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Indybay Feature

SoCal Grocery Worker Strike History & Analysis

by Natasha Moss-Dedrick
This article looks at the SoCal grocery workers' strike and specifically the failure of the union (UFCW) to prepare and execute an effective strategy. It looks at the same issues as does the accompanying audio documentary, but goes further to look at the current and future role of unions in general. It was written for the forthcoming issue of Processed World magazine.
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A STRIKE BY ANY OTHER NAME

Take a close look at the badge on the grocery worker’s chest next time you go to pick up toothpaste at a Safeway (Vons), Kroger (Ralphs, Cala, Bell), or Albertsons. You might see one that reads, “I’m the property of [store name].” That’s how some of the 70,000 southern California grocery workers are expressing their feelings about their recent strike and lockout and the resulting contract. Some workers are biting their tongues, others are fighting among themselves, and nearly everyone is talking about quitting. But Doug Dority, the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) International until the end of the strike, called it “one of the most successful strikes in history.”

Last winter’s grocery workers’ strike was the biggest strike in almost a decade; not since the Teamsters’ 1996 UPS strike have so many workers been out on the picket line. The way this strike was handled speaks volumes about the (dis)organization and orientation of the UFCW—the union representing the grocery workers—and the labor movement in general.

My interest in analyzing the southern California grocery worker’s strike comes from sadness about what is and a desire for what can be. I want people, workers, to organize their collective power, taste that power, and use it successfully. I tasted it once, when I was a bicycle messenger in San Francisco. In 2000 my co-workers and I organized against very crappy wages and conditions and for worker control at the company. We actually won big, and we did it outside union channels and without negotiating a written contract. To my surprise, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (the official union trying to organizing bike messengers in San Francisco) impeded us in many respects. My “union, yes” attitude was shaken up by the experience, leading to important questions and interesting possibilities.

The UFCW “strategy” employed in the southern California grocery workers’ strike was dead on arrival. Many strikers and observers believe the union didn’t do enough before, during, and after the strike to organize the workers, broaden the fight, and hurt the companies. Ray Rogers of Corporate Campaign, Inc., a firm that helps unions strategize, put it bluntly: “With that number of workers idled full-time…, with the proper direction, support, and strategy, they not only should be able to win a strike, they ought to win a revolution.” The UFCW is the AFL-CIO’s biggest union, with 1.4 million members. It has enormous human and material resources, and yet it led its strong and determined members to defeat.

“Now it’s just another job, not like it used to be. It’s no career anymore. Everybody lost respect and trust in the union, and of course, we don’t trust the store…. We didn’t win anything; in fact we lost a lot,” says Lydia Baouni, who invested almost 30 years of work in the unionized grocery store industry. Things haven’t worked out the way she expected. She worked full-time at Safeway until two years ago, when she moved to Ralphs after being dismissed from Safeway for pursuing charges of sexual harassment in the workplace. At Ralphs she started at the bottom, working parttime as a courtesy clerk, bagging groceries and servicing the deli. She went from making $19 an hour as a daily manager and training coach to making less than $7 an hour.

Lydia was a shop steward for UFCW Local 770 at the Silver Lake store in the Los Angeles area until just before the recent strike. She stepped down from the position because she didn’t like what she saw in the union. “When you ask questions [of the union] and they don’t have answers for you and are completely rude to you, why do I have to force myself to be 100% with them?”

Even so, at the urging of her fellow workers, Lydia took on the role of picket captain at her store when the strike began in October 2003. She is very proud of her picket crew for the tenacity and strength they showed in holding the line for fourand- a-half months. They faced many hardships, including losing homes and cars, facing eviction, and going for months without health care. For working 30 to 40 hours a week on the picket line, strikers were paid $240 in the beginning, and later $100, while enduring winter rains, black smoke-filled skies from the raging southern California fires, threatening thugs, and an unprepared and uncommunicative union.

Lydia says the union’s “lack of communication is the number one reason things are falling apart” for the workers. The lack of communication and accountability from UFCW officials to union members came up repeatedly in my interviews with workers and community-based strike supporters. The union didn’t communicate to the workers about what was happening with the strike, so as Lydia spent each day and night on the picket line, her friends shared with her what they learned from the television news.

You might expect a union to provide its members with all information pertinent to making an informed decision about their future in the workplace. You might also expect a union to allow time for members to consider the details of a contract and to hold meetings to answer questions about it. That didn’t happen with the UFCW in southern California. Eighty-six percent of the workers voted “yes” to a contract at the end of February 2004. The contract was nearly 30 pages long, but the members say they only received a partial summary. The union said it was the best contract workers were going to get and suggested they vote “yes.” Workers were asked to vote on the contract on the spot or by the next day without any unionwide discussion.

What disappointed Lydia most during the strike was the union’s decision to pull pickets from Ralphs stores a month into the strike. She was told, as the picket captain, to come to a late-night meeting regarding a secret that would be revealed the next day. At the meeting she learned that her crew would be moved from picketing their own store to picketing a Vons store because the union wanted “to give consumers a shopping option.” At noon the next day, a union official told everyone to leave Ralphs. “I asked why and refused to leave, so he said, ‘If you don’t move the police are going to put you all in jail.’ We were tired and mad. I said, ‘I’m not going to move and my people are behind me.’ So he asked everybody to move and they said ‘No, we’re behind her.’ They brought a lawyer and all these people from the union. They tried to explain to us that they had made a contract with the store that if we didn’t move they’d put us in jail. They even had our [strike pay] checks at the other store.”

At Vons, her crew had to fight with customers, managers, and scabs as if it were day one. Saying the strikers were in their territory, thugs intimidated them by firing guns into the air, throwing eggs at them, and threatening to beat them up. Lydia says she stayed at the picket line from 7:00am until midnight because she didn’t want anything to happen to her “girls”, as she referred to the many single mothers on her crew. According to Lydia, the union did nothing to help and said there was no better location to offer them. Union officials, though, say they dispatched people to handle many of the frequent reports of violence against picketers. The strikers remained at Vons for nearly three months before they returned to picketing their own store. The union returned pickets to some Ralphs stores in mid-January after it became clear that the “big three” stores had made a deal with each other to share profits, thereby softening the financial impact of the strike, and taking advantage of the increase in sales at Ralphs due to the removal of the pickets. The strike and lockout ended just over a month later.

The Contract

The contract signed at the end of February made many concessions. The union made no gains; they just staved off some of the cuts the companies wanted. The average southern California grocery worker makes less than $22,000 annually. It’s the benefits and pay progressions which come with unionized grocery store positions that have made these jobs desirable for working-class people, especially women, young people, and single mothers. All that has changed with the new contract. A two-tier plan has been instituted in the stores, with one benefit and pay scale for new hires and one for current workers (those workers who were already employed by the companies when the strike and lockout began).

Multi-tier systems have become commonplace in union contracts. These systems effectively create a hierarchical work environment with people doing the same work for different pay. Upon returning to work, many grocery workers found their hours cut, with new hires given the cut hours at less pay. The new pay scale gives new hires as much as $4 less an hour for the same work. To make matters worse, the duties of lower-paying positions have been expanded to include work formerly completed by workers in higher-paid positions.

While the union managed to prevent the creation of separate health benefit funds for new workers and current workers, the contract significantly reduces the health care costs of the employers at the expense of the workers. First, not only did the eligibility rules change so that new hires are ineligible for health benefits until the end of their first year of employment, but they also have to wait a year-and-a-half after that before their dependents can be covered. Second, insurance premiums are to be paid by all new hires, and beginning in the third year of the contract, current workers will be expected to pay premiums for their coverage as well. Finally, the employers now contribute approximately $3 less per hour worked to the employee health benefit fund. These and other changes mean less, or no, health coverage for workers and their families. (For more information on estimates of the impact of this contract on workers and Californians in general, see http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/press/index.shtml.)

As for the pension fund, again the union managed to prevent the companies from creating separate funds for new hires and current workers, but big reductions were made in employer contributions. Although very few new hires will likely stay with the companies long enough to get a pension, new hires now earn about half (80¢ per hour worked) of what current employees make.

The most devastating aspect of the new two-tier system is something that many workers themselves did not understand when they voted on the contract. As current workers accept promotions into new departments, they are now paid the new employee wage! For example, under the old contract Cornelio Higuera, another Ralphs employee and a Local 770 member, was working between 30 and 40 hours a week, making $17.90 for half of it and $7.50 for the other half, depending on which position he was scheduled for. After returning from 141 days on strike, he was offered and accepted a promotion to the seafood department where he now works fewer hours and makes $7.55 under the tiered system.

When I asked Rick Icaza, the millionaire president of Local 770 (the largest UFCW local in southern California, with 20,000 grocery clerk members) why strikers say they are finding out the hard way that they, too, are subject to the twotier system, he said such knowledge was “clear and unequivocal” before the signing of the contract and that Cornelio “shouldn’t have accepted the promotion.” I told him that when Cornelio tried to retract the promotion after he got his first paycheck, management told him it was too late. Icaza suggested he file a grievance. Cornelio and many other strikers and strike supporters said the union totally ignores its members. If the union responds at all, it is to blame the contract and claim its “hands are tied.”

Besides the pay and health care cuts, the grocery workers (unless they are among the many who have already quit been laid off) are also being harassed at work using provisions of the new contract and the strike settlement agreement. The companies were given a 21-day period to do whatever scheduling and logistical changes were necessary to get stores up and running again. The contract also allows the companies to relocate workers to stores within a 25-mile radius of their home, and there’s nothing the workers can do about it. Those who were more militant on the picket line are feeling the heat, with transfers, shift changes, fewer full-time positions, and layoffs. One shop steward was transferred to three different stores within 24 hours. The strike totally altered the work environment, with low morale, feelings of betrayal by the union and the companies, and exhaustion. Adding fuel to the fire, strikers are working alongside scabs, as allowed by the contract. Workers say at least two scabs remain at each store, with many more working in the bigger stores. Furthermore, management forbids any talk about the strike, and even the use of the word “scab” is prohibited at jobsites.

In brief, the result of the contract is that workers who struck got the short end of the stick, losing what they had and gaining nothing. Unionized grocery work will change as the two-tier system is fully implemented: relatively decent wages and benefits will be largely replaced by unlivable wages and benefits. All this happened while 70,000 workers put themselves on the line for nearly five months, hoping the power of their collective actions, and their union’s strategy, would prevail. Maybe it should be no surprise that they didn’t.

What’s History Got to Do with it?

The UFCW is an amalgamation of many kinds of workers. It was formed in 1979 by the merging of the Retail Clerks International Union and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union. Since then it has absorbed many others, from the Insurance Workers International Union to the United Garment Workers of America. The southern California UFCW locals are not used to fighting; last winter was the first time they were engaged in a serious battle with the grocers. But some of the union officials had previously been involved in big UFCW struggles.

Ex-International president Doug Dority had been with the UFCW for decades. His name is closely linked to the infamous 1985 Hormel meatpacking struggle in Austin, Minnesota. The UFCW local there, Local P9, leveraged its considerable power and spirit in order to win higher wages and address the serious safety issues at the plant. The International urged the members of the local to go on strike, and they did, for nine months. They created a strong community of workers and worker-supporters. They used the union hall as a community center where they shared skills and resources with one another. Apparently, however, P9ers were becoming too autonomous by trying to raise their wages several dollars above the standard pay of other UFCW meatpackers. So the UFCW got organized—they put the local into trusteeship and negotiated a concessionary contract.

According to Ray Rogers of Corporate Campaign, Bill Wynn, then-UFCW International president, sent Doug Dority to undermine P9’s efforts. Seven years ago, at a Laborers International Union conference, Dority made an eye-opening admission. Rogers explains what happened:

“I walked up to Doug, and said, ‘Ya know, you still have a terrible situation in the whole meatpacking industry, and you could really use our help.’ Doug responded, ‘The problem with you, Ray, is that you attack the people you work for.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute. I was working for and representing Local P9. Are you talking about that situation?’ He said, ‘Yeah’. I said, ‘Why was it that an international union that couldn’t spend one penny to help out these workers who were fighting so hard against concessions but they could spend millions of dollars [on] 30 organizers, 30 rent-a-cars, and 30 hotel rooms to undermine and destroy everything that this union and my organization were fighting for.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I’m the guy that sent them in.’ So, I looked at him and said, ‘You should be real proud of yourself, you set the labor movement back decades.’ He was then real anxious to get away from me.”

Dority isn’t the only UFCW official with a duplicitous history. Joe Hansen, the man who recently took over as International president, was also in Minnesota at the time of the Hormel strike, working as assistant to the regional director. According to Jim Guyette, the president of Local P9 during that strike, “Joe Hansen was the guy who sold the Austin workers down the road.” He was involved in negotiating the contract that meant many of the strikers wouldn’t get their jobs back and created a two-tier system in the plant. “Unfortunately,” Guyette says, “the most militant trade unionists find themselves without a job. They’re the ones that buy the union line on how to win a strike, and those are the ones the union never gets back to work.” After working for over 18 years in a plant, Guyette himself became one of those workers. Ray Rogers says the meatpacking industry has never recovered from the concessions made by the union and is still one of the most horrendous and dangerous industries in the United States (for more on this, read Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal).

Comparing the Hormel strike with the southern California grocery strike, Guyette says the “same method of operation” was used by the UFCW. His advice to UFCW workers who are considering a fight-back strategy: “You have to understand your union doesn’t always have the same interests that the membership has. You have to look at the UFCW in the context of what’s best for them. Their method of operation has been retrenchment and trading full-time jobs for part-time jobs.”

The Devil in the Details

Everyone, even UFCW officials, agrees that the fight should have been a national one. Union officials, however, told me that the necessity of employing a coherent, multi-faceted national strategy only became obvious in hindsight. For the most part, the struggle was isolated to southern California, even though other UFCW contracts expired at the same chain stores around the country, and other UFCW grocery worker strikes took place around the same time and over the same basic issues. No attempt was made to use the national power of the union to fight the national companies and their national resources. The union handled, and continues to handle, each contract negotiation individually or regionally. Both Rick Icaza and Ron Lind, secretary-treasurer of San Jose Local 428, declared that the grocery stores “are no longer regional,” family-owned operations— as if to suggest that prior to this, it hadn’t dawned on them that they represent workers at stores that are giant chains stretching across the country and, in the case of Safeway, into Canada. Although union officials acknowledge that the need for a national campaign is now obvious, the union’s actions around the country show otherwise.

Both Icaza and Lind said the companies’ hard line was out of character, implying that that’s why the union was caught off-guard. “Safeway and the union had a bond. [Safeway CEO] Steve Burd changed that,” said Lind. Sounding a little forlorn and still surprised by the companies’ approach, Icaza lamented, “We had a working relationship with the industry that was a win/win situation.”

Icaza even told me that it wasn’t a surprise that the stores intended to make big cuts during these contract negotiations. In fact, the UFCW had over a year’s advance warning that the companies planned, as Burd put it, “to narrow the gap in every single negotiation without exception” by freezing wages or offering lump-sum payments; establishing a market-based rate for new hires; offering voluntary buyouts to senior employees; redesigning health-care packages; containing pension increases; and striving for more liberal work rules. Those are Burd’s paraphrased comments as they were posted on the UFCW website, and excerpted from the November 18, 2002 issue of Supermarket News. Furthermore, Bernie Hesse, head of organizing for UFCW Local 789 in Minneapolis, told me a real campaign “should have been set up two years ago when Safeway started sending out VHS tapes to workers saying, ‘This is the economy we’re in, and we’re paying X amount an hour more than our competitors and we need to survive.’” So, the union knew it was coming, but didn’t prepare for the fight. Workers say they didn’t even know they would be striking until three days beforehand.

In explaining its hard line, the grocery industry said it needed to reduce wages and health-care costs because of the “Wal-Mart threat” and the need to be able to compete with the low-wage, non-union employer. The UFCW in southern California countered that Wal-Mart plans to build “only” 40 stores in California over the next four years, taking just 1% of the market share. Even so, a short time before the strike and lockout, the UFCW raised membership dues in order to build a fund to prevent Wal-Mart from coming into the region. In April, a campaign in which the UFCW participated successfully prevented Wal-Mart from building a store in Inglewood, California. The UFCW has embarked on union drives at various Wal-Marts around the country, but hasn’t won a battle with the giant yet. So instead, they’re spending union money to fight Wal-Mart’s expansion. (Wal-Mart is the biggest private employer in the United States, with over one million workers. Its record on labor issues here and abroad, environmental issues, and the destruction of locally owned stores is atrocious.)

Union officials also point to Wal-Mart when discussing the cuts in the southern California contract. Minneapolis’s Bernie Hesse said, “These jobs, even though they took an asskicking, are still the premier jobs in retail because they’re organized, they have benefits, and for the most part these jobs pay a living wage. If you go to the unorganized side of retail— Wal-Mart, Target, Kmart—most of these jobs are not even close to this.” Unfortunately, as a result of this contract, there are significantly fewer grocery jobs paying a living wage. Unlivable union wages are a bad advertisement for unions. It’s no wonder many potential union members reject unionization on the basis of paying dues—it’s hard to make the argument for dues when many union members make $7 an hour and others are laid off after taking collective action.

The executives and shareholders of the grocery stores lost more than $2 billion in collective revenue as a result of the strike, but they consciously took such a hit in order to lower their labor costs and divide and conquer their workforce with a two-tier wage and benefit system. In fact, Steve Burd called the losses an “investment in our future.” Last year, while the supermarkets cried “Wal-Mart,” they profited in the billions. Now, they’re hoping to impress shareholders and raise stock prices with lowered costs of doing business in southern California and the presumption that they will produce similar results as more contracts expire around the country.

The UFCW leadership defends this strike as a victory. The fact that the workers held the line and stuck it out for as long as they did is a sign of solidarity and determination, for sure. Icaza says the economic hit the stores took as a result of the strike is a victory for the workers. But let’s not forget that Safeway and Albertsons are Fortune 50 companies. Safeway’s annual revenue (not profit) is larger than the revenues of corporations like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo. Who truly, tangibly took a hit from the strike is the workforce that stayed on the picket line, not the shareholders of the companies, or the local union officials who make up to $200,000 annually. Though Doug Dority said that employers everywhere got the message “that attempts to eliminate health care benefits will come at a high price,” that price isn’t high enough! (For more information on tactical and operational lessons learned, see the April 2004 issue of Labor Notes.)

Many workers and community supporters were disturbed that so many goods made it onto store shelves during the strike. The UFCW didn’t put up pickets at the distribution centers until over a month into the strike, when the stores were already stocked for Thanksgiving, and those pickets stayed for only a few weeks. Why this happened isn’t exactly clear; Icaza says the union waited for the go-ahead from the Teamsters, the union representing the workers who drive trucks from the distribution centers to the stores, and that pickets were removed when the Teamsters’ strike funds ran out. This situation highlights the lack of coordination between the two unions.

