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

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Rebuilding the Labour Movement on the Basis of Class Struggle — the Experience from Greece
Posted by MLToday | Apr 28, 2025



People’s Voice (Canada)
April 16-30 2025

As we head to press, Greece has been brought to a halt by a massive one-day general strike over wages and the cost of living. The Greek labour movement has undertaken many heroic struggles recently and is a source of inspiration for working people across the globe. At the heart of this resurgence is PAME, the All-Workers Militant Front.

Formed in 1999, PAME is an open, democratic organization which unites the most active, fighting forces of the labour movement. It is rooted in class struggle and anti-imperialism, and is committed to ending the exploitation of one human by another. Currently, PAME-affiliated unions represent 850,000 workers.

But how was this militant labour front organized? The following article is based on edited excerpts from a PAME document published in 2013, fourteen years after the front’s founding. It details the efforts to reconstruct the Greek labour movement on a class struggle basis, with “the aim of overthrowing anti-people policies.”

_________________

The main conditions for rehabilitating the trade union movement are its release from the influence of the employers, governments and the mechanisms of the European Union, and its release from the ideas of class collaboration.

The form for reconstructing the labour movement is organizing and uniting the working class in massive trade unions, both sectoral and industrial, based on its unified class-oriented interests and its contemporary needs, against corporatism and division.

The working class’s needs stem from its position in production – that it is the producer of all wealth – and from the level of development of the productive forces, which can ensure today a higher level of prosperity. But these needs are not satisfied today. On the contrary, they are limited; they are constantly compressed downwards while the dominant tendency is of absolute and relative impoverishment.

This means that, while productive wealth, the level of development, and science and technology are at incomparably high levels compared to previous decades, the lives and working conditions and living standards of the working class follow a reverse path.

This contradiction is not an exception, and nor is it a temporary phenomenon. The tendency to absolute and relative impoverishment and permanent mass unemployment is a permanent and long-lasting tendency both in conditions of development and in conditions of crisis. This tendency becomes even more sharp in times of crisis.

This contradiction has to do with the capitalist path of development. More precisely, it has to do with the development of corporate monopolies and their dominance in all spheres of economic and social life in all countries. Development takes place unequally, which produces many contradictions and conflicts and makes the monopolies even more aggressive while expanding.

For monopoly capital to be profitable today it must sharply increase the exploitation of the working class by abolishing basic labour rights and profiteering off people’s basic needs (health, housing, education etc.) Everything we experience today emerges from this strategy.

This explains why capital internationally has launched a full-scale attack with a unified strategy to overthrow all the achievements and rights of the working class, under the general direction of labour market liberalization.

PAME, in assessing these current developments, set as a central priority the urgent need to reconstruct the trade union movement so that it is capable of answering this full-scale and generalized attack, so that it is a movement capable of struggling not only in the immediate conditions but also for satisfying the needs of the whole working class. This requires breaking with and overthrowing the monopolies, and the parties and mechanisms which serve them; this requires a struggle that will end the exploitation of one human by another.

With this in mind, PAME set 14 years ago the main priority for the labour movement: freeing it from the collaborationist (government- and employer-oriented) trade unionism. This is a very powerful mechanism that traps the labour movement and converts it into a mechanism for reconciliation with employers and the mechanisms of the capitalist state.

This is the main reason why the labour movement found itself disarmed in the face of attacks from capital, particularly during capitalist economic crisis.

The struggle to reconstruct the labour movement is of great importance and must engage every honest worker and unionist, especially in the face of new obstacles erected by the employers and modern social democracy. We call upon every unionist, every trade union, and every worker to think hard: the movement cannot have the same goals as the employers and the multinationals. Our goals are defined exclusively by the needs of working people. This means full-time and stable jobs for all, decent wages and pensions, free health benefits, education and welfare.

Sector by sector, union by union, factory by factory, the alarm bells must be rung for coalition and struggle, so that the honest labour forces are not encircled in the trap of new government and bosses’ mechanisms. Unions which operate democratically will gain in strength through the participation of workers in planning actions.

The basic and main focus for a reconstructed labour movement is to change the correlation of forces, between those that struggle for a workers’ solution to the crisis and those that act in favour of capital. To be in favour of both capital and workers is impossible. We need to struggle for the abolition and overthrow of anti-people policies and anti-labour laws, not for the continuation of the same policies under another government. We need to struggle to break with and overthrow the monopolies and the EU, not for the perpetuation of their power and exploitation. We need to struggle for the satisfaction of working people’s contemporary needs, not for the management of poverty. And we need to struggle to strengthen international solidarity.

The real question is, do we want a movement that is organized and class-oriented or a movement that simply directs traffic? A movement that is distanced from the unions, with the workers in unorganized workplaces alone against their employer, or a movement with workers organized into unions in the workplace and in the streets and the squares?

Will we strike and demonstrate just to change the managers of parliament while leaving capitalist property and privileges untouched, to eternally exploit the wealth produced by workers? Or will we struggle for another path of development with the people in control of the wealth they produce?

The power of monopolies may seem stronger today, but it is not more powerful than determined people and it is not eternal. We can shake their system, create bigger cracks, obstruct their decisions, delay their attack, and gain time and ground through our struggles.

For this to happen, we need to strengthen the class-oriented struggles, the organization of workers in every sector, workplace and factory. We need to free working people from the influence and positions of the employers.

There is only one road for workers. That is to proceed fearlessly to a systematic organization and to organized resistance that questions not only governments, but the power of monopolies. This is the only source of hope, and it requires working people to play the leading role in economics and politics so that they will control the wealth they produce and their lives.

*******

“Their Profits Or Our Lives!”
PAME Statement for April 9 General Strike:

We strengthen our organization in the unions. In every workplace, in every factory we are setting up new unions and health and safety committees. We are strengthening the demand for the whole of our lives, for wage increases and collective agreements, for the protection of our lives and for the exclusive public and free provision of all necessary services in health and education. We strengthen solidarity with those who are struggling.

We strengthen joint action with the self-employed and small professionals, farmers, pupils and students against our common enemies, the capitalist state and its governments, the business groups, the imperialist hawks of NATO and the EU.

We strengthen our solidarity with all peoples suffering on the fronts of the imperialist wars. We strengthen our demand against the war spending plans of governments and the EU.

We strengthen the struggle for a better tomorrow, so that we and our children can live a life with rights and dignity.

https://mltoday.com/rebuilding-the-labo ... om-greece/

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DON’T BLAME THE RUSSIAN THUNDERBOLT — MAY DAY BEGAN AS AN AMERICAN CELEBRATION AND PROTEST


by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

“When war and revolution come, remember the long years in which the storm was rising, and don’t blame the thunderbolt”.

That warning appeared in the Chicago Tribune in November 24, 1895. It was written by Clarence Darrow, then a young city lawyer working for railroads and also for unions in the years which followed the bitter, violent battles for limited work hours and higher wages. The Chicago union struggle initiated the May Day strike for protest and celebration between 1881 and 1886.

Today the US is one of the few countries in the world not to recognize the holiday, moving “Labour Day” from the spring to the fall to erase the history. Darrow (1857-1938) was to become the greatest courtroom lawyer in American history; today he is almost forgotten.

Read Darrow’s grim history, click left. If you prefer to listen, click right.

Left: https://www.amazon.com/
Right: https://www.amazon.com/

https://johnhelmer.net/dont-blame-the-r ... more-91500

******



Trump’s Tariffs: Economic Warfare or Winning Strategy? (Photo: ipv6proxy-staging.phone.com)

The Trump Tariffs and the U.S. Labor Movement
By Michael D. Yates (Posted May 01, 2025)


A cornerstone of Donald Trump’s economic policies is tariffs. Claiming that just about every country in the world has ripped off the United States—even stating that the European Union was established to do this—he sees tariffs as a way for the U.S. to get even. Playing up the anti-Chinese propaganda that is now the stock in trade of Republicans, Democrats, and the mainstream media, he says that China is the worst abuser of America and so deserving of the highest tariffs. He claims, with no evidence, that tariffs will not only bring in trillions of dollars in revenue but also reinvigorate manufacturing industries through import substitution. He may or may not grasp the fact that if the latter goal is achieved, little revenue will be forthcoming, as there would then be few imports to tax.

The rollout of the tariffs has been haphazard, with Trump’s mercurial reversals, bombast, and lies generating anxiety among business leaders and financial talking heads. Fears of both recession and inflation, with resulting unemployment and lower capital spending, are now widespread. But despite the serious economic downsides of the Trump tariffs, they have been supported by numerous labor unions and some left thinkers and activists.

Trump has convinced many of his followers that the tariffs he is imposing, with his authority to do so coming from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977, are paid by the countries against whose products the tariffs are imposed. This is not true. When a tariffed good enters a port of entry in the United States, customs inspectors collect the duty from the importer, a U.S. company. A product priced at $1,000 with a tariff of 10 percent will thus cost the importing company an additional $100 per unit imported. The importing company will then try to pass this extra cost onto consumers, as is the case with any sales tax. Its ability to do so will vary, but studies show that most of the tariff burden is ultimately paid by consumers. This will reduce demand, output, and employment. And because working people spend a higher fraction of their incomes than those with higher incomes, tariffs are regressive, harming those lower down in the income distribution the most. If other countries retaliate, U.S. exports will fall, and this will also mean lower U.S. incomes, spending, and employment. For example, U.S. exports to China, which are now subject to high Chinese tariffs, account for nearly one million U.S. jobs and about $150 billion in total income.

Given these downsides, why would unions and left-leaning writers support them? Shawn Fain, reform president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), has championed Trump’s tariffs. On March 26, 2025, the union officially stated:

This afternoon, the Trump administration announced major tariffs on passenger cars and trucks entering the U.S. market, marking the beginning of the end of a thirty-plus year “free trade” disaster. This is a long-overdue shift away from a harmful economic framework that has devastated the working class and driven a race to the bottom across borders in the auto industry. It signals a return to policies that prioritize the workers who build this country—rather than the greed of ruthless corporations.

“We applaud the Trump administration for stepping up to end the free trade disaster that has devastated working class communities for decades. Ending the race to the bottom in the auto industry starts with fixing our broken trade deals, and the Trump administration has made history with today’s actions,” said UAW President Shawn Fain.

Fain says that tariffs are “a tool in the toolbox…to bring jobs back here, and, you know, invest in the American workers.”

Fain does qualify this endorsement by saying that many other things have to happen as well, such as pro-labor NLRB decisions, protection of Social Security and Medicare, etc, none of which has the slightest chance of happening under Trump. Fain mentions the “free trade disaster,” referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), enacted first by the Clinton administration; it took effect on January 1, 1994. This agreement was indeed a disaster for workers in all three signatory nations: the United States, Mexico, and Canada. However, Fain ignores the fact that tariffs will be a calamity for working-class communities as well. In fact, more than half of UAW members are not in the auto sector. What will Fain and the union do to protect these workers from the harmful effects of tariffs? And what if Trump one days decides to punish Stellantis (formerly Chrysler), which is headquartered in the Netherlands, while favoring Ford and General Motors. What then, brother Fain?

The founder of Jacobin magazine and currently president of The Nation, Bhaskar Sunkara, lavished praise on Fain, calling him labor’s “greatest voice.” He added that “strategic tariffs can provide some relief from social dumping and help auto sectors.” There is nothing strategic in Trump’s tariffs other than the effort to reassert declining U.S. economic power and setting the stage for a war with China. Trump’s first administration harmed workers considerably, and, so far, the hurt has only worsened, almost exponentially. That labor leaders would praise anything Trump does is unacceptable. It illustrates a nationalism that should be vigorously opposed by labor in the nations of the Global North. It is nothing but a “beggar your neighbor” strategy, which is a slap in the face to labor organizations in Mexico, for example, who actively supported UAW strikes. It also means that the UAW has aligned itself with its members’ class enemy, automobile corporations. Given the increasingly tight interlock between big capital and the U.S. state, labor support for tariffs hearkens back to the labor-management cooperation strategy that did great damage to rank-and-file workers. Allying with Trump is tantamount to allying with capital. In the end, the wealthy will be done little harm by tariffs. Workers will lose, just as they lost with “free trade.”

Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters has also supported Trump’s tariffs. O’Brien, who disgraced himself by speaking favorably about Trump at the Republican national convention in July 2024, says we should look at the good side of tariffs:

But I think what’s important, you can look at the good side of tariffs and the bad side. I think what’s important to us and to working people and the unions is to bring back manufacturing, bring back industries that were allowed to go to foreign countries, where we can actually put people to work, create a middle class and give people opportunities in industries that once thrived in the United States. So that’s a positive.

He goes on to say,

Well, I think, if tariffs are going to play a role where it’s too expensive to import products from other countries, and it’s going to be cheaper to manufacture them, but more importantly, create jobs that were lost as a result of bad trade agreements that were made in the early 90s, I think that would be a positive thing, creating jobs in America.

In a Nation essay, Dustin Guastella, Director of Operations for Teamsters Local 623, justifies the tariffs with a more sophisticated account, lamenting the long decline in U.S. manufacturing brought about by NAFTA and “free trade.” Tariffs, he says, can help bring back the glory days of U.S. manufacturing supremacy. He doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that U.S. industrial decline and the slow growth of capital investment have roots in the nature of the political economy of globalized monopoly-finance capital headquartered in the United States and the failure of organized labor to do anything about this except joining with capital in cooperation schemes that lowered the living standard of its members and greatly augmented the class power of those who owned and managed the auto corporations. In another piece in the Nation, Chris Lehmann puts progressivism’s cards on the table, arguing that it might have to be a Wall Street meltdown that blows up the Trump administration’s “batshit,” economic plan.

The United Steelworkers union also support the tariffs, with the same stale arguments: “United Steelworkers International (USW) President David McCall … [wrote that] Trump’s tariffs ‘send the message to our trading partners that they must earn’ the right to participate in the U.S. market.’” This is a union that has locals in Canada! And many members not part of the steel industry.

I found all of these pro-tariff statements by U.S. labor leaders repugnant. I taught steelworkers in Johnstown, Pennsylvania during the 1980s when the once vibrant steel industry there fell apart. In 1982, Johnstown and the surrounding area had the distinction of leading the nation in unemployment, with an estimated rate of 26 percent. Thousands of steelworkers permanently lost their jobs, and when the U. S. Steel plant was sold, hourly wages went from in excess of $20 to $8. I taught a class on labor law in 1982, in a union hall. There were more than seventy students, almost all steelworkers, and nearly all unemployed.

