United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 30, 2021 11:17 pm

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Bessemer Amazon is the Beginning, Not the End of the Movement to Organize Labor in the South!


As we await todays count of the Bessemer Amazon union vote, it’s important to remember what this campaign means regardless of the outcome of the union vote. Bessemer has opened a new period for the labor movement’s opportunity to organize in the US South, and of the important role of Black workers in championing this strategic direction.

Taking on the world’s second largest corporation in a region where all of the Southern states combined have less union members than the state of New York alone, and where the legacy of Black enslavement still divides the working-class in social, political and economic ways, the Bessemer campaign objectively represents a struggle to build workers power against the power of a global corporation and thus against global capitalism.

This campaign must be viewed as an opening battle developing the various components for a strategic concentration to organize labor in the South. The Bessemer solidarity actions that have taken place in more than 50 cities across the US, including elements of international solidarity, has helped to highlight the importance of organizing labor in the South. Expressions of solidarity with the Bessemer workers campaign, were carried out by many local and national trade unions, members of the clergy, and even president Biden had to take a pro-union position because of the popular support generated by Bessemer.

Bessemer shows the potential of the intersection of a mass movement against systemic anti-Black racism that took the form of Black Lives Matter, organizing labor in the South, and the class struggle led by Black workers. Labor and progressive forces must build on this development regardless of the outcome.

The Southern Workers Assembly (SWA) is focusing on building a rank-and-file anchored and led infrastructure in the form of local worker assemblies that unite workers in key industries like Amazon, auto, meatpacking, transportation and hospitals to name a few, to build a framework for a worker’s led social movement in the South.

As was the case during the 1930s, the radical and progressive forces engaged their forces in helping to organize labor in industries that were foundations of industrial capitalism. With the new technology represented by Amazon, organizing labor will require an understanding of how 21st Century capitalism uses technology and artificial intelligence to monitor the speed and set grueling schedules for workers, to maximize profits. Amazon workers in Italy went on a 24- hour strike on March 22, 2021, over the pace of work, job security, fewer work hours for drivers and more stability for temporary workers and other issues.

With the covid-19 pandemic greatly impacting “essential workers” in industries and jobs that heavily employ Black, Brown and women workers, organizing labor across the US will be in great demand. Labor activists and progressive forces must seriously work to help organize workers in the remaining major industries so that the working-class can exercise maximum levels of power in a global economy where workers are struggling around various issues and using varying tactics.

The starting point for worker organization cannot afford to wait for the launch of a union campaign. It must begin by using the same laws under the National Labor Relations Act, that unions use to protect their right to organize. Workers must use these laws to help begin the process of building a workers movement infrastructure inside key industries and workplaces.

Yes, Amazon using its billions to go all out to defeat the union, hopes that a defeat will not only stop efforts to organize Amazon, but seeks to be a champion in trying to defeat the development of a national and international movement to organize labor in the South. Bessemer Amazon is the beginning, not the end of awakening workers in the South and the national and international labor movement of the strategic role of the South in the global economy and for creating a global labor movement as a necessary base and force for changing the power relations favorable to a radical social transformation of society.

If you organized solidarity actions in the South for Bessemer Amazon workers - Come to the Southern Workers School Series Starting April 18, 2021! More information will be shared on this in the coming days.

Victory to the Bessemer Amazon Workers and the sentiment and organizing components fostered by their courageous labor campaign!

Statement from Black Workers for Justice
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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 09, 2021 2:51 pm

Bessemer Amazon Union Vote: We Learn as We Struggle!
BY SOUTHERN WORKERS ASSEMBLY | APR 9, 2021 | AMAZON, STATEMENT


In spite of the vote count, important developments have resulted from the Bessemer Amazon workers’ campaign. We applaud the Alabama Amazon workers who took on the world’s second largest corporation drawing thousands of activists into a long-over-due workers’ rights movement. Elected officials, clergy and leaders from major unions have expressed their support. Organizing labor in the South has once again become a national and international mantra.

Solidarity committees were formed in cities across the US, and workers in the South have registered for a Southern Workers Assembly School to learn how to begin organizing in Amazon and other major industries and sectors. Inspired by the courage of the Bessemer workers, these solidarity committees seek to unite workers, community and progressive forces into local worker assemblies.

Multi-Workplace Strategies are Needed Against Major Corporations
The Bessemer Amazon campaign points out the difficulties in trying to organize in a single workplace location of a major corporation. Amazon directed billions of dollars at defeating the Bessemer campaign by intimidating and making the Amazon workers and communities around Bessemer feel small and overwhelmed. From the early tactic of paying workers $2,000 to quit while promising to not challenge their unemployment claims, to the many thousands paid to union busters and more, the company was determined to maintain some of the most inhumane working conditions existing today. In the face of that, the struggle by the Bessemer workers against this corporate giant was a real act of courage – for themselves, for all Amazon workers, and for the Southern working-class.

Many Worker Committees in Many Locations Acting in Coordination
The US Southern, national and international labor movement and working-class has an obligation to advance the working-class struggle begun by this campaign This will require a dedication to workplace-based organization and a commitment to take coordinated collective action to redress the worst of Amazon’s inhumane working condition. There needs to be a national discussion about the Bessemer Amazon union campaign providing the workers a platform to talk about their experiences. This discussion will be part of the work of the SWA Southern Workers School in the future.

No Retaliation
The right to form a union and act collectively is protected by law. Any contrary actions by Amazon against workers must be challenged by all that supported this campaign. The issues don’t disappear because a union vote is completed. There is still much work to do to follow the momentum.

The Battle has Begun, Let’s Continue!

https://southernworker.org/2021/04/bamazon-vote/

READ OUR NEW PAMPHLET – WORKERS GUIDE TO MEATPACKING (DISPONIBLE EN ESPAÑOL)
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https://southernworker.org/meatpacking
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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 11, 2021 2:50 pm

Why Amazon Workers Voted Down a Union and What Can Be Done
BY OAKLANDSOCIALIST ON APRIL 10, 2021 • ( LEAVE A COMMENT )

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Union advocates at Bessemer Amazon center

What is happening here that workers in the Amazon distribution center in Bessemer Alabama voted down the union by almost 2-1? It’s not that unions in general are unpopular. On the contrary, a 2020 Gallup Poll revealed that 65% of Americans approve of unions. That is up from only 50% ten years earlier.

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“Pro Nissan & pro union” – the UAW “organizing” slogan at the Nissan plant.
Why should workers join and pay dues to a union if it’s pro company?

So why do workers keep voting down union representation, as they did in 2017 at a Nissan plant in Mississippi and at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee in 2019? Why does this keep happening?

The apologists for the union leadership blame the union busting tactics of the employers. And union busting they do, including intimidating, harassing and sometimes even firing pro-union advocates and organizing anti-union mandatory meetings. The Nation magazine has one such article. It gives clear examples of these tactics. It also suggests a few tactical tweaks for the union, but basically it simply blames the employer’s union busting tactics. That is like blaming the wolf for eating the sheep. That is what a wolf is born to do. If the sheepherder allows the wolf to continue doing this, then it’s the sheep herder who is to blame.

Mike Elk in his Payday Report goes a little more into depth, as does Tatiana Cozzarelli in her article in Left Voice.

Elk, for example quotes one worker, Ashley Beringer, who commented: “I guess I’m more so against it [the union] because I don’t know much about [unions], I’ve never had to deal with unions until now.” All the explanations in the world cannot do the trick. What would be needed is for workers like Beringer to see and feel the union in action, and not just to see it from the outside, but to actively participate in it. In other words, to organize work place actions. For this, a radically different approach to union organizing would have been necessary.

Cozzarelli goes even further. She explains that the organizing drive to an extent revolved around keeping the support of such politicians as Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and even Biden himself. She comments: “Unfortunately, at Amazon, there were no concrete measures to organize workers in rank-and-file assemblies to strategize and decide on the direction and future of the struggle. Left Voice was able to speak to Amazon workers through local connections. These workers said that they had little or no contact with the union beyond a few text messages and a phone call. They didn’t get to discuss or decide on next steps for the unionization effort or to discuss what a union could do for them. This kind of organizing would have been key to push back against the bosses’ lies.”

Such comments lead to an even deeper issue: The absolute determination of the union leadership to maintain the “teamwork” with the employers. Yes, we may have some scraps from time to time, but that’s just like arguments within a family; at the end of the day we are all family. That is the leadership’s attitude. As Bob King, then-president of the UAW, said to the Chamber of Commerce in 2011: “We need to join together…. When we join together we can go down a path to true economic growth and prosperity…”

Not only that, but due to present leadership policies politically the unions have been nearly totally missing in action politically. Where, for example, where they in all the thousands of protests against the murder of George Floyd? Where were they in Ferguson after Michael Brown was killed in 2014, or in all the protests in between?

In other words, the horrific working conditions at places like Amazon and the continual wage cutting has led to an increased general recognition that unions are positive and necessary. But the role of the union leadership has been to suppress any tendency of workers themselves to organize and struggle against their own boss on their own particular job. The general mood in the working class tends to overcome the particular situation in any one work place.

What is needed is for activists and socialists inside the unions to organize independent opposition caucuses. Such caucuses would have to emphasize a twin approach: One would be for the union to break from this pro-employer “team” approach. The other would be for the unions to play a key role in the social protest movement, such as the protests against the police brutalizing and killing people at will.

Right now, most union members tend to feel pretty alienated from their own unions, so building such caucuses might be slow going. However, a wider protest movement that draws in millions of workers, including union members, is bound to break out. Once that happens, it will affect the mood inside the unions. Then the experience and hard work that such union activists and socialists inside the unions will pay off.

https://oaklandsocialist.com/2021/04/10 ... n-be-done/

Bolding added.

And lean hard on Dems to repeal Taft-Hartley. They'll never do it but 'make them deny it.'
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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 23, 2021 11:54 am

BESSEMER: NO ORGANIZING EFFORT IS EVER WASTED
Posted by Chris Townsend | Apr 16, 2021 | Featured Stories | 7

Bessemer: No Organizing Effort Is Ever Wasted
BY CHRIS TOWNSEND
April 14, 2021



The loss of the April, 2021 union drive at the Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon facility is a disappointment to all who cheered-on the union cause, and it is doubly so for militants and leftists. Of course it is. Worldwide.

But, who among us believed that it could have succeeded in today’s environment? Against all odds, with a threadbare union campaign, up against one of the biggest anti-union corporate fortresses of the modern era? If you thought that an election win for the RWDSU was actually in the cards then you are either brand new to the movement, have never been involved in a union organizing campaign, or you have resorted to wishful thinking and daydreaming as a substitute for cold logic.

And while the cold logic may dictate that the deck is stacked against the workers and unions at every turn, to abandon the battlefield to the employers is to accept defeat. The fact is, when you belong to the working class today, you must re-learn the old military stratagem, “When you are too weak to defend, you must attack.” Once encircled, unless a breakout is attempted, then annihilation is inevitable. Can anyone objectively assessing the condition of the working class today question whether we are encircled? Or whether our unions are facing imminent annihilation?

The Amazon workplace – like the rest of the workplaces in this country – is a dictatorship. This may come as a startling news flash to some. Not to the thousands of worker-organizers now toughing it out in the Amazon shops all over the globe.

And it’s no shock to me, either. I have spent the past 42 years in the union trench being harassed and attacked by virtually every employer that I have ever dealt with. I started as a rank and file organizer. I participated in two union elections as an employee, in a recognition strike, and I worked as a union salt in two different companies. The union was successful in only one out of five of those attempts to organize. All of them were against-all-odds. Me and my coworkers in each case had all sorts of reasons to wait, delay, or even give up. But we pushed ahead up the beach no matter the fire raining down on us. I didn’t join the labor movement because I picked it as the winning team. I joined it because as a class-conscious worker I had no alternative, and in fact it was an obligation.

In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s I was a field organizer for the United Electrical Workers Union (UE), assigned to several simultaneous organizing drives we kept going at plants of the gigantic General Electric Company (GE). In its heyday – before the company collapsed owing to its own endemic dishonesty and hubris – GE was an anti-union monster like no other. I saw GE break every labor law in the book, and commit anti-union acts too numerous to describe. The company employed more “Union Avoidance” operatives than we had organizers on the UE payroll. Every campaign was the union organizing equivalent of scaling Mt. Everest. Only occasionally did we succeed. Most of the time we lost, frequently very badly.

