"Dying of hunger in a supermarket and not daring to open a tin of sardines"
Last week I posted an article about self-management at a factory in Uruguay. Here's another article, which focuses on Venezuela but also mentions factory occupations in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, and Panama. The upshot is that these occupations are no longer isolated incidents, they're part of a movement across Latin America. [Update: here's another and another about Venezuela's effort to create an international organization of worker-occupied factories.]
For as long as I've kept this blog (three whole weeks!), I've maintained that the most urgent task at the moment for the American labor movement is to organize, organize, organize. That is, to bring into our movement the 90% of American workers who don't even have a union yet. Not that we shouldn't have a vision for the future (that's what this blog is supposed to be about, after all), but that there's no point in pretending we can take a shortcut to socialism.
Of course, "organize, organize, organize" is what CTW is all about. But CTW has been faulted for planning to organize only the 50 million American workers whose jobs can't be shipped overseas. I think this is a reflection of respect for the jurisdictions of AFL-CIO unions, and a recognition of CTW's current limitations, rather than an expression of disdain for manufacturing workers. Still, the question remains, what are we gonna do with what remains of the American manufacturing sector? (Given that concessions, concessions, and more concessions are not an acceptable answer.)
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll say that part of the answer to that question is, "organize, organize, organize." For example, the UAW could get serious about organizing the foreign-owned plants in the South and about building international solidarity in the auto industry.
But for workers in factories that are closing, organizing a union (or strengthening the union they already have) isn't really an option. Is there no way for these workers to be part of the movement? The wave of factory occupations across Latin America provides a tantalizing answer to this question. This is easier suggested than organized, but these workers have nothing to lose but their pinkslips.
Here's a quote from the article I linked to above:
"[A Venezuelan union leader] also explained the destruction of Venezuela’s manufacturing industry. According to figures he gave, in 1999 there were nearly 12,000 manufacturing companies in the country, but now the figure was less than 7,000, which meant a loss of more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs. At the same time 90% of Venezuela’s companies were in the service sector. This extreme situation was due to the fact that 'capitalists are no longer interested in production' when they can get much quicker returns through speculation."Sound familiar?
In South America, workers are increasingly responding to this situation by occupying and operating factories that otherwise would be abandoned. Wouldn't that be a better option than passing by the shuttered textile mill every day on the way to your new job at Wal-Mart?
posted by submarino @ 9:41 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Occupying and operating a factory is a lot more difficlt than it sounds, especially in the US. To begin with, assuming the property owners and courts enforced US property laws, workers would have to be prepared to defend the factory with force.
In addition, the problem of raw materials, electricity, etc, requires large amounts of capital, and even if we had the capital, you can be sure that we would be met with a bosses picket line as it were that kept just about everything out.
It seems to me, we need to raise an old demand that seems to have been forgotten.
"Jobs for all unemployed workers building schools, hopspitals, and public works at union scale wages."
Of course, this demand can never be comletely achieved under capitalism which depends on the "reserve army of labor" that is the unemployed workers. But it is a solid demand that workers can organize around. And even winning relatively small concession on this demand provides employment and finfncial relief to thousands of workers and improves the overall quality of life for everyone.
Perhaps Louisiana would be a good place to start...
Thanks for the comment. I second your motion for that kind of demand in Louisiana. I posted about that not long ago, and it seems that the beginnings of the type of movement that demand would require are underway.
As for occupying factories, I don't know how hard it is because I've never tried it. I can imagine it's very hard. But I know that organizing low-wage service-sector workers at viciously anti-union employers is very hard too, and that can't be a reason not to try.
The 1937 sit-down strikers at GM in Flint, Michigan, were up against the national guard, and they defended their positions not with force but with nonviolent resistance. They held their ground inside the factories, and the rest of the community (led by the wives of the strikers) marched to the factory to confront the national guard on the streets. Eventually the national guard backed down.
I don't have a complete logistical plan for how to obtain the raw materials and energy necessary to operate the factories, but I'd suggest that the network of occupied factories taking shape in Latin America would be a good place to start.
Hey, I thought this article about worker self-management in Venezuela was interesting.
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/lebowitz241005.html
Lebowitz is arguing that what we need is co-management, so that worker self-management doesn't just mean managing the factory (or whatever) to benefit only the workers working at that site.
Also, there's another exchange about the AFL-CIO role in Venezuela on New Labor Forum, though can't seem to figure out how to get to an e-version of it. Will try to post the basic jist of the argument when I get a chance.
peace,
MC
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