This was a decade before NAFTA. It reflected the stagnation of the U.S. economy that began in the 1970s as the special conditions the U.S. enjoyed after the Second World War began to weaken. The steel plants were old, and the corporations, who had enjoyed years of global dominance after the war, failed to modernize them. In response to the stagflation that resulted from the stagnation of capital spending and the monopoly pricing of big business, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker pushed for and succeeding in implementing monetary policies that pushed interest rates up as high as 20 percent. His stated goal was to lower wages by generating unemployment, and this is what happened. Not only did the high interest rates dampen demand for many interest-sensitive purchases, but they also made it impossible for many steel firms to roll over their short-term debts. Soon enough, all of this forced a precipitous fall in steel employment, with plants closing in Johnstown, Pittsburgh, and other steel towns. Because I knew that unemployment and plant closings are positively correlated with deaths by suicide and homicide and deaths from hypertension, heart attacks, cirrhosis of the liver, and stress, for the affected workers and their families, I bluntly told my students that Paul Volcker was a murderer.

The response of the USW was weak, to put it mildly. Workers received supplemental unemployment compensation through collective bargaining and some trade-related relief from the federal government. However, the deeper problems of corporate investment, alternative uses of shuttered plants and equipment, and member democracy, much less the reliance on the Democratic Party and its full-throated support for U.S. imperialism, were never addressed by the union. Foreign steel companies simply had more modern facilities that produced better steel. When Volcker came to Johnstown around 1984 to speak to the business elite, the union couldn’t even muster an informational picket line to protest what Volcker had done.

During the 1990s, both before and after Clinton was elected president, I taught UAW members in Pittsburgh as part of an education program negotiated by the union and General Motors. Every worker had to participate in a one-week set of classes. Mine were on Wednesdays; I spent the day teaching the rudiments of political economy, with the focus on labor. The students, most of whom had endured at least one plant closing, invariably worked long hours, sometimes seven days a week. Their lives had been upended by corporate decisions to shut down or sharply curtail operations, and the long hours and constant (mandatory) overtime stressed them severely, though many needed the money and wanted to save something for future business actions, over which they had no control. Their response to my radical economics and program of class-conscious unionism was always positive. By this time, the UAW had fully embraced class collaboration, and its top staff were already mired in the corruption that, with the help of the federal government, made Shawn Fain’s union presidency possible. Not coincidentally, the class in the previous day, Tuesday, was a multiple-hour assault on Japan, then producing high quality cars that directly competed with GM vehicles. It was official UAW propaganda, long on nationalism and racism, short on facts. Rather than allying U.S. workers with their Japanese counterparts, whose unions were destroyed after the Second World War as the U.S. occupation made common cause with Japanese organized crime, the UAW chose to join its supposed domestic class enemies to bar Japanese imports. Instead of organizing Japanese transplant companies in the U.S. South, the union chose to make enormous concessions to U.S. auto companies so that they could extract larger profits from the exploitation of their members. The union embraced competition, such that workers at GM competed by means of concessions and “greater productivity” (in reality, lean production) with workers at the other unionized auto companies and even with local unions within same company. The result was a downward spiral in wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions. The word “strike” disappeared from the union’s vocabulary. Dissidents in the union were suppressed. Jerry Tucker, who championed “working to rule,” that is, doing only what the collective bargaining agreement required, in effect, a form of workplace sabotage, and who led a successful effort to beat back right-to-work legislation in Missouri, was treated as a pariah as the UAW eventually purged him from his staff position.

Before Clinton’s election, some of my students pointed out what an ambitious and duplicitous person he was. Yet, in the end, the UAW and the AFL-CIO as a whole endorsed him for president.

There are other unions that have voiced support for Trump’s tariffs, but rather than examine each one, I want to suggest a plan of attack for labor against the entire Trump program, which goes far beyond opposing the tariffs. We are facing a neofascist government, which plans to completely remake U.S. society in the image of something not unlike Hitler’s Germany. Labor needs to reject all of this administration’s fascist-like efforts, including the tariffs, which are part of a larger represisve progam. There is nothing in this government’s present and likely future actions that supports working people. Quite the contrary. Thousands of federal workers have been fired, with false charges they were unproductive or hired because they were women or minorities. Undocumented workers now live in fear as they are dragged off the streets and put in prison in the United States or sent to hellhole gulags in El Salvador. Immigrants are told they have to self-deport, including immigration attorneys. The children of immigrants, some as young as two have been deported. College students, who are either working or are future workers are targeted for opposing genocide, often with the full complicity of college administrators. They have been attacked by Israeli operatives, doxxed with the resulting personal attacks and violence, and blacklisted so they won’t be hired after graduation. Medicaid is being cut, and nearly two-thirds of recipients work full- or part-time, while those who don’t work for wages but are caretakers of children and parents are surely part of the working class. Similar reductions are planned for Medicare and Social Security, which will negatively affect retired workers and the significant share of the elderly who are still working. The massive cuts in federal education spending directly and negatively impact educators and support staff, along with the kids who will soon enough be workers (already states are allowing children as young as twelve to work in dangerous occupations).

Trump’s NLRB appointees (following dismissals), along with those in the Department of Labor, are and will be making anti-labor decisions, as will the Supreme Court. Trump has already ended collective bargaining for federal workers he claims are critical to national security, including 50,000 TSA (Transportation Security Administration) agents. Cuts begun at Health and Human Services, now headed by health quack Robert Kennedy, Jr., not only will result in unemployed health workers but the policies he wants to implement will make workers sick or kill them. The enormous increase in military spending will lead to more cuts in social welfare spending and will sharply increase the risk of wars, both directly and negatively affecting working people. The enormous regressive tax cut now in the works will further increase inequality, reducing consumer spending among those with the lowest incomes and at the same time making workers less physically and mentally healthy. We have already pointed out how the tariffs will harm workers.

In the face of all of this, there are many things organized labor can and should do:

Join in the ongoing demonstrations now taking place throughout the United States. Organize labor-centered demonstrations like the one planned for May Day in Oahu.
Target specific members of the Trump administration, his Supreme Court advocates, members of Congress, local sheriffs and police departments, and all those employers who have bowed down to Trump for informational picketing. Give these actions widespread publicity and invite the general public to join.
Continue to file lawsuits against illegal filings, deportations, and executive orders.
Call one-day work stoppages in as many places as possible, building to more general strikes.
Protect vulnerable workers through collective bargaining negotiations and refuse to give up contract provisions that now offer such protections. This might be especially effective on college campuses where there are now unions of faculty, staff, and student-workers. The UAW and the USW have many members in higher education now. (The USW has recently organized nearly every worker at the University of Pittsburgh). Support anti-Israeli genocide protests on campuses. And make opposition to genocide a union principle. Unions have Palestinian- and Arab-American members. Protect them. And they have undocumented members as well. Don’t allow employers to give in to government pressures to identify and prosecute them.
Begin to educate members on how to resist any and all illegal actions against members. Reach out to all workers in doing this.
Never throw workers from other countries under the bus. We have a global economy, and international solidarity is important. Actions that benefit a few U.S. workers at the expense of workers in other parts of the world won’t be forgotten, to the detriment of the U.S. working class.
Those laboring on the nation’s docks but enjoying union protection should refuse to handle military cargo headed to Israel. All unions should stand firmly against genocide.
None of these measures will likely stop Trump. A comprehensive, longer-term strategy will be necessary. Organized labor in the United States is weak, notwithstanding the pronouncements of the social democratic left to the contrary. Organized labor is not enjoying a rebirth. There have been a few successful organizing campaigns and strikes, but union density, major strikes, and labor’s political power are at historically low levels. These trends could be reversed, though I doubt they will be any time soon. However, at least two things could be done:

1.Teach workers how to organize. Labor stalwart Chris Townsend helps to run the Inside Organizer School in Northern Virginia (there are sessions of the school elsewhere too), where there has been a striking rise in union membership. Young workers learn how to organize, using the works of William Z. Foster and others as guides. They are trained to “salt” nonunion workplaces, that is, get hired and then agitate for a union. The Institute then offers support, sometimes even including housing. Chris’s efforts were critical in the organizing of hundreds of Starbucks stores. There is no reason why labor unions and workers’ centers cannot do the same.

2.Begin to educate union members and all workers in a systematic way. There are labor studies programs at various colleges and universities that do this, but there are not enough of them. Unions must also educate their members, not just about filing grievances and other everyday necessities but general education in labor history, politics, and political economy. Few unions do this, and this is one reason why their members don’t have a working-class outlook on life. Instead, they are apathetic politically or vote against their own interests. More than 40 percent of households with a union member who went to the polls voted for Donald Trump last year (though 57 percent voted for Kamala Harris, a larger percentage than for Biden). Worker Centers, some independent and some affiliated with labor unions, do offer worker education (The Chinese Staff and Workers Association in New York City does.), but there must be many more of these, along with labor colleges such as the one established in Minneapolis.
Organized labor in the United States collectively has about $35 billion in assets. Why not use some of this money to set up worker education centers in every medium-sized and larger town in the country? Have a space where any worker can come and make a complaint about a workplace. Hold short meetings and classes, offered at convenient times and give these wide publicity. Have special events for specific groups of workers, for example, those who work in restaurants. Have a library with books and magazines geared to workers.

3.Organized labor in the United States collectively has about $35 billion in assets. Federal workers now getting fired and the academic community are facing increasing threats and losing funding. The terrorized immigrants for whom union membership might offer some hope of support, and the great numbers of unorganized workers who shall face increasing pressure in their lives as tariff-influenced inflation takes hold, and who rely on scant and decreasing Federal benefits (such as food stamps) offer a vast opportunity for imaginative organizing. It is an illusion that these government funds and the existing limited power of U.S. unions can be maintained unimpaired as the neofascist offensive unfolds. Where union power is concerned, it is a case as in so many other areas of use it or lose it.

https://mronline.org/2025/05/01/the-tru ... -movement/

[blindpig]

Communist work in the trade unions

Our role is not to take over the bureaucracies but to bring a class-conscious understanding and programme to rank-and-file militants.
Proletarian writers

Monday 5 May 2025


The best example of genuine solidarity delivered by the organised British working class is that of the ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign, which frightened the TUC into threatening a general strike and the ruling class into abandoning its attempt to send more arms and soldiers to the ongoing war of intervention against Soviet Russia. Not only did the workers win their point regarding the war, they also scared the government into making unemployment and pension concessions. This was the closest that British workers have yet come to making a socialist revolution, complete with organising committees up and down the country and militant communist leadership.

The following resolution was passed unanimously by the tenth party congress of the CPGB-ML.

*****

Congress notes the following statement by Comrade Stalin, taken from a speech he made in 1924:

“Still more difficult and peculiar are the conditions under which the trade unions are developing in the west.

“Firstly, they are narrow owing to their ‘tried’ craft-union practice and are hostile to socialism, for having arisen before the socialist parties, and having developed without the aid of the latter, they are accustomed to plume themselves on their ‘independence’ they place craft interests above class interests and refuse to recognise anything beyond a ‘penny a day’ increase in wages.

“Secondly, they are conservative in spirit and hostile to all revolutionary undertakings, for they are led by the old, venal trade union bureaucracy, which is fed by the bourgeoisie and is always ready to place the trade unions at the service of imperialism.

“Lastly, these trade unions, united around the Amsterdam reformists, constitute that vast army of reformism which serves as a prop for the present-day capitalist system.” (Concerning the international situation, Bolshevik, 20 September 1924)

Congress further notes that the trade union movement has witnessed repeated heavy defeats during the recent period. In 2023 alone, the Royal Mail dispute, the nurses’ strike and the collapse of the teachers’ strike all served to highlight once again the ever-growing gulf which exists between the trade union bureaucracies and their rank-and-file membership.

Despite this, congress notes that the British trade union movement in 2025 remains the largest single organiser of working-class people in the country, despite the fact membership has fallen to roughly half what it was at its peak in 1979, and that the movement is in a far weaker state in every respect.

Congress notes that the present period of weakness and disarray has its roots in the defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers in 1985, whose members were betrayed by the class collaborationism of the Trades Union Congress, individual trade unions and the imperialist Labour party. The defeat of Britain’s most militant and best-organised union precipitated a period of rapid retreat across the board, and unions transformed their structures and core activities from an ‘organising’ to a ‘servicing’ model. This was accompanied by a shift away from industrial action and an increasing reliance on bourgeois state institutions like Acas, the courts and the European Union to oversee dispute resolution and plead for rights protection.

This congress believes that, while trade unions are not revolutionary organisations, and despite all the weaknesses outlined above, it is vital that party members should build strong and active links with the trade union movement, since it remains a vital field for popularising Marxist science amongst rank-and-file members and offers the best opportunity for bringing over most advanced and best organised proletarians to our cause.

This congress further believes that there is no benefit to be gained for our movement in trying to capture paid positions in the trade union bureaucracy. What we have every interest in doing is popularising our party’s line and programme amongst the wider union membership. Only such a practical guide to action, based on a clear Marxist analysis, can bring back a sense of class-conscious optimism to British workers, reinvigorate and guide their activity, and thus enable them to experience for themselves the very real power they possess, if only they can learn how to harness it.

Congress resolves that our members’ work within trade unions should focus on four key areas, as outlined in the party’s pamphlet Manifesto for the Crisis: Class Against Class. These are:

1. Working-class demands in response to the cost of living crisis. The period since the outbreak of the deep crisis of overproduction in 2008 has been marked by rampant austerity, state-sponsored money-printing and exceptionally high government borrowing, all in order to bail out the British banking system, which has more than once teetered on the brink of total meltdown, and which we have been told is “too big to fail” by the very same people who lecture us on the efficacy of the ‘free market’ to decide all questions.

Notwithstanding the official ‘recovery’, the deep crisis of overproduction has in reality continued unabated, manifesting itself in an economy that flatlined for 12 years before plunging once again into chaos, at which point the government used the excuse of Covid-19 to cover the 2020 bailout of the stock market. The combination of increased money-printing for corporate bailouts and subsidies with lockdown measures that created catastrophic distribution disruptions led to a prolonged period of rampant and unbridled inflation across the western imperialist bloc, including in Britain.

This inflation was further fuelled by Nato’s military and economic war in Ukraine, during which the government has printed even more money to subsidise the arms industry and the fascist junta in Kiev, and caused energy prices to spike still further by placing draconian sanctions on Russian oil.

Workers have borne the brunt of this inflation. The costs of food, rent, fuel and other essentials skyrocketed and were not offset by increases in wages, which saw a massive real-terms fall as a result. The period of 2021-3 was punctuated by disputes and strikes in all fields of the economy as workers sought redress for the sharp decline in the value of their wages. For many, such as NHS and teaching staff, this latest pay cut came on top of years of below-inflation pay increases that were imposed on state-sector workers – all part of the government’s swingeing austerity programme to ‘balance the books’ following the 2008 bank bailouts.

