I first became aware of the two-tiered wage system in 1997 when UPS workers, organized by the Teamsters, went on strike to challenge the growing reliance on part-time workers who earned only $8 per hour. In a good article on the strike for Jacobin, Joe Allen, who worked for UPS for a decade, summed up the victory that a militant, 1930s-type struggle had won:

The company reached a tentative agreement with the Teamsters on August 20, 1997, fifteen days after the strike began. UPS agreed to the union’s main demands to create ten thousand full-time jobs out of low-wage part-time positions, the largest wage increases in UPS history, and protection against subcontracting of union jobs. The company also backed off its plan to hijack the full timers’ pension fund.

Ron Carey hailed the agreement as an “historic turning point for working people in this country. American workers have shown they can stand up to corporate greed,’” he said.

It was the biggest labor victory in a generation and led many people to believe that the US labor movement was finally poised for a dramatic comeback. Referring to the aftermath of the air traffic controllers’ strike smashed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, historian Nelson Lichtenstein wrote that the strike ended “the PATCO syndrome, a sixteen-year period in which a strike was synonymous with defeat and demoralization.”

As it happened, Lichtenstein was wildly over-optimistic. Instead, since 1996 the two-tier system has continued and deepened as a way of keeping workers divided. Even the bourgeois Washington Post allows Jacobin editor Alex Press to take note of this in August 2018 despite Jeff Bezos’s embrace of what might be called a one-tier system that screws everybody working for him. Press writes:

“Two-tier” refers to contracts that divide a workforce into distinct wage and benefit tiers based on their hiring date. Workers in both tiers are union members, but they toil under separate conditions. Usually, the lower-paid tier comprises workers to be hired after the contract’s negotiation, leaving them little recourse, even as they are forced to accept lesser terms.

The latest two-tier crisis centers on one of the United States’ largest private-sector unionized employers, UPS. If the company gets its way, it will be a signal to employers nationwide: You can’t directly bust your employees’ union, but here’s a way to divide and conquer, undermining them from within and locking in division between workers in the process.

Ironically, despite a majority of UPS members rejecting a contract that would continue to make concessions to the boss on part-timers, it was ratified anyway. A Teamster vote is only official if it has a certain percentage of members voting and in this case it was beneath that threshold. The vote remained low for obvious reasons. The Teamsters Union is a bureaucratic nightmare and most workers would rather stay at home watching a football game than vote. This wasn’t the case in 1997 when a reformer like Ron Carey led the union. But after he was forced out for campaign irregularities, Jimmy Hoffa Jr. took over and turned into what it is today, a typical business union.

No doubt the men running the UAW are not much different from Hoffa, probably worse. Despite this, the UAW is on strike now with the two-tier wage system being a primary grievance. Once again, Jacobin, despite its woeful tail-ending of the Democratic Party, continues to be a useful source of left analysis of working-class struggles. Jane Slaughter, a long-time journalist on trade union struggles, has an article titled “GM Workers Strike Against Low Wages and Two-Tier Contracts” that is worth reading. She writes about the boiling discontent at the shop-floor level that finally put sufficient pressure on the stiffs at the top to call a strike:

GM was bailed out by taxpayers to the tune of $50 billion in 2009. It made over $8 billion in profits last year, while paying no federal income taxes yet gifting CEO Mary Barra $22 million. For GM to demand concessions from its overworked employees now is a sign that it thinks the UAW is an easy foe.

After all, UAW president Gary Jones may be distracted. His house and that of former president Dennis Williams were both searched by the FBI on August 28. Jones’s top lieutenant before he became president, Vance Pearson, was charged with using union funds for personal luxuries, and it’s widely believed that Jones and Williams will be next. Pearson was the sixth UAW official to be recently charged or convicted of graft.

Crawford said as the strike kicked off, “Yes, the UAW is corrupt. It’s disgusting beyond belief. But this is not about them. It’s about us. We can and will clean house. But we have a more immediate fight on our hands right now.”

Undoubtedly, the UAW strike is a reflection of a change in the relationship of class forces with teachers, airline attendants, grocery store and hotel workers raising hell. It is difficult to gauge where this is all going but it just might be the actual break in the status quo that Nelson Lichtenstein wrote about in 1997.

For background on how the UAW, one of the most militant unions of the 1930s, became so bureaucratically degenerated, I recommend Michael Yates’s Monthly Review article titled “Who Will Lead the U.S. Working Class” from 2013. It is a review of two books about the trade union movement with Gregg Shotwell’s “Autoworkers Under the Gun: A Shop-Floor View of the End of the American Dream” most relevant to its current sorry state. Michael writes:

Union givebacks ultimately led to the decimation of the UAW during the Great Recession. GM and Chrysler declared bankruptcy, and the federal government demanded—and received—draconian concessions from the union in return for a bailout, in which the owners suffered nothing. And in a final blow to workers and the union, partnership and the resultant worker demoralization helped make possible the recent enactment of a right-to-work law in Michigan, the very cradle of industrial unionism.