What then? Did we give up and back away from further election showdowns with the company? Did we pine away for some perfect moment when we would charge the drawbridge? Did we sit back and enjoy life until the opportune moment to organize arrived? Did we convene the piss-and-moan club to proclaim our lack of all the advantageous situations that we wanted? Did we set ourselves up on high as self-assured gurus who sat in judgement of everything that other unions did, or tried to do? No. Never. We collected ourselves, dusted ourselves off, kept our union together, and we went back to the front, again and again.

When we lost – as we did more often than I care to admit – we were at least spared being subjected to the current torrent of second guessing and criticism now being heaped on the RWDSU for having the ambition – and yes, probably the poor judgement – to launch the recent drive.

Most of it being shoveled out by progressives and leftists, so far as I can tell.

You can pick apart the union campaign in Bessemer all you want. And keep your laptops and wine goblets at the ready. You will have many, many, more opportunities to complain about what went wrong in the future failed organizing drives yet to come. Bessemer is merely a milepost on what will be a long and arduous road to organize this piece of the commanding economic heights. Many more losses lie ahead. Strikes and other uprisings are ahead. The union organization of corporate America will be a messy affair. There will be many casualties. It will not be done according to a script penned in a university or NGO someplace.

A brief study of our own U.S. labor history reveals clearly and starkly that Amazon and the other major employers today will not be organized until the left wing does the hard, thankless, exhausting organizing work of patiently building real union structures and real organizational muscle. Random angry workers will not do it. Mainstream Democrats will not do that work. Sideline kibitzers will not do the organizing. Well intended critics will not do it.

Instead, plain and simple worker-militants, socialists, communists, anarchists, disaffected young workers, and every other sort of radical will do the work. It will require the same effort and ideological zeal that organized the early unions, the infant AF of L, the IWW, the TUEL, and the CIO. And while it’s apparent to everyone that today’s business unions are not up to the task, what is the antidote to that? Should we take the business union leadership off the hook by never pushing them to put the considerable resources of the unions to work on the hard and difficult organizing front? Do we see our role as reinvigorating our otherwise moribund unions? Or, do we just see our role as diagnosing the business union malaise, detailing its inadequate failures, publicizing them far and wide via the internet, and demoralizing everyone in the process?

I choose instead to think about the 738 workers in the Bessemer facility who withstood an avalanche of Amazon company lies and pressure and voted “yes.” To them all, I tip my hat, extend my thanks, and only wish that I could have been there with them right up until the end, even if it was a bitter ending. I know what it is to be forced to drink from the bitter cup.

But it was those bitter sips that reminded me that I was right to commit my life to the overthrow and end of this rotten system, the Amazon system. The system of wage slavery where all of us are compelled to sell our labor by the slice, to bosses only too eager to work us to death and squeeze everything they can out of us. The system that creates and enriches a Bezos, while the workers are ground down, beat down, run ragged, and thrown away eventually like so much garbage. The same awful system that endangers the viability of the planet, and that impoverishes billions of wage slaves in every part of the world.

By the logic of some of the Bessemer critics there can be no election or showdown until the opportune or perfect moment arrives. I reject that completely. This is not to ignore reality, justify recklessness, or cast off good judgement, either. It is a realization of the validity of the observation by early U.S. labor organizer and leader William Z. Foster that, “No organizing effort is ever wasted.” Foster observed correctly that, “The organization of the unorganized millions of workers is primarily the task of the left wing. There is no other section of the labor movement possessing the necessary courage, energy, and understanding to carry through this basic work.”

I commend all of the Amazonians, union volunteers, and staff who threw themselves into the fight. You will be remembered as participants when the first real punch was thrown at the Amazon citadel. The critics, they will be forgotten. All Empires fall. Amazon will too.

Read William Z. Foster’s collected works on his union organizing career; https://www.intpubnyc.com/product/ameri ... -unionism/


-Chris Townsend was a 25 year staff member of the United Electrical Workers Union (UE), and currently is the organizing director for the Amalgamated Transit Union, (ATU).

https://mltoday.com/bessemer-no-organiz ... er-wasted/

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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Sat May 01, 2021 2:16 pm

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MAY DAY: The Forgotten Labor Day
APRIL 30, 2007
Pittsburgh
Most Americans who came of age during the Cold War grew up believing that May Day was some sort of communist holiday, invented by the Russians. Every year on May 1, television news would show us official parades through Red Square in Moscow, the leaders of the USSR standing in review atop Lenin’s Tomb as soldiers marched in formation and tanks and missiles rolled past. Few Americans were aware that May 1 each year was the occasion for general strikes and mass parades by labor union members in other foreign capitals such as Paris, Rome, and Mexico City.

Since 1890, May 1 has been recognized around the world as International Labor Day. The origins of this holiday are not to be found in Russia, France or Mexico, but rather here in the United States – specifically in the struggle to shorten the workday to a tolerable length, and more specifically in events that occurred in Chicago in May 1886.

Throughout the 19th century, the struggle to shorten the workday was a central issue in workers’ efforts to form unions and gain some control over their own lives. The battle over hours was at least as important as the fight for higher wages. Early industrial capitalists imposed working days of 12, 14, or 16 hours, and workweeks of seven days. But from the beginning of industrialism, workers pushed back and tried to establish a more humane schedule of work.

In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (which two years later renamed itself the American Federation of Labor – AFL) voted to call for direct action – strikes – on May 1, 1886 to enforce on employers, from that day forward, the principle “that eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor.” When May 1, 1886 arrived, there was indeed a mass strike wave across the U.S., involving some 400,000-500,000 workers in large and medium cities as well as small towns.

CHICAGO 1886
Chicago was a major center of this movement, with as many as 90,000 demonstrators in the streets that day. A major portion of the Chicago strikers were immigrant workers – German, Irish, British, Polish, Czech and others. Industrialists, bankers, newspaper editors, and government officials were in a panic. On the third day of the strike wave, police opened fire on 500 workers protesting against scabs at the McCormick Harvester plant, killing four and injuring many others.

Outraged at the murders of their fellow workers, Chicago workers gathered in a mass rally the following evening, May 4, at Haymarket Square. A crowd of 3,000 listened to speeches by movement organizers. Near the end of the final speech, 180 police advanced in military formation on the crowd that had now dwindled to around 200. As the cops moved on the speaker’s stand, a bomb flew though the air and exploded in from of the police, killing one instantly and wounding dozens. The police regrouped and opened fire on the crowd, killing one and injuring many. Several officers were fatally wounded in the melee of “friendly fire” from their own force.

The next day the mayor declared martial law. The authorities and “respectable” citizens, were gripped by anti-labor hysteria, and viewed the eight-hour movement as a terrorist threat to civilization. (But John Swinton, the most influential labor journalist of the day, believed the bomb was thrown by a police provocateur to discredit and destroy the labor movement.) Hundreds of militant workers were arrested, homes and union offices raided. Eventually eight men were picked to face trial the murder of a police officer at Haymarket, most of whom had not even been present at Haymarket Square on the evening of May 4. But all of whom were effective labor organizers, and therefore viewed as enemies by the ruling class of Chicago. Six of the defendants were immigrants (five German, one British), which aided the effort to demonize them.

The trial was a travesty, with no workers on the jury and the outcome obvious in advance. Seven years later, Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld pardoned all of the accused, declaring that they “were not proven guilty of the crime,” and were instead victims of a biased judge and a packed jury. But the pardon came too late for five on them: on November 11, 1887, the State of Illinois had hung Albert Parsons, Adolph Fisher, August Spies, and George Engel. Louis Lingg had committed suicide, or was murdered, in his jail cell.

The Haymarket affair, and the execution of the Haymarket martyrs, was a gigantic if temporary setback to labor and the eight-hour movement in the United States. But by 1890 the AFL was again calling for May Day strikes for the eight-hour day, and labor movements in European and other countries, following the American lead, were making May Day the workers’ day of celebration, protest, and rebellion. The 1905 Russian Revolution began on May Day. In 1913 May Day arrived in Mexico, where it was (and is still) called the Day of the Chicago Martyrs. May Day continues to be celebrated by working people around the world, from Buenos Aires to Berlin, Nairobi to New Delhi.

But in the U.S., the land of its origin, businessmen and politicians worked hard over the years to steal May 1 from the labor movement, and to erase its memory. In 1939 the state of Pennsylvania declared May 1 “Americanism Day.” In 1947 Congress declared it “Loyalty Day.” Congress in 1958 proclaimed May 1 as “Law Day.” Billionaire Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York said that observing the traditional labor May Day “bordered on treason.” The Chaplain of the U.S. Senate used the occasion of May 1, 1960 to preach “Obedience to Authority.”

2006: WORKERS RECLAIM MAY DAY
On May 1, 2006, immigrant workers to the United States revived May Day as an American working class holiday, a day to demonstrate for justice. Several million immigrant workers in the U.S. participated in “the Great American Boycott,” refusing to go to work and joining in mass demonstrations. May Day 2006, and other mass demonstrations earlier last spring, arose out of protest against HR 4437, a bill that was passed by the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives in December 2005 and would have made all undocumented immigrant workers felons, and imposed stiff penalties on those who knowingly employ or assist undocumented immigrants. This bill never passed the Senate, but the battle over immigration continues.

Those who are hostile to immigrants complain that they don’t know the language, customs and history of the U.S. But school children in Mexico learn about Haymarket and the history of the eight-hour movement in the United States, while school kids in Chicago don’t. Mexican immigrants arrive here knowing May 1 as “the Day of the Chicago Martyrs,” and immigrants from other countries know that history too, while most Americans – probably even the majority of union members – know nothing of it. If immigrant workers are able to teach us something about our own labor history, and our own lost working class traditions, they will have brought us a great gift.

Historian Peter Linebaugh, who wrote the movie review of Amazing Grace in the March UE NEWS, wrote an article some years ago on the deeper history of May Day, going back to ancient times and dealing with both the green (environmental) and red (workers´ struggles) sides of May Day. To read his "The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of MAY DAY", click on the following link: www.midnightnotes.org/mayday/

https://www.ueunion.org/ue-news/2007/ma ... -labor-day
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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Wed May 12, 2021 1:24 pm

Biden is Full of Crap on Helping Working People
Riva Enteen 12 May 2021

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Biden is Full of Crap on Helping Working People

If Biden wants to help workers, he can fully implement the National Labor Relations Act, which hasn’t been enforced in 86 years.

“Workers need guaranteed affordable childcare, and by now $15 an hour doesn’t even cut it.”

“Go slow!”
I don't trust you any more
You keep on saying "Go slow!"
"Go slow!"
But that's just the trouble
"Do it slow"
Desegregation
"Do it slow"
Mass participation
"Do it slow"
Reunification
"Do it slow"
Do things gradually
“Do it slow"
But bring more tragedy
"Do it slow"
Why don't you see it
Why don't you feel it

From “Mississippi Goddam,” Nina Simone

I received the following email from somebody I struggle with about incremental change: “We all are so used to being cynical about Democrats baby-steps for reform but this is huge.”

What he considers huge is the Executive Order Establishing the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment. Although some delusional people are calling Biden the new FDR, President “nothing will fundamentally change,” is certainly not committed to working people.

If the US truly cared about workers, to start with, there would be monthly checks to all who lost income due to Covid, as many capitalist countries have done:

Percent of wages currently subsidized by governments due to Covid:

Japan: 100% for small businesses; 80% for large firms
Netherlands: Up to 90%
Norway: Up to 90%
Germany: Up to 87%
France: Up to 84%
Italy: 80%
United Kingdom: Up to 80%
Canada: Up to 75%
United States: 0%

If the US truly cared about workers, sick days and health care would be guaranteed for all, so workers wouldn’t go to work sick and could access medical care. Workers need guaranteed affordable childcare, and by now $15 an hour doesn’t even cut it. Student debt is drowning children of working families struggling in a workforce under Covid. If Biden truly cared about workers, with a stroke of his pen he could eliminate minate federal student loan debt. Workers who are behind on rent or mortgage due to Covid need their housing debt forgiven, and eviction and foreclosure prohibited. Lest we forget, homelessness exacerbates covid . The banks need to eat it for a change.

If the US truly cared about workers, medical debt would not be the largest cause of bankruptcy. Democrats received more money from drug companies than Republicans in the 2020 election. So are we surprised there will be no regulation on drug prices?

