Communication Workers Walkout Begins Fri at 12:01 am

"We are making this a limited job action right now to drive it home to SBC that our members are serious about securing their future at SBC," said Bahr. "We know that a prolonged strike could cause a loss of major customers and do significant damage to the company, and hopefully that can be avoided."

This statement defines the problem with this strike. Why are the union "leaders" trying to avoid damage to the company? They should be trying to maximize damage! The capitalist class and the workers have absolutely nothing in common; their interests are distinct and in direct opposition. If the working class can realize this and fight back, they have great power in solidarity. The SBC workers should not allow cowardly union "leaders" to ruin their chances in this strike by cuddling up to the bosses. The rank and file must stand up for their own interests, and the entire community of the working class should support them in solidarity. We don't need a wimpy, four-day pseudo-strike, what we need is class war. SBC is, I believe, the most profitable (or at least among the most profitable) telecommunications firm today, yet it has laid-off thousands of workers recently. It is outsourcing jobs overseas so it can pay people shitty wages. It's time to stand up and fight back against this evil company.

i get the vibe from your post that the only thing you'd be happy to hear about would be a declaration from the sbc workers that they are on strike indefinitely until the ruling class capitulates. maybe i'm wrong -- i'm actually curious as to what you would like to hear these folks doing.

i'm not saying i wouldn't love to hear that the SBC folks Did demand control over the company, but it's also nice to see some flexing of muscle by labor in this country.

A 4 day strike is an empty gesture, like pissing in the wind. A successful strategy is just that--doing whatever it takes to win. Symbolic actions are demonstrations of impotence.

Anyway, "meddle," you know as well as I do that the union hacks often make a couple hundred grand a year, are members of the same country clubs as management--hence their ability to negotiate a new contract over a game of golf, they send their kids to the same private schools as management--hell, they even do coke and patronize the same call girls WITH management.

So now we're clear that people supposedly "representing" workers have completely opposite class interests. Look at labor history in the U.S.--the working class almost only made gains when they wildcatted or went outside and against the unions, at least in the 20th century. The late 1930s sit-down strikes in Detroit, Flint and elsewhere wastn't led by the CIO--the CIO was created by them and ended up acting to contain working class power and take it off the shopfloor and wither it away with bureaucrats at negotiating tables in conference rooms.

And sure, unions like the IWW refused to even mediate their power with contracts at the beginning--as well as refusing to allow union representatives to be full-time bureaucrats in air-conditioned offices. They had to remain rank-and-file workers.

So let's not fool ourselves. Unions can represent our class interests about as much as a church can represent our spiritual interests. They're both rackets. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can truly start taking these struggles onto the true terrain of class war and stop standing on the sidelines watching unions negotiate defeat after defeat, all the while declaring victory after conceding to massive give-backs.

THIS IS CLASS WAR. IT'S TIME TO START FIGHTING IT TO WIN!

To add more fuel to the flames, here's look at SBC's CEO compensation:

http://www.forbes.com/static/execpay2004/LIRT9T4.html?passListId=12&passYear=2004&passListType=Person&uniqueId=T9T4&datatype=Person

According to the Forbes page, Wiseacre is paid well over the Telecom Services median (especially when viewed in terms of his total 5-year compenstation). In addition, he has a "Pay vs. Performance" grade of "D".

Sorry if I came across as being disrespectful toward the SBC workers and the union. I support labor and unions and the struggle of the working class for freedom and dignity, and I too am pleased to see labor flexing its muscle recently, especially in the Bay Area. I'm not saying this strike has to go on indefinitely until the capitalists are forced to surrender, but simply that, as was mentioned above, "it's time to start fighting it to win."

My problem then, is with the reformist attitude of the union leaders, who were interested in a symbolic show of power that would minimize damage to the company. That is not a healthy working class attitude; it betrays a startling lack of class consciousness. I still hold to what I said in my first post that the strike's purpose should be to *maximize* damage to the company. Success will come only when the working class realizes that its interests and those of the capitalist class are diametrically opposed. And I don't think that should be seen as an outrageous claim in leftist circles. It is the basis of class struggle.

So, I'm not saying this strike is "the one," but merely that greater militancy and more direct democratic control by the rank-n-file would be nice for a change. Each strike should be seen, as the IWW and others have said over the years, as a skirmish in preparation for the greater battle to come, the General Strike. Instead of calling a hopelessly futile, four-day strike, the workers should set their demands and take direct action to secure them, and the entire community of the working class should support them, whatever it takes. This is serious stuff, and we should take it seriously.

By the way, I think it's good and healthy that we are having this discussion.

Peace and Solidarity ---

meddle, I'm not sure if my last post actually answered your question sufficiently, so here's my point put more succinctly: I would like to see the workers achieve victory in securing their demands, that's all.

The reason for my original post was that I was concerned the 4-day strike would end in defeat, and I still am. But I'm definitely still holding out hope.

Not disagreeing that in many cases union leaders are corrupt, disingenious, and or toothless...BUT...It's sooo easy for the psuedo-revolutionaries (like gifford?) to sit back and deam strikes such as these to be 'empty gestures.' Instead of going after benefits which may actually improve their lives in tangible ways - while actually KEEPING their jobs (and a 4 day strike may in fact disrupt 'bussiness as usual) - I suppose you expect them to disreguard everthing and become cannon fodder in some sort of impending class war?

Best of luck to the strikers...