The party’s nine-point emergency plan, detailed in Manifesto for the Crisis, lays out a programme of measures that workers should be demanding in order to address this crisis and prevent their rapid descent into ever deeper poverty. It includes the nationalisation of all utilities without compensation, the mass building and requisition of social housing, the full renationalisation of all parts of the NHS, leaving Nato, and taking steps to raise wages and end the constant cycle of money-printing which governments of both colours have been stuck in for over 15 years.

These demands should be the foundation upon which party members build their work within trade unions, from the grass-roots level with their fellow workers in local branches, all the way up to national congresses.

2. Defy the anti-trade union laws. The trade union bureaucracies and the TUC have for decades made empty statements about the need to fight the anti-worker legal framework which has been specifically designed to ensure that no serious union struggle can ever be successful. Notwithstanding the occasional verbal protest or motion to conference, however, there has been no substantive or meaningful action to have the anti-union laws overturned.

In fact, trade union bureaucrats have acted as the enforcers of this pernicious and oppressive legislation, routinely using the excuse of ‘the law’ to frustrate the struggles of their own members. Britain’s anti-trade union legislation has enshrined this role for union leaders, and they dutifully comply. Such defeatism and class-collaboration can and must be broken by educating workers as to why these anti-unions laws exist and the role of the state and the unions in drafting and enforcing them.

We must also promote the understanding that, in times of struggle, while trade union bureaucrats may promote the idea that there is no alternative to workers taking on their employers with one or both hands tied behind their backs, there is no reason for the proletariat to accept this premise. Wildcat strike action (ie, immediate walkout by members with a ballot taken on the shop floor), if well organised and supported, is an extremely effective weapon against the predations of employers. Workers possess great power when their hands are on the levers of capitalist production, even if, after such a prolonged period of defeat and retreat, many are not fully aware of this power.

3. Break the link with Labour. The link between the Labour party and the trade unions is a vital mechanism of ruling-class control in British society. When the ruling class’s preferred party of rule, the Conservatives, becomes untenable, then the Labour party is deployed as a reliable alternative – a ‘safety valve’ through which workers are encouraged to vent their anger, since they have been taught for generations that Labour is ‘the party of the working class’.

The fable that the unions founded the Labour party and that therefore that party serves the working class has long since been thoroughly exposed. The Labour party is a loyal servant of British imperialism, and the trade unions’ financial and organisational links to Labour, far from enabling workers to control Labour party policy, are actually a mechanism for making sure the unions remain servile to the electoral interests of the Labour party, which in turn remains servile to the interests of the monopoly financiers in whose interests the British state is really run.

The more thoroughly bureaucratic the trade unions become, the better the leaders of these organisations are able to serve their Labour party masters, ensuring by backroom manoeuvres that their own members’ struggles are suppressed and curtailed, and utilising the legal framework to justify retreat after retreat. All of which inculcates a mindset of resignation and defeat that is extremely effective in demotivating members who in other conditions would be inclined towards militant activism.

The trade unions’ link with Labour is constantly reinforced by a revolving door of personnel and policy exchange. Good work in the service of the ruling class within the trade union movement is rewarded with promotion – either to some elected office or to some other well-remunerated role within the state machinery. Those at the very top of the trade union movement have a vested personal interest in maintaining the Labour link – as is evidenced by the number of former general secretaries now donning the ermine and gracing the red benches of the House of Lords.

As Marxists, our members must be unrelenting in their efforts to educate their fellow trade union members in the history and role of the imperialist Labour party, and in the role that the Labour link plays in hamstringing working-class struggle. This must include organising similarly-minded trade unionists and tabling motions for disaffiliation from Labour at every available level of their unions.

4. No cooperation with the imperialist war machine. Trade union leaders and their bureaucracies have played a critical and shameful role in supporting British imperialism for well over a century. They consistently help to promote aggressive wars, despite the terrible suffering these bring to workers abroad, and despite the fact that, in strengthening the hand of the British ruling class, they are weakening the class position of their own members.

Contemporary examples include the 2022 threat by members of Unite the Union (under the influence of hysterical British bourgeois propaganda that was enthusiastically amplified by Labour and trade union leaders) that they would refuse to unload ships owned by Russia’s largest shipping company Sovcomflot at the Flotta oil terminal in Orkney. Both the regional and general secretaries publicly supported this action, with Unite leader Sharon Graham complaining that the government was not going far enough in its economic war against the Russian people:

“I am very proud of [Unite the Union’s] members taking a principled stand to prevent Russian oil coming to our ports. But it is appalling that they have been put in this position by the [government], which is still dragging its feet on sanctions.”

In October 2023, the TUC national congress passed a most disgraceful composite motion, cynically entitled ‘Solidarity with Ukraine’. This motion, moved by the train drivers’ union Aslef and shamefully supported by the collaborationist rump which is all that remains of the National Union of Mineworkers, falsely accused Russia of authoritarianism, of suppressing trade unions, and of carrying out ethnic cleansing in Ukraine. It completely ignored the actions of the United States and its imperialist partners that had led to the war: looting the country and repeatedly subverting its democracy following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; carrying out the Maidan coup and installing a puppet dictatorship in 2014; and unleashing eight years of military and fascist death-squad terror against all those who resisted the imposition of the west-backed junta in Kiev.

Trade union leaders talk incessantly about ‘solidarity with Palestine’, but aside from motions passed at conferences and the occasional wearing of a Palestine flag badge on a lapel, this solidarity amounts to precisely nothing. Quite the reverse: Unite’s Sharon Graham has openly defended arms exports to the Israeli regime and attacked Palestine solidarity supporters within her own trade union.

We must increase our efforts to explain to workers the necessity of building a mass campaign of non-cooperation with imperialist warmongering and genocide. Such a campaign would include: refusing to make or move munitions needed for the battlefields; refusing to handle or transport any other supplies or manpower; and refusing to help in the creation, print or broadcast of the media lies which soften up the public for imperialism’s wars.

And we must take every opportunity to impress upon rank-and-file trade union members the complicity of the trade union movement and the Labour party in the blood-soaked savagery of British imperialism.

Congress therefore instructs all members to:

Read the Manifesto for the Crisis, become familiar with its contents, and take every possible opportunity to explain those contents to others.
Join their trade union, if one is active in their workplace, or if there is potential to build a union branch amongst their co-workers.
Become active at branch level if they are already a member, working to spread the genuinely class-conscious understanding that is contained in our programme and extend its influence amongst the organised working class.
Take copies of the Manifesto and leaflets containing its demands to demonstrations and stalls wherever they are held, understanding that only by building up a general awareness of and broad sympathy towards such a programme can the conditions be created for its acceptance.
Congress further instructs the party leadership to:

Hold meetings and create campaign materials to spread awareness of the history of the ‘Hands off Russia’ campaign – its goals, its methods and its successes.
Continue to produce topical materials promoting the party programme outlined above, as and when new opportunities arise.
Continue to do everything possible to connect our line of mass non-cooperation with the militant core of the Palestine solidarity and antiwar movements.
Produce a new pamphlet that combines existing materials on the general strike of 1926, the miners’ strike of 1984-5 and new material on the ‘Hands off Russia’ campaign to help educate workers in the history and spirit of militant trade union struggle in Britain.
This congress reaffirms the communist view that successful experience in using its organised power to wrest concessions from the ruling class is a vital step towards building proletarian confidence in itself as a class. Our role is to assist in bringing the working class to the realisation that it is indeed the ruling class in waiting; that its problems are ultimately unsolvable while capitalist production relations persist; and that ultimately it must progress from the struggle to improve conditions for the sale of its labour-power to the struggle to abolish the wages system itself.

https://thecommunists.org/2025/05/05/ne ... esolution/

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A Fighting Union’s Path to Renewal: The UE Story
May 9, 2025
By Chris Townsend

The UE NEWS asked retired UE Political Action Director Chris Townsend to write a summary of how UE’s membership base has changed over the years. Brother Townsend joined the UE staff in the late 1980s, when the membership was primarily (though not exclusively) manufacturing workers, and retired in 2013, after the union’s membership had expanded to include significant numbers of public-sector, higher education, federal contract and rail crew workers. He supplemented his own experience with detailed research from UE convention proceedings and interviews with participants.

The ongoing organizational renewal and substantial growth of the United Electrical Workers (UE) is one of the most distinctly remarkable stories in the U.S. labor movement in decades. Few other unions have suffered such losses from state repression, raiding attacks by opportunist unions, and the catastrophic effects of corporate job relocation — and survived. Of the original 42 unions who comprised the founding roster of the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO) in 1938, a grand total of eight survive intact today. UE is one of them. The remainder have passed out of existence, been destroyed by repression and employer attacks, or been merged into larger unions and lost forever.

Born in the electrical, radio, machine tool, and related manufacturing industries, UE membership for the first four decades remained nearly completely within those industries. The constant emphasis on the need to organize the unorganized did lead to many thousands of non-manufacturing members being brought into the union, but virtually all were clerical or technical workers already working side by side with UE’s members for the same employer. Occasional small groups of non-manufacturing workers would find their way to UE and try to join. They were dutifully encouraged to unionize but directed to another union, whichever union that might already represent that sort of worker elsewhere. Union “jurisdictions” were a serious business then, with most unions dutifully staying in their own lane so far as the types of workers they organized. With UE’s organizing base in several specific manufacturing sectors, it was almost unimaginable that unrelated types of workers would somehow make a home in a union dominated totally by factory workers.

Along Comes Antioch College


Members of UE Local 767 protest the Vietnam War in 1971.

By the mid-1960’s, during the beginnings of the student organizing upsurges across the country in support of the civil rights movement and in opposition to the burgeoning Vietnam war, Antioch College student Larry Rubin contacted UE asking the union to organize the service and maintenance workers at the Yellow Springs, Ohio, campus. Rubin and other students had already told the workers about UE’s record at the bargaining table, its democratic processes, and its rank-and-file character. The reflexive impulse of the union was to refer them to another union, a union better suited for their type of work. But Rubin, the students, and the workers involved all made the case over and over that UE was the union they wanted to belong to.

UE organizer Mel Womack, one of the early African-American staff members, finally went to bat for bringing the Antioch workers into UE, taking Rubin’s plea all the way to the UE officers in New York City. “I knew about UE from my family in Philadelphia, and this was the right union for these workers. But we had to convince them that it would be a good fit,” commented Rubin.

Making the decision a bit easier for the union was the fact that virtually the entire union membership in Ohio had been destroyed or lost during the preceding 15 years of raids and plant closings. As the union organized new factories and reclaimed some lost shops in the heavily industrialized state, the Antioch College workforce offered a chance to rebuild a solid foundation for new manufacturing organizing. A 1965 strike for union recognition was quickly won by the college workers and students, and their official entry into UE allowed for the reconstitution of UE District Seven shortly after.

For the past 60 years the Antioch members have played a consistent and positive role in the life of the union that had nearly turned them away. But the members of UE Local 767 today comprise just a handful because of the closing of most Antioch operations in 2008 — a victim of epic mismanagement. The Antioch College story transcends the entire era from when UE began to seriously consider new non-manufacturing workers for membership, and it also teaches the lesson that in an economy driven completely by profits and “efficiency,” even a workplace such as Antioch is not immune to layoffs or closing.

Tough Decisions
By the 1970’s, UE began to experience wave after wave of layoffs and plant closings as manufacturing bosses began their exodus from the U.S. for low-wage zones across the globe. Retired UE Director of Organization Ed Bruno commented that, “All through the 70’s and into the 1980’s we suffered major losses as plants closed. Formerly big plants were whittled down to just a few hundred members or even less. It was hard to imagine. By the time Reagan was elected President the floodgates opened. We had tried to organize runaway plants in the South, with only limited success. And those plants were not immune to closing either, as we discovered with the loss of the Tampa Westinghouse and Charleston General Electric plants we had organized. No plant was safe anymore.”

As the 1980’s ground on, the union experimented with a number of strategies to organize again and regain lost membership. “By 1987 and ’88 we were forced to rethink our relationship as a union to the manufacturing sector. We looked at trying to organize semiconductors, medical equipment, service shops and other industries still largely based here in the U.S. And we decided to take a look at the plastics industry.” said Bruno. “We went all-in.”

The Plastics Organizing Effort


Plastics workers from across the country gather at the UE national office in Pittsburgh, November 1989.

The plastics industry presented a formidable target for UE organizing. It was decentralized and largely unorganized. Profits were high, and wages were low. Early probing into the 600,000-worker sector yielded above-average interest in unionizing by many workers, but employer resistance was fierce. Sensing the need to move quickly under the deteriorating conditions, UE devised the “Plastic Worker Organizing Committee” (PWOC) plan of action, where several hundred plants would be approached by the union simultaneously. All with the hope of triggering a contagious wave of new organizing spirit among the workers in the industry as was the model of legendary U.S. organizer William Z. Foster in his approach to organizing meatpacking and steel industries early in the 1900’s.

For more history on the PWOC efforts see the thumbnail history here by the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee. And for readers interested in Foster’s legacy his collected works, American Trade Unionism, is available from International Publishers.
Early PWOC results were encouraging, as large numbers of workers responded to UE’s outreach and call for organization, better wages, better benefits and working conditions. Plastic product and component manufacturing plants were leafleted widely and workers were contacted in several hundred plants. PWOC groups were started across a dozen states and the union launched a full mobilization with hundreds of union staff, local leaders, members, and UE supporters deployed. But almost immediately employers responded to the organizing push with fanatic and illegal repression.

Workers were fired, threatened, and terrorized from coast to coast. Union-busting meetings were held in union targeted shops, and so pathological was boss resistance that plastics employers not even encountering UE yet forced their workers to attend anti-union meetings. In UE’s historic base city of Erie, Pennsylvania, then and now the home of many thousands of UE members and retirees from several locals, the plastics employers held meetings to coordinate their plan to repulse the organizing effort by all means legal and illegal. Gigantic billboards were put up across the city decrying UE’s organizing effort, all to induce fear and panic among the several thousand workers in the Erie PWOC area.

Crushed
Only a handful of plastics shops were organized by the end of the nearly two-year effort. One, Reid Valve in Leetsdale, Pennsylvania, was organized only as a result of the massive lawbreaking by the company during the organizing drive. Current UE International Representative John Thompson, then a shop leader, led the drive in the plant where the employer engaged in illegal firings and conduct so severe that the NLRB ordered recognition for the union without an election as the remedy for the outrageous company lawbreaking. The exceedingly rare “bargaining order” granted to UE by the labor board for the Reid workers may well have been the only such order granted that year to a labor union trying to organize.

Organizing progress across the entire union had nearly come to a halt as the union-busting cloud descended on workplaces across all sectors. Between the late 1980’s and 1992, the union was able to win elections and organizing drives totaling barely several hundred workers per year. This crisis was mirrored across the entire labor movement, as mass layoffs, partial closings, and complete plant shutdowns accelerated. The inability to crack into the plastics industry in spite of the herculean effort by the entire union was sobering. Was there a future for UE? Or any union? Was there a way forward? Could the union even hang on, let alone revive?

New Course Needed
The question of widely diversifying the industrial sectors being organized by UE remained a larger option, and by the early 1990’s a small trickle of such shops had already been won. Experimentation with organizing non-manufacturing workplaces and affiliating existing independent unions took form, but were small in scale as most efforts remained focused on factory organizing. Bus operators in Greenfield, Massachusetts joined city and school district workers already part of UE. Movie theatre and radio station staff had organized into UE in Boston. Construction workers in Sacramento, California signed up. A temporary employment agency was organized in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Radio station staff were won in Los Angeles, California. Bank safe installers and alarm technicians were organized in Philadelphia. A newspaper staff unit had been organized in Vermont. And there were others, mostly small shops. Recruiting union members in already-organized open shops also brought in some needed new blood as the union implemented a renewed push in this regard as well.

Early Forward Momentum
With the election of Bob Kingsley as the new Director of Organization in late 1992, it was apparent that UE was in immediate need of expanded experimentation with the organization of new sectors. “We didn’t want to give up on organizing manufacturing workers, but we had to do something to bring in new members to offset the losses,” said Kingsley. “Our factory members stepped-up and saw the need too. Over and over and over again we relied on them to take the UE message to workers far away from the factory floor.” Magnifying the earlier work of Ed Bruno, Kingsley launched a major outreach to independent unions across the country. Results were significant, and in 1993 alone more new workers were organized either by affiliation votes or NLRB elections than in the previous decade. Public sector workers, truck drivers and mechanics, port workers, warehouse workers, and food service workers joined, boosting the numbers of non-manufacturing members in UE dramatically. Factory workers continued to be organized as well, a welcomed uptick after years of decline.

Iowa
The campaign to win the affiliation of the large Iowa United Professionals (IUP) independent union was key to opening the door to additional units not traditional for the union. This large statewide unit of state professional workers had voted in a leadership vote to join UE in 1989, only to be counseled to return home and develop actual rank-and-file support for the move. By the spring of 1993, both IUP and UE were ready, and the overwhelming vote to join UE by the membership was another shot in the arm for UE’s rebuilding efforts. Kingsley recalls, “We won the Iowa affiliation vote in the middle of their epic spring flood, where half the state was under water. We had UE factory members from all across the country crisscrossing the state, extolling the UE’s merits from the shop floor perspective, in the midst of this calamity. We got votes for determination alone and won overwhelmingly.”

The big Iowa win allowed UE to launch additional organizing campaigns for unorganized public-sector workers at school districts and county workplaces, with new successes. By 1995, graduate teaching and research assistants at the University of Iowa contacted UE, and veteran organizer Carol Lambiase was tasked with determining if a campaign was feasible for the 2,600 workers.

After an enormous and sustained campaign, the University of Iowa workers voted overwhelmingly to join UE in April of 1996. This marked the largest organizing win in several decades for UE and gave the union new energy to expand organizing even further. Everyone in UE was celebrating the big Iowa win, but a common question was, “Tell me again what kind of work they do?”


UE NEWS coverage of the election win at the University of Iowa.

New Directions
The organizing success in Iowa, including UE’s very first graduate worker unit, all set the stage for continued UE growth in the public sector as well as other new sectors. Through the 1990’s and beyond, UE set down additional membership roots in the health care sector, at food coops, among rail crew van drivers, and among federal contract workers, all while maintaining a realistic focus on new organizing in the original manufacturing sector. Gene Elk and Mark Meinster followed Kingsley as directors of organization in the last decade, and each led membership and staff in the direction of further growth in a diversity of sectors. Both helped set the stage for the explosive growth of the last three years, enabling the union to emerge from the pandemic period strengthened with more than 35,000 new members joining from higher education ranks alone.

A Remarkable Renewal
The role played by UE Local 896, the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students (COGS) — the University of Iowa graduate teaching and research assistants and first UE win in that sector — was trailblazing. Local 896 has compiled a solid record of rank-and-file and democratic local functioning, aggressive struggle on behalf of the members’ interests, and in opposition to the blizzard of political attacks waged against public employees in Iowa for almost 30 years. This outstanding record is all the more remarkable given that owing to the nature of their profession, workers do not remain for lifetime careers. Each successive generation must relearn the union history and from the point they are hired must join the front ranks of the local.

It would have been inconceivable for any of us who spent time in UE — in my case a 25-year career — to have imagined that Local 896 would have helped to rekindle UE to such an awesome extent. But why not? When those of us who were grappling with the difficult and at times unsolvable puzzle of just how we were going to reverse UE’s decline, and build new membership again, we always believed that there existed a large section of workers who wanted real, aggressive, militant, and member-run unionism. We learned that workers are shaped somewhat by the work they perform for a boss someplace, but more than that working people are shaped by a desire not just for any union, but for a better kind of union. UE’s assembly line workers, machinists, toolmakers, and factory hands are now largely replaced with higher education, public service, health care, rail, retail, and technical workers. But rank-and-file unionism pushes on to another generation, delivering real results and proving that member-run unionism works.


A full stage during the Organizing Report at the 2023 UE Convention.
UE holds high that banner, and the response of workers like the several tens of thousands who have poured in to the union’s ranks in the past several years is proof of that. A special union salute is in order to the UE founders, the old-timers who kept UE going in the most trying of times, the current membership, officers, local activists, and staff who kept rallying to UE’s banner, and now to the many new faces arriving to replenish the ranks.

If UE did not exist it would have to be invented. On to the next stage of growth, and wherever that takes us.

https://www.ueunion.org/ue-news-feature ... on-may-day&&

UE Locals March, Rally for Workers’ Rights on May Day


UE Local 150 members marching on May Day in Raleigh, North Carolina.

May 16, 2025

On Thursday, May 1, UE locals across the country participated in International Workers’ Day actions to stand up for workers’ rights. Local 667 joined a march in Pittsburgh and Local 1498-GWU held a series of actions throughout their campus in Las Cruces, New Mexico, including a screening of the film UNION, which tells the story of how Amazon workers in Staten Island won their union. Local 896-COGS in Iowa City, Iowa participated in a mass march to stop deportations and to keep families together. They also held another action on May 2 to protest the University of Iowa’s attempt to roll back programs to address racism and sexism on campus. Local 1466 (UGW of UNM) had a bargaining session with University of New Mexico administration and turned out 50 members to put pressure on the boss before heading to a local rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In Baltimore, UE Local 197-TRU graduate workers organized a protest at Johns Hopkins University to demand the administration make the university a sanctuary campus, commit to fully funding ongoing research, and publicly affirm support for academic freedom. In an interview with CBS Baltimore, Local 197 member Sheridon Ward said, “We're going to keep making noise until our academic freedom and our international workers have adequate protection. We have a responsibility to use our union power when our workers are threatened."


Local 197-TRU members present their demands to Johns Hopkins administration.

Local 1043-SWGU joined a local San Francisco rally and organized a speak-out campaign to show their university how important grad workers are. Local 300-CGSU joined an Ithaca rally and celebration of working-class struggle. Local 1105 (UMN-GLU) focused on celebrating immigrant workers at their action in the Twin Cities, while Local 256 (MIT-GSU) participated in a Boston march for worker power over billionaires. The MIT grad workers spoke out about the recent attacks on higher education, immigrant students, and scientific research. In Chicago, members of Local 1103-GSU and Local 1122-NUGW marched through the city streets after holding their own actions on their campuses.


Members of UE Locals 1103-GSU and 1122-NUGW march in Chicago.

Local 1107 and Local 1186 members attended a panel discussion in Madison, Wisconsin centered on preparing for a 2028 general strike. The panel was hosted by Madison Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and included Local 1107 Recording Secretary David Berg, Local 1186 steward Matthew Thompson, and representatives from the South Central Federation of Labor and the United Faculty and Academic Staff. When discussing demands that would be made in the general strike, Berg raised the idea of eliminating Right to Work for Less legislation in Wisconsin, which prohibits closed shops in the state. He also brought up single payer universal healthcare as a future demand. He made the point that not only does for-profit insurance eat into workers' wages, but the threat of losing health insurance is a major obstacle to workers striking for better conditions. Local 1186 members also marched for immigrant and workers’ rights on May 2 (see article below by Local 1186 member Elizabeth White.)


UE members Matthew Thompson, Local 1186 (left) and David Berg, Local 1107 (right) speak on a panel about a 2028 General Strike on May Day in Madison, Wisconsin.

Local 150 chapters showed up as a contingent to the May Day march in Raleigh, North Carolina. Local 150 UNC Chapel Hill chapter President Nyssa Tucker was part of the Durham labor choir that sang at the rally. The UE members then marched with other unions and community organizations in front of the state legislature. Speakers included Local 150 Vice President William Young and UE Field Organizer Brea Perry. They focused on the need to fight back through organizing and labor actions like striking against the far-right oligarchy that is taking shape in the U.S. Most of the speakers pointed out the need to speak out against the Palestinian genocide and ICE's repressive actions. A highlight of the march was the international solidarity mentioned in a majority of the speakers’ speeches.

======================================================================================

Local 1186 Members Join Day Without Immigrants and Workers March
By Elizabeth White, UE Local 1186



In Madison, Local 1186 joined dozens of community organizations in a Day Without Immigrants and Workers march on May 2. Over a thousand strong, we took to the street and occupied the capitol once more in scenes reminiscent of 2011, when as a united front against Scott Walker the people took our house and lived there as a community building bridges instead of walls.

Local 1186 maintains an action calendar on our social media and reaches deep networks of activism through our radicalized membership. Led by Voces do la Frontera, more than 20 members of our local stood behind our brand new marching banner next to nurses from one local hospital fighting to form a union and with another group of nurses who just sent out a 10 day notice to strike. We joined dairy farmers and teachers and organized labor from every sector. Our unified message of worker solidarity brought us together and in true Wisconsin fashion the megaphone was passed from hand to hand — every body has a right to be heard. In Madison when you leave a rally the rally does not leave you. We will come together again and again, stronger and louder until our demands are met.

https://www.ueunion.org/ue-news/2025/ue ... on-may-day&&

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Dear colleagues,

The International Workers’ Institute (IWI) is organizing an important international lecture via Zoom, which we invite you to attend. This will be a valuable resource for trade unionists and the workers’ movement as a whole.

The lecture will be held on Tuesday, June 24, featuring a presentation of the book Blue Collar Empire by Professor Jeff Schuhrke, who will deliver the lecture and answer questions.

Time: 10:00 AM Eastern Time

The Zoom link is:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87034677061?p ... myjw9R32.1

Meeting ID: 870 3467 7061
Passcode: 6NBif3

We encourage you to inform your union affiliates and friends so they can attend this important event. Translation into languages other than English will be provided.

For Further information contact the IWI Executive Committee (info@theoryandpraxis.eu)

https://www.theoryandpraxis.eu/

[blindpig]

How the ICE Raids and Crackdowns on Anti-Genocide Speech Are A Threat to All American Workers
Posted on June 11, 2025 by Conor Gallagher

David Huerta, president of SEIU California and SEIU-United Service Workers West, was injured and then arrested while documenting a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on Friday. He is now facing a felony charge of conspiracy to impede an officer with the the Los Angeles native’s detention the latest example of how organized labor is being hit hard from the raids by masked ICE agents.

Not only is the Trump administration not going after the employers of undocumented labor, but it is instead targeting union members who were legally living and working in the US. Team Trump is doing so by cancelling humanitarian parole, revoking the visas of many graduate student union members, and other ICE actions that target individuals in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong skin color and potentially the wrong outlook on capital-labor relations.

Unions are increasingly sounding the alarm that the ICE agents snatching people off the street is part of the administration’s wider crackdown on organized labor.

The AFL-CIO’s Department of People Who Work for a Living (DPWL) recently held a series of hearings across the country to provide a platform for working people and local communities to express their views on the current administration’s policies. Summarized in this report, they argue that the Trump administration’s mass deportation program, with its disregard for due process, threatens the constitutional rights of every worker and poses serious disruptions in key industries and local economies. Let’s take a look at what they’re saying and how this is playing out.

Far from focusing immigration enforcement efforts on people who pose a public safety risk, Trump has taken active steps to strip status and work authorization away from millions of working people,many of whom have been members of our workforce and our unions for decades. These enormous populations have all had their status terminated and are now fighting in the courts to preserve their ability to live and work here:

Nearly 1 million workers with Temporary Protected Status due to unsafe conditions in Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti and Venezuela.


More than 1.5 million workers with Humanitarian Parole (an unfortunately named form of protection that has nothing to do with the criminal justice system) who were invited here with sponsors from Afghanistan, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Note that all these countries have in recent years—and in some cases, dating back much further—been on the receiving end of US invasions, “counterterrorism” operations, sanctions, regime change efforts, and other modes of violence and plunder. In return, some lucky few get to live the American dream working long hours for low pay and have had the temerity to try to better their lot by joining unions here in the US. Their reward?

Like our federal workforce, hundreds of thousands of these immigrant workers received notice through harshly worded form letters that their status, and therefore their ability to work, was being terminated. Some were given as few as seven days to pack up and leave the country, and told that failure to do so would result in criminal prosecution.64 These callous terminations are effectively resulting in mass layoffs of workers across the country, causing massive disruptions in key industries, local economies and union membership.

Larger Plan at Work

While militarized ICE agents sweeping into communities across the country might appease some of Trump’s MAGA supporters and provide the illusion of doing something about the exploitation of foreign workers, a closer look shows that it is part of a coordinated attack on all of labor.

How so? Let’s start with Donald himself and go from there.

Trump’s businesses rely on and continue to seek H-2B non-agricultural “guest” workers. A crucial difference between the H-2B and H-2A—covering agricultural workers—and individuals who worked in the US under temporary protected status or humanitarian parole is that the latter two categories didn’t have their ability to stay in the country legally tied to their work.

That made them less exploitable. They were free to change jobs and unionize.

Guest workers, on the other hand, are loved by Trump and many employers because they are basically indentured servants. Even the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security “acknowledge that H-2B workers face structural disincentives to reporting or leaving abusive conditions, and often lack power to exercise their rights in the face of exploitative employment situations.”

H2-A guest workers also faced a major setback in their fight to organize last year when a District Court Judge issued an injunction in August that blocked them from unionizing in 17 states. Meanwhile, the guest worker program features labor trafficking, and rampant wage fraud, illegal recruitment fees, wage theft, and illegal threats of retaliation. Abuse is made easy by the fact that it’s almost impossible for workers to quit their jobs since their visas are tied to a single employer. Mike Rios, a DOL regional agricultural enforcement coordinator, describes the H2 program as the “literal purchase of humans.”

As of 2024 there were 384,900 H2-A and 215,217 H2-B workers in the US. About 40 percent of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, and as of 2020 there were more than 406,000 individuals with Temporary Protected Status, which allows them to reside and work legally in the US due to unsafe conditions in their home country. The similar humanitarian parole covered another 530,000-plus.

Trump is trying to end Temporary Protected Status, and on May 30 the Supreme Court allowed the administration to pause humanitarian parole. Notably, Trump and his ICE goons are not going after H2 workers, but they are targeting those who try to organize them.

In March, ICE agents smashed his car window and detained Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, who began working as a berry picker at the age 14 and helped found Familias Unidas Por La Justicia, an independent farmworker union in Washington State. He advocated around issues like overtime pay, heat protections for farmworkers and criticized the exploitative nature of the H-2A program. A Seattle immigration judge had ordered Juarez Zeferino’s removal in 2018.

Edgar Franks, the political director of Familias Unidas, tells Truthout that the view from the ground makes the Trump administration’s aims fairly obvious. It’s not about ridding the country of immigrant workers nor even prioritizing the white working class. It’s about making all of labor more easily exploitable:

It was meant to silence the organizing, deport as many people as possible, and to bring in a captive workforce through the H-2A program. We think that might be the ultimate plan: to get rid of all the immigrant workers who are organizing and fighting back for better conditions, and to bring in a workforce that’s under the complete control of their employer with basically no rights. It’ll make it even harder to organize with farmworkers if more H-2A workers come. It wouldn’t be impossible, but it’ll be more difficult.

A White House official told NBC News that Trump wants to “improve” the H-2A and H-2B programs, although it’s unclear what exactly that means. If his first term is any indication, it means “improve” for the employers. During Trump 1.0 the temporary work visa programs steadily grew a total of 13 percent larger, and he used the Covid emergency to help make it happen:

During the pandemic, his administration issued a series of emergency measures that made H-2A and H-2B visas more flexible and employer-friendly. Workers were allowed to stay in the country for longer periods of time, in part because they had been deemed “essential workers,” and wages for H-2A workers were effectively frozen.

With more emergencies arriving on multiple fronts, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a replay. Should the Trump administration succeed in replacing temporary protected status, humanitarian parole, and others with guest workers, it would make it that much harder to organize. As Noah Zatz, a law professor at UCLA notes:

…work under threat of incarceration outside of criminal punishment, or racialized state violence outside incarceration—also highlight continuity with immigration detention and deportation. This continuity is particularly important because labor advocates and the labor movement have come to understand—through a long and still-contested process—how employers gain power to intimidate, retaliate against, and divide workers when the state’s deportation threat hangs over them and can be invoked by employers.

Labor Needs Due Process and Free Speech

The AFL-CIO also notes how the disregard for due process and crackdowns on speech hurt immigrant workers now and will do doubt be turned on all workers down the line:

In another alarming development, immigrant workers, including green card holders and work visa holders, have faced arrest, detention, revocation of status and deportation with a complete lack of due process. These attacks are affecting more and more of our union siblings, including:

SMART Brother Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to a Salvadoran mega-prison in what the Department of Justice has admitted was a mistake. The administration is refusing to comply with a unanimous Supreme Court order to facilitate his return.
Former UAW Brother Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder with a pregnant U.S. citizen wife, who is being detained without charge and told his green card will be revoked for criticizing U.S. foreign policy.
SEIU Sister Rümeysa Öztürk, a grad student worker, was being detained, and was just recently released, for the offense of writing an op-ed in the Tufts University Law School Journal.
Hundreds of other higher education student workers around the country from a wide range of unions have had their visas revoked for reasons ranging from the exercise of free speech to being from countries now being considered for new travel bans. The quickly escalating efforts to deny due process, define what constitutes acceptable speech, and arbitrarily strip workers of their visas and work permits creates a climate of fear and sets a dangerous precedent for the rights of all working people, whether they are citizens or not.

Despite all the masked ICE agents ripping people out of Home Depots and actions and “ICE Barbie” parachuting in for photo ops, the administration has yet to go after employers of illegals, which is the easiest and most effective way to stop their hiring—but that’s not the goal here. Here’s the AFL-CIO with a fine example:

As an indication of what this imbalance in spending and priorities looks like in practice, ICE reported that it conducted a recent raid at a Philadelphia car wash because it had reports that workers were being exploited. The consequence, however, fell to the seven immigrant workers who were arrested, rather than the employer who was violating their rights. In a country where we rely on workers to report violations to enforce our labor laws, inappropriate enforcement responses such as this risk chilling the exercise of workplace rights, making all workplaces less safe and undermining our organizing efforts. Moreover, these misplaced worksite enforcement priorities incentivize predatory employer behavior that will fuel a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions in major industries around the country.

At the same time, the Trump administration is gutting the Department of Labor that was already woefully understaffed (750 investigators overseeing fair labor standards at 11 million workplaces) and unserious about penalties anyways (maximum penalty per child laborer is $15,000). It has been a bipartisan effort to continually torch it with Trump now acting as an accelerant.

As the administration continues to dismantle the federal agencies charged with enforcing our labor and employment laws, the investment in immigration enforcement continues to increase. Our nation already spends 14 times more on immigration enforcement than it does to enforce all the laws to protect more than 165 million workers in job sites around the country. Gutting our government’s resources and capacity to enforce labor standards and protections while stripping immigrant workers of rights and ramping up immigration enforcement is a core part of the anti-union, anti-worker playbook that will enable employers to violate worker rights with impunity. This is a toxic formula that will drive down standards for all workers in key industries and increase wage theft, child labor violations, and preventable workplace injuries and fatalities.

Indeed, that appears to be the plan. With Trump and DOGE’s gutting of the National Labor Relations Board, attacks on federal workers unions, selective deportations, Gold Cards, and promotion of H-2 workers, the goal is to make all workers more like the undocumented ones. Here’s Michael Macher:

…the US immigration system runs not on the enforcement of immigration laws, but on their selective nonenforcement. Employers have relied on the state to ignore the exploitation of undocumented labor while holding the credible threat of deportation over workers. This has had the effect of strengthening employer bargaining power generally against all workers—lowering wages, weakening unions, and shifting the politics of work away from collective bargaining and wage-and-hour regulation. The interest in labor that is weak and disorganized has driven US politicians, consciously or not, to adopt the role of petty bosses, threatening the deportation of significant portions of the US workforce. But if Trump can afford to blow up this arrangement, it is because the precarity of the undocumented worker represents the future of labor relations in the US, not its past.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/06 ... rkers.html

******


Crystal Londonio, wife of detained Machinist Max Lodonio, speaks at the June 6 rally. Richard Howard, the president of her husband’s Machinists local is at right (in hat) with another local member. (Photo: Zack Pattin)

‘IAM Max’: Machinists rally for member detained by ICE
Originally published: Labor Notes on June 9, 2025 by Zack Pattin (more by Labor Notes) | (Posted Jun 11, 2025)

Rallying under the banner “IAM Max,” 200 union members and supporters gathered outside the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma, Washington, on June 6 to demand the release of Maximo Londonio, a member of Machinists (IAM) Local Lodge 695 who has been imprisoned by ICE since mid-May.

“He should not be here, he should be at home with his wife and family,” said Machinists International President Brian Bryant at the rally.

We want everyone that’s illegally in this facility set free.

Londonio, known as “Kuya” (meaning “big brother”) to his family and co-workers, is the lead forklift driver at Crown Cork and Seal, an aluminum can manufacturer, in Lacey, Washington. He moved to the U.S. with his family in 1997 when he was 12 years old. He and his wife, Crystal, a U.S. citizen, have three daughters. He is a lawful permanent resident with a green card.

The Londonios were returning home from a trip to the Philippines celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary when Max was detained at Sea-Tac Airport. He was held there for five days before being transferred on May 20 to NWDC, a for-profit prison operated by GEO Group.

Bryant said that he recently spoke to a Machinists local in the area on their 125th anniversary. He said he reminded those in attendance that their own union local was probably founded by people just like Max: immigrant workers fighting for a better life.

The rally followed a series of demonstrations in Washington in support of Londonio as well as other union activists detained by ICE. These include Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, a farmworker organizer with Familias Unidas por la Justicia, and Llewelyn Dixon, affectionately known as “Aunty Lynn,” a laboratory technician at the University of Washington and member of SEIU Local 925. Like Londonio, Dixon has a green card.

Along with their unions, the immigrant rights groups Tanggol Migrante, La Resistencia, the International Migrants Alliance, and the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) have been working together to demand justice for the detained immigrant workers.

Londonio and Dixon appear to have been targeted by ICE now because they each had a non-violent criminal conviction more than 20 years ago. Crystal Londonio acknowledged this, but said Max “took accountability for his actions” years ago. What has been a non-issue since has been politicized by the Trump administration and is now being used as a weapon to target immigrant workers like Londonio.

After three months in detention, Dixon was released on May 29. Now her family, co-workers, and union are joining with Londonio’s to demand he and everyone else in the facility are set free.

Juarez, who helped win a major heat protection law for farmworkers in 2023, is still being held at NWDC and does not have a hearing scheduled until November.

A ‘STAIN ON TACOMA’
First opened in 2004 and operated by GEO Group since 2005, NWDC was referred to as a “stain on Tacoma” by multiple speakers at the rally. It has been the site of regular protests for years, both outside and inside the facility.

Conditions in the prison are so bad that prisoners conducted a hunger strike in 2014. Liliana Chumpitasi from La Resistencia, an immigrants’ rights organization founded to support the hunger strike, told the crowd about the inhumane conditions inside.

She said there are currently around 1,600 people imprisoned in the facility, compared to 2024 when there were on average 700. Now, as many as 24 people share one bathroom and there are not enough beds to go around, she said.

Many of the bad conditions are not unique to the current administration. Last year, two people died inside the detention center, and 15 others attempted suicide. Physical and sexual violence are routine, and prisoners are afraid to seek medical care for fear of further assault.

ICE INTIMIDATION
April Sims, president of the Washington State Labor Council and a lifelong resident of Tacoma, spoke about how ICE is routinely called in by employers to intimidate workers during organizing drives and is a threat to all organized labor.

WSLC represents 600,000 union members across the state. In 2020, the council joined La Resistencia’s Shut Down the Northwest Detention Center campaign.

Members of several Machinists locals and districts attended the rally, including Londonio’s Local Lodge 695, as well as IAM Lodges 289 and 2202 and Districts 160 and 751 (at Boeing). They were joined by members of the Teamsters, UFCW, UNITE HERE, the Tacoma Education Association, SEIU, and Longshore and Warehouse (ILWU) Local 23, as well as three central labor councils.

At the rally, Tricia Schroeder, president of Dixon’s SEIU Local 925, announced the news that SEIU California president David Huerta had been assaulted, arrested, and hospitalized during a major ICE raid in Los Angeles. (Huerta was released on June 9 but faces a felony charge.)

“They want us fighting each other and not fighting for wages,” Schroeder warned, saying anti-immigrant propaganda is a way to keep workers from uniting around common interests.

Other speakers tied the crisis immigrants face here to even worse conditions they or their families fled, such as in the Philippines. Marx Rivera, an organizer with Tanggol Migrante, blamed the government of the Philippines for creating the crisis that has driven so many Filipinos out of their country in the first place.

He connected Londonio’s imprisonment to the repression against slain ILWU activists Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, who were murdered in Seattle in 1981 by agents of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines.

LABOR IN MOTION
A local grocery worker and member of UFCW 367 at Friday’s rally explained that she hadn’t been involved in immigrant justice before and didn’t usually attend protests either. But big changes in her local union, especially new leadership and recent rounds of open bargaining for their grocery store contracts, and her friendship with Londonio’s local union president, Richard Howard, got her more active in her own union, leading her to join the rally.

When workers and their loved ones are subjected to ICE raids and imprisonment, everyone else affected by that repression becomes a potential friend and ally. Dixon’s nieces and co-workers are now rallying for Londonio and continue fighting for Lelo Juarez. The Londonio family is now fighting for them and everyone else in the facility, with the support of Londonio’s union fully behind them.

“We’re fighting for the ones we love, and not just our families, but everyone inside there who doesn’t have a voice or the support we do,” said Crystal Londonio.

We will continue to fight to free them all.

https://mronline.org/2025/06/11/iam-max ... ed-by-ice/

[blindpig]

Hard Truths About the US Labor Movement: An Interview with Chris Townsend
By Chris Townsend, Michael D. Yates (Posted Jul 16, 2025)

Chris Townsend has been organizing workers, conducting political work for labor unions, and teaching young workers to organize for almost all his adult life. He is, as we say, “the real deal.” While most of us opine and pontificate about labor, Chris does the dirty work. He organizes. His contributions over several decades have played a key role in rebuilding the United Electrical Workers (UE), rekindling new organizing and campaigning in the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), helping to initiate what has become the Starbucks movement, and contributing in countless other ways to the work of the labor movement. He declares without hesitation that, “the workplace in the United States is a dictatorship,” and proposes dramatically expanded union organizing as one antidote. Chris is also a committed socialist, someone who understands that the labor movement must be much more than just disconnected and isolated labor unions, politically adrift, organizationally stagnant, and taking blows from all sides. Organized labor must return to its roots, when bringing capitalism to an end was the ultimate goal. —Michael D. Yates

Michael D. Yates: Chris, how and when did you first become active in the labor movement?

Chris Townsend: I joined the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) in Tampa, Florida, just after I got out of high school. I grew up in Pennsylvania, and in 1979 the economy was at a dead stop. Every mill, mine, railroad and other employer had a layoff list a mile long. A young kid like me had zero chance of finding any job. Mass unemployment was a scary thing to see when hundreds of people would line up for a handful of jobs. I was on my own and took off for Florida where I had an Uncle I could stay with. He said there were at least a few jobs down there. I got hired as a sanitation worker and I found out that the ATU was organizing the entire municipal workforce of the City of Tampa. I fell into it by accident. ATU took the lead because for twenty years they had represented the bus operations which were eventually run by the city. By the time I arrived the public sector had been allowed to officially organize through a State of Florida process. The organizing drive included over 3,600 workers in every city classification, from Accounting Clerk 1’s to Zookeeper 2’s, and everything in-between. I jumped into the union with both feet, doing just about everything you could think of. Some of the old-timers who ran the local were Cuban Americans, but they were communists and sympathizers who had fled the Batista regime. The Cuban Revolution was their political North Star so to speak. These guys trained me and put me to work. I was a volunteer organizer who did anything they needed me to do in just about every corner of the city. I became a shop steward for a while, then was elected to the local Executive Board in late 1981. Somehow, I got nicknamed, “the kid,” and I hated it. There were lots of other young workers there, but I guess at 17 and 18 and 19, I was the youngest who was that active.

MY: Did you move to the left before or after your entry into the labor movement?

CT: I became a leftist in high school, by listening to shortwave radio and reading. One of the things I read was Monthly Review, it was carried by the Franklin and Marshall college library. They put it out with the newspapers and magazines, and their library was open to the public. I saw my future prospects declining day by day under the Nixon regime, then Jimmy Carter. I figured out bit by bit that this “system” we have is not our system, it’s the bosses’ system. It robs people, oppresses people, torments people, and crushes them. And it does not hesitate to massacre on a gigantic scale when it wants to. The U.S. genocide on Vietnam was sickening. When our puppet regime in the South finally collapsed at the end of April, 1975, we all saw it on live TV. It was the way that we abandoned and just ditched most of our supporters and hangers-on in the final bug-out that ironically convinced me that I was a socialist. If these people were dumped so fast, why on earth would I think that these same ruling forces would ever help me if I was in a jam? This rotten boss system is in it for the money, the power, the bloodlust. They don’t give a damn about workers.

Once I learned about the class system, the class struggle, and class interests, my loyalty became crystal clear. I owe my allegiance to my class, the working class. Period. I’m lucky I learned that when I was young. I suppose there are more complicated ways to become a Marxist, but that was mine. I didn’t need to read Marx’s Capital to realize as a worker that I was at the bottom, always at the mercy of the boss and his gang. I have read plenty of socialist literature over the decades and it doesn’t take a 400-page textbook to explain all this to a worker. I thought then, and I still think, that the constant tendency to grossly overthink these basic realities is one of our greatest and most debilitating diseases on the left. As I turned left, I was also pushed along by Carter’s revival of military draft registration, which I flatly refused. My family also lived twenty-four miles from the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in March of 1979. Seeing the nuclear industry in cahoots with our government and endangering everyone for their superprofits just put me over the top. I also read Lenin’s article, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism” about that time, and the door opened for me. Every worker needs to read that short article.

MY: You worked for many years with the United Electrical Workers (UE). Tell us about this time in your life. What is special about the UE? What lessons did you take from your work there?

CT: I was recruited to work for UE in 1988. I joined a squad of organizers who were assigned to try to organize the plastics division of General Electric (GE). There was no bigger, more powerful, or more anti-union corporation than GE. UE was the original union that organized huge portions of that conglomerate in the 1930s. But by the time I joined UE, the combined forces of GE, Westinghouse, Congress, the FBI, the CIO, the AFL, practically all the Democrats and Republicans, and the news media had thrown every punch there was to try to kill them off. While enormous damage was done, they failed to completely liquidate UE. It really is a “rank and file” union, a “democratic” union, a “militant” union. The salaries of union leaders and staff are very modest. Militance is encouraged, not crushed. New organizing is a top priority of the union, not just an afterthought. Political positions are arrived at democratically, by the members. I saw all that up close. Go to the UE web page and read their Constitution. That’s the document that mandates how the union is run. You won’t see anything like it anywhere else, sadly. UE represents today a living fragment of William Z. Foster’s TUEL (Trade Union Educational League), the TUUL (Trade Union Unity League), and the early CIO. There were other unions similar to UE in many ways, but they were the unions wrecked and destroyed by employer and state repression in the 1940s and 50s. The business unions were also eager to feast on the wrecked left-led unions, but UE and ILWU managed somehow to survive.

After four years in the field as an organizer, UE sent me to Washington, DC, to run their Washington Office. It was quite an assignment for a guy like me. No other union would have ever, I mean ever, selected a guy like me to staff their political action work. That’s another UE “difference”. Being “just a worker” really meant something. For twenty-one years I conducted the federal and state level political work of UE, its political education work, and I also kept a big hand in organizing and bargaining. As the political staffer I still participated in new organizing, independent union affiliations, strike struggles, and bargaining. I joined the General Electric UE bargaining committee at that time. During this assignment I was also able to work closely with Bernie Sanders. The AFL-CIO had banned him, wanted to oust him from his House seat, but he was extraordinarily supportive of our UE locals in Vermont, and our new organizing. We were happy to work with him, and I had five or six years where UE was practically the only union who would deal with him in DC. I am considerably to the left of Sanders, and it was always fun for me when I was introducing him to a UE group as “My conservative friend from Vermont.”

In those years UE was grappling with the need to diversify from being a strictly manufacturing union. Plant closings and layoffs were draining away tens of thousands of members, and new organizing in factories was at a low ebb. Where it remains today. We continued to try to organize in manufacturing, but practically all the results were found in other sectors. When I retired from UE in 2013 after twenty-five years, we were already a majority non-manufacturing union. There was no alternative.

Today, UE has experienced a major rebirth with the addition of more than 35,000 workers in the higher education field. We first organized graduate and research workers in 1996 in Iowa, and today UE is composed of workers in seven different industrial sectors with the higher ed grouping now the largest by far. And I have to point out that today, in mid-2025, UE is once again larger than the IUE, the right-wing union started in 1949 with the sole goal of destroying UE. The dwindling IUE fragments merged with the CWA about twenty years ago. They have rejected significant new organizing, and it was sometime in the past two or three years that UE passed them up. I wish that the tens of thousands of IUE victims, now gone, could see this day.

UE is known today for lots of things, its left character perhaps one of the most widely known aspects. But the really amazing thing is that UE has survived and is rebuilding. Most embattled unions just fold up and merge with another union, never to be heard from again. We were determined to survive and preserve as best we could the member-run and left principles of the union. All serious labor students should examine UE for its history, its character, its methods of bargaining with and dealing with employers, and its political stands. If you are in a union today, looking at our current moment, I would say that you had better study how UE suffered immense blows for decades and has still somehow survived. And now grown again, without resorting to gimmicks like union mergers that get labeled as “new organizing.” UE defies convention, and they prove over and over again that there really is an alternative to the failing business union model that we are all saddled with today.

MY: You have belonged to and worked for other labor unions, and you have been a successful organizer everywhere you went. You have also trained many organizers. Give readers a rundown of your organizing activities, including recently through your union organizing schools. How is it that you have succeeded? What is your secret, so to speak? Why are workers receptive to what you do? Why aren’t there many more of you out there, because if there were, we might now see our labor movement being revitalized?

CT: I have belonged to four unions over forty-six years in the labor movement; ATU, UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers), SEIU, and UE. All very different kinds of unions. My short time in UFCW was as a successful salt, and my brief stint at SEIU was characterized by my jerking the local union forward by restarting its new organizing and adding almost 500 new members. In 2013 I retired from UE and rejoined ATU after a break of twenty-nine years since I had been a member in Florida. Larry Hanley, a bus operator from New York City and a force determined to revitalize ATU, was elected ATU President and recruited me to start his mobilization department and restart their new organizing. My time at ATU was a whirlwind. I kicked new organizing into gear and today ATU is at its largest membership ever in 133 years. Almost 10,000 new members have been added by winning more than 235 campaigns in the U.S. and Canada. And we built a campaign apparatus that now allows the union to conduct bargaining support and strike struggle, and to defend transit workers from political attacks.

Almost one-third of that organizing success has been in the South. The AFL-CIO is well aware of this success, but they sit camped-out today in several southern states, claiming to “organize.” They should take a look at ATU’s experiences in the south, but they won’t. They are busy spending a lot of money, organizing little, and diligently carrying on the AFL-CIO tradition of organizing failure. In my time at ATU we also engineered one of the greatest victories against transit privatization when we defeated the privatization of 175 bus operators here in Washington, DC. And won their return to the public transit agency. We did this after an 84-day strike in 2019, in Lorton, Virginia, of all places. We followed an initial game plan devised by ATU President Larry Hanley, myself, and my co-worker Todd Brogan. Big ATU Local 689 in Washington, DC, was won over after initial resistance. Hanley’s bold goal was to try to win a reversal of privatization someplace and then launch this movement in other places to combat and turn back the spreading privatization cancer in the transit industry. But he passed away before the final success of the campaign, and his successor regime immediately abandoned any notion of continuing this work. Today it’s as if this remarkable victory never happened. When I decided to retire from ATU in 2022, this was one of the reasons. The post-Hanley leadership is quite content with privatization. Business union lethargy and small-mindedness comes in many flavors, always at the expense of the rank-and-file.

My most remarkable feat at ATU was when Larry Hanley, myself, and longtime organizer Richard Bensinger started a union organizing school in late 2017. We needed a means to train ATU leaders and local officers to expand the new organizing program. Bensinger raised the idea of the training work being done in the context of a multi-union collaboration to encourage “salting” as an organizing tool. Each participating union could rely on the overall experience of the volunteer collective as they engineered their own campaigns. A number of unions including ATU were able to organize new shops through the school, and in 2020, even under the cloud of the pandemic, Bensinger and the Workers United, Rochester, New York, Joint Board launched what became Starbucks Workers United. Salts were recruited and deployed to three Starbucks stores in Buffalo, New York, where the first three NLRB elections were won in later 2020. As of mid-2025 more than 600 Starbucks stores have been organized through NLRB elections. It is still amazing for me to think about how that drive is in large measure an outgrowth of the homemade organizing school that we had constructed under the ATU umbrella. I worked to get William Z. Foster’s collected works, American Trade Unionism, back into print to use with the school. Nearly a thousand copies of Foster’s book have been used with the Starbucks workers and in 250 other workplace campaigns since then.

What is even more amazing than the historic success of the Starbucks movement is the near complete lack of interest in this actual upsurge by the rest of the labor movement. The AFL-CIO is thoroughly disinterested in listening to the details of how the school, the salting, and the early campaign was put together. I have personally spoken to the top leaders of 15 unions to try to coax them to sit for an hour and listen to how the school was started and how the salting was conducted. No takers. This same near-total lack of interest goes for the academic labor programs and the labor nonprofit world. You might think that the story of how one of the most successful campaigns in recent decades was started would be a curiosity. Not at all. I have, thankfully, had considerable success with young workers, some local unions from a variety of unions, and left organizations who have listened to the story of how we started the organizing school and by extension the Starbucks movement. Through probably 125 different Zoom sessions and meetings, I spread the story and have promoted Foster’s book. Many of the participants go on to attend one of the organizing schools I run, or teach at, and dozens have become volunteer salts in campaigns in ten different industries.

MY: Following the previous question, the labor movement continues to lose ground and most unions do little organizing. Nor do they do anything to educate their members, especially to teach workers the truth about the political economy in which labor has to operate. Yet, some academics and popular organizations and magazines continue to claim that there is taking place a resurgence of the US labor movement. Every strike, every time a “dissident” wins high office in a union, every new contract is greeted with unadulterated joy and a sign of good things to come. What is your assessment of the US labor movement? Why, given that the facts do not match this optimism, do we keep seeing what we might call “the good news only” school of reporting and commentaries?

CT: We have slid into a period in our labor movement where decline, decay, stagnation, and timid leadership have become formalized. The “leadership” today in many unions is at best an administrative layer: functionaries carefully tending to the decline, keeping things on-track as we are pushed towards oblivion. There are examples to the contrary, but not very many in my experience. Our left and labor press also suffers during this period, as increasing numbers of writers come forward who have virtually no substantial experience in labor work. We have to be careful not to blame the inexperienced, especially in an era when getting any real experience is difficult, and sometimes impossible. But we should not excuse the editors of these publications, who dutifully cram all sorts of “good news only” stories into the publications. We have folks writing articles and even entire books on new organizing today who have organized few, if any, new workers in their own careers. I use the example of someone with a car repair issue; How many of us take our cars to the shop and then tell the service manager to assign the least experienced “mechanic” to fix our problem? That’s patently absurd when we think of it that way, but this is today how labor staffs most of it organizing work, and it certainly applies to how many of our left writers are selected. And to top off this problem, there seems to be little to no curiosity or desire to go out and find the people who are, or who have, done the difficult organizing work. And really debrief how they are actually winning the campaigns they are. Our movement leadership just puts the “organizer” hat on almost anyone, offers little guidance and even less training, and then hires another crop of “organizers” when they quit—or are fired.

This state of labor journalism also doesn’t inform very well. Who is Liz Shuler, the head of the AFL-CIO? Of course, that’s a trick question, since she is one of the absolutely least experienced labor “leaders”—ever— at her level. She was given the top spot in the labor movement with virtually no trade union experience to speak of. Writing about that I suppose might explain a lot of how we got into the jams we are in, but god forbid we would say something unkind about “the first woman” to run the labor federation. The reality is there are 10,000 women unionists out there, toughing it out in the shops, winning grievances, leading, bargaining, striking, and organizing. But none of those things are requirements for holding the top spot in the labor federation today apparently. Any one of them could outrun Shuler.

Everyone oohs and ahhs when some new progressive looking or sounding labor face pops up, but who are they? What have they actually done in their labor careers? Half of the labor articles written today are just fluff, tiny episodic reports on the passing of resolutions, quickie advertisements of one-off events with little context for readers, or labor travelogs repeating the obvious. I blame the editors—if there are any—for this low-calorie offering. Of course, let’s not let the unions off the hook. Their reporting and writing, if it exists in any substantial way at all, is frequently an embarrassment. No substantial reporting or researching is produced by most unions. The web sites are bare minimum on content. This history of unions who have struggled for more than 100 years are covered in two paragraphs—maybe.

I am a vigorous promoter of labor books and deeper reading on our rich history of labor movement struggle, and I’ll say that 95 percent of the books I sell and promote are completely unknown to the readers. The unions, with only a few exceptions, do nothing to educate their members in any significant way. And there is certainly no discussion about the disasters we are experiencing, and no explanation about how the Democratic Party has systematically participated in our destruction—by literally setting the stage for Trump. Union conventions and meetings are few and far between today and cut to minimum to allow a platform for the incumbent leaders only. And let’s not forget the generous socializing and casino time. The money spent on any one major union Convention these days could double the new organizing of dozens of unions. This is a disaster in so many ways, and one not to be minimized. It is no wonder that we have lots of members wandering around in a daze, or if they are not in a daze they might actually think that we are moving forward because they read an internet blurb about some incidental win someplace. The facts are that organized labor in the United States continues to be ground-down across all fronts. We cannot face our many crises for many reasons, including that there is little understanding of the real gravity of our situation.

MY: Needless to say, there are many unions that could use new leadership, However, those who champion union dissidents almost never ask themselves, change for what? The same goes for organizing. Cesar Chavez and the UFW leaders had periods of success, and they taught others to organize. But then what? What about building a radical labor movement as a goal, even as you fight for better working conditions, better pay, shorter hours, etc.? How can we avoid creating institutions and elevating leaderships that, in the end, refuse or fail to challenge the most critical foundations of capitalist society? Capitalism tends to create and shape, in effect, the people and institutions it needs to reproduce itself. How can this be challenged?