“Workers who are behind on rent or mortgage due to Covid need their housing debt forgiven, and eviction and foreclosure prohibited.”

During the presidential campaign, Biden promised to seek legislation to reduce drug prices by having the government use its leverage with drug manufacturers through the Medicare program. But at some point in the last few weeks, the administration decided not to include a proposal on drug prices in the new policy blueprint. The Huffington Post nails it: “The governments of nearly all developed countries negotiate directly with manufacturers over prices, in one way or another. Giving the U.S. government similar power is wildly popular , according to polls , in no small part because the relatively high cost of prescriptions here is such a burden on so many Americans.”

A friend, with health insurance, was recently charged $1,700 for required school vaccinations for her two children in California, where in her home country of Zambia, it would have cost her $40. If Biden was truly committed to working people, why is there such a financial burden to keep our kids safe and healthy?

So what are Joe and Kamala giving us? A Task Force. As somebody told me when a growing movement to end JROTC [Junior Reserve Officers Training Corp.] in SF lost steam after a task force was established, “If you want to kill something, give it a task force.”

Marty Walsh, Vice Chair with Kamala Harris, is heralded as the first union member to serve as Secretary of Labor in nearly 50 years. He declared he will “ensure that working people have one of their own at the table every time a major decision is made that affects their lives.” One in a table of 20? Of 12? And only for major, not minor, decisions? What an insult!

Biden issued executive orders restoring collective bargaining in the federal sector, but collective bargaining is already protected under international law. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights [ICESCR] is a treaty adopted by the UN which commits its signatory nations to work for economic, social and cultural rights including labor rights, the right to health, education, social security, and an adequate standard of living. 171 countries have ratified the treaty, but the Senate has yet to do so. If Biden truly cared about working people, he would urge the Senate to ratify the treaty.

The recent Amazon union defeat in Alabama allows Jeff Bezos to continue making over $13 million an hour off the sweat of his workers. In These Times asserts that “The election showed the clear limitations of pursuing union certification through a broken NLRB election process ... A far simpler way for workers to gain union certification and their collective bargaining rights is through a procedure called ‘card check.’ If a simple majority of workers sign cards authorizing a union to be their representative, then their employer would be compelled to recognize and negotiate with the union that workers chose. This provision was part of the 2009 Employee Free Check isn’t part of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act) now Choice Act (EFCA) that, despite Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, died during President Obama’s first term. Unfortunately, card check isn’t part of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act) now pending in Congress.” Why not?

“The PRO Act died during President Obama’s first term.”

The White House Fact Sheet describing the executive order makes a glaring understatement: “There is still much more the federal government can do to empower workers.” It adds, “Since 1935, when the National Labor Relations Act was enacted, the policy of the federal government has been to encourage worker organizing and collective bargaining, not to merely allow or tolerate them. In the 86 years since the Act was passed, the federal government has never fully implemented this policy.”

Although I hope I am wrong, I doubt that Biden’s will be the first administration in 86 years to fully implement the NLRA. Talk is cheap. If the task force was sincerely committed to a “whole-of-government approach to empower workers,” it knows what to do. Failure to address the myriad and pervasive combined crises of late-stage capitalism and Covid could bring about the structural changes workers have been hungering for.

More than 42 million people in the US filed for unemployment in the first 11 weeks of the Covid crisis, and during that time, the nation’s billionaire wealth rose by more than half a trillion dollars. If an elected government is not committed to its working people - the majority - is it legitimate? What has the advice to “go slow” gotten us? Malcom X said: "That's not a chip on my shoulder. That's your foot on my neck." People with a foot on their neck don’t say go slow.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/index ... ing-people

**************************************************

Freedom Rider: The End of Low Wage Work
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist 12 May 2021

Image
Freedom Rider: The End of Low Wage Work
The combination of unemployment and additional stimulus support has made staying home a better economic decision than working for peanuts under stressful conditions.

“The opportunity to hear why workers make a logical choice is never heard.”

The latest popular lament in the United States is not about how the people suffer under a predatory system. In usual fashion, the people themselves are turned into villains when they refuse to acquiesce to their oppression.

Low wage workers have made the rational decision to take a break. Why shouldn’t they? They have no safety net, no guarantee of housing or health care or child care or transportation. The combination of unemployment and additional stimulus support has made staying home a better economic decision than working for peanuts under stressful conditions.

One would think that employers in retail and restaurants are the victims. The corporate media repeat endlessly that they can’t find workers but don’t tell us why this situation has taken place. The opportunity to hear why workers make a logical choice is never heard. The result is more right wing propaganda masquerading as news.

Even worse, workers are now being punished because they refuse to knuckle under. Montana and South Carolina have chosen to forgo federal unemployment support in an effort to force people back into low wage jobs. Montana’s governor said, “We need to incentivize Montanans to reenter the workforce.” His brilliant plan is to give up the additional $300 per week and instead give $1,200 just once. South Carolina’s governor is competing in the cruelty olympics, complaining about “dangerous federal entitlements” and cutting off money to people who need it the most.

“Workers are now being punished because they refuse to knuckle under.”

These servants of corporate interests have reason to worry. There are signs that workers have had enough. Employees in a Maine Dollar General store walked out and explained that the low pay and business model of being overworked was no longer worth it to them.

It is a positive change to see workers take a little bit of advantage of the system. The system takes advantage of them often enough. Discount stores like Dollar General are the fastest growing retail outlets in the country. They hire as few workers as possible, wrongly classify workers as managers in order to exempt them from overtime protection, and regularly engage in wage theft. It is little wonder that the unemployed have decided to stand down.

They should be supported by everyone else and their efforts should be part of political demands made to the supposedly less evil democrats. These positions would be filled if wages were higher and working conditions were better, and no one should be confused about that fact. Any anger should be directed at the employers who bend the law to favor themselves and to the politicians who do their bidding. The workers who fight back as best they can should not be the targets of criticism.

“Any anger should be directed at the employers.”

Complaints and demands should be directed at the members of congress who claim to be progressives. Instead of joining the pro Joe Biden propaganda they should confront him and the rest of the neoliberals and make good on the image they have created for themselves. If Biden is truly “transformational” now is the time for him to prove it.

Real political transformation is needed but unlikely to happen at this juncture. The lesser evil crowd won’t do more than they are doing now. Neither will the people who covered for them and spoke of “moving them left” and “holding feet to the fire.” The catastrophe of low wage work is the end result of years of collaboration between the ruling classes and political leadership in both major parties.

Hopefully these jobs will remain unfilled when the unemployment runs out. The Dollar General workers in Maine put up a sign which read, “Google ‘general strike’ and learn how we can take our power back!” The refusal to go back to bad pay and unfair conditions is a kind of strike but it can’t end when the money is cut off.

The restaurants allowed to pay less than the minimum wage to tipped workers and the wage stealing retailers should fear that these bad jobs will go unfilled. The moment is ripe for a general strike but that means organizing, political education, and resistance. The people stocking shelves and flipping burgers can’t resist on their own. At the very least the rest of us should counter the vilification and fight efforts to kick them while they are down.

Everyone in this country is likely to end up in the same predicament of precarity and disposability. We may not know how to call a general strike, but we should know which side to choose in this struggle.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/freed ... -wage-work

It is past time for workers to abandon the deceitful Democratic Party. It is well past time for a real workers party.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Sat May 29, 2021 1:59 pm

Chile, after nearly fifty years of despair
On May 15 and 16 of this year, the people of Chile began a process to overturn the nearly 50-year interruption of the nation’s social and economic development. With the election of a representative body to a forthcoming Constitutional Convention, Chilean voters may finally break away completely from the nightmare imposed by the military-fascist regime of Augusto Pinochet.



The Chilean military’s coup in 1973 broke what was then the longest streak of formal parliamentary rule in any South American country. The international left viewed the Popular Unity coalition government, led by the Socialist and Communist Parties and elected in 1970, as an experiment testing the viability of the parliamentary road to socialism. The Chilean ruling class and the US government also saw it the same way and were determined to crush it.



With the socialist experiment destroyed by the coup and fascist rule installed, Chile became a laboratory for the most aggressive policies of market fundamentalism: privatization, deregulation, and the absolute administration of economic life by profitability. Under the direction of the so-called Chicago School of political economy, Chile became the dream of die-hard free-marketeers: a veritable Hobbesian state-of-nature.



The experiment failed, by bourgeois measures and even more so as measured by every misery index of the people's well-being.



Tragically, the debt incurred in unwinding the worst aspects of the disastrous policy exceeded the debt incurred by the Allende government in expanding the social benefits of the people in 1970-1973.



Since Pinochet’s departure, Chile has been in a limbo between the restraints on change imposed by the undemocratic 1980 Pinochet Constitution and the pressure for democracy and social advance pressed by the social movements.



Finally, with the May 15-16 election of a Constitutional Assembly, and the opportunity to construct a new, progressive Constitution and move beyond the 48 years of retarded development and backwardness, the future of Chile appears brighter. Especially significant in this election was the strong showing by the coalition led by the Chilean Communist Party, garnering the second-most delegates to the convention.



While this is a step forward, one must never forget the costs to the Chilean people of nearly half a century of the effects of fascist repression and unfettered economic exploitation.



And one must never forget the ugly, brutal role of the US government in destroying the Popular Unity experiment, a role that the US continues to play in undermining independent developments in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, and virtually every other country in the Americas.



Recently, a reminder of the sweeping, decisive, and unconscionable intervention of the US government and US institutions in Chile came from the records of a partisan of Chilean democracy, a first-hand observer and victim of the machinations of the shameful servants of US imperialism.



Geoffrey Fox joined eleven other Chicagoans, including trade unionists Abe Feinglass, Ernie DeMaio, and Frank Teruggi, Sr (his son, Frank Jr was murdered by the Pinochet junta) on a fact-finding visit to Chile in February of 1974.



Cramming interviews, meetings, and even clandestine contacts, the group experienced the full horror of the Pinochet butchery. As one military officer told them: “We have moved from the stage of mass slaughter to the stage of selective slaughter.”



Upon his return, Fox penned a detailed, first-hand report of the findings. A vice-president of his own American Federation of Teachers (AFT) local, he naturally thought that the national union’s publication, The American Teacher, would be a ready recipient for an article chronicling the harsh fate of teachers under Pinochet.



And indeed, he was right. The editor, a long-standing defender of labor rights, David Elsila, gladly received Fox’s article and pressed for its publication. The article was typeset and all but printed.



But Fox and Elsila underestimated the reach of the Cold War anti-Communist consensus, from its core in the upper reaches of government through the security establishment, the educational system, the media, and the labor union leadership. The Cold War chill brought all of these institutions into compliance with US foreign policy goals (imperialist designs!).



After purging the left from trade union work and expelling the left-led unions, the center-right labor leadership agreed to an unholy alliance with the US ruling class. In exchange for slavishly following, even promoting, US foreign policy, the labor chiefs sought to achieve an era of cooperation between capital and labor. It was a small price to pay for capital to grant nominal increases in wages and benefits, while getting labor subservience in quelling labor insurgencies in other regions of the world. Militancy and solidarity were surrendered for labor peace, a result satisfactory to both complacent labor leaders and the guardians of capitalism, but a shameful betrayal of the international working class.



No one personified this betrayal more than the assistant to the president of the AFT, Alfred Max Loewenthal. Nearly every AFL-CIO union and the Federation maintained gatekeepers to deny even a hint of radical ideology or militant action to appear within its bounds. More often than not, they were ex-Communists or Trotskyists, who bore extraordinary grudges against the Communist Parties and their left associates. They could be relied upon to vigilantly veto even a whisper of criticism of US imperial policy.



Most notorious of those was Jay Lovestone, an ex-Communist who parlayed his anti-Communism into the leading foreign policy advisor to the center-right in the labor movement and who constituted its conduit to the CIA. It is no exaggeration to view him as the leading Cold War organizer of the US labor movement’s role in its complicity with the CIA in resisting leftist labor movements throughout the world.



The AFT had its own gatekeeper in Al Loewenthal. He came into the labor movement as the leader of an anti-Communist local in the militant United Electrical Workers Union (UE). When a rival, anti-Communist union (IUE) was established to raid UE in the Cold War, Loewenthal enthusiastically joined, rising in the IUE hierarchy before escaping scandal and moving to AFT.



Loewenthal became an important part of the AFL-CIO anti-Communist, pro-imperialist architecture, serving the notorious CIA collaborating AIFLD.



When Elsila dared to print Fox’s report in the AFT paper, Loewenthal was on it like the rabid watchdog that he was.



In denying publication to the Fox report on the ruthless repression in Chile, Loewenthal explained:

In essence, what I have written is a criticism-- perhaps also a protest--using the Fox article as a glaring example of the injection of an ideology into A.T. [The American Teacher] which is at variance with AFT and AFL-CIO policy on a current matter.... Even worse, its publication would have made the A.T. the dupe of a Communist strategy on Chile and opened AFT to ridicule.



Elsila mounted an admirable defense, though to no avail. Anti-Communist hysteria always won out in the eviscerated, post-war, Cold War labor movement, as it often does today. He wrote in his appeal:

Fox is a reputable sociologist who has written studies on Latin America; he speaks Spanish fluently; and his trade union credentials include having been elected vice president by his AFT local. The goal of the committee was to determine to what extent workers are suffering under the junta and to report its findings. The commission’s report and Fox’s article are based on interviews with the US ambassador to Chile, junta officials, trade unionists, rank-and-file workers, and others. It is about as comprehensive a report on the status of things today in Chile as one can get.



Of course, none of that mattered to staunch Cold Warriors. Thus, the AFT joined, unknown to its members, in propping up a fascist dictatorship and in taking a stand on the wrong side of the history of the workers’ movement. The members could not be trusted to make up their own minds on the butchery in Chile.



In place of a report urging solidarity with workers in another land, AFT members got another Cold War saga about Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet dissident. Years later, after Solzhenitsyn was no longer useful to the security services, we learned of his ultra-conservatism, his disdain for democracy, and his anti-Semitism. Truth was sacrificed in the interest of US imperial objectives.



Fox and Elsila fought the good fight. Elsila soon left AFT to edit Solidarity, the newspaper of the United Auto Workers (UAW), a union with its own unpleasant Cold War legacy, but a touch more tolerance. Fox continued teaching and writing about Latin America and addressing other progressive themes: his novel on the Paris Commune will be out later this year.



Their story is more than an anecdote about the Cold War. It is not a reminder of the past; rather, it exposes the unseen mechanisms that constantly mesh and turn, burnishing a false depiction of US foreign policy while undermining the bonds of our common humanity. The same institutions that surrendered their independence, sold their integrity for acceptance in ruling circles, and stained international solidarity operate today in enabling US rulers to undermine social progress from Venezuela to Afghanistan and many places in-between and beyond.



The dishonesty and ideological corruption that drove Loewenthal to serve the forces destroying Chile after 1973 are still infecting the media, the NGOs, the CIA-funded front organizations, the public intellectuals, the security services, the foreign affairs establishment, and, sadly, the labor movement.



The cost to Chile has been incalculable.



Now, maybe, the Chilean people can move forward again.



Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Sun Jun 13, 2021 1:53 pm

Image

The United Mine Workers Strike at Warrior Met Coal
June 11, 2021
By Lambert Strether – June 9, 2021

Thank goodness Teen Vogue has a labor reporter, because without Kim Kelly, we might not be hearing anything about the United Mine Workers of American (UMWA) strike at Warrior Met Coal in Brockwood, Alabama, where over 1,000 miners have been on strike for over two months. Here is the UMWA strike page (which permits donations by check, but not online, which seems a little old school). https://umwa.org/support-umwa-miners-on ... rrior-met/

Warrior Met coal isn’t used for power; it’s a premium product, metallurgical coal. It’s possible to reverse engineer the high-level economics behind the strike from the Warrior Met company page. I have helpfully underlined the salient points:

Warrior is a U.S.-based, environmentally[1] and socially[2] minded supplier to the global steel industry. It is dedicated entirely to mining non-thermal metallurgical (met) coal used as a critical component of steel production by metal manufacturers in Europe, South America and Asia. Warrior is a large-scale, low-costproducer and exporter of premium met coal, also known as hard coking coal (HCC), operating highly efficient longwall operations in its underground mines based in Alabama. The HCC that Warrior produces from the Blue Creek, AL, coal seam contains very low sulfur and has strong coking properties and is of a similar quality to coal referred to as the premium HCC produced in Australia. The premium nature of Warrior’s HCC makes it ideally suited as a base feed coal for steel makers and results in price realizations near the Platts Index price.

So, high prices and low costs. And why are the costs so low? Well, there’s a history here. Warrior Met has a history. Coal barons gotta coal baron, and it’s been that way for some time. From the Montgomery Herald, “Recovery includes humane priorities“:

Warrior Met was once known as Jim Walter Resources, known also as a builder of affordable stick-built homes across the southeast, including West Virginia. In Alabama, the firm had North America’s deepest coal mines at 2,000 feet that produced methane gas and high-quality metallurgical coal. On Sept. 23, 2001, a cave-in caused a release of methane gas that sparked two major explosions, killing 13 UMWA members.

Then U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, spouse of U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., cited Jim Walter for 27 violations and $435,000 in fines. She then approved MSHA reducing the fine to an insulting $3,000, which was appealed by the UMWA. MSHA then increased the fine to $5,000.

In the fulness of time, Jim Walter Resources went bankrupt — whether for-real bankrupt, or Sackler-style bankrupt, I don’t know — and emerged in 2016 as Warrior Met. The UMWA offered contract concessions: over five years Warrior Met become profitable. Now it’s payback time, except not. From WHBM, “Alabama Coal Workers Strike For Better Wages, Fair Treatment“:

Warrior Met Coal took over and workers agreed to cut their wages and benefits to keep the mines open. Employees said the company promised to restore some benefits after five years. Warrior’s latest offer is about a 10% pay increase, but that doesn’t cover what they lost.

“Oh it’s a slap in the face,” [miner Courtney Finklea] said. “All we wanted was a piece of the pie, and I guess the pie was never given to us.”

Sadly, the company’s initial offer was insultingly low:

Shortly after the strike was launched and more than three-quarters of the workers walked out, the company came up with a tentative agreement with UMWA negotiators, which only offered a wage hike of [$1.50] per hour increase, over the next five years. This deal was overwhelmingly voted against by union members with over 91 percent voting ‘no’. On April 12, union members voted along similarly large numbers to continue their strike.

$1.50? Really? (And what was the UMWA thinking?) But the strike isn’t just about Warrior’s broken promises, or wages. It’s also about working conditions. From AL.com, “Striking Alabama coal miners endure arrests, see little progress: ‘We’re just standing together’”:

Ramey Foster wanted to illustrate why miners have been on strike for more than two months against Warrior Met Coal, so he pulled out two small booklets.

One was thin, yellow, dog-eared and stained, while the other was a pristine, thick white paperback perhaps four times the size of the other.

“This is the contract we’ve been working under,” Foster said, holding up the smaller one, which he kept in the bib of his overalls while in the mines.

Somehow I don’t think the new contract is shorter because Warrior Met found a way to say the same thing with fewer words. Because this is what the new contract allows:

James Traweek has worked at Warrior Met Coal for four years at the No 7 mine in Brookwood. He explained miners accepted a $6-an-hour pay cut and reduction in health insurance and retirement benefits during the bankruptcy process five years ago, while adhering to a strict attendance policy.

“We were required to work six, sometimes seven days a week, for 12 hours a day. We worked on a four-strike system, which meant missing four days in a year resulted in termination,” said Traweek. “The only thing that was accepted as an excuse was a death in the immediate family. We had to work sick with the flu and many other illnesses in fear of losing our jobs.”

He noted the workers were just seeking to be compensated what they were worth in wages and benefits comparable to other unionized mines. Warrior Met Coal have brought in replacement workers as part of their continuity plan, the use of which Traweek characterized as “gut-wrenching”.

“We’re fighting for our families and every other member of the organized labor community across the world. We can’t allow corporate greed to rob us of our dignity and worth,” added Traweek. “After bringing a company from bankruptcy to record breaking production, we feel we deserve more.”

Meanwhile, the coal baron’s minions are running into striking miners with their cars. From WBRC, “Video shows trucks hitting workers picketing outside Warrior Met Coal“:

The United Mine Workers of America tells WBRC, some of its members have been hit by cars three times in the past three days while on the picket line.

In video, you can see a red truck bumping someone picketing outside Warrior Met Coal.

The other video shows a black truck hitting someone else as it made its way into the plant.

UMWA feels this is the company or some of its workers way of not allowing its workers to rightfully protest.

And meanwhile, nothing is complete without the usual cast of characters:

Blowhard Republicans. From Labor Notes:

A supposed defense of coal miners, their families, their way of life, and their culture has been front and center of the Republican agenda ever since the push for decarbonization began. It was a key part of the Right’s pushback against Obama and his “war on coal.” Hillary Clinton faced tremendous pushback for her awful statement on the 2016 campaign trail that she was going to “put a lot of coal miners out of business.” In contrast, Trump said, “we’re going to put these coal miners back to work,” even bizarrely donning a hard hat in coal country at one point.

As all this has unfolded, I was waiting for someone on the Right to speak out in support of these workers. This, at least in appearance, has all the trappings of a story that conservatives can rally around. You’ve got coal miners, in Alabama, many of whom are conservatives (I saw more than one MAGA hat while walking the picket lines with them), fighting for themselves, their families, and their communities. They’re demanding fair compensation against elites (Republicans hate elites now, right?), and the government is coming in and suppressing their freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom to protest. What’s missing for a good conservative culture war story?

Well, it isn’t what’s not there. It’s what is there. This coal miners’ strike has something that stories about the Great Cancellation of Dr. Seuss don’t: working-class solidarity wielded against bosses.

If the same right-wing talking heads who spent hours wailing about Mr. Potato Head a few weeks ago decided to rally around the strikers, many in the conservative rank and file would join them. But those conservative talking heads never will, because it threatens their class interests and the bosses they carry water for. Because if coal miners who are conservative and liberal, Black and white, in a deep-red state like Alabama can walk off the job to demand better pay and working conditions, then maybe the average Fox News watcher could, too. And we can’t have them thinking like that.

Wussy Democrats. From the Week:

Under the National Labor Relations Act, unions have a right to strike so long as they follow various rules. Assaulting a union picket [with a vehicle] should be something that triggers an investigation and possible sanctions from the National Labor Relations Board (which oversees union law), but so far there has been no sign of that.

This is an area where President Biden could accomplish a lot just by speaking up. To his credit, he did mildly encourage the union drive at Amazon months ago, but that was always going to be an uphill battle. This time the union already exists, and only wants a fair contract. The risk calculation for Warrior Met would change very quickly if the president was looking over their shoulder and directing a lot of media attention in the process.

The Fratricidal Left. From WSWS:

Top UMWA District 20 officials Larry Spencer and James Blankenship physically assaulted two members of the “Dixieland of the Proletariat” podcast, falsely believing them to be representatives of the World Socialist Web Site. Both Spencer and Blankenship are members of the executive board of the Alabama AFL-CIO.

During the assault, Spencer told the podcasters to “get the f**k out of here” and flipped over their table. Blankenship threatened to kill one of the podcasters, who is black, shouting: ““I’ll beat your mother f**king brains out, boy!”

I dunno. Did Spencer and Blankenship negotiate that $1.50 raise?

And finally, an unusual member of the cast of characters:
@StanMorrical
You might be interested to know that CALPERS, the largest US public employee union pension, and CALSTRS, the California teachers union pension, are owners of Warrior Met Coal per their most recent holdings disclosures. Hmmm.
1:20 PM · Jun 8, 2021

Wait, what? A highly principled organ of a deep Blue state working against a union? Doesn’t CalPERS have some sort of social justice policy that covers this situation?



* * *
The Warriot Met story has it all, doesn’t it? I can’t understand why “Rachel” doesn’t cover it every night….
NOTES

[1] From AL.com, “State blames coal mine after creeks turned black near Tuscaloosa“:

The Alabama Surface Mining Commission has issued a notice of violation to Warrior Met Coal after two local creeks ran black for weeks with dark colored sediment near the company’s Mine No. 7 in Brookwood, Tuscaloosa County…. The pollution in the creek was first reported by nearby residents, who lodged complaints with ADEM and the Surface Mining Commission on April 26. According to state records, ADEM inspected the site and collected water samples on April 27, and the mining commission inspected the site on May 6 and 7, informing Warrior of the violations on May 7.

[2] Come on, man.



