds and threaten officials' salaries and careers.

Fortunately, unions are more than buildings, golf courses and
bank accounts. All of these could be lost without losing the
essential core of unionism - class solidarity. If fighting to
win means sacrificing union "assets," then that is what must
happen.

Unions cannot allow themselves to be held back by a
bureaucratic structure that protects its wealth more than its
members. 

Twisting Reality

Chapter 7 explores how employers twist reality to gain support
for attacking workers.

Traditional unionists insisted that workers are not
commodities; they are human beings with the right to determine
what happens in the workplace. Furthermore, "the rights of
workers must trump market considerations."

    "One of the main tenets of traditional trade unionism was
    that workers could not allow the market to determine wages
    and working conditions, as the market, unrestrained, will
    continually drive workers toward poverty, injury and even
    death."

The traditional union principle that capital can create
nothing without workers - that labor creates all wealth - has
been turned on its head, so that capital is now revered as the
source of jobs and prosperity. Even more shocking is the
extent to which union bureaucrats accept this lie and use it
to pressure workers to accept concessions, in essence, to
surrender to the market. Burns concludes, "Challenging this
pro-management bias is key to reviving trade unionism."

Reviving the Strike offers some powerful lessons:

    * There can be no common interest between bosses and
    workers, only war.
    * Workers will always lose if they play by the boss's
    rules.
    * The power of workers lies in their ability to stop
    production. If they don't use this power, they have
    nothing with which to bargain.
    * Workers can stop production only if they unite as a
    class, disregarding the boundaries of job description,
    workplace and industry.
    * Now that production is international, class solidarity
    must also be international.
    * In order to fight effectively, workers must break the
    laws laid down by the employers and their State.
    * When workers challenge the employers' right to dictate
    what happens in the workplace, they challenge capitalism
    itself.
    * The question of power must lie at the core of any union
    strategy.

In any war there are only two options: fight to win, or
surrender. Both options produce casualties. There is no "safe"
option for workers under attack, no place to hide in the hope
of protecting one's individual job, dignity and life.

Burns criticizes the pessimism of "professional" unionists who
justify doing nothing while they wait for some spontaneous,
successful strike to resuscitate a dying labor movement. We
can and must lay the foundation for renewed struggle in the
here and now.

As Burns explains, developing class solidarity is a process. A
minority of determined workers can pull more anxious co-
workers into small activities, and the more workers act
together, the more courage they have to do what they might
never do as individuals.

Reviving the Strike is inspiring and easy to read. It provides
the information and the arguments we need to build a new labor
movement from the ground up - one that fights to win.

(Other book reviews: The Civil Wars in US Labor 
http://susanrosenthal.com/articles/civil-wars-ignores-the-political-lessons 
and Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice
http://susanrosenthal.com/articles/solidarity-divided-a-return-to-class-politics)

=====

Who is Susan Rosenthal? http://susanrosenthal.com/about

The Doctor's Dilemma Resolved

I am a physician and a socialist. I always wanted to be a
doctor, probably because my brother Ron was born with severe
hemophilia for which there was no treatment at the time. To my
young mind, doctors had the power to stop suffering, and I
wanted that power.

I had the good fortune to be born at the right time. During
the 1960s, the Canadian government subsidized children from
the working class to go to university. My second stroke of
luck was getting into medical school.

I soon discovered how powerless doctors really are. Most of my
patients' problems were rooted in social conditions that were
outside my control. The best I could do was manage their
symptoms.

Medicine radicalized me. I was a socialist because I came from
a family of socialists. But I didn't really understand
capitalism. Like most people, I thought it was an economic
system.

As a physician, I learned that capitalism is the system of
social relationships in which we are all immersed. We are born
into it; we are shaped by it; and we re-create it every day.

Capitalism is cruel and heartless and tears people apart,
mentally, physically and socially. In order to survive, we
must replace it with a completely different system based on
equality and reciprocity, a socialist system in which we all
share the world's work and the world's resources.

Until recently, my two identities of physician and socialist
occupied separate spaces. At work, I tended an endless
succession of wounded people. Outside of work, I struggled to
change a heartless social arrangement that propelled the
wounded to my door.

I wanted to connect these two activities, however, physicians
tend to be a conservative section of the middle class, well-
rewarded for managing the misery that capitalism creates. I
could find no medical organizations that questioned this role,
only reform groups offering different levels of misery
management. I wanted the misery to stop. So I continued my
double life, unaware that capitalism would present the
solution to my dilemma.

I've worked primarily in Canada, but for a time I also lived
in the United States. In both countries, medical services were
traditionally delivered by small businesses. During the 1990s,
large corporations (HMOs) cornered the American market by
offering lower-cost medical services. It was a scam.

By 2005, 45 million Americans could not afford medical
insurance, and medical bills had become a prime cause of
financial ruin, even for those who had insurance when their
problems began.

Canada's medical system is also in crisis caused by decades of
under-funding. In 2004, Canada's Supreme Court declared that
all patients cannot be assured of getting medically-necessary
treatment.

Most medical professionals have jumped on the rationing
bandwagon, echoing the cry that there's not enough to go
around. As I explain in Professional Poison, professionals are
trained to manage capitalism, not to challenge it.

In contrast, most health workers believe that people's needs
should come first - our patients' needs and our own. That
belief compels us to organize with other workers against
capitalism.

Organized health workers are the best defenders of medical
services. I learned this in 1981, when the Canadian Union of
Public Employees (CUPE) struck Ontario hospitals to protest
cuts to staff and services.

For seven days, 13,000 striking health workers defied back-to-
work legislation, media attacks, police harassment and the
jailing of top union officials. Unwilling to mobilize an all-
out public-sector strike to press their demands, union
officials caved in.

The defeat was substantial. Thirty-five worker-activists were
fired, and more than 9,000 were disciplined. My brother Ron
was one of the fired activists, being the chief shop steward
and picket captain for the Toronto General Hospital.

Eventually, all the activists were reinstated, but Ron had
died of heart failure by then. He was only 32. It wasn't the
strike that killed him, but the betrayal of union officials.
As he wrote,

    "In the events leading up to the strike, during the strike
    and throughout the defense campaign, the union brass acted
    against the interests of the rank and file."

Should society produce for profit or to meet human needs?
Health workers face this question on the job every day. Every
day, we are immersed in human suffering. And every day, we are
denied the resources required to alleviate that suffering.

The only enduring solution is for the working class to manage
society so that health workers can manage the health system.
Until then, the business/profit model will rule, regardless of
the harm it does to us and our patients.

Our first step is to build fighting unions, not talk-shops
that build careers for professional union bureaucrats. And we
need to organize across unions, as a class, to fight for a
sane society that puts people first. That is what real
socialism is - billions of people working together to take
care of one another.

As a socialist, I have written many articles and several
pamphlets, including Striking Flint, a narrative history of
the GM sit-down strike. As a physician, I have explored the
link between society and health in my newsletter, Trauma and
Illness and in my second book, SICK and SICKER: Essays on
Class, Health and Health Care (2010).

My first book, POWER and Powerlessness (2006), integrated my
experience as a physician with my experience as a socialist.
It also brought me into contact with other health workers. In
the fall of 2007, we organized ourselves as International
Health Workers for People Over Profit.

I finally found the solution to my dilemma. Social power is
necessary for human health, and solidarity is the best
medicine. Ron knew that. It just took me a little longer.

=====

[Many thanks to Dr. Rosenthal for sending this to Portside,
and sharing this with the readers of Portside.]

____________________________________________

PortsideLabor aims to provide material of interest to
people on the left that will help them to interpret the
world and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

PS Labor Archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate