Steel Union Head Hopes for a Seat at the Bosses’ Table

By Charles Walker

---

Chances are that next week you won’t find yourself on a bar stool next to Steelworkers president Leo Gerard, and neither will I. But if I did, I’d use the opportunity to tell him about some of the beliefs and ideas that were the moral and strategic compass for some outstanding U.S. labor leaders and militants. The labor folks I have in mind are the likes of Eugene Debs, Vincent St. John, Bill Haywood and Farrell Dobbs. Each one was a class-conscious workers’ leader and a fighter for workers’ right to a civilized life. Each one had no use for capitalism in any guise. They railed against corporate and government frontal assaults on workers’ chief defensive organizations, trade unions, and the flanking attacks by company unions, labor-management groups and government labor boards. These labor leaders were convinced that business unionism was poison, and the antidote was workers’ organizational and political independence.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it more likely than not that Gerard would judge me terribly naïve. I say that because the officialdom of Gerard’s union, the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), views capitalism and how unions can most effectively operate within it far differently than did the radical labor leaders I so much admire. But which views are naïve?

To my way of thinking a recent statement in Labor Notes (Feb.) by Gerard reveals that he has serious illusions about capitalism, its bosses and their politicians. His illusions may explain a lot about the deteriorating power of the steelworkers union, and the rising joblessness of its members. If so, labor partisans could do worse than try to learn from the union’s failed outlook.

Gerard’s says that the globalization of capitalism is bad (he calls it “Rambo capitalism”); he says workers need a capitalism that gives “labor and other progressive groups an active role,” which would restore “America’s historic commitment to economic and social justice…” In other words, the fundamental problem with capitalism today is that labor and progressive groups don’t have “a seat at the table”, an expression common around the AFL-CIO these days.

But suppose that labor officials and social justice leaders did have a seat at the table. Would it really make a difference? Would they be little more than window dressing for bosses intent on having their way? The experience that organized workers have with such notions indicate that having a seat at the table can be — and in the long run always is— a deadly dead-end. For example, the participation of labor officials on wage labor boards during WWII didn’t protect workers’ wages from inflation. Many workers then turned their backs on the so-called tripartite boards (business-labor-government) and staged recurring “wild-cat” strikes. More recently, the participation of the International Association of Machinists on the United Airlines executive board has not protected the union’s mechanics and cleaners from the airline’s current maneuver to force still more concessions.

The steelworkers have a long postwar history of labor-management, a-seat-at-the-table schemes that included no-strike pledges, economic sharing plans, and the 1973 Experimental Negotiating Agreement. “Since 1980 we have worked with the companies to institute modern work practices, often in the face of great skepticism from our members,” the steel union admitted just last year. But the steel union’s members haven’t benefited like the steel bosses have, the union now says. “[W]e have accepted extremely modest wage and benefit improvements — allowing our standard of living to erode. Since 1980, real wages (adjusted for inflation) for Steelworkers have stagnated, while our productivity has increased by 174%.”

Now who’s naive? Gerard — who says his members have lost 34,000 jobs in the past 16 months, while “real wages (adjusted for inflation) for Steelworkers have stagnated;” — or the socialist who says, “It never fails! Every scheme based on the fallacy of an identity of interest between labor and capital in which both are cast as ‘partners’ to their mutual benefit always ends up by the workers being skinned”? (Workers, Bosses, and Bureaucrats, by Tom Kerry).

No doubt, Gerard would also disagree about who’s realistic and who’s naive about international trade. Gerard says that, “Trade Agreements like NAFTA should not be about incentives for multinational corporations to destroy communities by undermining working families’ living standards … Trade agreements that exploit people in these ways strip them of their dignity and nurture nothing but social upheaval.” Gerard is right, but that doesn’t help matters since he’s blind to the history of imperialistic trade that mostly divided the world into the super rich and the super poor. For example, Belgium is rich because the Congo is poor. Some of India’s former wealth still enriches the English ruling elite. Wall Street’s trade relations with Latin America have made poverty endemic from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego.

For the world’s workers there has never been a Golden Age of capitalist trade marked by “America’s historic commitment to economic and social justice.” From the slave/rum trade to the indebtedness of Argentina to U.S. financial corporations, there has not been a time when capitalist trade did not strip some people of “their dignity” and nurture “social upheaval,” including wars. World War II was a continuation of World War I, which was a trade war over colonies. The fact that some American, European and Japanese workers got a small share of the wealth that imperialists shipped home didn’t justify or purify the economic exploitation and political subjugation that define imperialism. In short, it’s naive for Gerard to ask U.S. workers and social justice activists to join him in a fight to return to a Norman Rockwell-like system of trade relations — a trade system that never existed.

Gerard says that the ”global economic system must benefit more than the very few who now control it.” Socialists say that’s right, and they mean it. But socialists believe that’s it’s naive to think that merely having a seat at the imperialist’s table is going to right things, anymore than labor-management, a-seat-at-the-table schemes have kept steelworkers from unwanted joblessness. Now, of course, the day that Gerard concludes that the imperialist’s table needs to be overturned, socialists will back him up. Might even let him buy the next round.