Featured image: File Photo

(Naked Capitalism)

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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 23, 2021 5:49 pm

Image
Longshore workers walk off the job in solidarity with Teamsters in San Pedro, Calif., in April 2021. (Brittany Murray / MediaNews Group / Long Beach Press-Telegram via Getty Images)

How labor can win at the bargaining table
Posted Jul 22, 2021 by Sam Gindin

Originally published: The Nation (July 8, 2021 )
Labor, Movements, Socialism, StrategyUnited StatesNewswireAmerican Labour Movement

The state of the American labour movement has, since the mid-1970s, been dispiriting. There have, of course, been moments of creative and inspiring resistance, but the predominant story has been a chronicle of decline: private-sector unionization rates below where they were a century ago, the abject failure to make breakthroughs in key emerging sectors, defensive stagnation in bargaining achievements, and–election-year rhetoric aside–the political marginalization of working-class concerns.

The revival of the working class as a social force is the definitive economic and political challenge now confronting the American left. Whether the post-pandemic moment will be a turning point with unions poised for a new militancy, and whether the recent delegitimation of state and political institutions might lead to a sustained revival of progressive class politics, are open questions. It “depends.” And what it depends on will have a lot to do with what happens in organizing at the workplace level.

Which is why, by Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor, is a rare piece of good news. Published by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, it builds on McAlevey’s earlier works, adding new case studies on the detailed process of collective bargaining (often foreign territory to many workers and labour academics), incorporates participant interviews, and focuses laser-like on the challenge of exactly how to raise worker expectations and actually win.

Written as a “report” on new bargaining experiences in the health, education, and hospitality sectors and among journalists, Turning the Tables is essentially a comprehensive handbook for workplace organizing. The specifics of the method are presented in admirably clear prose, while the rich case studies illustrate and validate the underlying organizing method. The interviews underline the exhilarating emergence, through the bargaining process and strikes, of workers’ strategic skills and confidence.

Case Studies

Most of all, the case studies highlight the difference between going through the motions versus actually organizing. In too many unions preparing for bargaining, surveys on workers’ preferences are generally pro forma, generating minor interest; in the case studies here, surveys repeatedly become a tool for generating intense collective discussions. In their communications strategies, unions have been catching up on the use of social media; here the emphasis is on labour-intensive direct contact. As a psychiatric nurse asserts:

Facebook is helpful. Email is helpful, Texting is helpful. But there’s still nothing that beats that one-to-one communication.

Similarly, opening the actual bargaining sessions to members is about more than being “inclusive” (important as that is). The experience also tends to sharpen the separation from management, build trust in the union, and create a sense of the larger collective. A teacher notes that with open bargaining “everybody gets to hear what is happening in other people’s worlds.” Another adds that having far more members engaged in day-day bargaining “knits you together as a community.” In the small rural town of Greenfield, the Massachusetts Nurses Association even opened up its bargaining to include members of the community.

Yet, while McAlevey has inspired a remarkable domestic and international following, she also has her critics. One wing of that criticism surfaced after McAlevey’s recent argument that the drive to organize Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., did not incorporate “best practice.”

Some, though acknowledging that McAlevey’s specific criticisms had validity, charged that expressing them publicly in the aftermath of a painful defeat was a betrayal of solidarity and amplified worker demoralization. Others went further and questioned the very notion of “best practice.” Every organizing drive and bargaining campaign, they argued, is context-contingent and varies with the main concerns of workers, the sector involved, the nature of the workplace, the balance of power between workers and employers, and so on.

The reproach for speaking out does the labour movement no favors. It comes disturbingly close to echoing familiar appeals for “unity” and “solidarity” from union leaders more interested in silencing their opposition than in risking what it might take to win. Restricting controversies to private circles rather than dealing with them in the open is both patronizing to workers and counterproductive. The Bessemer defeat was the right time to raise hard questions, because it was a moment when the movement was paying attention.

Arguing that McAlevey’s particular approach falls short is one thing. It is, however, quite another thing to cavalierly dismiss the very attempt to develop a best practice in building worker power. McAlevey’s work, culminating in Turning the Tables, makes a convincing case that such a core of strategic principles–a method–is indispensable.

McAlevey’s method is based firmly on workers’ self-determined needs; appreciating that “class” is experienced both inside and outside the workplace; focusing on informal leaders as catalysts to the broadest membership participation; applying structure tests to assist workers in collectively assessing the depth of their strength; and increasing the degree of direct worker participation in bargaining (“Big Bargaining”).

A longer-standing and more substantive critique of McAlevey’s approach is that it is “staff driven”–controlled not by the workers themselves but by outsiders. This notion that workers are spontaneously radical but limited in expressing this by staff and bureaucratic leaders standing in their way is blindingly naive. Are we truly to believe that workers can one day take on capitalism and transform the world but are incapable of taking on their own elected leaders? It should be clear to anyone who has interacted with working people that they have no “inherent” nature; workers can be radical or conservative. Capitalism has, through the logic of its structures, created a working class whose daily experiences push it to a dependence on employers, drive it–out of necessity–to short-termism and pragmatism, divide and fragment it multidimensionally, and often leave it too exhausted to be actively engaged.

The challenge–the active organizing challenge–is to build on the contradictions within capitalism to support the remaking of the working class: to develop the individual and collective potentials of workers into a coherent, confident, and creative social force capable of leading a struggle against not only their employer but eventually capitalism itself. Such organizing cannot be achieved without “leadership”; the question is what kind of leadership, with what relationship to the workers affected? Above all, does the overall strategy adopted in the workplace contribute to developing the individual and collective strength of workers in a way that is self-sustaining after the organizers leave? (The absence of such lasting power is the basis for McAlevey’s critique of Saul Alinsky.)

The defining principle of the method that McAlevey learned and adapted through her time at New England Local 1199 (itself modeled on the CIO organizing of the 1930s) begins and ends precisely with the basic democratic principle of broadening and deepening the participation of the workers involved. It starts with the commonsense understanding that workers develop unevenly, and this is where the informal workplace leaders, as opposed to those appointed or selected via a caucus, come in. They may or may not originally be pro-union–but they are central because they are defined by the trust fellow workers have in them. The crucial role of the organizer is to find such leaders and win them over. It is these informal workplace leaders–and not outside organizers–that are to become the key catalyst to reaching and activating the rest of the workforce. And the ultimate goal is that a significant majority of workers become organizers in their own right.

Actual “staff driven” unions–code for bureaucratic, top-down unions–will not touch McAlevey with a 20-foot pole. Such union leaders fully understand that the threat implied by McAlevey’s approach to organizing is precisely that it may make their lives less comfortable by raising expectations, encouraging far greater direct worker participation in bargaining, developing confident and active members, and opening the door to new leaders who might challenge those currently in place.

McAlevey’s method may not meet some “revolutionary” test, but its proven successes, ratified in practice by workers and further corroborated in Turning Points, underscores the crucial truth that workers can achieve valuable, if partial, victories even within capitalism. There are, indeed, limits to her method. It cannot for example be applied–at least not without significant modifications–where union leaders are hostile; the strategies for replacing such leaders does not fully parallel those for fighting the boss. Overcoming competitive relationships across unions also demands further changes.

Organizing

The realities of a capitalist economy remain challenges not only for McAlevey but for all union activists–and the left as a whole. Organizing at the union level cannot be directly translated into organizing politically for a more egalitarian, democratic, environmentally sustainable society; political organizing is a distinct sphere of activity. Nevertheless, even there, the invaluable tool kit McAlevey has provided can advance the task of developing a working class with the vision, capacities, and self-confidence to go further.

Two specific elements of her method are especially critical. The first may seem obvious: organizing rooted in the workplace. But the extent to which the postwar history of trade unionism has involved retreating from or trading off workplace rights and power for centralized and technical collective bargaining cannot be stressed enough. In this regard, bureaucratization has indeed been a barrier to working-class achievements. Equally problematic are calls for “social unionism”–investing in recruiting new workers to the union without appreciating the centrality of first educating, developing, and maintaining the existing workplace base. Without that base, progressive intentions will be internally undermined.

A second crucial contribution is McAlevey’s emphasis on wall-to-wall “industrial” bargaining–bringing all workers in a workplace together regardless of differentials in status. Along with opening the door to regional or sectoral organizing and bargaining, this promotes the practical importance of the class sensibility that is fundamental as well to a larger politics. And that impetus to a class perspective is further reinforced by mapping what/who you are up against, who is potentially on your side, and in erasing the often “artificial distinctions between ‘workers’ and ‘community.’”

Workers may share class indignities, but, siloed in their individual unions and struggles, they are not a class in any coherent ideological or applied sense. And their formation into a class cannot be assumed or wished for–nor can it be conjured up by uncritically celebrating failed efforts. It can only happen through struggles, experimentation, evaluating lessons learned, and the emergence of institutions to facilitate this process. McAlevey’s great contribution has been her determination to enter into this process with eyes wide open, a faith in the individual and collective potentials of working people, and an indefatigable drive to systematize experience and lessons.

https://mronline.org/2021/07/22/how-lab ... ing-table/
Are we re-inventing the wheel all over again? To be sure, we stand on the shoulders of giants, and one of those was William Z Foster. Most of the important points made by McAlevey can be found here:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/foster ... /index.htm

The emphasis on democracy in organizing and the subsequent functioning of the union, organization but flexibility, adaptability, are all here. Under the topic of 'General', for example:
I. General
1. The steel workers cannot be organized by agitation alone ; it requires thorough organization work to unionize them.

2. The work must be coordinated and planned—per organizer, per locality, per day, per week, etc.

3. Not mechanical blue-print tactics, but flexibility. The degree to which the proposals below can be applied depends on local conditions; the workers’ mood and strength of organization, the attitude of the bosses and government towards the campaign, etc.

4. The organization work must be carried out upon the basis of an energetic drive, not spontaneously and spasmodically, or merely a slow, gradual growth; sags in activity and loss of momentum are very dangerous in the drive by weakening the confidence of workers.

5. A strong discipline should prevail all through the campaign, but each unit must develop a healthy initiative, based on a vigorous trade union democracy.

6. A central aim must always be to draw the largest possible masses into direct participation in all the vital activities of the union ; membership recruitment, formulation of demands, union elections, petitions, pledge votes, strike votes, strike organization, etc. This gives them a feeling that the union is actually their movement.

7. Self-criticism at all times is absolutely indispensable to the working out of proper tactics.

8. High morale among the organizers and enthusiasm and confidence among the workers are indispensable conditions to the success of the work.

9. Organizers do not know how to organize by instinct, but must be carefully taught.

10. Every organizer and unit in the campaign must be activated at all times. The whole organizing force should move forward as one machine to the accomplishment of its goal of building the union.

11. Hard work and sobriety are basic essentials for success. Chair-warmers and irresponsibles should be made to feel unwelcome in the organizing crew.

12. Every step taken in the campaign must have as its central purpose the direct recruitment of new members. The main slogan is: “Join the Union”.
And this cannot be overemphasized:
Individual recruiting is the base of all immediate organizational work in the steel industry. It is fundamentally important in every steel center and may be the only form for the time being in company union towns and elsewhere where terroristic conditions prevail. An elementary aim in the campaign should be to activate the greatest numbers of workers to do this individual button-hole work. The campaign can succeed only if thousands of workers can be organized to help directly in the enrollment of members. This work cannot be done by organizers alone. Their main task is to organize the most active workers among the masses in great numbers to do the recruiting. The tendency common in organization campaigns to leave the signing of new members solely to the organizers and to recruitment in open meetings should be avoided.

<snip>

(e) Key men in shops, fraternal organizations, etc., should be given close attention and all efforts made to sign them up, but this work should not be done at the expense of broad organization work among the masses

(b) Local unions should hold mass meetings of the workers in their respective mills and sign up new members. There should also be special meetings held for the various numerically important crafts where necessary. Often workers will join at such meetings when they will not sign up at large, open mass meetings. It is very important from an organizational standpoint that the local unions and their branches be set up as soon as practical and a regular dues system established. This impresses the workers with seriousness and stability of the movement. Merely signing up a worker does not organize him. He must be brought into a local union, given a union card, got to paying dues, attending union meetings, etc.
It is good that McAlevey has brought this vital topic into focus and having not read her work myself I can only offer that Foster, despite a few minor anachronisms here and there, put forth a detailed program of what is required that is as relevant as it was in 1936. Steel is not the same as healthcare or education but work is work and bosses in capitalist society are bosses, that relationship is always the same.

