Our History, Part IV: From the 1980s to the present

The 1980s began with a sharp interest rate increase, leading to a “strong dollar” and a resulting decrease in exports that decimated manufacturing. The unemployment rate reached 11% by 1982. During 1981-83, 21.2% of workers in heavy industry were laid off. In response, poorer workers demanded lower taxes, which further increased their contradiction with public-sector workers. 

In 1981, air traffic controllers represented by the public-sector Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on an illegal strike – illegal because, as federal workers, they were prohibited from striking by the Taft-Hartley Act. President Reagan – whose campaign had been endorsed by the union! – invoked his executive power under Taft-Hartley to immediately fire 11,345 striking workers. Scab workers were brought in to fill their places. After the PATCO strike, major strikes declined. Strikes have never again reached even one-third of pre-PATCO levels. Although the government action was immediately an attack on public-sector workers, it weakened the entire working class, and particularly the weak private-sector unions. Following PATCO, private-sector union density experienced an accelerated freefall. 

President Ronald Reagan signs the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (White House Photographic Collection)

In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was passed, which for the first time made it illegal for bosses to hire undocumented workers. This disgusting law made the bosses into an arm of immigration enforcement, giving the bosses the ability to call for recertification of immigration status in the face of union organizing, forcing a breach between documented and undocumented workers, further weakening the force of the working class. 

The unions were complicit in this attack on the working class: the AFL-CIO supported the IRCA because they falsely believed that a reduction of the number of undocumented immigrants would result in higher wages. This reactionary hope proved to be empty – a working class divided along the lines of nationality is weak and incapable of victory, which requires the strong unity of the multinational working class of the US.

The 1990s

By the 1990s, there had been profound changes to the economy, with employment shifting from manufacturing to service industries. Based on this, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) launched the Justice for Janitors Campaign, which organized workers in the unorganized janitorial industry. The core of militant workers who led the struggle included many recent immigrants from Central America, particularly El Salvador and Guatemala, who brought experiences of collective struggle from their home countries. They were joined by recent immigrants from Mexico. 

In this campaign, SEIU organized janitors by geographical area, rather than by shop, and pushed for master contracts covering the whole industry of a city. Justice for Janitors organized demonstrations and protests, which were in turn supported by civil rights organizations of various kinds. This culminated in a three week strike in Los Angeles that ended with voluntary recognition of the union.

The anti-worker North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed into law in 1994 by Democratic President Bill Clinton over the mild objections of the bureaucratic AFL-CIO. The effects of NAFTA were predictable: a further sharp decline in manufacturing jobs and an increase in the outsourcing of manufacturing. There was an urgent need to transform the national union federations, which led to the rise of “reformers” in the AFL-CIO bureaucracy.  In 1995, the New Voice slate won the leadership, representing an ‘updating’ of AFL-CIO after the end of the Cold War: John Sweeney, who had led SEIU during the Justice for Janitors campaign, became the president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka of the United Mine Workers (UMW) became its Secretary-General, and Linda Chavez-Thompson of AFSCME became its Executive Vice-President. 

The turn of the millennium saw a key shift in union policies, with a turn to positions that were relatively pro-immigrant and critical of US military aggression abroad. The LA Central Labor Council played a leading role in this change. During the large protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999, the AFL-CIO aligned with the left in their criticism of the predatory actions of American finance capital. However, this alliance did not last long – the left and the AFL-CIO split ways once again in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The 2000s

In 2005, a group of unions broke away from the AFL-CIO to found a new national union federation, Change to Win (CTW), hoping to turn the labor movement around from its decades of decline. However, these efforts were modest, and the breakaway unions largely adhered to the bureaucratic practices of the AFL-CIO. For this reason, they were unable to reverse the decline in union density. 

Also in 2007, the Obama Administration introduced the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would have strengthened the NLRA, made it easier for unions to organize, and recognized card check union elections as binding. This Act was promoted with great fanfare and many wonderful-sounding promises were made, but even though the Obama administration had a supermajority in Washington for its first two years, absolutely no effort was made to pass the EFCA and it quietly died the same death that all promises of the bosses’ political servants do.

The Great Recession of 2007-2009 was a further blow to the labor movement: unemployment shot up, workers lost their homes and retirement funds, and the economy was decimated. Many union jobs were lost and were replaced with low wage, non-union service industry jobs. Public approval of unions reached an all-time low in 2009. In most sectors, union membership fell faster than employment.

As unions declined further in the mid-2000s, worker centers emerged to fill the void. Worker centers are non-profit organizations that try to fight for workers’ demands outside of trade unions, mainly through lobbying efforts, lawsuits, and supporting certain legislation. 

The key turning point in the growth of worker centers was the series of immigrant rights marches in the spring of 2006, organized in response to an anti-immigration bill that had passed in the US House in 2005. As a result, the AFL-CIO began to support the worker centers, who often focused on immigrant workers, highlighting certain abuses and undertaking litigation. The turn to worker centers represented a further decline in the trade-union movement, because worker centers do not unite the broad working class into a fighting organization. Rather, they try to bypass class struggle with lawsuits and appeals to Democratic politicians. 

The 2010s

By 2010, public sector unions outnumbered private-sector unions for the first time in US history. In the decade of the 2010s, the relatively more robust public-sector unions became the chief battleground of the labor movement, as there were renewed attacks on public-sector unions.

