Why Did the Los Angeles Supermarket Strike End
in Defeat?
The following letter from Internationalism, the US section of
the International Communist current, is a comment on an article
published in the last issue of R&BN.
While we wouldn't use the same words or formulations, there are
certainly many things in Loren Goldner's "Notes
on Another Defeat for Workers in the US: The Los Angeles Supermarket
Strike of 2003-2004," which was published Red & Black Notes
#19, that are on the right track. For example, we agree that the
grocery workers' fight was an important strike for American workers
in the struggle to resist capitalist attacks on their living
standards in the form of cutbacks in their medical benefits and that
it ended in a serious defeat. It's also accurate to say that the
strikers were militant and enthusiastic, and that other workers were
sympathetic and wanted to demonstrate their solidarity. Who could
disagree with observations that the unions followed the same
"localist and legalist strategies of so many losing strikes of
previous years," that the union kept the strikers "under control,"
and that "no mass meetings were held to discuss strike strategy." And
it is clear that "the decisive factor in the defeat was the absence
of any challenge to the union strategy from the UFCW
rank-and-file."
However, the article falls terribly short in explaining why this
terrible defeat occurred. Goldner doesn't seem to understand why the
unions persist is such disastrous tactics year after year. He thinks
perhaps that "they underestimated the willingness and ability of the
three chains to lose millions of dollars in order to break the power
of the unions," or that "it is possible that the UFCW leadership in
Southern California thought they could win, based on the early
momentum, not realizing that the supermarkets had national backing
and a national strategy." Essentially, Goldner's explanation boils
down to this: the union leaders underestimated, they didn't realize,
they didn't understand. In other words, they made mistakes. A
possible implication of such an analysis could be that different
union leaders smart enough understand their adversaries and to use
different strategies and tactics could have won the strike - though
of course Goldner's article does not specifically advocate such a
reformist, leftist view.
This kind of analysis is totally inadequate. It reflects a wrong
understanding of the class nature of trade unions in this period of
capitalism. First of all, this struggle was not an attempt to "break
the power of the unions," as Goldner suggests. It was all about
cutting the standard of living of the working class, pure and simple.
It is usually the unions and their leftist choir groups that raise
the "union busting" slogan as a way to divert attention from the true
nature of the bosses' attacks on the workers, often as a way to
celebrate an allege "victory" when the union's "security" is
maintained even as the workers suffer wage cuts and layoffs. If
anything, in this strike, it was the power of the unions that was
used effectively to defeat the strike and help American capitalism as
a whole, and not just the three national corporations involved, to
achieve a significant victory in scaling back the medical benefits
for American workers.
The supermarket strike failed because the strike remained firmly
under union control from start to finish and trade unions are no
longer organizations of the working class. Unions once were defensive
organizations of the working class in an earlier period capitalist
development, but for nearly a century since the period of the First
World War they been integrated into the state apparatus of
capitalism. As we wrote in Internationalism 130, "unions are part of
the capitalist state, the arm of the ruling class, charged with the
specific function of controlling the working class, and rendering its
anger, combativeness, and solidarity harmless for capitalism. The
lesson that workers must remember is that the way to advance the
struggle is to push aside the unions and take control of the struggle
into their own hands." In the supermarket strike, the unions and the
union leaders didn't make any mistakes; they did the job that they
are supposed to do for capitalism
and they did it quite
well.
Internationalism
June 24, 2004
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