Most of the time, when the distribution centers weren’t being picketed, truckers drove to the stores and turned their engines off near the picket lines instead of parking at the loading area as they normally do. Some drivers didn’t go any further, while others left ignition keys on the seat, allowing managers or scabs to take the truck the rest of the way. Some Teamsters called in sick and showed solidarity with the grocery workers in other ways.

“It doesn’t matter how much stuff gets into the stores,” according to Ron Lind of the San Jose local. He is also the spokesperson for the UFCW Bay Area Coalition, which represents eight locals with contracts expiring September 11, 2004.

If a union is a structure within which workers build power and solidarity together, then efforts to encourage that must happen all the time, not just in reaction to a particular negotiation period. The work of a union is to defend the immediate interests of the workers, but even within this limited framework they didn’t deliver. The excuse that they were unprepared for the fight because grocery industry negotiations have always been smooth ignores that they had over a year’s warning that the companies planned something different this time. It also reveals huge holes in the union’s overall mission.

Union, Yes?

Most unions in this country, including the UFCW, appear to be purely on the defensive—struggling to maintain what they have, not pushing for more. This is a sad reality. Workers make the world go round, while a small, wildly demented, and shortsighted elite direct which way it spins. As long as thinking critically about unions and rethinking working-class strategies for gaining economic, social, and political power are regarded as either anti-union or a handshake with the bosses, the working class will suffer from a lack of strategy and vision.

A labor union is nominally an alliance of workers set up to advance the interests of wage earners, and those interests can be defined narrowly or broadly. I’d like to see new kinds of unions, ones that are understood as organizational bodies from which workers not only build power to determine wages and benefits and to ensure safe working conditions, but also that function as power bases in alliance with the communities in which workers live. As it is now, a clear dichotomy exists that asks us all to see our lives in at least two parts—as workers, and then separately as people living our lives. In that separation, we lose power. If we look at our work and ask, “What purpose does this job serve?” and “Does this job support the development of the kind of world I would like to live in?” we will often find that we are working against ourselves. This realization can help us determine how to focus our collective energies not just on immediate needs, but on long-term visions as well.

There are many repetitive, dangerous, and meaningless jobs that serve only to maintain the capitalist system while creating inequality and destroying the environment. Unions today don’t address how the narrowness of their struggles actually works against the people they claim to represent. When workers’ struggles focus only on specific working conditions, keeping their immediate work interests separate from all other interests, they actually reinforce the system that enslaves them.

A lot of important work doesn’t get done, while a lot of destructive work does. Teachers and nurses are being laid off everywhere, not because we need them less but because there is less profit in caring than in killing. Creating sustainable food systems; ratcheting up the development of new energy systems; developing more options for recycling and reusing “waste”; facilitating the spread of new and old practices for revitalizing polluted water, air, and soil; designing more public space for arts, education, and recreation—these are all endeavors that a visionary society might choose to undertake.

But as working-class people, we don’t have conversations about the value or the appropriateness of the work we do, nor is it in the interest of unions in their current forms to promote these conversations. At their (rare) best, union decisions are made democratically, participation by the rank and file is high, and workers make gains on the job. At their (all-toocommon) worst, none of this is true, and instead unions like the UFCW seem to purposefully work against even the immediate interests of workers.

At first glance it may seem paradoxical, but unions have more in common structurally with the bosses than the workers. Neither would make money if not for the workers, and both rely on the predictability of the workforce in order to maintain their positions. Just as employers aren’t interested in workers gaining the collective power needed to make changes to the current set-up, neither are unions, because they lose credibility as workers act outside the established protocols. A really organized group of workers is likely to come up with its own demands and tactics, which would create problems for the union officials whose job it is to make sure that workers play by the rules. In other words, it’s not in the interest of union officials for workers to become a strong and unified force; it’s not in their interest to truly organize the workers. This is easily seen in the UFCW struggle: with all the human and material resources at their command, if the UFCW had truly wanted to organize workers, they certainly would have.

The UFCW, and most unions today, attempt to increase membership by promising “job security.” Not unlike “national security” in a capitalist-run world, “job security” is propaganda. It’s a fraud. When the power of unions has been largely curtailed by labor laws to the advantage of bosses; when most contracts contain no-strike clauses; when the legal way to handle an unjust firing or demotion is to file a “grievance” that won’t find its way through the National Labor Relations Board process for years; when, in short, all aspects of the relationship between bosses and workers are made predictable through the union contract, there can be no promise of job security. When companies pick up and leave the country to reap the benefits of some other workers’ cheaper labor, there is no job security. To suggest otherwise is a lie, and yet unions do it all the time.

We could be deciding what’s important to us, and what we’d like our lives to look and feel like. But instead of talking about what work is worth doing for the sustainability and health and joy of all life, the discussion is about which jobs we want to protect from being mechanized or taken to workers across the border; it’s about keeping crappy non-union jobs out, so we can maintain our often crappy union jobs. No wonder union membership continues to diminish—there’s so little vision, so little connection made to the other aspects of our lives.

70,000 people in southern California experienced a long strike and all that comes with it. Those workers saw their bosses and their union in action. The vast majority of them had probably never been involved in anything like it, and many say they were changed by it. People tasted solidarity and felt the hierarchies of class like never before. Craig Bagne, from a Manhattan Beach Ralphs store, tells a story about a box boy who was a troublemaker on the picket line. “A union representative and I were on our way to another store and we asked the box boy to come with us. The union rep told him if he wasn’t willing to fight then to get out of here. Weeks later, he began to show up at rallies, then he wanted the bullhorn, and after that he was out there leading the charge. It’s incredible to see people change…. a box boy, a natural born leader.”

What kind of organizing will bring the “box boy leader” and the rest of us working-class folks into strong, strategic, and visionary movements that work together to up-end the system? Are there ways to change unions and make them strong advocates and organizing bodies for all working-class concerns? Or do we need to scrap them altogether and create new organizations with new ideas and strategies? Or is doing some of both the answer? What we largely have now in the labor movement is not just bad leadership, but institutional stagnation and backwardness. The world has changed a great deal since trade unionism began, and a reassessment of unions is overdue. I hope it starts by discussing our visions of what we want our lives and our communities to look like.

§Photo
by Zoe Noe
socal_grocery_strike_history___analysis-7_1.jpg
Neighborhood protests in San Francisco’s Noe Valley have met the closing of a local organic food market with steady opposition.
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by G. Munis, forwarded by T. Szamuely
Here is a succinct analysis of what unions have ended up becoming:

http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/munis.html
by x344543 (intexile [at] iww.org)
G Munis is full of shit. The problem is not unions per se, but rather the concentration of power, whether that power is concentrated in the hands of capitalists, state bureaucrats, union bureaucrats, or clergymen.

Here are some examples of how unions can fight against the forces of capital seriously:

http://www.iww.org/organize/strategy/
by Vincent St. John
Why do all these wannabe Lenins, like T. Szamuely, always tell us to read some wooden abstract theory from France. Is May '68 in Paris their ONLY model for revolution?

Why don't they look at the radical and bloody past of the American labor movement, things like the '34 General Strike in San Francisco, instead of always having the theory come from somewhere else? I wouldn't go so far as to say they're "Eurocentric," but it's pretty clear that don't know fuck all about class struggle in North America. Why else would the theory always have to be imported, instead of being an organic development from struggles that have gone on where they themselves live?

The Munis critique has its moments, but these sectarian leftist types like T. Szamuely who promote them are just a more rabid version of the folks who always look to the Zapatistas, or Cuba, or Nepal or the legacy of Che or some other far off exotic place where they really don't know anything concrete about the struggles there. So, I have to agree with the previous poster, that Munis is bullshit. Read Jeremy Brecher's "Strike" or Howard Zinn's chapters on the Wobblies in "The People's History of the U.S." instead. May '68 might be cool and romantic, but the IWW kicked ass in organizing and promoting class solidarity. We need a heavy dose of that today.

Vince
by x344543 (intexile [at] iww.org)
The IWW is organizing now as we speak:

http://www.iww.org/unions/iu530/truckers/truck9.shtml

The G Munis pamphlet ignores the role of the IWW completely and it's condemnation of the CNT in Spain is grossly oversimplified and without merit. It was not the CNT rank & file that caved in to the forces of capital it was some of the CNT leadership, and they did so because they were faced with a dilemma. They were actually asked to take over the government by the socialist leadership. Essentially they had to make a choice they were not prepared for. Should they have:

(1) Taken government power and then used their power to abolish government? To do so would have been a violation of anarchist principles, but in retrospect, according to Vernon Richards, this is what they should have done; or

(2) Should they have stood by anarchist principles and refused state power and let the socialists continue to rule (which they did ineffectively which lead to the eventual Communist takeover which ultimately lost the revolution) which resulted in a lost opportunity?

It's all well and good to look back with 20-20 hindsight, but when one is entering uncharted territory without a roadmap to utopia it isn't always easy to see which road to take. The CNT leadership actually stood by their principles (which was the purist choice) when the prudent choice would have been to take control of state power even if to shut it down!

On the oter hand, lets look at the May Days uprisings of 1968 in Paris. What did it ultimately accomplish? It brought down a left socail-democratic government and resulted in its replacement with a rightist DeGaullist government! Last time Ilooked, France was still as capitalist as ever.

What G Munis and his hack followers never acknowledge is that working conditions are almost always BETTER when workers are represented by a union than their non-union brothers in equivalent jobs. Sure, unions are not as revolutionary as G Munis would like, and they can and should be criticized for that. But there is really no viable alternative to workers' organizations when it comes to improving working conditions, and it is unlikely that any revolution will overthrow the power of capital without the participation of unionized workers.

