"A history review is necessary to appreciate the changes in American society over the past 30 yrs" [View All]

[Hannah Bell]

Strike activity—the most basic indicator of class militancy—increased dramatically from the mid-1960s on, among broad sections of the industrial working class... In 1970 the total man-days lost as a result of work stoppages hit 52.7 million. That was the year of a two-month-long strike of auto workers against General Motors. It was also the year of the massacre by national guardsmen of four students at Kent State University.





These figures testified to the immense combatively of the working class throughout the 1970s. The high point of class militancy was the national coal miners’ strike of 1977-78. The strikers rejected two sell-out contracts negotiated by the union bureaucracy and defied a back-to-work order issued by President Jimmy Carter, who was acting under the provisions of the notorious Taft-Hartley Act.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of three events that signaled the beginning of a vicious counter-offensive by the ruling class against the working class.

The counter-offensive began with the appointment by President Carter, a Democrat, of Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve... Volcker immediately set about to break the back of working class militancy by raising interest rates to unprecedented levels, thus provoking a severe recession and driving up unemployment. Under Volcker, the prime rate eventually went as high as 21.5 percent.

The second event was the announcement by Chrysler that it would shut down a major production facility in Detroit, the famous Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck that employed several thousand workers. This decision was accepted by the UAW, which ignored demands by rank-and-file workers for action to defend jobs. Opposition was strangled and the factory closed without resistance.

Finally, the UAW bureaucracy decided to grant Chrysler major concessions on wages and work rules. This began a pattern of union-management collaboration that cleared the way for subsequent attacks on the jobs, wages, working conditions, and benefits of all sections of the American working class. All these events took place even before Reagan was elected president.

The defining event of the Reagan presidency—the firing of 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, members of PATCO—sent a signal to all corporations that strike-breaking and union-busting was legitimate and would enjoy the support of the government...

In the years that followed, the AFL-CIO bureaucracy sanctioned a wave of government and corporate strikebreaking. There were no shortage of strikes during the 1980s—by Greyhound bus drivers, Continental pilots, Phelps Dodge copper miners, Hormel meatpacking workers, and AT Massey coal miners, to name only a few of the best known struggles of the 1980s. But these and virtually every other strike were isolated by the AFL-CIO and defeated...

The most telling statistical evidence of the impact of the corporate-controlled unions on the working class is the virtual disappearance of strikes in the United States...




http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/may2009/rep1-m19.shtml