Throughout all of this, the automobile manufacturers continued unilaterally to pursue their interests. While the union bashed the Japanese, the corporations partnered with Japanese companies. They took the profits they made from union concessions and invested them in foreign operations, which, the author informs readers, are now the major source of their profits, and where corporate assets are not subject to U.S. bankruptcy laws. They began to spin off their parts components, converting them into quasi-independent corporations that now supplied modular components to them (such as steering wheel assemblies and seats). These new entities either operated union-free or, with UAW cooperation, remained union but with much lower wages and benefits, and weaker work rules.

Although not the lunch-bucket stereotype of the old left’s concept of the working class, the members of the Professional Staff Congress in New York, including my wife, are also dealing with a two-tier wage system. CUNY (the City University of New York) relies heavily on adjuncts and they are like the underpaid part-time workers at UPS but put in the same hours as tenured professors like my wife.

James Hoff, who teaches English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and is tenured himself, has been an untiring advocate for raising the pay and benefits of adjuncts. He has an article in Left Voice titled “Will CUNY Go on Strike?” that is must-reading. His article begins:

More than two years ago, rank and file members of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) union of the City University of New York began to organize around a set of bold demands for worker equality. At the center of these demands was a call for a minimum $7,000 per three-credit course for adjunct faculty—an amount that would bring them close to parity with their full-time colleagues. Long exploited by management, the use of underpaid adjunct faculty at CUNY has increased dramatically over the last several decades, creating a two-tier wage system that has undermined the PSC’s ability to fight for more funding for the university and divided the union. Recognizing the transformative nature of the demand, which would require a complete restructuring of the university, activists began to rally around the slogan “$7K or Strike!” ($7KOS). These rank and file union members, many of them adjuncts themselves, argued that the most effective way to approach such a demand and still win a good contract for the rest of the bargaining unit, was to begin the negotiations on a militant footing and quickly move toward organizing the membership for a confrontation with management that included the credible threat of a strike.

Even though a strike would present challenges to my wife and me, this is a fight we would gladly take part in. Just two years before she finished her Ph.D. in 2007, she began working as an adjunct at Metropolitan College. In a stroke of luck, she got a tenure-track position at Lehman College that was arduous to say the least. Just two years ago, she became tenured and protected from the vicissitudes of adjuncthood and the tenure-track. I feel a deep solidarity with CUNY adjuncts as should be obvious from this article and wish them victory.

The  late Robert Fitch: he argued that the automatic checkoff of dues weakened unions

The left tends to see the Mark Janus vs AFSCME case under deliberation by the Supreme Court as a life-and-death battle for the AFL-CIO. It involves agency fees, the money that non-union members are required to pay in a union shop. Janus sued to prevent them from being imposed. The case was submitted by Bruce Rauner, the Republican Governor of Illinois who is just as much a tool of the Koch brothers as Scott Walker of Wisconsin who pushed through legislation that led to his state becoming an open shop alongside Indiana and Michigan, two other former trade union bastions .

In a similar case (Abood v. Detroit Board of Education in 1977), public unions were permitted to divide expenditures between collective bargaining and political advocacy but Janus claims that any money that goes into the collective bargaining bucket is tantamount to political advocacy since it can be used to press for pension benefits that would drain state and local government treasuries. Liberal outlets like Huffington Post and In These Times fret that a vote in favor of Janus would weaken the Democratic Party since it relies heavily on contributions from AFSCME and SEIU. In a long and informative article for In These Times, Mary Bottari of the Center for Media and Democracy notes:

In 2016, labor was the largest contributor to state-level Democratic candidates, accounting for at least 18 percent ($128.7 million) of their total fundraising. Unions also mobilize their workers as persuasive door knockers at election time who can explain who they are and what they fight for.

Oddly enough, the Center for Media and Democracy received 60 percent of its funding in 2011 from the Schwab Charitable Fund, a philanthropy funded in turn by liberals who have accounts with Charles Schwab & Co. Schwab is a heavy donor to the Republican Party and has even chipped in to pay Donald Trump’s legal fees over Russiagate. Twice a year the Koch Brothers host a secret conference where they and other rich bastards can discuss how to screw the working class. Charles Schwab was there at the last one along with other billionaires who donated to Trump.

I’ve been following the news reports on the Janus case but an Adam Liptak article in yesterday’s NY Times really made me sit up and take notice. He called attention to the assessment of David L. Franklin, Illinois’s solicitor general who supported AFSCME’s case:

The lawyers in the case gave varying answers to questions about what would happen if the mandatory fees were eliminated. “When these kinds of obligations of financial support become voluntary, union membership goes down, union density rates go down, union resources go down,” said David L. Franklin, Illinois’s solicitor general, who argued in support of the union.

“When unions are deprived of agency fees, they tend to become more militant, more confrontational,” he added. “They go out in search of short-term gains that they can bring back to their members and say, ‘Stick with us.’”

Let me repeat what he said with emphasis: “When unions are deprived of agency fees, they tend to become more militant, more confrontational. They go out in search of short-term gains that they can bring back to their members and say, ‘Stick with us.’”

Bingo. No wonder the Democrats and the trade union bureaucracy want to defeat Janus. His victory would threaten to turn the clock back to when the trade union movement was really a MOVEMENT.