CT: Many top labor leaders are largely content, smug, immune to challenge in most cases. They construct staff and crony machineries to stay in office. They make 2-3-4 hundred thousand dollars year upon year, and pretty soon they are millionaires. They will do anything, and I mean anything to keep those jobs. Even the better labor leaders all strike me as overwhelmed, isolated from outside ideas, and just plodding forward reacting and not leading. Grinding away until their own retirement arrives. The so-called “Change-to-Win” movement of twenty years ago was led by some of the labor millionaires. Whatever that was, it was a monumental fizzle. We all had to witness that huge multi-year uproar just to re-learn that highly paid leadership and staff regimes are incapable of self-reform. There is more political life at the local level, and for the honest elements and the left that is where time must be spent. We need the left to dive-in and learn how these unions really work and then run for office. Staff jobs at a certain level can allow for influence, but not nearly enough to really alter the disastrous course of things. We also need to reach the “center” elements in the labor leadership, that large layer that is uneasy, worried about the decline, have some basic trade union principles, and are willing at times to put their support to attempts to correct course. The path to power in these unions has always been a principled left-center alliance. The members overwhelmingly support change, forward motion, and frequently even hard struggle. But the conservative elements, the corrupt elements, the self-serving elements in the leadership want to hang on to that power and money. And we won’t build the momentum needed to drive those elements out of the unions by running around yelling about political issues remote from the workplace, passing endless resolutions, or by not doing any of the work required. Our unions are in desperate need of a revival of new organizing and recruitment, something the existing leadership largely wants to avoid at all costs. If they even think of it at all. The members instinctively see the need to bring the unorganized into the unions, not to do them a favor but to defend our weakening situation. A center-left alliance in the union is the only path forward for the required new organizing. I run new union organizing schools regularly and there is huge and expanding interest out there from workers. The problem is that most of the unions are inward-focused, some are asleep, and most are structured to ignore outsiders such as the unorganized. And when was the last time that left elements raised the call to “organize the unorganized!”? Never.

The same goes for what we ultimately want from this labor movement. What do we want at the end of this ordeal? A slightly better deal in this rigged game? Or how about “A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work?” the old AFL beggary? What the hell does “fair” mean, anyway? Don’t we want something bigger, something to upend this rotten system? It astonishes me how timid, how narrow, and how docile the unions are. How will we get through the coming 80 percent of Trump’s term with this mindset? By trying to reason with unchecked corporate power? Relying on suspect judges and failed Democrats? We better think harder about the need to not just challenge this system, but replace it.

MY: As one example of the struggles of a prominent union today, you and I have had correspondence about the state of the United Auto Workers union. How do you explain its current difficulties? Shawn Fain, the union president, has been a hero of the social democratic left. According to The Nation’s president, Bhaskar Sunkara, who also owns Jacobin magazine, has declared Fain “labor’s greatest voice,” and he applauded Fain’s support for Trump’s simple-minded tariff policy. Yet, Fain is now accused by some of running the UAW in a dictatorial manner, with not much to show for his leadership in terms of new organizing and member education. What is your take on all of this?

CT: The UAW was delivered to its current dilemma on account of a federal government takeover and a leadership election that was compelled by government decree. The ideological corruption of runaway “labor management cooperation” eventually created a corruption rot that permeated entire layers of the auto union leadership. Is the U.S. government the best force to address a mess like that? Of course not. But like in many unions there was zero chance that the membership would ever find the means to get things cleaned up. And let’s note that the federal government control mechanism is paid for by the UAW members, another price to be paid by the membership for the miserable leadership of past decades. Millions and millions of dollars each year are paid out for this government monitor. Imagine this; the corruption gets found out and is prosecuted, and the “remedy” is for this federal government to meddle for as long as they want, and it’s all paid for by the members!

Shawn Fain was elected several years ago in this huge mess, and he defeated the old guard – but just barely. He takes over running a union afflicted with all sorts of corruption, a staff where many had been associated with all that, and with a membership that has never, ever, in living memory had to face playing much role in running their union. I think he did as well as could be expected with the Big 3 auto negotiations and strike in his very first months, and the union was able to organize the VW plant down south. These are significant things for any labor leader today. As for the left media and all of its chatter on the union, I would dismiss most of that out of hand. Most of these writers have no experience running a union, nor do very many of them have any idea of the dynamics in this – or any union. A few of them who thought Shawn Fain was some sort of far-left force are just lost in their own fumes. The intrusive and perpetual federal monitor rarely even gets mentioned. His job is to run around and collect incidental complaints and grievances, and then report it all as something substantial. This is ludicrous. One thing the federal monitor – or the left reporters – will not investigate is the fact that the UAW has lost 80% of its membership in the last 50 years. All in just the time I have been active in this labor movement. Is that an issue we need to consider? Or is it some ridiculous he-said-she-said jotted-down by the federal monitor, so he can allege some sinister activity is afoot? We have to consider the unaccountable roles of these federal monitors in any thinking we do about the state of the auto union today.

Yes, I have some opinions about how Fain has operated, of course I do. But I am rooting for the union to get back on something like a sustainable and relevant course, so the UAW can play a far larger role in a positive way. We need that. We need the UAW to get back heavy on the organizing front. But I don’t see that yet. I see some odd staffing decisions and not a lot of results, at least so far. I would counsel Fain to not get roped-in to the staff-driven habit of commenting on everything. So far as Trump’s tariff frenzy, let’s get a few things down for the record. Tariffs are a federal tax on imports to supposedly protect domestic manufacturing. One problem is, what is “domestic” manufacturing? And we all know— Shawn Fain most of all knows—that the “domestic” companies like the rest will lie, scheme, collude with competitor companies and governments, and do anything to squeeze more profits. That is how the U.S. auto industry was reduced to the fragment that it is today. Trump has made so many claims on tariffs that it’s safe to say that nobody knows where it is at. They are on, off, up, down, this is his deliberate style of bamboozling. The fact is it will be months and years before this calms down and it will be possible to see their real impact. Brother Fain is also in an epic jam. Democrats have imposed free trade for forty years. Look at the obvious destruction visited on our manufacturing sector. How many jobs lost, fifty million in fifty years maybe? Then along comes Trump, and he tells the working class he is going to reverse that. If you want to know how Trump was elected twice just read the last page of Karl Marx’s speech on free trade from 1848.

Can our auto industry be defended and rebuilt? And if it is rebuilt, even a little, will it be organized, or unorganized? And doesn’t the UAW have to deal with Trump’s tariffs no matter their opinion of them? A too-big section of UAW members support Trump. Or they did for last year’s election. Is the union addressing that? How? And as for the “reform” forces in the UAW, the two opposing trends have fallen out, the organization which was a part of the election of Fain is now dissolved. Where does all this go now? There are a lot of questions here. It is time for all of us to spend more time considering the entire puzzle here with the ongoing UAW story, as opposed to falling for cheap internet click bait based on the federal monitor’s skullduggery. That’s good counsel on a lot of things.

MY: When the left-led unions, which included the UE, were disastrously expelled from the CIO in the late 1940s, the US labor movement lost its most progressive forces. Those that favored the extension and deepening of the best features of the New Deal, organizing workers in the South, and promoting international working-class solidarity. There has been no recovery from this. You have always maintained your radical, communist, and anti-capitalist principles, whether it has been playing your role in building a left bloc in the unions, resurrecting the organizing thinking of William Z. Foster, or relentlessly promoting new and expanded union organizing. Global solidarity has been strikingly absent from the labor movement ever since the expulsion of the left-led unions. Which, by the way, had the most progressive collective bargaining agreements. Why is it that today’s AFL-CIO is, to put it bluntly, so politically backward?

CT: William Z. Foster observed 100 years ago that the U.S. labor movement was small, weak, industrially scattered, and politically backward. Yet he saw that it possessed immense possibilities for forward movement—if it could be stirred to action. I see the identical situation today. He also observed that, “The left wing must do the work.” I have been a mostly out-of-the closet communist in my many years in labor, although I was always careful. You have to be. I want people who work with me to know that the largest part of why I have been successful, and have made whatever contributions I have, is because of my underlying Marxist understanding of how things really work. I find it curious that so many leftists manage to exclude “communism” from their list of approved beliefs, yet in case after case they have to confess that it’s the communist movement that must be credited for so much. They harken back to the 1930s and the explosive growth years of the communist movement, yet refuse to adopt the same methodologies for their work today. They daydream about those decades of great working-class advance, and then apply the same loose, fuzzy, and unscientific methods in their struggles that communists reject. This is not a specific U.S. defect, but we do face it. And in my opinion, it’s why our left today is incapable of crystallizing out of the several million people who would hold communist or socialist views any organizational form that possesses coherent structure or power. Our movement is also weakened, and finds its vigor and discipline sapped, by an addiction to a myriad of identity politics. And with the bulk of the left today unconnected to workplaces we have little contact with the working class that is all around us. Everyone wants to glory in what divides us, but rarely does anyone care to explain what it is that unites us—the class system, and the class struggle. As for the AFL-CIO, last year the federation paid a consultant lots of money to dream up a new slogan. They came up with, “It’s Better In A Union.” Now they are driving around the country in a big bus emblazoned with the same label. I presume AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Secretary Treasurer Fred Redmond, with assorted staff and functionaries are out meeting members in different places. Ok, the members appreciate a visit from the top brass, but since “it is better in a union,” what is the Federation doing to reach out to the more than 100+ million workers who are unorganized? Who labor increasingly for dictatorial bosses. Who work with few, if any, benefits. Working to pay for their health care. Have no retirement pensions. But who overwhelmingly support unions, as public opinion polls have shown for years? Well, the AFL-CIO does virtually nothing to organize the unorganized masses. That’s the job of the affiliate unions. What if they refuse to do it? Then it doesn’t get done, like it has not gotten done for many decades. The union bigs will however talk about one thing on their bus trips, which is “Elect Democrats!” Never mind that this corrupt and collapsed Democratic “Party” is in large measure what delivered Trump to us not once, but twice.

MY: One final question: There can be little doubt that the United States is moving steadily toward fascism. Yet, organized labor has done little to actively resist what has been and will be a disaster for workers. The presidents of two labor unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Workers (AFSCME), recently quit the Democratic National Committee (DNC), presumably in protest against the weak response of the Democratic Party to Trump’s predations. Now, we might ask why any union president would be a member of the DNC. But beyond that, these two labor “leaders” have salaries well in excess of $400,000 a year. And to the best of my knowledge, neither ever organized a single worker. I couldn’t find any evidence that either one has endorsed Zohran Mamdani for Mayor of New York City. The AFL-CIO hierarchy has shown little intention of a no holds barred battle with Trump and his legion of fascists. Seriously, how can this be?

CT: When I retired from UE in 2013, in my final Convention report as their Political Action Director—for twwenty-one years—I told the members point-blank that Obama had already been overthrown. His governance was no longer his own. He was a stuffed-suit giving speech after speech, but the big moneyed interests, military and intelligence agencies were clearly operating to suit themselves. I mention that because Trump now returns to power in that environment where many of the firewalls and safety valves that might protect our weak democratic processes are already shut off. For labor, what have we done so far to resist? Wrung hands with Democrats, paid for an endless stream of lawsuits, posted things on social media, and… what else? We have lost at least half a million union members in the federal service alone. When is the new organizing and recruiting program to be launched? It doesn’t exist. It’s not coming. Not from this labor leadership. As for the Washington, DC, tempest in a teacup recently when the AFT and AFSCME union leaders quit the Democratic National Committee (DNC), I expect they will be back shortly. Labor has nothing without the Democrats, and that’s the way the Democrats like it. The New Jersey and Virginia elections this November may provide a Democratic Party boost, but Trump couldn’t care less. He obviously plans to expand his unilateral war on working people, and the courts are going to allow it. This guy is governing like any crazy boss that the unions see all the time. Bosses who ignore the contract and do illegal things. Because they know that it is unlikely that you will rise up. They know that time is on their side, not our side. They control most aspects of the situation. So just like when this happens in a union context, we need to reconsider our entire position, our response, our tactics. We need union leadership who will consider bold responses, militant responses, tactics that defy conventional wisdom.

My last thoughts are again on the dire need to mobilize the unorganized, to move them to organize, and put them in direct confrontation with the employers. Bringing new blood into the unions will act as a catalyst in many ways, it will destabilize the ossified unions and open the door to a possible revitalization. Enormous new openings for the left are in sight, if we choose to move into that territory. But our current left is largely allergic to workplace and union work. We are instead drawn over and over and over again into harmless and feel-good projects far removed from the shops, garages, stores, and offices. If we see the trade union realm as the means to confront the economic powers while at the same time reaching the masses of working-class people, we might make progress in rebuilding a substantial socialist movement.

That’s where we are at, in my opinion. Thanks for asking.

MY: Thanks, Chris. I hope readers will take the truths you have told to heart and begin to do the work that needs to be done. Private sector union membership as a proportion of wage laborers was more than twice as high 100 years ago than it is now. And the public sector unions are now under ruthless attack. The future looks bleak, unless reality is faced. We owe you a great debt of gratitude for trying to open our eyes.

https://mronline.org/2025/07/16/hard-tr ... -townsend/

[blindpig]

Over 3,000 Boeing Workers on Strike for Fair Contract


Boeing workers on strike, AUg. 4, 2025. U.S. X/ @fox6now

August 5, 2025 Hour: 9:01 am

‘We’ll be there on the picket lines, ensuring Boeing hears the collective power of working people,” said Brian Bryant.

On Monday, approximately 3,200 Boeing union workers in the U.S. states of Missouri and Illinois went on strike after contract negotiations with the company broke down.

The strike move was earlier announced after members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) District 837 voted to reject a modified four-year labor agreement with Boeing.

This vote followed members’ overwhelming rejection of Boeing’s earlier proposal on July 27 as a labor agreement officially expired before midnight. The workers were based at Boeing’s facilities in St. Louis and St. Charles, Missouri, as well as Mascoutah, Illinois.

“We will be there on the picket lines, ensuring Boeing hears the collective power of working people,” said IAM International President Brian Bryant in the statement on Sunday.

“They deserve nothing less than a contract that keeps their families secure and recognizes their unmatched expertise,” IAM Midwest Territory General Vice President Sam Cicinelli said.


“Solidarity is our strength. This vote shows that when workers stand together, they can push back against corporate greed and fight for a better future for themselves and their families,” said IAM Resident General Vice President Jody Bennett.

The IAM union is one of North America’s largest and most diverse industrial trade unions, representing approximately 600,000 active and retired members in the aerospace, defense, airlines, railroad, transit, healthcare, automotive, and other industries across the United States and Canada.