Finally, it should be pointed out that these are not exactly revolutionary times. Most workers are not thinking about revolution. They;re thinking about *survival*. While the UFCW certainly helped the employers screw over the rank & file workers, without a union, ieven one as fucked up as the UFCW, the workers would face conditions like those at WalMart. If I had to choose between UFCW and WalMart, I would have to hold my nose and choose UFCW.

Are there alternatives? You bet your ass there are. The IWW is one of them (for the unorganized at least). As for members of the UFCW, it seems to me the best course of action is to radicalize your union from within and also built support organizations independent of the UFCW. (In other words, the answer to the original writer's question is "both").
There's no point in entering into a serious point-by-point debate with dishonest tards like the IWW dogmatists here. These guys are members of a social club for geriatric hippies, a combination of the cub scouts and a nursing home.

They are probably incapable of learning anything, from the defeat of the real IWW as a real expression of working class antagonism to capital, eighty years ago in the 1920's, to the counter-revolutionary actions of the CNT during the Spanish Civil War, to the most advanced moments of working class resistance to capital since World War Two: Franch in May of 1968 and Italy in the 1970's.

Notice how these guys never have anything new to say about the world since World War Two -- for them, nothing has changed since the days of horse-drawn buggys and Vincent St. John, and the past has never looked brighter.

Capitalism is dynamic -- the pseudo-IWW is not. In the pseudo-IWW you can advocate almsot anything and be a member in good standing -- how can an outfit like that contribute anything substantial to a real opposition today?. The pseudo-IWW is the most incoherent leftist outfit in the US. It cannot transcend its historical baggage. Most people join it for nostalgia, and most take no active part in it after that.

The real IWW was the product of a long-gone period in the evolution of capitalism and working people's resistance to capitalist exploitation. We aren't living in 1905 anymore.

It's ultra-left, smart feller, not left.


Here's what I think about the so-called IWW of today, from the 'Love and Treason' web page, at:

http://www.infoshop.org/myep/love_index.html

"Trade unions are capitalist labor brokerages. They exist to negotiate the sale of their members’ labor power to employers, to keep working people in line, and limit the scale of our actions against employers. Unions divert the discontent of union members into harmless channels, transforming wage workers’ struggles into a form of interest group activity. They help us to remain passive spectators in the events that most affect our lives.

At their best, unions were once defensive organizations, attempting to obtain the highest possible price for the labor power of union members. From the 1930’s onward in the US, a vast array of labor legislation helped transform the unions into mechanisms of social control. Unions have ideologically and politically integrated unionized workers into the capitalist system, selling them the bosses’ agenda during times of peace and war. And in more recent years, as their strength and membership numbers have declined, unions in the US have openly advertised themselves as partners of management, protecting the profit requirements of capitalists against the needs of wage earners.

Unions often help employers reduce working people’s living standards through give-back contracts. Unions undercut wage earners’ power in labor disputes. Unions prevent strikes from happening, they prevent strikes from spreading, and prevent strikers from using the hardball tactics that are necessary to make employers cave in to our demands. Unions often use goon squads to keep strikers in line and halt actions that can break the back of a struck company. And when strikers who have been defeated by union maneuvers return to work under worse conditions than they endured before the strike, unions and their leftist camp followers frequently describe their defeat as a "victory." From the worthless perspective of unions and leftists anything short of everybody being fired and jailed is a victory, as long as the union apparatus remains in business. Economists, politicians, union officials and most intelligent business leaders all recognize the inherently conservative and capitalistic function of unions. Union bureaucrats occasionally use combative jargon, but this has no bearing on the unions’ real function as labor brokerages for capital. Democratic societies create a marvelous variety of false oppositions to help maintain the status quo, and unions have played their role well in these terms.

Anarcho-syndicalism proved to be a dead-end in France in 1914, in the Mexican Revolution, in Italy in 1920, and, in history’s greatest missed opportunity, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Unions with an ostensibly revolutionary ideology and a heroic past, like the contemporary IWW, are the empty organizational shell of a long-gone social movement. Today they are impoverished versions of mainstream unions, and their militants often do grunt-work for the bigger labor brokerages. The content of supposedly revolutionary union activity is no more revolutionary than that of any other form of union activity. History proves that syndicalism cannot break with a world defined by wage labor. This has also been the case with new unions in places like Poland, the former USSR, Mexico and the Philippines.

Social struggles often give rise to anti-hierarchical, collective forms of action and organization, like strike committees outside of and against the control of the unions, or mass public assemblies: these can be forms of real working class power. But any permanent formal organization of the working class outside of a context of mass action will end up becoming part of the bosses’ political apparatus, and get in the way of our fight for a better life.

In taking action in the workplace, and in extending actions beyond the workplace, wage workers have to fight outside of and against all unions and unionist ideologies. Our only way forward will be to create new forms of wildcat action and self-organization that won’t be limited to a single job category or industry, or limited to the workplace itself. We will have to do an end-run around the unions and the anti-working class labor laws they serve. This perspective has to become present in even the most limited and immediate struggles. It has to include strategies for large-scale action against employers and governments across regional and national boundaries."

This is the standard regurgitated academic diaherria of-the-mouth response from ultra-left sectarian Kevin Keating (don't let his use of pseudonyms fool you).

The fact is that the IWW's record speaks for itself as any visit to the IWW website will tell you.

Proof of contemporary ideas from the IWW can be found here

Proof that the IWW is involved in real workers' struggles are evident here:

Additional details of recent IWW history can be found here.

Point by point response to Keating's Horseshit (note direct Keating quotes are featured in italics

There's no point in entering into a serious point-by-point debate with dishonest tards like the IWW dogmatists here. These guys are members of a social club for geriatric hippies, a combination of the cub scouts and a nursing home.

Of course, Keating would say this because as you can see, if an IWW member were to debate him on a point-by-point basis, Keating loses the argument in a landslide.

As for the claim of dishonesty, I would simply state that it's not I who uses other people's arguments to make their case.

As for the description of the IWW and its demographic, Keating hasn't a fucking clue, because he never actually bothers to find out about the current membership of the IWW. He simply assumes things according to his own ideological whims.

They are probably incapable of learning anything, from the defeat of the real IWW as a real expression of working class antagonism to capital, eighty years ago in the 1920's, to the counter-revolutionary actions of the CNT during the Spanish Civil War, to the most advanced moments of working class resistance to capital since World War Two: Franch (sic) in May of 1968 and Italy in the 1970's.

The reason why the IWW declined in the 1930s is complex, and it would take far too much time to discuss it here, but contrary to Keating's opinion, it is not because its ideas were found wanting.

The description of the CNT as counterrevolutionary is ultra-left nonsense. There is absolutely no merit to that claim, especially given the fact that there was no organized tendency in Spain that was *more* revolutionary than the CNT. Some CNT leaders did make a tactical mistake which ultimately cost the anarchists and collectivized workplaces greater gains, but it is an article of faith to assume that history would have turned out any differently than it did, because ultimately what undermined the revolution in Spain in 1936 was the interference of Hitler and the tacit support of Hitler from capitalist powers elsewhere that didn't experience a checking of their power from revolutionary movements. As stated above, it's very easy to look back with 20-20 hindsight and criticize. It's quite another to try and plot an uncharted course without a map (which was being done in Spain).

Many claims are made (by Keating, Munis, and others) that the CNT prevented more revolutionary activity from unorganized workers. I have yet to see any substantive proof of this. The CNT also had to deal with workers with counterrevolutionary tendencies as well (such as workers willing to scab, workers who didn't show solidarity with their fellow workers, etc.). In comparison to business unions, the record of the CNT is actually quite positive.

Meanwhile Keating touts "to the most advanced moments of working class resistance to capital since World War Two: Franch in May of 1968 and Italy in the 1970's.", but he fails to mention (though it should be obvious to even a two-year-old) that neither "advanced moment" did anything substantial to achieve long-term revolution. Both France and Italy are currently capitalist states ruled by rightist governments (and in both there is currently a resurgence of extreme right wing nationalist hysteria). What revolutionary activity exists in both states generally takes place in the militant unions (certainly union membership has not declined substantially as a result of these so-called "advanced moments"). If these "moments" were so "advanced", then why are Italy and France not workers' paradises Kevin? I've challenged you on this point at least a half-dozen times and you have never been able to answer it. It might also be worth noting that the percentage of workers in unions in both France and Italy is substantially higher than in the United States.

Notice how these guys never have anything new to say about the world since World War Two -- for them, nothing has changed since the days of horse-drawn buggys and Vincent St. John, and the past has never looked brighter.

That's a lie. The IWW has has quite a lot to say since World War II (and that is evident in the link posted above). However it would be accurate to point out that the employing class and the working class still have nothing in common, so why should the IWW's opposition to capitalism be any less militant or pointed?

Capitalism is dynamic -- the pseudo-IWW is not. In the pseudo-IWW you can advocate almsot anything and be a member in good standing -- how can an outfit like that contribute anything substantial to a real opposition today?. The pseudo-IWW is the most incoherent leftist outfit in the US. It cannot transcend its historical baggage. Most people join it for nostalgia, and most take no active part in it after that.