It is not just a question of agency fees. It is also a question of the automatic dues checkoff that would not be affected by a ruling in favor of Janus. When people get enrolled in a union today, their dues are deducted from their paycheck just like health insurance and any other “benefit”. With unions failing to fight effectively for workers’ interests today either on wages or benefits, no wonder they are having trouble representing auto workers in the south.

In the 1930s, there was no such thing as union dues payroll deductions. Nelson Lichtenstein, a radical who has written extensively about the UAW, discovered that despite workers joining the CIO en masse after the sit down strikes of 1937, many left the unions when the recession of the late ’30s made it more difficult to win gains. For example over 8,000 workers had signed up with the UAW local at Fisher Body in Lansing by late 1937 but a year later only a little more than 1,000 were still dues-paying members.

Writing for Libcom, an anarchist website, Tom Wetzel provides a history of the union shop that, as you might expect, has a distinctly anti-authoritarian perspective. Like Lichtenstein, Wetzel notes that union membership was voluntary under almost all CIO contracts prior to 1942. The dues “check off” was virtually unknown in the late ’30s and dues were collected on the shop floor by shop stewards and committeemen. It is of course ironic that when the trade union movement was really a movement, it was operating under rules that are now considered inimical to trade union survival.

Echoing the concerns of David L. Franklin but from the opposite class perspective, Wetzel writes:

So long as the union’s continued existence depended upon voluntary rank-and-file support, the local union organization was under pressure to continually mobilize to get results. Grievances were pursued whether or not they were clearly justified by language in the contract, and stewards or local officers supported slowdowns or short wildcat strikes if they thought they might work.

Even when they didn’t approve of wildcat strikes or other direct action, local union officials were reluctant to condone company repression of such actions. The most active participants were almost always key union supporters in the plants. If they simply abandoned them to the company, the local officials were afraid this would discredit the union in the eyes of the workers.

Once the “union shop” had been achieved, however, the local union organization would no longer be under such immediate pressure to mobilize a constant struggle with the employers in response to worker grievances and concerns.

In voicing similar concerns but from a Marxist rather than an anarchist perspective, the late Robert Fitch has tied automatic dues checkoff to the decline of the trade union movement. In an interview with Forbes Magazine, of all places, Fitch stated:

The big problems with American trade unions are the legal foundation of exclusive bargaining, and closed-shop and automatic dues check-off. That exists in SEIU. [Automatic dues check-off] means that, unlike the European system, as a union leader, I’m no longer really dependent for my income on voluntary contributions from the workers. So I can disregard their preferences much easier. In Europe, the union leaders have to depend upon the dues that are voluntarily contributed by the members, so if the members don’t like what the union is doing, they stop paying dues, or they pay dues to another union. They can switch from one union to another.

Needless to say, people like Rich Trumka and Andy Stern have about as much interest in seeing the AFL-CIO transformed along these lines as Samuel Gompers did before there ever was a CIO. Speaking dialectically, it just may be the case that the total destruction of the organized labor movement will have to take place before a new labor movement comes about under the banner of workers power. Leon Trotsky considered such questions in an article titled “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay”:

Monopoly capitalism does not rest on competition and free private initiative but on centralized command. The capitalist cliques at the head of mighty trusts, syndicates, banking consortiums, etcetera, view economic life from the very same heights as does state power; and they require at every step the collaboration of the latter. In their turn the trade unions in the most important branches of industry find themselves deprived of the possibility of profiting by the competition between the different enterprises. They have to confront a centralized capitalist adversary, intimately bound up with state power. Hence flows the need of the trade unions – insofar as they remain on reformist positions, ie., on positions of adapting themselves to private property – to adapt themselves to the capitalist state and to contend for its cooperation. In the eyes of the bureaucracy of the trade union movement the chief task lies in “freeing” the state from the embrace of capitalism, in weakening its dependence on trusts, in pulling it over to their side. This position is in complete harmony with the social position of the labor aristocracy and the labor bureaucracy, who fight for a crumb in the share of superprofits of imperialist capitalism. The labor bureaucrats do their level best in words and deeds to demonstrate to the “democratic” state how reliable and indispensable they are in peace-time and especially in time of war. By transforming the trade unions into organs of the state, fascism invents nothing new; it merely draws to their ultimate conclusion the tendencies inherent in imperialism.

COUNTERPUNCH MARCH 3, 2017

The Scab Economy: the Origins of America’s Anti-Union Movement

Ever since Donald Trump became a front-runner in the 2016 primaries, leftwing pundits have offered varied historical analogies to help identify the threat we face. Was he more like Hitler or more like Berlusconi? In my view the best prism through which to view Trump is American history itself. Ever since the Reagan presidency there has been a concerted effort to turn the clock back to the 1880s—the gilded age. Or maybe even further back to Andrew Jackson, whose portrait Trump hung in the oval office. After all, it was Jackson who conned both voters and latter-day historians into believing that he was for the common man. Or fast forward to 1919 when the progressive Woodrow Wilson authorized the Palmer Raids that led to the deportation of 500 foreigners during a Red Scare.