(Bolding added)
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Re: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 02, 2021 2:13 pm

Defending Marx and Braverman: taking back the labour process in theory and practice
Issue: 171
Posted on 26th July 2021
Bob Carter

Writing his 1974 book Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, US Marxist and political economist Harry Braverman noted that Karl Marx had demonstrated that processes of production are constantly transformed by the driving force of capital accumulation.1 These transformations manifest themselves in the changes in the application of science and technology to production and their effect on labour processes in each branch of industry, as well as in the redistribution of labour among occupations and industries.

Marx’s analysis contrasted with the dominant industrial and sociological views of the 1960s and 1970s, which saw changes in work and occupations as largely benign. According to these, automation would remove heavy and tedious labour. Increasing demand for educational qualifications supposedly reflected the growth of skilled labour and white-collar occupations. New personnel policies seemed to reflect concern for workers’ wellbeing. More widely, academic sociology and conservative political ideologies saw the growth of white-collar workers as increasing the weight of the middle class, thereby reducing the viability of socialism. This belief was reflected by variants of socialist thought that saw revolutionary agency as moving from the working class in the most advanced industrial economies to the Global South, the peasantry and dispossessed.

For Braverman, the ascendency of this bourgeois view of work was largely a result of Marxists having added little to Marx’s work since his death, despite continuous and significant changes in the nature of the economy. There was simply “no continuing body of work in the Marxist tradition dealing with the capitalist mode of production in the manner that Marx treated it in the first volume of Capital”.2 Indeed, outside of the relatively few readers of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital, there was little knowledge of Marx’s contribution in the theorisation of workplace reorganisation and its effects on class relations. Thankfully, there has been an increase of academic interest in Marx’s ideas in this area since the Braverman’s “rediscovery of the labour process”. However, Marxist contributions to the subject have been overshadowed by theorists seeking to undermine Marx’s and Braverman’s understanding of changes in work and their effect on class relations and accumulation strategies.

Braverman challenged bourgeois characterisations of the capitalist labour process. He admitted that major changes in the organisation of production, in particular the growth of commercial, administrative and technical labour, “seemed to cut across Marx’s bipolar class structure and introduce a complicating element.” However, he also insisted that the adoption of Fordist production techniques, and Taylorism as a mode of work organisation, was spreading to more and more sections of the economy.3 Much “white-collar” labour was subject to exactly the same developments as “manual” work; to varying degrees, white-collar employees were becoming workers. Braverman contested descriptions of workforces as increasingly skilled, detailing employers’ tendencies to increase control of workers’ labour through scientific advances that separated the conception and planning of work from its execution—in short, deskilling. He also explained the continued relevance of capital’s utilisation of the reserve army of labour.

The impact of Braverman’s book was rapid and profound, reframing sociological views about work and challenging dominant academic orientations. Braverman’s influence has subsequently waned, though not due to outmoded insights, but rather because conjunctural factors have forced a retreat from class-based analyses in general.4 These factors included the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was said to foreclose any possibility of alternatives to capitalism, as well as the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and the popularisation of post-modernism.5 All of these developments reflected and deepened the loss of confidence in working-class organisation. However, as E P Thompson stressed, class is a relationship. Though overt mass resistance retreated (notwithstanding events such as the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike), the “other side” of the capital-labour relationship, spearheaded by the state, went on the offensive. This was, in Ralph Miliband’s terms, “class struggle from above”.6 The result was the enactment of anti-trade union legislation, which remains intact today, and assaults on the welfare state and living standards.

What follows is largely an appreciation of Braverman’s contribution. This is no substitute for reading the original. His work is both rich and deliberately accessible. This latter quality is very admirable and reflects Braverman’s experience as a worker and a socialist activist. There are criticisms to be made of his work, but these should not distract from his achievements. Following a summary of some aspects of Labour and Monopoly Capital, the second part of this article looks at the subsequent criticisms of the book, detailing how they developed into the essentially conservative project of the “labour process debate”. This field of academic argument became detached from its origins in Marx’s Capital and Braverman’s work. The labour process debate eventually coalesced into a new orthodoxy stripped of any relationship to class analysis. It is time to rectify the surrender of this vital subject to those incapable of seeing beyond capitalist production and to reassert that workplace relations are characterised by exploitation and class conflict.

Capitalism and the degradation of work

Braverman’s work emerged in the context of claims that the expansion of administrative, technical and professional jobs reflected growing skills among the workforce and a changing class composition of employment. Against these claims, he argued that whatever the surface appearances and formal qualifications of labour, the dominant tendency within capitalism was for work, and thus also the worker, to be degraded. Braverman’s argument was widely based, but its central thesis built on Marx’s theory of the labour process. Marx maintained that the “real” labour process takes place when the labourer “creates new use values by performing useful labour with existing use values”.7 The labour process described here is a labour process in general and, as such, “its elements, its conceptually specific components, are those of the labour process itself, of any labour process, irrespective of the mode of production or the stage of economic development”.8 As Marx insists, however, labour processes never occur in the abstract but always under concrete social relations in specific societies. One result of this is that not all employed activity is necessarily part of a labour process. Capitalist managers and their supervisors may be “at work”, but they are rarely performing the useful labour of adding use values through the production process and are thus are not engaged in a labour process. Instead, they are engaged in ensuring the creation of surplus value through the supervision and control of the work of others.9 Within the capitalist mode of production, the labour process is a surplus value-produing process. Indeed, in a typical commodity production process, the creation of surplus value is the “determining, dominating and overriding” factor, according to Marx.10

Both Marx and Braverman were focused on the inevitable violence that capitalist production wreaked on its workforce. Profits are only possible through utilising the unique capacities of human beings. Humans are differentiated from other animals by their ability to imagine the outcome of labour before they perform it. As Braverman summarised: “Human work is conscious and purposive, while the work of other animals is instinctual”.11 This unique characteristic allows the transfer of knowledge through culture, opening the way for material and technological progress. It also, however, makes possible the separation of conception from execution. Our unique ability for thinking before doing has enabled not only the development of humans as a species but also the subordination of labour to social relations of exploitation. The capacity to both conceive an outcome and plan its execution—a fundamental part of individual and collective development—has been fractured by the relegation of large parts of the world’s population to the fate of simply carrying out tasks determined and directed by others. Labour power has become a commodity, albeit a unique one, under capitalism.

When capital employs workers, it is hiring their capacity to produce. However, this capacity—labour power—has to be set in motion. Resistance arises in this process because the interests of capital and labour are opposed. This resistance can be conscious or unconscious, overt or covert, organised or unorganised. As Braverman stressed:

What the capitalist buys is infinite in potential, but, in its realisation, it is limited by the subjective state of the workers, by their previous history, by the general social conditions under which they work as well as the particular conditions of the enterprise and by the technical setting of their labour.12

Capitalists (or their agents) have to ensure that no more than the average socially necessary costs are incurred in the production process. This means controlling the costs and productivity of labour as well as managing the productive consumption of means of production so that “the use-value he has in mind emerges successfully at the end of this process.” The “capitalists’ ability to supervise and enforce discipline” is thus “vital”.13 Braverman redirected attention to how this supervision is carried out and its implications for both the degradation of the labour process and the transformation of the structure of social relations in the workplace. He writes:

Corresponding to the managing functions of the capitalist of the past, there is now a complex of departments. Each has taken over in greatly expanded form a single duty that a single capitalist exercised with very little assistance in the past.14

This growth of management has resulted from moves towards corporate ownership, increasingly complex business organisation and the logic of an intensifying division of labour. Particularly important have been the methods employed by the “scientific management” of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylorism attempts to leverage scientific inquiry to achieve the “disassociation of the labour process from the skills of workers”, the “separation of conception from execution” and a “monopoly over knowledge”. This enables capital to seize “control of each step of the labour process and its mode of execution”.15 Although there have been numerous objections to Braverman’s argument, these too often reduce his contribution to a “deskilling” thesis. The following section examines how sociology received and undermined Marx’s and Braverman’s accounts of the capitalist labour process.

The reaction to Braverman

Many on the left welcomed Braverman’s approach, which focused on a critique of the quality of work and challenged the idea that capitalism could produce an alternative to the drudgery that confronts the majority of workers.16 There was, however, no shortage of opposition to Labour and Monopoly Capital, though it was often repetitious and rarely challenged. One standard criticism was that Braverman had failed to recognise workers’ active agency. Tony Elger, a sociologist and critic of Braverman, accused him of an “objectivist conceptualisation of the working class, which fails to address how the class struggle is integral to the course of development of the capitalist labour process.” Elger added that Braverman’s book implied that “analyses of both the obstacles confronting the accumulation process and their resolution in the reorganisation of the labour process can be divorced from analysis of broader forms of political domination and struggle”.17

These criticisms miss the purpose of Braverman’s analysis. Unfortunately, Braverman’s death, two years after Labour and Monopoly Capital was published, prevented direct rejoinders to his critics.18 A more careful reading of Braverman is, however, enough to answer much of the dissent. After all, his decision to ignore working-class subjectivity was a conscious one: “This is a book about the working class as a class in itself, not as a class for itself”.19 Despite this, he was more than aware of the importance of workers’ subjectivity. Beneath the apparent habituation of workers to their conditions of work:

The hostility of workers to the degenerated forms of work that are forced upon them continues like a subterranean stream that makes its way to the surface when employment conditions permit or when the capitalist drive for a greater intensity of labour oversteps the bounds of physical and mental capacity.20

The successful intent of his book was to outline tendencies that, unimpeded, would lead to a complete separation of conception and execution and the total dominance of capital. Simultaneously, Braverman explicitly acknowledged the impossibility of this outcome because of the real complications, resistances and impediments faced by capital.

Elger was therefore correct that “Braverman establishes the basis for a general and abstract impulsion of capital towards the ‘real’ subordination of labour.” However, he was wrong to claim that Braverman “directly identifies this abstract impulsion with a uniform process of degradation of craft skills”.21 Features of the capitalist labour process such as the separation of conception from execution are best regarded as tendencies. A tendency need not be realised in every instance.22 Particular historical formations differ, but Elger’s insistence on emphasising “the complex, uneven and contradictory character of the organisation of collective labour” ultimately leads to a atheoretical empiricism.23 The role of theory is to abstract from complexity and variation in order to understand the dominant connections between features and developments. Despite this, Braverman was well aware of the obstacles to management unilateralism and the complete hegemony of capital:

This displacement of labour as the subjective element of the process, and its subordination as an objective element in a productive process now conducted by management, is an ideal realised by capital only within definite limits and unevenly among industries.24

Despite Braverman’s clear dismissal of the possibility of absolute management control, Elger felt able to reduce his position to one advancing “the simple conception of deskilling”.25 Adding to Elger’s criticisms, Craig Littler and Graeme Salaman opened a new front, accusing Braverman of ignoring alternative flows of income to firms that play a major or “even predominant” role, such as “currency speculation, asset stripping, commodity speculation and credit manipulations of various kinds”.26 However, such arguments displace the primacy of the production of surplus labour over those sectors in which companies subsequently compete for a share in its redistribution. In doing so, they further encouraged a move away from the focus on the workplace and the centrality of labour. In order to understand modes of workplace control, Littler and Salaman turned to Richard Edwards’ distinction between technical and bureaucratic control.27 Technical control is embedded in machinery, and this category is compatible with Braverman’s analysis. Bureaucratic control, on the other hand, is institutionalised through hierarchical job categories, positive rewards and disciplinary sanctions. Littler and Salaman argued, “Edwards’ analysis is a considerable improvement on Braverman’s more rigid insistence on the significance of just one characteristic form of control under capitalism”.28 Yet their judgement has not weathered well. Professional and administrative work has been subjected to the same Taylorist forms of management as other types of work, including in the public sector, where bureaucratic organisational relationships were most heavily concentrated. The early indications of this tendency were highlighted by Braverman, whose observations have since been deepened by research on state administration, call centres and tax offices, and the extension of performance management generally.29