Oh sure! The IWW hasn't change dwith the times. That's why the IWW doesn't have a website or organize telecommunications workers (like those at Free Speech TV)

Keating loves to use insults (basically because they (ineptly) disguise the fact that his arguments are incredibly weak) like "pseudo"-IWW. Fortunately, Keating hasn't a mandate to detrmine what is and what isn't "real", but in case anyone is wondering, the IWW that I represent is the same IWW that has existed continuously since 1905

As for the dynamism of capitalism, that is an excellent point, and if Keating would take it seriously, he'd understand that the conditions that existed around 1968-70, when workers in France and Italy engaged in working class resistence's "most advanced moments", were far more favorable to workers then than they are now. In fact, workers had much more collective power then and much of that is due to the progressive improvements to working conditions achieved by unionized workers after World War II (Murray Bookchin, an anarchist hostile to anarcho-syndicalism even admits as much in "Post Scarcity Anarchism"). Of course, Kaeting fails to mention that fact as well. Meanwhile working conditions for workers, in the United States at least are nearly as bad as they were in the 1930s and the only real differences between then and now are that capital uses modern technology (unions and workers can use it as well) and capital is far more globally organized than the 1930s. That said, the struggle between labor and capital is more or less essentially the same, so while the IWW has indeed modernized itself, there is little substantive change needed.

The IWW is acepted by workers of all walks of life in the US, Canada, and elsewhere. None of them seem to have any trouble dealing with the IWW's"historical baggage" (whatever that is supposed to mean).

Keating's comment that one can be "you can advocate almsot (sic) anything and be a member in good standing" is somewhat true, but so what? The IWW is a labor union not a political party. Only authoritarian cults demand strict adherence to dogmatic party lines. Members are entitled to their own opinions. However official statements endorsed by the IWW as a whole require a majority vote by the membership of the organization. It is highly doubtful that any measure advocating scabbery or endorsement of pro-capitalist positions would be taken seriously much less approved by the membership. If Keating thinks otherwise he is free to join the IWW and try it. I guarantee that if he doesn't cause most IWW members to fall on the floor laughing at his nonsense, his proposal will be outvoted by a score of the entire membership to one.

Keating's utterly ridiculous claim about "most people joining for nostalgia" is also false. The vast majority of the IWW membership are dedicated organizers or workers in shops either organized or in the process of organizing. The IWW just signed up over 180 predominantly Sikh truck drivers in Stockton, and I GUARANTEE you that NONE of them joined out of "nostalgia".

Of course statements such as these, made by Keating only prove that he has his head so far up his ideological arsehole that he has to eat out of his own stomach. That must be quite painful for you Kevin; ouch!

The real IWW was the product of a long-gone period in the evolution of capitalism and working people's resistance to capitalist exploitation. We aren't living in 1905 anymore.

We're not living in 1968 anymore either. And a great many of the IWW's victories took place in the 1920s, not 1905, Kevin, and the General Strikes that took place between 1920 - 1945 were based on models proposed by the IWW, so the "real" IWW is not as dated as you claim. Since many of the modern struggles that Keating would probably support (such as the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999) also included the involvement of the IWW, Keating's statement is essentially a non-sequiter.

It's ultra-left, smart feller, not left.

That's precisely your problem Keating. What does your stomach taste like anyway? Do you give yourself intestinal indigestion by sticking your head up your arsehole?"

Here's what I think about the so-called IWW of today, from the 'Love and Treason' web page, at: http://www.infoshop.org/myep/love_index.html

Currently this links to a page full of gibberish (though in fairness to Keating, that is not his fault. Maybe my browser is just fucked up), but I remember this piece. It's not about the IWW at all, but rather about Keating's laughable attempt to claim credit for the failed attempt to increase San Francisco Muni bus fares during the Frank Jordan administration. Even if Keating could take full credit (which is doubtful, because it's obvious to me he opportunistically added his efforts to a widespread opposition), the issue was settled by an ELECTORAL VOTE, hardly an ultra-left, revolutionary position. The last time I checked, Muni fares increased by 25% last year. Looks like we need a few more "advanced moments", eh?

Oh sure, there are a few comments about the utterly conservative attitudes of the SEIU 790 bureaucracy in regards to BART fare increases (and notice that Keating never makes a distinction between union bureaucrats as opposed to rank & file union members). The IWW would be the first to criticize these bureaucrats (and often are, though often we don't get the credit for what we do), but where are his specific comments about the IWW?!? I don't see any!

I could respond to the historically inaccurate nonsense that follows his link, but I think I have done that already. It is sufficient to say that it is very easy to intellectually masturbate and make ultra-left arguments from the comfort of ones chair or the local cafe, especially if one is higly selective with the facts.

It's another thing altogether to go out and actually effectively change the way things are. I have been attempting the latter for the past decade, long enough to know that Keating is full of it.

As for the article above, I agree with it (mostly). I might even actually use it on the IWW web page (and give full credit to the autor and provide a disclaimer that the author's views are not those of the IWW and that the IWW respects the author's right not to agree with the IWW) as an example of what is wrong with business unionism, because it differs quite dramatically in its conclusions than Keating or his hero G Munis.

I honestly don't know why Keating persists in pushing his nonsense. I have challenged him on it at least six times now (the last time was just 24 hours ago in a diffreent forum and I have yet to see him respond to what I wrote there) and each time he trys again he uses the same arguments. I guess he must be insane, because he keeps doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Maybe I am also insane, because I'd like to think that Kevin might have learned his lesson by now. Oh well, I suppose there is always hope.

by Workers Vanguard
The responsibility for this defeat lies squarely at the feet of the trade-union bureaucracy. The workers fought like hell, including several times defying the treachery of the bureaucrats. But as we wrote in “UFCW Strike: A Battle for All Labor” (WV No. 819, 6 February): “What is most importantly posed for the UFCW to succeed in its struggle against the supermarket bosses is the national extension of the strike.” As a UFCW member at the Pasadena strike vote told Workers Vanguard, “It’s like you said, we should have shut everything down and made it a national strike.”

http://www.icl-fi.org/ENGLISH/2004/UFCW-821-822.htm
by Workers Vanguard
The Bolshevik-Leninists propagandized for a perspective to transform the workers committees into mass organs of workers power at a national level, as incipient organs of workers rule—i.e., soviets—where political debate would be open to all left tendencies. The situation of dual power couldn’t last indefinitely; it had to be solved on the side of the workers or against them. The Bolshevik-Leninists had the program to solve it on the side of the proletariat. However, in January 1937 they were brand new and by May had only 30 people, without enough authority among the working class as a political tendency, although most of their leaders had fought in the POUM militias.

http://www.icl-fi.org/ENGLISH/2004/SpanishCivilWar-828.htm
by A. Materialist (jackroux [at] hotmail.com)
All you lefties can whine all you want about union mis-leadership but this strike was only the workers to lose and they lost big. You don’t want to criticize the workers because you want to lead them. Workers don’t have to follow the union if they don’t want to. Its patronizing bullshit to pretend otherwise.
Unions have long since given up any notion of class struggle. A working class struggle would mean pursuing the material interests of the workers AGAINST the interests of the capitalist class; the modern trade union refuses to orient itself in this way. Instead, it pursues what success it can on the basis of a "healthy" capitalist system. Every "demand" it brings to the bargaining table is, from the start, conditional on the success of the capitalistic firms; it wants a successful capitalism in which the workers can THEN compete for their own success. So, for example, the "struggle" over wages and benefits always begins with the question, what can the capitalists afford to pay, what level of productivity do they require to be "competitive" on the world market. i.e., the union completely subsumes its own agenda under the requirements of the system: what is good for the firm, for the industry, for the nation. If the workers were to start from their own needs, and put their own requirements unconditionally ahead, then some workers would get the idea that the capitalists and their system stood in their way; but they just don't start like that.
by aaron
well said, materialist.
by smackdown
Hands down: match goes to Steve from IWW. Nowhere does Keating's analysis intersect with reality on the ground.

by diamatt
kevin's dogma makes him seem like a time traveler, fantasizing about being in makhno's calvary by way of may 1968 in france. his *worker* or *working class* is ALWAYS in the abstract. frankly, the dude's delusional and needs to catch up a couple decades.
by smackdown and diamatt
I have to confess; brave guy that I am, I buttered up my fellow wax-museum guy Steve Ongerth under these two pseudonyms 'cause I haven't got the balls to attack Keating under my own name.

I'm a currently-paid up dues-paying member of the self-managed market relations branch of the IWW. I joined the IWW 'cause i like the way it says that we can own our own small businesses, and that this is what life will be like when the workers take over ina non-violent general strike.

cookies for all!
by Tibour Samuely
I post under false names because I want to fuck up the orginal article from this thread--which, by the way, is excellent. It's part of my ultra-left *intervention* to denounce counter-revolutionaries.

Mr. Tib
by Steve Ongerth (intexile [at] iww.org)
Notice that Comrade Keating hasn't responded to *any* of my arguments and continues to resort to prepubescent name calling.

I could, of course, suggest that "Situationism", "Left-Communism", and "G-Munis" have their own "Wax Museum", but that is not as effective is demonstrating that these tendencies are shopworn by stating the facts. (In fairness to these ideologies / thinkers, Keating may be vulgarizing them for his own purposes, and I wouldn't be surprised if that were so, but having been so alienated from them by Keating, I am loathe to waste any of my time exploring them further).

I *do* know, from my personal experience as a union worker (in at least *six* different AFL-CIO unions) that *none* of my coworkerkers even REMOTELY express a tendency that supports Keating's perspective. Most union workers support their union (or at least the potential for their union to undermine the stranglehold of capital), and usually bitch and moan about the "sell-out union bureaucrats". Some even understand that the bureaucrats only have the power to "sell out" because the capitalist state passes laws affording them the power to sell out, and the rank & file doesn't realize it has the power to resist that.