Just an apolgy to gifford...I just saw his post in the orginal thread about the strike. I think I mistook your uncompromising and genuine desire for a sort of 'armchair' stridency, indicting the workers as cowards. Sorry for the confsion

Time for a balance sheet.

I was in LA several times during the grocery workers' strike and walked the picket with strikers at 5 stores. The most common thing the rank-n-filers complained about was that the union representatives constantly tried to reign-in their attempts at autonomous activity. Back in the fall, 10,000 LA Metro transit workers were on strike and the UFCW told strikers that any solidarity actions between the two strikes "would confuse the public." I countered that it would make the class nature of the attacks of management more clear and possibly excite the "public," speaking as one myself. One picketer said she had thought taking the strike to the community, canvassing the neighborhood door-to-door, would help them explain their demands to folks who were buying into the line that the companies were promoting through mainstream media news and advertisements. I thought, "what a fucking great idea!" Again, a union business agent told her not to because it would confuse the issue. BULLSHIT!

I was in LA last weekend and many people said they thought the union "threw the strike" so that it would never get out of their control and lose them members. They'd rather run a deafest campaign with promises that the give-backs their demands were agreeing to "could be worse"--and to guarantee their own continued existence--than take risks, that they might not be able to contain, which would offer the real possibility winning.

But in the balance, what worked? Things like overwhelming community support of the strike and honoring of the picket line--but not everywhere. I was down there right before the holidays at the end of last year, and some stores were closing early because they had nothing on the shelves to sell, especially as this came after the Teamsters were honoring the picket lines at the distribution centers.

Also, things like the 60 or so UCLA students who went into a nearby Westwood supermarket on strike and did a shop-in--piling thier shopping carts high with perishables and then lining up at all the checkstands and when they got to cashiers saying "Are you a scab?" And then saying they could never buy anything and walking out, pointedly describing their hatred of scabs. The cops came, couldn't do a thing and the student were greeted to rousing cheers by the picketers.

Another night a critical mass bike ride rode through a store, up and down the aisles and managed to be well clear of the store before cops arrived. This action was incredibly entertaining to all the strikers who watched it.

And basically, the support for the strike was so widespread because anyone from the community who stopped to talk to picketers was able to relate to the health care demand, being something that fewer and fewer of us have these days. It's not a rearguard action to "hold the line," as in the union's defeatist slogan, but a front line necessity we should all be fighting for--free, universal health care which is not compromised by the profit drive of capitalism.

Understanding all this can inform the SBC strike. They should look carefully at the UFCW's defeatist position in the grocery worker's strike. The workers never really challenged the stores on things like allowing scabs into the stores or how the Teamsters didn't cross the picket lines--by parking on the street and letting a recently licenced management person drive it onto the store's lot and to the loading dock. At the level of symbolism, you can only hope to appeal to people's sympathy, which helps convince them not to cross the picket and helps. But the supermarket chains colluded with a profit sharing scheme that allowed them to share the loss. And with the UFCW calling off the picket on the locked out Ralph's stores, they all didn't feel the hurt. What wins a strike is making them feel pain of a work stoppage. Not something to be taken lightly, but something entirely possible if workers are willing to take risks, refuse to make the same mistakes of other failed strikes and to harness the class power with solidarity from other workers. Other predictable union-led strikes might, at best, lessen the severity of the give-backs, but still will be defeatist struggles that don't even attempt to win, let alone take the class struggle on the offensive.

I'm am totally willing to be corrected and be shown examples of recent strikes that succeeded. Those lessons can inform the SBC workers and all the others who'll be facing the same fate soon. The wildcatting truckers in LA and Northern California might be a positive example of new forms of organization and struggle that have the possibility of deepening and generalizing into truly radical working class offensives. We can only hope.

gifford

I was down in LA for the Thanksgiving weekend and I went with some comrades who'd bought 2 cases of Trader Joe's red wine. They'd tied solidarity messages around the necks of each bottle and drove down to the picket of their neighborhood supermarket and gave each striker a bottle. Most of the workers were Latino or Chinese, representing the diverse immigrants of the area, and they seemed thrilled that someone would offer them anything to congratulate them for merely striking. The message mentioned that their strike was the concern of all working class people.

At other markets, neighbors would drive by and take orders to go buy the picketers food, and it was obvious that these strike supporters were regularly treating the strikers to meals. Little things like these were the successes of the strike, despite the final defeat when it ended and remember here that the UFCW declared victory. On the cover of the newspaper the next day one striker said: “They are all thieves, the companies and the unions." (Carlos Beltran, quoted in the LA Times 3/1/2004).

What I say also showed me that there would have been overwhelming community support should the rank and file workers have tried to broaden the strike to other workers with solidarity actions, extending it across sectors to make the struggle on the larger terrain of all of society. This really could have drawn more people in with demands for health care for all.

At the end of the strike, the ILWU rank and file were donating a portion of each pay check to replentish the grocery worker's strike fund and had had some rallies in support of the strike.

When he died a few months back, the former radical San Francisco longshoremen Asher Herer asked that after his death any memorial donations be made to the grocery worker's strike fund as well. That's what I call eternal working class solidarity.

gifford

The Scab

After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab.

A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.

When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out.

No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there is a pool of water to drown his carcass in, or a rope long enough to hang his body with. Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab. For betraying his master, he had character enough to hang himself. A scab has not.

Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver. Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of a commission in the British army. The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife, his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled promise from his employer.

Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country; a scab is a traitor to his God, his country, his family and his class.

Jack London (1876-1916)
former worker—and Socialist
candidate for mayor—in Oakland