Boeing expressed disappointment over the vote. Dan Gillian, Boeing Air Dominance vice president and general manager, and senior St. Louis site executive, said that the company was “disappointed our employees rejected an offer that featured 40 percent average wage growth and resolved their primary issue on alternative work schedules.”

Boeing was “prepared for a strike and had fully implemented our contingency plan to ensure our non-striking workforce can continue supporting our customers,” he added.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/over-300 ... -contract/

[blindpig]

(Just substitute Democratic Party for Labour)

Labour is the enemy of the working class!

Trade unions must break all links and dismantle their Labour-aligned bureaucracies.
Proletarian writers

Friday 1 August 2025


With a Labour government in charge of inflicting austerity and repression at home, and with Labour overseeing genocide and wars abroad, how can working-class organisations justify their continued loyalty to a political formation whose entire history is one of loyal service to British imperialism and betrayal of the working people?

This article was included in our trade union free sheet for Summer 2025. Download the mini paper as a pdf.

*****

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party came to office in July 2024 with a ‘landslide’ of just 18 percent of the voting-age population’s votes. He picked up the baton of capitalist rule seamlessly from Rishi Sunak and proceeded to batter the people of Palestine to death with it. Along with the peoples of Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Congo and Iran.

And now, to try to save this dying system from the scrapheap of history, Labour is increasingly turning the state’s full force against British workers. Labour is a party of the monopolists and bankers – a party of capitalism.

Inequality: robbery of the poor by the rich
We are in the midst of a terrible poverty epidemic in Britain today – a crisis of capitalism that is forcing ever more of the working people into misery, privation and destitution. Real unemployment (so-called ‘economic inactivity’) is around 26 percent – one in four of the working-age population. And this at a time when the ‘cost of living crisis’ (ie, inflation) is undermining the purchasing power of wages at a rate unseen in recent decades.

The British ruling class has been printing and borrowing money for decades in order to wage endless wars and to subsidise and bail out banks and corporations it considers ‘too big to fail’. Workers are paying the price through crippling tax hikes and inflation, which have been exacerbated by the boomerang effect of economic sanctions against Russia in particular (Europe’s main provider of cheap energy).

Britain’s energy cartel has not been slow to take advantage of this situation to raise prices still further – to the great glee of shareholders, who are raking in record bonanzas as Britons freeze.

Today, the poorest 10 percent of British people (6.7 million) must try and live on £12,500 a year, while the poorest 1 percent (670,000 workers) receive a mere £7,000-£8,000.

Approximately 18 percent of the population live in relative poverty and a further 8 percent in absolute poverty. Thirty-one percent of Britain’s children are living in poverty, many of them arriving hungry at school. Around one million of those are excluded from the free school meals programme thanks to draconian regulations.

Meanwhile, the top 0.1 percent of the UK population (67,000 people) are luxuriating in an income of £700,000-£1,000,000 a year, and the 55 richest billionaires in Britain increased their wealth by £35m per day in 2024 – over £600,000 a day each! Yet the corporations these billionaires obtain their wealth from pay less than 10 percent of the government’s tax revenues.

What with the tax avoidance of the super-rich, a big uptick in military spending and a ballooning debt to be serviced, the Labour government is in trouble with its finances, despite 15 years of brutal austerity that was supposed to ‘balance the books’ (by quite literally killing the poor). Chancellor Rachel Reeves declares there is only one way out of trouble – to squeeze more out of the pockets of those who are already poor or those who are modestly comfortable.

It is in this situation that Labour MPs voted through Starmer’s (slightly modified) welfare bill, whose purpose is to slash welfare support even more, forcing the impoverished and the sick into the lowest-paid ‘workfare’ jobs, and preserving the two-child benefit cap that is pushing millions of children into abject poverty. The legislation will perpetuate and worsen the poverty of the most vulnerable, and ruin the future of millions.

It should be perfectly clear by now that Labour politicians will commit any crime to keep their well-paid careers, feathering their own nests while facilitating the continued global plunder and domination of the billionaire elite. Ex-PM Tony Blair is estimated to have amassed a fortune of £400m, secured as a reward for his oversight of genocide in Iraq, and his son Leo is well on the way to becoming a billionaire.

Labour serves the rich, not the working class, and its leading lights are extremely well paid for doing so.

Labour’s ‘plan’ for the NHS is to bleed it
Labour health minster Wes Streeting is keeping waiting lists deliberately high (seven million) while hospitals are facing relentless and swingeing cuts, which further reduce their ability to meet patients’ needs. And they are now being told to sack thousands of doctors and nurses – not in the interests of health provision but in the interests of privatisation.

Streeting’s ‘radical reform’ of what remains of Britain’s health service is being used to push two million more appointments – about eight million in total – into the private sector. We are not being given ‘special treatment’ when this happens; we are being robbed in broad daylight.

We will pay through the nose twice. First for the full and comprehensive NHS service we waited for but didn’t get, and then for the private service that will not look after most of the conditions many of us face (since they are not profitable enough to treat). Increasingly, British workers are being forced to pay for the urgent care they need from their own pocket, via insurance (nine million of us!) or in cash that they can ill afford – or get no help at all.

Wes Streeting is not only funded by the zionist lobby, but by private health corporations. John Armitage, one of his key backers, is a billionaire who ranked number 138 on the 2021 Times ‘rich list’, co-founder and director of the Egerton Capital hedge fund. Among its almost £19bn of investments, Armitage’s fund owns shares worth almost £834m in United Health (UH), a vast US private health corporation that is at the heart of introducing a private Medicare-style system to Britain in place of the NHS.

Waging World War 3 to save our slavery?
David Lammy recently spoke of wanting a “strong friendship with Israel based on shared values”. The ‘shared values’ of which Lammy speaks are genocide and regional war to despoil and plunder the whole middle east. They mean sending war planes in support of the illegal aggressive war that the USA and Israel are waging against Iran (as well as active military and financial support for genocidal wars against Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and anyone else who stands up to the imperialist hyenas).

They mean constantly escalating war with Russia in Ukraine – to the last Ukrainian! – and driving relentlessly toward war with China. Ultimately, they mean full commitment to a third world war of global proportions, quite possibly fought with nuclear weapons and risking the destruction of human life on planet Earth.

All for the preservation of the flagging superprofits of a monopoly-capitalist system of wage-slavery that is facing a systemic and existential crisis, and whose continued existence means only deepening poverty and ever more war for the mass of the population.

Labour’s pledge to Nato warmongers: austerity and war!
When the June 2025 Nato summit took place in The Hague, it did not escape the attention of thinking workers across the planet that the ‘world leaders’ in attendance should have been arraigned to face charges for war crimes in Ukraine and the middle east.

This will not happen, of course, because the Hague-based ‘International Criminal Court’ is a tool of Nato and does not prosecute the real criminals, who continue to be rewarded rather than punished for their crimes. At the summit, Keir Starmer pledged to raise Britain’s arms spending from 2.3 percent to 5 percent of GDP by 2035 – that is £130bn per year in today’s money, bringing it close to current spending on the NHS.

We recently found out when Palestine Action activists sprayed red paint onto fighter jets at RAF Brize Norton that the planes are actually owned by a hedge fund that leases them to the RAF. So genocide and war, like our crumbling health and social care services, are just more ‘PFI’ tools through which the billionaire elite loot the state twice over (and which are paid for by taxing the workers) – just as the middle-east war is also a tool for robbing the vast oil wealth of the peoples of west Asia.

Truly the capitalists – and their ‘Labour party’ governmental servants – are our implacable enemies! Their joy is built upon our misery. Their wealth upon our poverty!

It should be clear by now that a union movement chained hand and foot to the Labour party is no use to workers struggling for survival.

We need to break every organisational and political link with the Labour party and force our unions to start acting on behalf of the working class – to collectively and meaningfully organise to resist austerity, resist repression and resist militarisation. And to refuse en masse to cooperate in any way with the criminal imperialist war machine!

https://thecommunists.org/2025/08/01/ne ... ing-class/

[blindpig]

(Yeah, this is Britain, the details are different, but the class war knows no borders.)

Stalin at the Durham gala: what is the DMC afraid of?

Why is a picture of Stalin banned by ‘labour movement custodians’ while genocide-supporting Labour leaders are feted?
Proletarian writers

Tuesday 19 August 2025


The organising committee of the Durham miners’ gala have fallen a long way since the days when their predecessors were reporting back from the Stalin-era Soviet Union with glowing praise.

This article was included in our trade union free sheet for Summer 2025. Download the mini paper as a pdf.

*****

While Labour is attacking workers in Britain and across the world, what is the committee of the Durham Miners’ Gala (DMC) worried about? Bizarrely: the spectre of communism! Or to be more precise: the image of Stalin!

The DMC wrote to us to “instruct the CPGB-ML not to display images of Joseph Stalin at the Durham Miners Gala” as “such images are not in keeping with the values [!] of the Durham Miners’ Association (DMA) or our gala”.

These ‘labour movement custodians’ seem nervous that the very presence of Stalin’s portrait will expose their weak servitude to economism and to Labour-led social democracy – ie, their abject betrayal of the working class. [We wonder: has any other image been banned from the gala? Any party or banner? Any bourgeois or pro-capitalist ideology? Certainly not the rabid representatives of genocide in the Labour party!]

The DMC added, by way of ‘explanation’: “Since 1871, the gala has expressed the vital importance of trade unionism, the duty to look after each other in the community [!] and the desire to build a society where wealth is created for the common good. It gives a voice to the oppressed throughout the world. The gala brings people together in peace.”

As to ‘wealth being created for the common good’, that is simply not what happens under capitalism. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist can explain to this puny trade union ‘gentry’ that although workers labour mightily under capitalist conditions, they yet remain poor – and get ever poorer over time. Their work generates wealth that enriches the exploiting class. That is how capitalism works. That is the system that the present trade union bureaucracy and the Labour party serve.

And because we do not flinch from pointing out these uncomfortable truths, the worthies of the self-identifying ‘left’ endlessly proclaim that our party is ‘anti-union’! No, comrades, we are not against trade unions, but we are implacably opposed to everything that ties workers to their present conditions of wage-slavery and impoverishment.

What we are fully in favour of is helping the working class to organise itself as a class and in its own interests.

Trade unions will undoubtedly have a vital role to play in this process, but to do so they must break all organisational, ideological and political links with the imperialist Labour party (a servant of our enemy class) and get shot of the servile Labour-allied bureaucrats who currently control them.

One would hardly think it needs pointing out that all those trade union leaders being rewarded on retirement with a seat in the House of Lords are not getting a pat on the back and a fat expense account because the ruling class is grateful they spend decades fighting for their members’ (or our class’s) interests against the interests of the bosses!

Under conditions of capitalist-imperialism, you can serve the system or you can serve the working class by fighting for the system’s overthrow. There is no ‘third way’.

Far from defending the rights of workers, the DMC wants to preserve the link with the imperialist Labour party, and to keep workers’ activities within the bounds of capitalist exploitation, thus keeping workers in subjection to this criminal gang.

The beautiful banner they don’t want workers to see carries powerful words from Stalin’s well-known work The Foundations of Leninism – a book that schooled millions of class warriors, workers and socialists around the world:

“Either place yourself at the mercy of capital, eke out a wretched existence as of old and sink lower and lower, or adopt a new weapon – this is the alternative imperialism puts before the vast masses of the proletariat. Imperialism brings the working class to revolution.”

Stalin’s words, along with the teachings of Lenin, Marx and Engels, have never been more relevant and more needed by the workers. Perhaps that is why the DMC is so haunted by them?

Durham miners in the USSR
It is interesting to note how far the ‘values of the Durham miners’ have transformed over the decades. We invite our snivelling servants of capital, Guy and Mardghum, to read the report of a former general secretary of the Durham Miners’ Gala, John E Swan, written on his return from a trip to the Soviet Union in February 1937:

“In contradistinction to Britain, the introduction of science and machinery to industry [in the USSR, at a time when none other than Josef Stalin was the general secretary of the Communist party and leader of the country] is welcomed by the workers because the burdens of toil are reduced thereby and the industrial progress is reflected in an improved status for all instead of the increased wealth being diverted to the benefit of an unproductive few.”

Swan’s report noted that the USSR’s economy was still in the throes of transition, but described how Soviet workers were forging ahead with courage. Transport was improving, and the whole of the state was being organised with the faith and assurance that poverty would soon be banished. Of special interest to miners were the parts of the report dealing with trade unions, holidays with pay, pensions, workmen’s compensation, hours of labour, safety in mines and mines inspection.

During their visit, the Durham miners visited a plant producing tractors, rolling stock and heavy machinery, which employed 32,000 workers, 16,000 of whom were women. They reported that the Soviet working day consisted of just eight (fully-paid) hours, one of them being for meals. Wages were higher for skilled workers than unskilled, but all were paid for their off days.

“We were informed there were 900 expectant mothers, who would be given special care during the prenatal stage and for some time after their babies were born. Expectant mothers are given light work for four months before time of childbirth, with no reduction in their standard of wages, while for two before and after the birth of the child, they are paid full wages and not allowed to work at all. If she so desires, a mother may also be sent to a rest home.”

The report described the catering at the works canteen, which was of high quality and very low priced. All was described as being decent food that would contribute to keeping workers healthy and well fed. Creches for workers’ children were fully funded by the trade union.

The Durham miners also reported on a trip to the Bolshoi theatre in Moscow:

“All the important members of the Presidium, including Stalin, were present. Stalin was dressed in a khaki-coloured tunic and looked remarkably fit and well. He received a great reception, and there was no mistaking the affection the people had for him. Those newspapers who reported him to be a sick man would have had a great surprise had they seen how well and fit he looked.”

The Durham visitors heard a grand speech by Soviet president Mikhail Kalinin, in which he talked about the perilous march of fascism into Spain and described the USSR’s support for the international workers’ heroic battle against it. He also outlined betrayals by the counter-revolutionary Trotsky and his treacherous followers.

So what exactly about all this real working-class history has got the DMC so worked up?

The committee is clearly not thinking about how to serve British workers and bring socialism. Nor about how to expose and destroy the treacherous Labour party – that most insidious of enemies within our ranks.

Like far too many in the Labour-aligned trade union and labour movement bureaucracies, it would appear that the DMC’s members are too preoccupied with defending the petty privileges that go with being a trade union worthy to have any energy left for considering the fate of the working class or the future of humanity.

These privileges are paltry when seen in the context of our movement’s grand aims, but among other advantages they include the ability to control the ‘DMC2021 limited company’, which holds £4.5m in assets (£1.7m of them in cash).

Do the DMC committee members care for the millions of workers languishing in poverty and unemployment? Or for the millions being targeted by British bombs and sanctions?

Or do they just know which side their bread is buttered on?

https://thecommunists.org/2025/08/19/ne ... mc-afraid/