Those few workers who have anti-union tendencies are either aiming for management positions or have bought into capitalist anti-union propaganda. (One might ask Keating why capitalists are so hostile to unions if unions are such effective tools at containing and thwarting workers' resistence to capital. In fact, I have asked him that question on numerous ocassions, but he has never successfully answered it.)

It's obvious to me that Keating either has no experience working in a union shop, or what little experience he has is short term. I am not especially confident that he would listen carefully to what his coworkers have to say in any case.

Why is this such a big deal to me?

For one thing, I have listened to his incescant bleatings on this subject now for almost a decade (I first read his article in Anarchy Magazine about Stephen Schwartz in late 1994) and he sounds like a broken record (or would you prefer a skipping CD?). How long is he going to stick in this rut?

I wouldn't get so pissed off about his feeble insults to me or the IWW (which are more and more obvious to me as an indication that he has no real substantive argument), if he weren't so dishonest about them (he repeatedly claims that the IWW is a group of aging leftists without a party and no matter how many times I demonstrate the error of that statement, he repeats the lie).

I suppose Keating thinks that I discuss internal union matters (and conflicts with the boss) by reading passages of Ralph Chaplin poetry or quoting from yellowing copies of the Industrial Union Bulletin. Perhaps I only sing songs out of the Little Red Songbook in Keating's fuzzy imagination.

Were he to actually witness my interactions with my coworkers, he would see (but perhaps still ignore) my actual conduct, which is to discuss practical, real-world solutions to the repression of the bosses or the ineptitude of our union bureaucrats. Perhaps he'd hear me suggest that we should be more resistant to the dictates of capital. Not once do I pull out the Preamble to the IWW Constitution and quote it. It's far more effective to DEMONSTRATE the fundamental truths it contains.

What bothers me even more, however, is Keating's disruptive behavior in organizations that we mutually work with. In one of them, he does very little work, but criticizes just about more than anyone else our efforts to publish leaflets critical of the UFCW bureaucracy in the grocery workers' struggle (to him, no effort is sufficiently critical--unless of course it agrees 100% with G Munis). Even when we agree with some of his points, he STILL resorts to insults. NOBODY else in the organization (regardless of ideology) respects him (as far as I can tell). He has been a huge psychic vampire and has wasted a great deal of our time. Keep in mind all of these disagreements are over the text of *leaflets*. I shudder to think of the damage he might cause if this organization were to attempt anything on a grander scale.

I think Keating enjoys picking fights and insulting others, and so this gives him a sense of perverse pleasure. It demonstrates to me that his efforts to offer critical suggestions to proposed leaflet texts are not in good faith (otherwise why resort to insults?)

Keating's philosophy seems to be dependent upon everyone agreeing with him. Certainly, if they did, we could accomplish the goals he sets without conflict (of course, one could just as soon say that about Adolf Hitler or George W Bush). The real world is a lot more challenging than that.
by Kevin Keating
I honestly don't have time to respond point-by-point to the foam-flecked ravings of Steve Ongerth. Unlike Ongerth I have a real life to live, and a less than finite amount of time to squader in flame-wars with leftists. He should probably get his doctor to increase the dosage on his meds.

But when Ongerth claims I got involved in a group ostensibly committed to solidarity work with Safeway workers, so I can "disrupt" it, Ongerth is a stone liar.

I joined a group called BASSO, Bay Area Strike Support Organization, and openly and honestly attempted to persuade people in the group that their perspective of hoping that an anti-working class organization like the UFCW could become "radicalized" was a waste of time. In effect a perspective for "radicalizing" capital's labor brokerages disarms working people in the face of their enemies, in this case the Safeway corporation and the union that spearheaded the defeat of the Southern California grocery strike.

The only role an individual like Steve Ongerth can play in a group run by Trotskyists is to be a doormat for whatever perspective the Trots come up with -- and then peddal lies to back up the Trot's perspectives. The Trots in question have a clear idea of what they want, and the backbone to fight for it; Ongerth on the other hand can be manipulated by anyone -- and I mean anyone -- who spouts the right-sounding, coal-burning, steam-engine era, pro-union line.

Here's copy of a leaflet that some authentic enemies of capitalism and myself have given out at 7 Safeways and an Albertson's supermarket here in San Francisco:

This is the leaflet that BASSO should be distributing...

YOU HAVE TO PLAY HARDBALL TO WIN AGAINST MANAGEMENT TODAY!

An effective strike by Safeway employees will be a major step in reversing attacks by bosses and investors on all working people. A fight against management's attempts to rob you of access to health care will find a sympathetic response from tens of millions of wage earners all over the US. Health care is a major issue for all of us. We are all suffering from the same kinds of hardship at the hands of corporate America

A SAFEWAY STRIKE MUST BE RUN IN A WAY THAT WILL MEAN VICTORY FOR STRIKERS AND DEFEAT FOR MANAGEMENT. A strike that can be won means:

1. A strike run directly by the rank and file -- not by the UFCW apparatus. All major decisions concerning the strike must be made in mass meetings of strikers.
One way to make this happen in a strike is to start holding meetings with your co-workers now. Get together with co-workers in your store. Vis! it other stores and find out what's up with other Safeway employees -- there is still time to meet, discuss, and plan for action.

2. THE STRIKE MUST BE A NATIONWIDE STRIKE. Only a nationwide strike will be costly enough to company shareholders to make them back down on their attacks on Safeway workers.

3. ALL STORES MUST BE SHUT DOWN BY MASS PICKETING -- not by a few symbolic pickets.
Many Safeway shoppers are working people just like you. An aggressive, uncompromizing nationwide strike will find support from tens of millions of working people all over this country. It can be a step toward turning around twenty-five years worth of attacks on the wages and working conditions of all of us.

Only a strike that is very costly for Safeway investors can be won. If you hit them where it hurts, and hit them hard, again and again, they will have no choice but to back down and cave in to your demands.

HOW NOT TO RUN A STRIKE: THE DEFEAT OF THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA SUPERMARKET STRIKE AT THE HANDS OF THE UFCW.

The UFCW is a union with a long history of betraying its members to management during strikes. The most famous example, before the So Cal supermarket strike, was in the Austin, Minnesota P-9 meatpackers strike of the mid-1980's.

Recent antics of the UFCW leadership in Southern California were a textbook example of a union membership being defeated by a union leadership, a union acting in the interests of management and stock market investors against rank and file union members.

1. The UFCW always acts to isolate striking workers from one another. The strike was isolated to Southern California. Isolation means defeat.

And strikers were isolated from other strikers in the LA area who went on strike over the same issues!

In mid-October 2003, mechanics for the LA County Metropolitan Transportation Authority went out on strike in a dispute over who should pay for rising health insurance costs.
What was the UFCW's response? According to a UFCW striker on a picket line at a Pavillion store (an upscale branch of the Vons chain) on California Street in Pasadena, business agents from the UFCW instructed supermarket strikers to not go to the MTA picket line. The UFCW bureaucrat claimed "it would confuse the issue" in the minds of the public -- and this in a strike that had overwhelming widespread popular support.

The MTA strike was about health care issues that were virtually identical to the ones that had triggered the So Cal supermarket strike.

2. The UFCW was successful in keeping a workforce with little or no experience of strikes or collective action against bosses under control. No mass meetings were held to discuss strategy or the direction of the strike. Union members generally felt excluded from having a voice in how the strike was run. THIS DOESN'T HAVE TO HAPPEN AGAIN.

3. The union made it easy for management to get goods into struck stores. Teamster drivers didn't cross picket lines, but would park their trucks on the street, then allow supermarket managers to drive Teamster trucks up to loading docks. The UFCW didn't even ask the Teamsters to honor UFCW picket lines.

As a "good faith" gesture, three weeks into the strike, on Oct. 31st, the UFCW disbanded picket lines in front of Ralph's supermarkets. Employers immediately announced that they would be sharing profits and losses for the duration of the strike.

Working people living from paycheck to paycheck, and now in the middle of a long-term strike, were forced to match their limited economic resources against corporate supermarket chains -- thanks to the UFCW.

Out of a limitless servility to the bosses, and contempt for the needs of striking workers, at this point the UFCW began giving out leaflets urging shoppers to buy at Ralph's, where UFCW members had been locked out and were on strike. The UFCW ordered picketing to cease at distribution centers. This allowed Teamster drivers who had honored picket lines to go back to making deliveries for the struck supermarket chains.

4. By mid-January, the UFCW cut strike pay from a lousy $240 a week to $100 a week. And union officials who slashed pay and benefits for strikers were themselves bringing home six-figure salaries and fat expense accounts.

According to UFCW reports filed with the US Department of Labor, half of the top UFCW officials drew in upwards of $200,000 in wages, living allowances and expense account perks in 2002. Union President Doug Dority pocketed just under $400,000. Richard Icaza, head of UFCW's LA local 770, took home $278,783.

After a five month long strike, the antics of the rich businessmen who run the UFCW brought union members the same shitty contract offer they had overwhelmingly rejected and struck against in the first place.

Safeway workers here in the Bay Area must be prepared to take the direction of the strike into their own hands -- outside of and against the control of the UFCW. Independent cluster meetings and member to member communication are essential first steps to creating real rank and file organization and strength.