Much early criticism of Braverman’s work came from people who regarded themselves as part of the radical left. Prominent amongst these was the British Marxist social theorist Michael Burawoy. His criticism of Labour and Monopoly Capital, centring on its division between “objective” and “subjective” conditions of the working class, was not novel. Burawoy argued that “the productive process must itself be seen as an inseparable combination of its economic, political and ideological aspects”.30 In particular, drawing upon an earlier study, he defined the problem for capitalists as “securing and obscuring surplus” through winning workers’ “consent”.31 This allows capital to “conceal relations of production while coordinating the interests of workers and management”. The failure to obscure exploitation, thereby undermining consent, would result in the system becoming unsustainable without the emergence of a despotic workplace regime. The weakness of Taylorism was that it “fostered antagonisms between capital and labour, making the coordination of interests become less feasible and reliance on coercive measures more necessary.32 There was no recognition that exploitation might be obvious to workers even while economic circumstances compelled compulsion compliance. This allowed Burawoy to posit “limits on the form of the separation of conception and execution”. The result of this would supposedly be a tendency towards equilibrium: “Too little separation threatens to make surplus transparent, but too much threatens the securing of surplus. The capitalist labour process—in all its phases—is confined within these historically variable limits”.33

Breaking free of Marxist shackles

Some tried to defend Braverman’s analysis. In particular, Peter Armstrong made a spirited attempt to point out misreading and misunderstandings of Braverman’s work.34 He dismissed the charge that Braverman had proposed an “iron law” of deskilling and was guilty of technological determinism, and he rejected critics’ use of the particular to refute general tendencies. For Armstrong, Braverman’s opponents were attacking a strawman. The details of his defence of Braverman remained substantively unchallenged, but Armstrong’s work was nevertheless viewed as an output of “the orthodox disciple” and dismissed as “preventing the construction of a dynamic theory”.35 Armstrong thus failed to interrupt growing criticism of labour process theory within academic circles. Indeed, criticisms soon reached a critical juncture, as evidenced by the publication of David Knights’s and Hugh Willmott’s collection, Labour Process Theory.36 There, employment studies specialist Paul Thompson questi0ned the “intellectual validity and purpose of ‘labour process theory’” altogether.37 He cited John Storey’s contention that:

The labour process bandwagon has run into the sand. Indeed, the catalogue of amendments and criticisms attaching to labour process theory has led a number of critics to call for little less than the abandonment of labour process theory.38

Thompson’s response to this challenge established him as the leading proponent of a new orthodoxy. He contended that “the biggest problem with the original thesis was not in the extent of deskilling”, but in “the implicit or explicit assumptions made concerning its consequences in terms of homogenisation, degradation or proletarianisation of labour”.39 He added that “Braverman’s specific ideas about deskilling and managerial controls made it difficult, if not impossible”, to determine the composition of a core theory. Nevertheless, it might be more accurate to state that the objection was exactly to the Marxist core of labour process theory. A labour process project was to be constructed in contradistinction to Braverman, built around four crucial tenets. First:

As the labour process generates the surplus and is a central part of human experience in acting on the world and reproducing the economy, the role of labour and the capital-labour relation is privileged as a focus for analysis.40

Although Thompson is clear that this process involves exploitation, it does not necessitate a labour theory of value. In its place, he substitutes an alternative formulation, which “rests on the appropriation of the surplus labour by capital based on its ownership and control of the means of production, and the separation of direct producers from those means”.41 Moreover, having claimed the “privileged” position of the capital-labour relationship, he immediately circumscribed its extent: “There was no assumption that the capital-labour relation had any specific significance for analysing other social relations outside production”.42 It is unclear whether this implies that employees’ workplace relations do not directly influence their access to housing, mortality rates and the educational attainment of their children. In any case, these are all areas where there is demonstrable evidence of differential experiences based on class.

Second, there is “a logic of accumulation that forces capital to constantly revolutionise the production process”.43 However, the logic of accumulation “has no determinative link to any specific feature of the labour process, such as the use of skills.” Thus, “the division between intellectual and manual labour, hierarchical control and deskilling…are not inviolable laws. At any given point capital may reskill, recombine or widen workers’ discretion and responsibility”.44 It would seem, therefore, that competition between capitals has, within this framework, remarkably little determinate influence on anything.

Third, there is a “control imperative” —a tendency to seek greater control over the work process—but once again the operation of this imperative opens up the field to the widest possible outcomes:

We recognise that the control imperative specifies nothing about the nature, specificity or level of control mechanisms. Nor is it necessarily linked to the concept of managerial strategy.45

Fourth, although Thompson recognises that the social relation between capital and labour is an antagonistic one, he also states:

Precisely because capital has continually to revolutionise production and labour’s role within it, it cannot rely wholly on control or coercion. At some level, workers’ cooperation, creative and productive powers, and consent must be engaged and mobilised.46

These four tenets undermined the construction of any substantive theory. Thompson’s project is thus largely empirical and “draws heavily on Marx’s categories, but is not…Marxist”.47 This conclusion was reached “not primarily because of the rejection of any specific element…such as the labour theory of value”:

Rather it is because there is a direct and empirically unsustainable link in Marxism between the analysis of the capitalist labour process and the theory of social transformation through class struggle… The labour process analysis outlined above cannot provide a theory concerning the behaviour of employers and workers based on identifiable sets of interests generated within production.48

All structured, collective conflict has all but been dissolved in this framework. It is hard not to reiterate Littler’s question: “Does the notion of the labour process make much sense independently of, for example, the labour theory of value?”49 According to Thompson:

The form, content and historical development of changes in the labour process have to be established empirically, rather than “read off” from any general categories. There are no specific imperatives in the sphere of control, skill or indeed anything else.50

What is left if this claim is accepted? It is easy to conclude that there is still one imperative at work in Thompson’s analysis: the explicit need to sever labour process theory from its origins in Marxism and its radical practical implications.

The labour process and class relations

For Braverman, changes in the organisation of work on both micro and macro levels had implications for the class structure of capitalism. However, the significance of the relationship between the labour process and class is almost universally absent amongst Braverman’s critics, who ignore the impact of changes between and within occupations on class relations. The exception to this is the work of Chris Smith and Willmott, who were exercised by Braverman’s notion of “intermediate employees”—those in engineering, technical, scientific, lower supervisory, managerial and professional services roles.51 Intermediate employees share “the characteristics of worker on the one side and manager on the other in varying degrees”.52 Guglielmo Carchedi argued that at least some of these employees are part of new middle class. In place of Braverman’s and Carchedi’s approaches, Smith and Willmott favoured the descriptions contained in Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s Professional Managerial Class.53 For the Ehrenreichs, the professional managerial class comprised “technical workers, managerial workers and ‘culture’ producers’”, encompassing “teachers, social workers, entertainers and so on”.54 Mirroring the long tradition of conservative social science, they emphasised that “expansion of non-manual labour within both public and private sectors” mediated “the structural antagonism within capitalist society”.55 Such a theory ignores how this growing strata might instead gravitate towards one pole of that antagonism, thus intensifying moments of crisis and struggle.56

Smith and Willmott situated their account within a peremptory reading of Marx, and their own propositions were weakened by terminological inconsistencies. They argued that Marx’s treatment of this social layer was ambivalent. On the one hand:

From a Marxist perspective, it can be argued that junior and middle managers perform the functions of controlling the workforce initially undertaken by the capitalists. In this functional light, they are seen to comprise a fundamental part of a bourgeoisie that is segmented into owning and controlling components.57

None of the leading Marxist writers in this area would support this position, which would be much less contentious were it focused on chief executives or at least senior managers. Illustrating the supposed ambivalence of Marx’s attitude to this social layer, they continued: “It may be countered that the junior and middle ranks of management have become an integral part of the collective labourer, and therefore bear a much closer resemblance to that of their subordinates”.58

On the question of proletarianisation, Smith and Willmott have an initial position that is superficially more justifiable:

Proletarianisation as theorised by Marx simply means shifts in the character of labour into a wage labour form… In recent debates this definition has been unconsciously reconstituted to include changes within formal wage labour positions, in particular changes in the conditions of work and social position experienced by white-collar workers.59

Stemming from their wish to maintain that all waged staff are workers, Smith and Willmott’s statement was particularly aimed at Weberian-influenced writers who have identified skill and autonomy as intrinsically non-proletarian qualities. Such a position would suggest that the loss of these qualities implies a move from one class to another. In this, Smith and Willmott are correct: workers’ skill levels and limited autonomy within the labour process do not automatically signal their membership of the middle class. The majority of people being deskilled and subjected to greater control are employed not in situations of what Marx called “formal” subordination—that is, employed by capital but continuing to utilise pre-capitalist labour processes—but rather in “real” subordination in the specifically capitalist mode of production.60 Capitalism proper revolutionised the labour process through the increased division of labour, scientific advances and capital-intensive machinery, forestalling any possibility of a return to independent production. In such circumstances, all relations came under the direct sway of capital.

The drawback of Smith and Willmott’s treatment of proletarianisation is that it is tied solely to defending the idea of a large heterogeneous working class, defined only by the fact that all of its members receive wages. This downplays the difference between the formal status of some waged work and the reality of its roles in the workplace. Braverman had warned of this danger:

I have no quarrel with the definition of the working class on the basis of its “relationship to the means of production”, as that class that does not own or otherwise have proprietary access to the means of labour and must sell its labour power to those who do. But in the present situation, when almost all of the population has been placed in this situation and his definition encompasses occupational strata of the most diverse kinds, it is not the bare definition that is important but its application.61

Supervisors, for instance, are problematic. Yes, they are “wage workers”, but, at least while supervising, they do not add value to any product or service. Of course, as noted above, they might also perform other roles that do add value—coordination of the labour process was recognised by Marx as necessary for any complex form of social production and should be regarded as part of the collective labour process. Moreover, the continuous restructuring of capitalist production changes the roles of both workers and supervisors and, in turn, class relations. None of the richness and subtlety of the class transformations at the point of production are captured by Smith and Willmott’s approach.

It was Carchedi who highlighted the continued relevance of the production and appropriation of surplus value to the determination of class. In a pure model of capitalism, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat have diametrically opposed relationships within the production process. The capitalist owns the means of production (owner), does not produce value (non-labourer) and appropriates surplus value (exploiter) or surplus labour (oppressor). The worker does not own the means of production (non-owner), produces surplus value or surplus labour (labourer) and has their surplus value and surplus labour expropriated (exploited or oppressed). In this model, Carchedi maintained, following Marx, that although the capitalist has a definite role to play in the production process, a role necessary to guarantee the production of surplus value, the capitalist does not take part in the labour process because they add no use values to the final product. Carchedi’s distinct contribution here is his reconceptualisation the role of the capitalist in the process of production not as unproductive labour, but as non-labour, as outside the labour process entirely.62

The actual course of capitalist development deviates from the pure model. Rather, it is mediated by a multitude of other influences including workers’ responses and class struggle. As the capitalist production process was established, the mode of labour was revolutionised. Less and less could an individual be said to be the direct producer. Products became the result of socialised collective labour, extending what and who could be regarded as productive labour and productive workers. The socialised and collective nature of labour also signalled a transformation in the function of the capitalist within the production process. The individual capitalist was replaced first by a manager and then by a managerial hierarchy. The employees engaged within this hierarchy are paid salaries or wages, but this latter fact frequently masks their role, and is not sufficient to make them workers. As Marx stated:

To the money capitalist, the industrial capitalist is a worker, but his work is that of a capitalist: an exploiter of the labour of others. The wage that he claims and draws for this work is precisely the quantity of others’ labour that is appropriated. It depends directly on the rate of exploitation of this labour, as long as he makes the effort required for this exploitation.63

These simultaneous changes—the growth of the collective worker and the growth of managerial hierarchies—have complicated this situation. With the transformation of the social structure of the workplace, fewer occupations correspond with one function or the other in a pure way. Often jobs have both collective worker and capitalist functions. On one hand, these jobs involve coordinating tasks and contributing technical knowledge, but on the other hand, they involve controlling and supervising labour on behalf of capital. Carchedi designated people in these locations as a “new middle class”. Some of these employees almost exclusively perform roles formerly carried out by the capitalist; like their roles, their interests are tied to capital. Others, at the lower end of the managerial hierarchy, tend to have greater roots in the labour process and therefore a much more tenuous loyalty to capital.64

Not just theory: changes in class relations

How class relations at work change as labour processes are transformed can be illustrated by concrete examples. For instance, traditionally, front-line managers in British tax offices came from the workforce, and they frequently advised their teams on tax questions. They were part of the same bargaining units as these teams and belonged to the same union, sometimes as leading members. Through the introduction of lean production methods, senior management disrupted these relationships by assigning roles to front-line managers that were focused almost exclusively on monitoring output targets, increasing their disciplinary role. These changes were resisted, but their aim was clear: to reinforce the function of capital in front-line managers’ roles and to lessen their involvement in the actual labour process. They remained waged, but their class relations changed.65 When working-class struggle is moving forward, workers encroach on managerial control of the labour process by reducing the authority of immediate supervision. In periods of ruling class offensive, the opposite occurs.