In 2011, Wisconsin passed a law that took away the rights of public-sector workers to collectively bargain. In the wake of Wisconsin, anti-public-sector union laws were passed in some 15 states, banning collective bargaining or limiting its scope, restricting the ability of unions to automatically collect dues, and allowing employers to act unilaterally when negotiations with unions break down. Although public-sector unions were the focus of the assault, right-to-work legislation was passed attacking private-sector unions in 19 states during the same period.

While public-sector union density remained stable at around 35%, in absolute numbers there was a sharp decline, largely due to austerity measures in the aftermath of the Great Recession. States laid off public workers to eliminate budget shortfalls, and the overall number of public-sector workers plummeted. Moreover, the stable union density numbers hardly matter when one considers that increasing numbers of public-sector unions had been stripped of collective bargaining rights.

However, despite the assault, there were episodes of militant struggle in public-sector unions. Notably, the enormous Chicago Teachers Strike erupted in 2012, in which 26,000 teachers struck for 11 days, completely shutting down Chicago public schools in their fight for better pay, improved working conditions, and better education for students. 

In September 2011, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests against the Great Recession bailout of the big banks and corporations erupted. Some unions participated, including many in New York City, the heart of the OWS protests.

In the aftermath of OWS, the organizing efforts of the big trade unions were directed to campaigns like Fight for 15 in the fast food industry. This campaign was based on the now familiar worker center model, rather than on organizing unions in these restaurants and fighting for better wages with the strength of unions. In 2014 and 2015 there were waves of Fight for 15 “strikes,” consisting of one-day walkouts. These were largely symbolic actions rather than examples of organized workers taking up the strike weapon with a serious expectation of forcing concessions from the adversary.

The Fight for 15 campaign sparked efforts to raise minimum wages in key cities where unions are still relatively strong, including San Francisco, LA, and Seattle, affecting some 5.1 million workers between 2012-2016. While states have raised minimum wages for decades, municipal minimum-wage increases were a new phenomenon. However, a minimum-wage floor cannot compare to the wage floor a strong sectoral union can establish. This principle holds even more true for the larger goals of the working class movement. Conscious workers treat victories as territory captured from the class enemy, rather than as ends in-themselves.

In the wake of OWS and Fight for 15, worker centers grew rapidly all over the country. One prominent example is the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), which advocates for workers to cooperate with “good” bosses (!) and lobby politicians (!!), rather than join unions (!!!). Another prominent example of an expanding worker center is the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which has 42 local organizations. This period saw an overall boom in the growth of worker centers: in 2003, there were 137 workers centers and by 2013, there were more than 230 such centers.

In 2016, the populist wave swept over the American political scene. It had both “left” and right variants. On the right was the figure of Trump – an openly racist, ultra-reactionary demagogue. However, Trump addressed himself to the “little guy” – by which of course he meant small business owners and the uppermost, best-paid layers of the working class – with empty promises of bringing back manufacturing and restoring uncontested US political and economic dominance in the world. This was a cynical attempt to get the working class onboard with a far-right project that only benefits big finance capital. 

The “left” populist of the moment was Bernie Sanders, who promised more manufacturing jobs via a vague and impossible “Green New Deal” and a whole litany of plans to “rebuild” the welfare state of the post-WWII era. This trends aims at renewing the welfare statist pact with the upper layers of the working class, exclusively in the interests of capital.

Class conscious workers should recognize backwards-looking populism, in whatever form, for what it is: an effort to incorporate the working class into the political project of our class adversaries by demagoguery (Trump) or “pro-worker” rhetoric (Sanders).

Conscious workers know that this is a fight between factions of the bosses’ political servants and that the only way forward for the working class is for us to build our own class organizations, based on our own class interests which are always and everywhere antagonistic to those of every faction of the bosses. This fact is even more clear when we see the decaying figure of Joe Biden, ever the pliable tool of big finance capital, seemingly abandon the neoliberal policies he championed his whole career for an eclectic mixture of both Trumpian and Sanders-style populism, from which the working class has received zero benefit.

However, there is a counter trend beginning to develop in the US. There is a new vigor in the labor movement based on the declining economy and political crisis. In 2016, 40,000 Verizon workers went on strike. In 2018, there was a wave of militant teachers strikes. Then came the pandemic crisis, the burden of which the bosses and their political servants threw entirely on the backs of the working class. 

In 2021, there was a wave of strikes that even the big corporate media outlets could not ignore: Hunts Point, St. Vincent Hospital, Warrior Met Coal, Frito-Lay, Nabisco, Volvo, John Deere, and many more. Though it is most certainly premature to declare a rebirth of the labor movement (remember that strike wave in 1970?), it is clear that there are many workers who are beginning to see that only reliance on our own class forces can advance the interest of the working class.

One red thread runs throughout the history of this country: the working class can only identify and fight for its own interests when it has its own class organizations, its own politics antagonistic to the politics of the bosses, and its own program that goes far beyond basic economic demands and marches towards the final end of capital, of wage labor, of exploitation, and of oppression. 

Conscious workers study this history so that they can undertake this heroic task, this monumental duty that history places exclusively in the hands of the working class.

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Our History, Part III: From the 1950s to 1970s