WHEN YOU FIGHT AGGRESSIVELY IN YOUR OWN INTERESTS, YOU ALSO ACT IN THE INTERESTS OF EVERY OTHER WAGE-EARNER IN THIS SOCIETY.

angryworkers [at] yahoo.com

by keating
It's Situationist, not "Situationism," you dope.
Kevin isn't putting all his cards on the table. He went/goes to BASSO meetings with an eye to recruit--which isn't any different from a Trot or other sectarian leftists. Here's his declarative statement:

http://sfbay-anarchists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=106

And when Kevin wasn't able to "use" the cut and paste functions of Indybay computers, I foolishly gave him most of the research for his attached flier that I'd compiled myself--including the interviews I did in the 3 times I went to Southern California to investigate. But, being that it was Kevin's unilateral project after that, I didn't have any part in it and couldn't contribute examples of successful actions that made the Southern California strike inspiring, despite it's overall defeat. And Kevin is a parasite for not making his own post on Indybay and piggybacking his dogma on Natasha's very throrough and excellent article.

And if I had to vote, despite my misgivings about unionism, I'd have to say Steve wins hands-down. Kevin seems to have a very limited vocabulary of abuse--which he regurgitates to the point of painful boredom--and can't seem to stop himself from talking shit. If he could grow up and make a substantial critique there would be something to debate, but it seems like he can't grow out of junior high school. Hopefully, someday he will.

gifford
by Kevin Keating
It's nice to see that I've hustled Gifford Hartmann into attacking me under his real name, as opposed to the adolescent pseudonyms he usually cowers behind.

So, let's review the examples of Gifford-logic on display here:
1. Gifford and I were going to draft and distribute a leaflet to Safeway workers. But his non-stop sketchy clown antics led to my breaking off things with him. I then wrote the leaflet posted above, and with the help of some excellent comrades -- people ulike Gifford, who come through on what they commit to -- we have distributed about 170+ at the stores mentioned above.

What has Gifford done with his research about the So Cal strike, which the nominal Marxist apparently regards as his private property? Nothing, I'll bet. Nobody has kept him from coming up with a leaflet of his own and distributing it among Safeway employees. Gifford Hartmann is an all-talk-and-no-walk kind of guy. He doesn't come thorugh on anything that involves more than sitting on his fat ass and shooting his mouth off.

2. The next point will be hard for a guy like Gifford to understand, so I'll try to type slowly. Regarding the issue of "recriuting," revolutionaries try to get together with other people to act together. A group is almost always potentially more effective than an individual acting alone -- unless the group tolerates the presence of someone like Gifford, whose personal demons are in the driver's seat so much of the time, and to such an out-of-control degree, that he becomes a liability in almost anything he get involved with.

Gifford is a guy in his 40's who has never written anything, never created anything, never helped to make anything jump off, and he thinks a little reading in the Critique of Political Economy qualifies him to act as judge and jury over people who are more capable than him -- in Gifford Hartmann's case that's practically everybody. Unfortunately the US ultra-left milieu is mostly made up of incapable characters of the Gifford Hartman stripe, and not of energetic, capable, for-real subversives.

If Gifford can't grasp why the G. Munis critique of unions is relevant in the context of the So.Cal. grocery strike, then I think he is clueless as well as inept and untrustworthy. You know, Gifford, the current-day version of the IWW has lots of guys like you in it. Why don't you join them? You won't have to do anything but sit around spouting hot air. They have a high tolerance for incompetence. It might be just the place for you.
by cp
hmm. The IWW is run by Trotskyists? My understanding was specifically was that they weren't.
Steve Ongerth has always seemed like a highly effectual person with a life, to me. He works on a ferry, and the IWW organized lots of truckers signing up in Stockton because they're getting screwed over. And at the Grassroots house, there are these famously tedious unpleasant meetings monthly for trying to deal with stuff related to keeping up the building where they literally will take two years to plan and discuss cleaning the bathroom or installing a lightbulb on the porch. It can be very sad. The main egregious parties seem to be certain members of the green party, and a communist (the communist sect probably has less than 3 members), and the earth first won't show up, nor will the Tenant's Action Project group which has the best space in the house but does no work and got caught embezzling city money and never opens their space but refuses to leave, and then people in my group Prison Literature Project (which hasn't had a meeting in years, they just send books) kind of cower when fistfights break out between the communist and the guy with a personality issue. Meanwhile, the IWW is responsible for most of what gets done in the building. They take notes, drag people to the meetings, and on their own initiative buy toilet paper and lightbulbs and install them without group consultation except for financial reimbursement. The world needs more leftists who can can actualize their plans like this.
by Steve Ongerth (intexile [at] iww.org)

Well, here we go again. . .

Keating STILL hasn't actually responded to any of my points, but I suppose I really shouldn't be surprised, because I don't think Keating has any grounds from which to respond. Of course, he seems to be a virtual cornucopia of insults.

This discussion seems to have degraded into a leftist firing squad (stand in a circle and shoot towards the middle), but I am frankly fed up with Keating draining the energy of the rest of the left, most of whom do good work even if imperfectly. As far as I am concerned, Keating produces little of value. So let's stroll once again into Keating land with our crap detectors and respond with facts:

response to lies by Elks-lodge guy Steve Ongerth . . .

Elks Lodge? Honestly Kevin, I didn't know I was an Elks Lodge brother. Can you tell me what the benefits of my membership are since you're so bloody knowledgable about my life?

Lies? Kindly cite one--just one--instance where I tell an untruth anywhere in any of the threads on this discussion. You can't do it.

I honestly don't have time to respond point-by-point to the foam-flecked ravings of Steve Ongerth. Unlike Ongerth I have a real life to live, and a less than finite amount of time to squader in flame-wars with leftists. He should probably get his doctor to increase the dosage on his meds.

Faced with (at best) a very weak position from which to argue, Keating resorts to the classic "I Have a Life" (doubtful) excuse for not backing up his rants with facts. Not content with THAT, he spews more (inept) insults (such as hints that I am less than mentally stable). For the record, I am not now nor have I ever been on any "meds" prescribed or otherwise. I don't even drink very often.

But when Ongerth claims I got involved in a group ostensibly committed to solidarity work with Safeway workers, so I can "disrupt" it, Ongerth is a stone liar.

No Kevin, it is you who is lying (either that your you have trouble reading). I never said that you "joined BASSO so you could disrupt it"; I said that "What bothers me even more, however, is Keating's disruptive behavior in organizations that we mutually work with." Of course, your behavior in BASSO has been consistently disruptive, and one could certainly deduce that your intentions are disruptive (for whatever motivating desire). NONE of my statement is untrue, and you twisted around my words, so it is you that is the liar here, not me.

The only role an individual like Steve Ongerth can play in a group run by Trotskyists is to be a doormat for whatever perspective the Trots come up with -- and then peddal lies to back up the Trot's perspectives.

That is entirely true. Fortunately, BASSO is not "run by Trotskyists". Some of the members of BASSO happen to be Trotskyists, but BASSO is a democratic organization, where each member has a vote. Keating has as many votes as anyone else (and much to Keating's disdain, he is usually in a minority of one).

The membership of BASSO is primarily (though not exclusively) rank & file union militants who often challenge the rule of their union bureaucrats, and some have even led wildcat strikes and have been attacked by the union bureaucrats for doing just that. Not all members of BASSO identify as "Trotskyist". Some call themselves "communists", "socialists", "radicals", "militants", or "syndicalists"; some don't label themselves at all. Furthermore, there are only two or three lesser known Trotskyist tendencies represented in BASSO (there are no members of the ISO or the Spartcist League--thank goodness). Keating's description of BASSO is as inaccurate as his insulting caricatures of the IWW, but what else is new? Keating always hurls insults at those who challenge and expose his horse shit.

The Trots in question have a clear idea of what they want, and the backbone to fight for it; Ongerth on the other hand can be manipulated by anyone -- and I mean anyone -- who spouts the right-sounding, coal-burning, steam-engine era, pro-union line.

What an amazing coincidence! I was meeting with some coal-burning, steam engine driving short-line railroad workers just last night! They were complaining about some sort of "big horseless carriages with diesel engines" driven by 200 truckeres who wanted to join this organization from Stockton called the IWW or something. I couldn't stick around, because I had to meet with some ice delivery drivers who were complaining about this new-fangled machine called a "refrigerator". Being a "wax museum tard", I had never heard of such a device.

Seriously, though, Keating is spewing more lies and untruths. I have often disagreed with the other members of BASSO, and of all of the members of BASSO, my position has been closer to Keating's (in regards to the UFCW) than anyone else's (I will prove it later on), but where Keating and I disagree is over the potential for unions to overthrow wage slavery.

Keating is 100% convinced that unions are not only incapable of challenging wage slavery, but in fact unions are 100% in service of wage slavery. His citation of G Munis is usually the argument he uses to make that point.

I have argued, contrarily, that even though business unions (i.e. any labor union, including both trade unions, craft unions, industial unions, and amalgamated unions that is not anti-capitalist) are indeed an impediment to abolishing wage slavery, workers are still usually materially better off belonging to them than no union at all. The difference isn't much, and by no means are business unions the only alternative, but to argue that unions are the tool that capitalists use to enslave workers is sheer folly, and that claim is just not supported by the facts.

Statistically, workers who belong to unions earn a higher wage and greater material benefits than their non-union equivalents, and they have safer and saner working conditions.

Nations where the rate of unionization is higher tend to have better working conditions even in unionized work environments than nations with lower rates of unionization.

It is true, that most business union bureaucrats do indeed passively enable (or even actively support) the worsening of rank & file members' conditions by the employing class, and generally speaking that tendency increases as uncoerced, organized rank & file membership participation within the structure of the union decreases and vice-versa.

Sometimes, rank & file activists within a union (or even across several unions) form reformist or radical organizations to assist them in gaining greater organized rank & file control over their unions (examples include TDU, AUD, and Labor Notes). These organizations tend to fall short, because they make the false assumption that the problem can be solved with a substitution of one union bureaucrat or bureaucratic faction with another. Alternatively, some (like AUD) erroneously place their faith within the legal framework of the capitalist state and gain a few minor reforms at the expense of their unions being free of state interference.

