(via Lee Sustar's article on labor in the newest International Socialist Review)
"It was during that 1930s crisis that the United Auto Workers (UAW) stormed onto the scene with dramatic factory occupations led by communists, socialists, and other radicals. Today’s UAW, though, is a vastly different organization. It has followed its long-established strategy of partnership with employers to an extreme conclusion by becoming, through health-care trust funds, a major shareholder in GM alongside the U.S. government and the majority (55 percent) shareholder in Chrysler. To achieve this bizarre form of employee ownership—the union trust fund will get just one seat on the company board—the union agreed to ban strikes for six years, eliminate work rules negotiated over decades, cut overtime pay, and further concessions.The result of all this is the virtual elimination of the difference between UAW-organized plants and non-union ones. The UAW, which once steadily raised the bar for wages and benefits for the entire U.S. working class, is now leading the way down."
This is indeed a sad state of affairs. It was difficult not to have relatively high hopes months ago in November as a new President and an increased Democrat majority in Congress entered Washington, both of whom touted their resolve to pass EFCA loudly and often. But given the way things have turned out, it's difficult to imagine how much different things would be for labor had Obama and the Democrats lost the election.
Obama has done little to make good on his promises to pass EFCA and his Administration has been more interested in bailing out bankers and placating Capital than in better the condition of working people. Sustar points us to a damning public statement from January in which the Obama Administration bragged that it was tougher on the UAW than the Bush Administration had been. Indeed, it touts the fact that "in virtually every respect, the concessions that the UAW agreed to are more aggressive than what the Bush Administration originally demanded in its loan agreement with GM."
But, of course, Obama is not solely to blame for the demise of what appeared to be an ascendant moment for labor in the US.
As Sustar points out, inter-union clashes coupled with problems in union leadership have been detrimental as well. Arguably, the follies of union leadership are a large reason why EFCA hasn't been passed. The UAW leadership, in particular, seems most in need of indictment at this point. I understand that they are trying to keep GM from going under, but the meagre scraps from the table they've settled for are tantamount to major defeats in the short and long term. Again as (via Sustar's article) former Canadian Auto Workers economist recently wrote: "the UAW's GM membership is down to 64,000 (from 450,000 at the end of the 70s, when major concessions first began to be extracted). If GM is 'successful' in its current restructuring, that will be further reduced to 40,000. Thirty years of concessions and a 90 percent loss in jobs. If ever there was a failing strategy for workers, this was it." And I think Sustar is right on when he argues that the concessions and defeats forced upon the UAW recently are tantamounts to defeats for the entire US working class (and, ipso facto, gains for capitalists).
In more ways than one this purportedly 'new era' in the US is looking more and more like a newly-packaged version of the same old. I don't think the Obama-Hoover comparison is out of place. This is a serious disappointment. It remains to be seen how deep the contituities will go or how apt the analogy will prove to be, but there is little concrete evidence that Obama intends to do anything like what FDR's administration began trying to do in 1933.
At this point, we'll be lucky if the already-compromised 'public option' gets through the filibuster-proof Democratic Congress.
