Is labor organizing in the imperial core regressive?
Is labor organizing in the imperial core regressive?
May sound like 
but I am actually curious here.
Does seem like all you're doing is helping labor aristocrats get better access to tasty treats.
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The big unions are all corrupt as fuck and absurdly top-down and undemocratic. This is because they've been shaped that way since FDR. The NLRA was designed to turn unions into state sanctioned and controlled institutions and then they were purged of anyone who had ideological commitments to democracy or socialism. From there they were allowed to collect dues from employees working under their contracts even if those employees were not members of the union which meant there was no material reason for them to actually do anything more than win an NLRB run election and a single shitty contract. Then they could embed themselves like ticks in job sites.
Today most unions are sitting on billions of dollars in pension and insurance funds. Union officials regularly make six figure salaries for nothing while their members make poverty wages. They are blatantly undemocratic institutions in which the members have so little say that the federal government consistently intervenes in elections. The unions do not have any obligation to recruit, educate, agitate, or organize their members. Most of the unions are only interested in getting Democrats elected primarily to fight right to work so that they can continue to extract dues from non-members. The unions also frequently suppress the self activity of their members and make it harder for them to organize and will even collaborate with management to remove problematic workers. When strikes or other actions do happen they happen at the whim of union leadership, not the members. They have been shaped this way by decades of opportunism and US government interference.
Unions do not have to be this way though. There's no actual obligation to go through the NLRA process. There's no obligation to work under the boots of the big unions. We should aim for strategic militancy not timid super-majorities. We should exercise working class power and democracy, not legalistic state power. We should fight like guerillas, not like liberals. Communists in the US should focus more on workers and sow our roots deeper into job sites, but among the 90% of American workers that are not organized in any sort of union who are generally the most proletarian workers, not among the 10% who are in unions. We should not seek to join bigger unions that will stamp us out. We and should replicate the successes of the CIO ninety years ago. If we are in the big unions already we should be organizing within them as communists, forming caucuses along our political orientations and tactically supporting reform efforts.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/14569230
My response 👁️👄👁️ although now I realize I completely neglected the subject of organizing in the labor-aristocratic industries, I just kind of left it to be assumed that organizing these people would just make it easier for them to help exploit others. I also neglected to talk about corrupt union leadership as a section of this, as well as lawyers. Raytheon medical benefits can get fucked etc
Yeah I agree that most of the union workers in the US are not particularly well off. Unions like NEA and UFCW are massive, business-oriented, and many of their members are dirt poor. I think the issue we run into as leftists is that we just sorta dogmatically look at unions as a good thing (or at least Lenin's century old formulation of them as useful forms of proletarian organization) or we go ultraleft and reject them as colloborators in colonialism and genocide (which isn't to say they aren't) with very little insight into the internal contradictions of a union, how they came to be this way, or what a union even is. The lack of democracy and the outright hostility to workers self organizing within the big unions fucks their members over just as their protectionism or militarism fucks the global proletariat over.
Near where I live for instance there are union members in mills who are frequently ordered to work 24 or more hours in a row and their local has been outright hostile to any sort of strike or activity to fight it. Idk what their contract looks like or how well they're compensated but they've had multiple members killed in car accidents driving home and many more injuries on the job after working for a day straight. These are the "good union mill jobs" everyone's grandparents had.
There are of course union workers in military contractors and such that are directly benefiting from Imperialism or other forms of exploitation, but the reason the big unions suck is because they are one degree from state institutions designed to choke out proletarian revolution and democracy, not because their members are all living rich off the blood of the global south and have democratically decided to keep it that way. White collar non-union workers in email jobs are much more likely to be true labor-aristocrats that produce nothing than a UFCW grocery clerk or an NNU Nurse.
Swag, one second, also my apologies for deliberate necroposting just feels bad to miss a discussion by 48 hrs