This movement towards greater managerialism also happened within the English and Welsh school system following the 2003 “workforce remodelling agreement”. This agreement was signed by the majority of the teacher unions (although the National Union of Teachers opposed it) because it promised to ease teachers’ workloads by assigning a number of tasks to teaching assistants, thus redefining teachers’ roles. However, this promise was empty, and other changes increased expectations and pressure on teachers. Work intensified, surveillance of performance increased and middle management expanded. Before the agreement, a number of teachers in each school received management allowances for all sorts of responsibilities, such as timetabling and heading a department or division. Head of department roles and other such positions were associated with greater expertise in pedagogical techniques and subject areas. Management allowances were removed by the agreement and replaced by a smaller number of enhanced “teaching and learning responsibility” (TLR) payments. Recipients of TLR payments were responsible for the performance of their area and the effectiveness of their staff. In this way, these roles were partially transformed, putting them at a greater remove from the teaching process and the addition of useful knowledge. Instead, TLR roles, at least partly, acted as transmission belts for government policies through the surveillance and control of others’ labour.66

None of these changes in class relations at work are acknowledged by mainstream labour process theory. Indeed, Smith and Thompson denied the possibility of a labour process theory account of these phenomena, declaring that any attempts to “reconnect the analysis to class theory” were “flawed enterprises”.67 Thus, the very possibility of such an analysis is denied. This denial was simultaneously an attack on the concept of a new middle class formed by the contradictory social relations of capitalist production. Smith and Thompson cited “writers in the late 1970s and early 1980s” who, they claimed, held that “the middle class and not the working class was the new force in capitalism”.68 No evidence was produced to link these unspecified writers (presumably Carchedi and Nicos Poulantzas) with this argument. Nor was any evidence adduced for a further accusation that they ignored the “consequences of real ownership relations” by focusing instead on “control relations between types of workers and managers in the production process”.69 Both Carchedi and Poulantzas specifically distinguished between legal and real forms of ownership.70

Smith and Thompson’s argued that the very idea of a new middle class implied that “the senior manager and the lowly supervisor, leading hand or team leader shared…the same class by virtue of their involvement in controlling workers in the interests of capital”.71 Their objection to the terminology of the “new middle class” was far from unique. Indeed, in many ways, it matters little whether we refer to “contradictory class locations”, a new “intermediate class” or a new “petit bourgeosie”. What does matter is that the underlying social relations are made clear. None of these terms imply that this class is unified and cohesive, just as the “petty bourgeoisie” of classical Marxist theory lacked clear and independent interests.72 Carchedi, who was the most prominent adopter of the “new middle class” category, was aware of the varied nature of the roles associated with ensuring the extraction of value from labour, as well as their complex relationships with, and direct involvement in, the labour process.

Smith and Thompson’s final criticism is starkly inaccurate. They characterise the writers making links between the labour process and class relations as having “an aversion to empirical analysis”. This aversion apparently flows from their “very sterile functionalist project of manufacturing classes out of the technical division of labour within waged labour in a pure and abstracted capitalist system”.73 However, even though empirical research was a weakness of the progenitors of the labour process theory approach, this does not immediately invalidate their theoretical contribution. Moreover, Smith and Thompson themselves exhibited the same weakness with their lack of references to studies of managers, supervisors and the consequences of restructuring social relations in production.

Contemporary issues and partial responses

This critique of the current state of labour process theory has centred largely on prominent members of the grouping that organise the International Labour Process Conferences. This is justified by the extent of its influence; the 2021 conference website lists 28 books published in the period 1985-2021.74 The absence of Marxist responses to the triumph of this revisionist project is telling. Even in collections supposedly aimed at promoting Marxism, overtly Marxist views are ignored in favour of accounts arguing against them, although overt criticisms of Marxism are more muted and commonalities stressed in these contexts. Hence, Thompson and Smith have focused on “recent attempts to create more active linkages between political economy and workplace relations”.75 They cite Thompson’s work on “disconnected capitalism” and Smith’s on labour mobility as examples of this.76 Nevertheless, the results of these linkages remain vague. If anything, they further move focus away from the workers’ exploitation at the point of production.

The further reach of analysis into some areas, and the absence of engagement in others, has resulted in the emergence of specific challenges to orthodox labour process analysis. Below, I list four examples of this.

Labour mobility

The movement away from concern with production is clearest in Smith’s account of “labour mobility”, that is, the capacity of workers to choose to which capitalist they sell their labour. Smith suggests that this ability to move jobs, which distinguishes capitalism from other modes of production, is a power equivalent to industrial action within the workplace. By Smith’s own admission, this view was hard to justify, and he acknowledges that noted researchers “see individual and collective workplace action as superior to market-based dispute resolution based upon the labour market”.77 He also recognised but “one of the most detailed studies of labour turnover within an explicitly labour process perspective” concluded that “quitting was unable to resolve collective grievances, and it was therefore not necessarily a strategy that furthered worker’s interests as a whole”.78

Smith’s argument was underpinned by reference to the impact of labour mobility in competitive labour markets. However, since the end of the long boom, insecurity has been a general feature of workers’ employment, and so Smith’s failure to reference Marx’s concept of the “reserve army of labour” was a big weakness. Marx’s starting point, described here by Sébastien Rioux, Genevieve LeBaron and Peter Verovšek, was much sounder:

Within a free labour market the worker is not only free in the sense that “he can dispose of his labour power as his own commodity”, but also in that he is “free” from other sources of sustenance and “has no other commodity for sale”… The worker is therefore “free to starve” if he does not enter into a “free” labour contract.79

Compliance and consent

Smith, in contrast to Braverman, placed emphasis on “compliance and consent”, suggesting that employers can use labour power more productively by engaging with it rather than controlling it: “Groups of relatively autonomous workers, who are increasing as manual labour declines in certain parts of the world economy, either cannot, will not, or do not need to be tightly controlled”.80 However, although there may be relatively autonomous workers in certain (unspecified) parts of the world, the growth of millions of workers in China and South East Asia in modern factories and under brutal supervision would seem to bear out the progress of a tendency towards direct control over the labour process. Indeed, this is even the case in established capitalist countries. In these parts of the world, Smith claims, “appeals to professional values, creativity, career, goodwill, or trust” are “deemed more suitable methods of translating the capacity of skilled and professional workers into labour effort and value”.81 Yet there is much evidence to the contrary. British research, based on six organisations that had the components of “high performance work systems” (greater autonomy, participation and partnership‐based union involvement), threw doubt on the sustainability of the argument that the systems improved “employees’ quality of working life”.82 Similarly, in central and local state employment, where professional employees are most numerous, new public management and performance management regimes have limited their autonomy and discretion.83

Smith also criticised Braverman’s claim that there is a tendency for labour to be degraded by the controls imposed by capitalist production: “Although Braverman judged capitalism to possess a ‘degradation imperative’ whereby high value skills are replaced by low value ones, in practice, this is one tendency among several and is more contingent than absolute”.84 As Irena Grugulis and Caroline Lloyd have pointed out, however, Braverman recognised that some upskilling took place, but the question was whether this raised average skills or polarised them. They concluded, “Much of Braverman’s critique remains relevant today, in particular, his challenge to optimistic ‘upskilling’ arguments and his awareness of the caution required in using data and the ‘misuse’ of the term ‘skills’”.85 Beynon has also written persuasively on the bifurcation of skills in contemporary capitalist production.86

Emotional labour

The concept of emotional labour has gained increasing traction in labour process analysis. According to Thompson and Smith, “Marx highlighted the embodiment of labour as consisting of male, female and child categories…and today we would extend these to the emotional and aesthetic aspects of labour”.87 This claim was used to illustrate how labour process theory “has been at the forefront of research into new sources of labour power”.88 However, suggestions that the notion of emotional labour is an advance on Marx’s understanding is unsustainable for two reasons. First, Marx made clear the complex and multifaceted nature of labour power, which he described as “the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form and the living personality of a human being.” These are “capacities that he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind”.89 Second, the term was popularised by Arlie Russell Hochschild, who explicitly acknowledges her debt to Marx.90 Once the concept of emotional labour was embraced by the new labour process writers, above all by Sharon Bolton, it took on a separate and independent status from other aspects of labour power.91 Moroever, Bolton’s definition of emotional labour was restricted to that directly involved in the accumulation of capital, ignoring both unproductive labour in the public sector and socialised collective labour more generally.92

Digital capitalism and platform work

Simon Joyce has noted that academic research into platform work—that is, “paid work mediated via an online platform”—has increased in recent years. Yet, although empirical studies of this phenomenon have proliferated, “to date these have generated little theory”.93 Joyce has examined the relations involved in these forms of work from a Marxist perspective by mobilising the concept of subsumption:

The process of formal subsumption is not found only at the birth of capitalist relations. Rather, it is also a recurring feature of mature capitalism, associated with the emergence of new branches of production.94

Joyce believes capital’s relationship with platform workers contradicts the contention that they are self-employed. He instead regards their payments as analogous to piecework. By “grasping platform work as a social relationship between labour and capital”, Joyce claims that he “de-prioritises the legal conceptions of employment that frequently dominate discussion in favour of a more sociological approach”.95

Conclusion: reiterating the importance of a critique of the capitalist labour process

The strong interest in the capitalist labour process engendered by Braverman’s work encouraged socialists to look at relations in the workplace in a new and different light. However, this initial reception remained underdeveloped, and the radical implications of Braverman’s Marxist approach were blunted by labour process theory’s incorporation into academic debates amid a downturn in class struggle. Although there were critics of the revisionism that resulted, their arguments for greater concentration on the labour theory of value, exploitation and class relations were summarily dismissed or ignored altogether.96

An appreciation of Marx’s and Braverman’s approaches to the capitalist labour process leads us towards questions about class relations, the inseparability of the exploitation, oppression and alienation of workers, and the importance of workers’ self-activity. Working-class emancipation has to start with struggles for collective autonomy and control at work—extending the “frontier of control”. This requires taking back aspects of the organisation of work and transforming them from functions of capital (control) to aspects of labour (coordination). This necessitates challenging current forms of bureaucratic trade unionism that minimise issues of job control and dignity, focusing instead on pay while accepting subordination.

Writing 40 years ago, Theo Nichols asked, “What is a ‘labour process’ approach?” His answer was that, in contradistinction to “industrial”, “organisational” and “managerial” studies, the labour process approach arises out of “a primary concern with capital accumulation and class struggle”.97 On this measure, today’s mainstream labour process theory falls short. Nichols has subsequently argued that, in the arc of post-war labour studies in Britain, many of the same preoccupations have remained: an interest in subjectivity; the relative neglect of capital accumulation; and, related to this, a focus on managerial concerns.98

This tendency has been bolstered by concerted attempts to sever links between the concept of a capitalist labour process and its Marxist origins. Many texts acknowledge Braverman’s importance in reviving the subject, but his ongoing contribution is largely demeaned. Consequently, some areas are badly served and substantive issues unresolved. The relationship between the labour process and other areas of capitalist society has been an issue of contention from early on, when stress was laid on both the plant-level autonomy of the labour process analysis and the need to examine the full circuit of capital. The preponderance of case studies has accentuated the difficulties of integrating analysis with other areas, insights and disciplines. If Nichols’s prescriptions were taken up and the project looked more broadly at the conditions for the production of surplus out of labour power—both theoretically and in specific capitalist societies—problems of focus and boundaries would largely dissolve. This is illustrated by Nichols and Beynon’s Living with Capitalism (1977), which deals with migration, relocation of industry, levels of capital expenditure, automation, masculinity, the labour of superintendence, trade unions and other topics. This book’s coherent and convincing picture of significant social and class developments would have been impossible without the overtly acknowledged influence of Marx and Braverman. Using their reflections to understand social class relations and changes in the labour process in order to build a viable socialist organisation remains of central importance today.

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Bob Carter was Professor of Work and Employment Relations at the University of Leicester. He is author of Capitalism, Class Conflict and the New Middle Class (Routledge, 2015) as well as a number of articles on trade unions and the restructuring of public sector labour.

http://isj.org.uk/marx-and-braverman/

Notes and references at link. Extensive.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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