Virginia Worker Editorial Board Member Sal Rojo argues against the unfounded claims of a labor revival for the US working class while drawing parallels between our current period and those of the 1920s when the “fall of the house of labor” occurred in part due to union leadership mismanagement, as well as the response from the left wing of labor of then compared to today.
In the beginning of the year National Public Radio ran a story on the stalled union campaigns at Starbucks and Amazon led by Starbucks Workers United and Amazon Labor Union. While Starbucks Workers United has won union elections at several hundred stores and Amazon Labor Union has remained the only union to win an election at any Amazon jobsite, workers at both corporations have remained without a contract for years, stuck in endless litigation and dead end negotiations by the corporations’ lawyers. This is not a coincidence, but by design from both the corporations, the union bureaucrats, and the US government.
The legal framework to regulate unionization in the US was purposefully created and maintained to minimize disruption to the flow of commerce. While the National Labor Relations Act enshrined the right to unionize and the right of workers to be free from retaliation by bosses for exercising these rights, in practice they are largely toothless and the bosses know it. It’s cheaper and easier for bosses to break the law or use roundabout ways to unionbust without explicitly breaking the law than it is to abide by the law and respect the supposed rights workers have to organize and unionize.
Even if the costs both ethically and financially can be high for bosses there’s also the principle of the thing, which is that capitalists refuse to relinquish any control or power over the workplace. It’s a dangerous situation for bosses to allow wage slaves to believe they can have any power or say over their work lives.
Despite recognizing that the working class is not on a level playing field against their bosses, this does not mean it’s impossible for workers to organize, unionize, and win demands. A major reason it seems that we are at an impasse or in a continued death spiral in terms of working class power is because of the acceptance of such terms by the union bureaucracy who adopt business unionism as their guiding ideology when dealing with US capitalists and their state.
There is no recognition from this leadership that we are in a class struggle with irreconcilable differences between workers and bosses. The desire to fight and defend what little workers have, let alone fight to improve the material benefits and situation of workers is minimal. What militancy we’ve seen in the past few years has only been in response to the desire and necessity by rank and file workers to fight back and stop the downward trend of workers’ standards. We also see how easily union bureaucrats take advantage of these sentiments to either win officer elections as “reformers” in the unions and/or wage PR campaigns to present verbal militancy while minimizing any rank and file militancy that escapes their control as Sean O’Brien has demonstrated with the UPS contract campaign.
The left wing of labor is supposed to break through this dynamic which has been in place even longer than the existence of the National Labor Relation Act. But the main organized “left wing” of labor – like Labor Notes – has become accomplices to the agenda of business unionism. This situation reflects larger ideological trends in modern US society where there is a pandering to progressivism (such as the corporate adoption of DEI initiatives) while materially the conditions remain the same where capitalists and union bureaucrats ruthlessly enforce their tyranny upon the working class.
Our current situation is somewhat reflective of the conditions of the US working class in the 1920’s. This was a period of major union decline, corporate profits were up, and the union bureaucracy was more than willing to allow the working class to lose ground. One big difference was the left wing of labor had coalesced around the Communist Party’s labor front – the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL).
The TUEL acted as the driving force to push workers into mass action while battling the union bureaucracy in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) – oftentimes led by Socialist Party members in union leadership positions. Unlike the AFL officialdom, TUEL members struggled to expand the reach and capacity of unions to unskilled workers – who oftentimes were immigrants, women, and workers of color. Across every industry the TUEL fought against wage cuts, the degradation of work conditions, the division of the working class, discrimination, the union bureaucracies, anything and everything that weakened the working class.
The TUEL also fought for organizing the unorganized, industrial unionism, union democracy, and the formation of a labor party (something the left wing of labor today lacks severely). It was communist workers who turned an otherwise bleak period of US labor history into something inspirational and worth adopting in our current situation. The program and efforts of the TUEL laid the groundwork for the labor upsurge of the 1930’s leading to the formation of the CIO, mass strike actions, and occupations breaking through capitalist fortresses in the heavy industries. None of this was thanks to the union officialdom who constantly red baited the TUEL, pandered to patriotism, sold out the workers to the bosses, collaborated with organized crime and the government to imprison, attack, and kill communist workers fighting for worker power. This goes without saying the threat of worker revolution was real to the union bureaucracy, capitalists, and their government as the Russian Revolution was still fresh and the Communist International was supporting the TUEL as was the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU).
Arguably our current situation is even worse than the 1920s for the working class. Our “left wing” of labor today is not coalesced around a revolutionary orientation. There is no TUEL or US revolutionary workers party, there is no communist international or Red International of Labor Unions, no socialist state acting as a headquarters to ideologically and materially aid workers movements across the globe towards winning a revolution in any nation. We are starting from scratch, we are starting isolated from a demoralized and atomized working class. Our enemies controlling the unions outfund us, and outorganize us with the aid of the US state, capitalist parties, and an army of nonprofit fronts. Their ideology is dominant and unlike in the 1920’s workers now seem to have no hope there is a real alternative to capitalism.
Despite all this we have a century of history and lessons (both positive and negative) to learn from in building a new foundation to take us past the defeat of worker revolution domestically and internationally. The fall of the house of labor is an opportunity for the rise and victory of a communist workers movement.
The Virginia Worker 
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