Additionally, there are also cases of rank & file activity outside of the unions' structure altogether (and I should repeat, again, for Kevin's benefit, that I support such efforts, as long as they build rank & file workers' power and aim towards abolition of wage slavery).

There are also revolutionary unions, including the IWW, who are neither "counterrevolutionary" nor "outdated" (despite Kevin's vain attempts to claim otherwise--he cannot support those claims with any credible evidence).

Keating sees no role or redeeming value in unions at all. That is his prerogative. But I submit to you all, once again, HE HAS NEVER MADE A CONVINCING ARGUMENT THAT HIS PROPOSED STRATEGY FOR ABOLISHING WAGE SLAVERY (or "commodity relations" as he describes it) HAS ANY CHANCE OF SUCCESS. His position is deemed to have merit (by him and those paltry few that agree with him) because unions, and revolutionary movements that include unions) have thus far been unsuccessful (even to the point of self sabotage) in overthrowing wage slavery.

But that's the real trick, isn't it? It's very easy, but highly disingenuous to declare failure of a strategy you shun when your own hasn't been any more successful. It's even worse when your own strategy is in fact equally if not more spotty. Kevin often invokes the May Days uprisings in Paris of 1968, but as I stated before, this watershed event not only did not abolish wage slavery in France, it did quite the opposite! Meanwhile, Keating cannot find one instance in the ENTIRE HISTORY of the IWW where the IWW functioned in the role of "Labor Brokerage for the Bosses" against the will of its rank & file members. (In several instances, the IWW has lost rank & file members, precisely BECAUSE the IWW REFUSED to act as a shill for capitalism).

So what the hell is Keating's grounds to criticize? Answer: absolutely none.

Now here's where I prove that my position is closer to Kevin's than anyone else in BASSO's: I find little, if anything that I disagree with in his proposed leaflet (the only diagreement I have is that he considers the UFCW bureaucrats to be the entire UFCW. I do not. Most workers do see the union as a "third party" and that is unfortunate, because a huge, entrenched, rank & file organization, presumably one that represents "real rank and file organization and strength" would be a revolutionary union like the IWW. (In fact, at least for a while, the ILWU was an imperfect attempt to create a rank & file controlled ILA on the west coast. It was of course flawed and those flaws have grown over time).

The other members of BASSO do not agree with Kevin's proposed leaflet. I am personally too busy to give a shit about the issue, because the text of the leaflet is immaterial in comparison to what BASSO does to actually build "real rank and file organization and strength". The fucking leaflet could be blank or merely a graphic of a raised fist. Leaflets and propaganda are about 1% of what is needed to do that.

But, because Keating is a sectarian, ultra-left absolutist, anything less than 100% lockstep agreement with him is considered to "be a doormat for whatever perspective the 'Trots' come up with".

If Kevin had any intentions of working with BASSO in good faith (which I am convinced he does not), he would more honestly describe these happenings and try to work with BASSO instead of butting heads with everyone even over the SLIGHTEST disagreements. Of course, for Keating, less than 100% agreement with him is "being a doormat" rather than working within a rank & file democratic group. If Keating cannot even work with rank & file workers close to (but not 100% in agreement) with his perspective, he is utterly daft if he thinks he can convince the rest of the wage slave class (a great many of whom are pro-capitalist, unfortunately).

The problem with Keating, as I see it, is that he isn't actually interested in building an actual working class organization (whether it is called a "union" or something else) with "real rank and file organization and strength", because in such organization, you don't get 100% agreement on anything. The type of organization that Keating would create would merely be another doctrinaire, sectarian, ultra-leftist party.

It's Situationist, not "Situationism," you dope.

Who GIVE'S a fuck?!? Honestly, this is precise;y what I am saying. Keating requires 100% lockstep agreement with him.

If Gifford can't grasp why the G. Munis critique of unions is relevant in the context of the So.Cal. grocery strike, then I think he is clueless as well as inept and untrustworthy. You know, Gifford, the current-day version of the IWW has lots of guys like you in it. Why don't you join them? You won't have to do anything but sit around spouting hot air. They have a high tolerance for incompetence. It might be just the place for you.

I cannot and will not try to speak for Gifford, but I will comment on this statement, because again. Keating dredges up a meritless arguement that I have questioned him on repeatedly to no avail.

I suspect the reason why Gifford "cannot grasp" the relevance of the Munis pamphlet to the So. Cal. groecry strike, is because it has no such relevance.

What happened in this strike is not so much that the UFCW bureaucrats undermined the militancy of the rank & file (which they did), but that the rank & file was not prepared to prevent them from doing so, and in some cases were surprised when it happened.

I don't know about Gifford, but to me, the Preamble to the IWW Constitution provides a much better analysis of what went wrong in Southern California in less than 5% as long a document as the rambling G Munis text. Even the original poster doesn't utterly reject unions (and I have pointed this out ad nasuem).

It goes without saying, of course, that Keating has no credible argument against the IWW, so his only recourse is to hurl adolescent insults at it. I remind everyone, however, once again, that G Munis doesn't even MENTION the IWW in his text (which was written well after the IWW's early history.

Keating will scream and howl about how I am a member of the fossilized "Fake", "Potempkin Villiage", "Wax Museum", or "Pantomime" IWW (his EXACT words), but whereas the as described IWW is currently composed of workers fighting against the forces of capital (see my earlier post, or just visit the IWW web page if you need proof), there is no such organized resistence that I know of that exactly follows Keating's or Munis's proposed strategy (though it is not clear that Munis had anything beyond a copious and portentious critique of other strategies). So based on that, I have to ask who are the REAL denizens of the Potempkin Villiage, Comrade Keating?

Who REALLY has no revolutionary program or fresh ideas?

Who REALLY seems stuck in a wax museum?

by Steve Ongerth (intexile [at] iww.org)

First of all, I apologize (to the Indymedia Collective) for the multiple, identical posts; I experienced a slight computer bug. If you could delete three of the four, I'm sure everyone would appreciate it. :-)

Many thanks to "CP" for her supportive comments, but to be fair (and just to reinforce that I am not an opportunist who takes credit for other people's work, unlike "Many Names" Keating):

Members of COPWATCH do at least as much work as I and other IWW members in maintaining the Grassroots House in Berkeley, including cleaning up after others. I mostly do paper work; they do physical labor, such as gardening and actual construction work.

It is not I who signed up all the truckers, but in fact it was three other hard working members. I merely produced the truckers' website. The others did the lion's share of the work.

Finally, while I may agree with Trotskyists on a few issues, just because I believe that rank & file union members might succeed at wringing control of their unions from the bureaucrats, does not make me their "doormat". And, with all due respect to my comrade Trotskyists (whom Keating so disrespectfully refers to as "Icepick Heads" on numerous occasions), I do not believe that a workers' party is a necessarily helpful strategy (though I may be wrong. Like Keating, I, too, do not have a precise roadmap to utopia, but I at least have the honesty and good sense to admit it. Keating does not).

by Kevin Keating (tiborszamuely [at] yahoo.com)
If Steve Ongerth will briefly, very briefly, restate his main points, I'll deal with them. But I'm not plowing through a mass of words the length of 'The Brothers Karamazov' to do it.

1. Maybe he'll explain why the IWW has "union shops" that are actually small businesses where the owners are members of the IWW. What does owning your own business have to do with getting rid of capitalism? Marx talks about the working class abolishing itself -- after we get rid of the commodity economy. It doesn't mean we'll all become small business people instead of being exploited proletarians.

2. Ongerth mentions an article I wrote in 'Anarchy' magazine 11 years ago. The context of this was that the SF IWW Branch had a member who was a paid propagandist for the Nicaraguan Contras, and for Reagan's war policies in Central America. But the IWW was so hidebound by rules for its conduct drawn up at the time of World War One that they couldn't act in any way against this individual, for example by expelling him, or otherwise putting the word out about him. Is that the sort of thing you can expect from a valid radical or revolutionary organization?
by Steve Ongerth (intexile [at] iww.org)
<p>Well that's better. At least Keating is actually making a half-hearted effort to address the facts (for a change). Luckily for him, I have answers to his questions:</p>

<p><i>If Steve Ongerth will briefly, very briefly, restate his main points, I'll deal with them. But I'm not plowing through a mass of words the length of 'The Brothers Karamazov' to do it.</i></p>

<p>No, Kevin, I am not going to do your work for you. You're an adult, capable of doing ityourself. Since you have a penchant for writing long diatribes and screeds, you are certainly capable of responding to me on a point-by-point basis.</p>

<p><i>1. Maybe he'll explain why the IWW has "union shops" that are actually small businesses where the owners are members of the IWW. What does owning your own business have to do with getting rid of capitalism? Marx talks about the working class abolishing itself -- after we get rid of the commodity economy. It doesn't mean we'll all become small business people instead of being exploited proletarians.</i></p>

<p>That is an excellent question (or series of questions). Here's my answer:</p>

<p>The IWW has no shops that are small businesses as Keating describes, unless they are workers collectives where each member has equal control over the workplace.</p>

<p>Currently, the IWW in the Bay Area has no presence in any collectively run shops (although the workers in two such shops were IWW members in the past, this is no longer the case).</p>

<p>The 30-plus collectives that are members of the organization Network of Bay Area Workers' Collectives (NOBAWC) are not IWW shops.</p>

<p>As for Keating's interpretation of Marxism, I'm not sure how he arrives at his conclusion. There are as many different interpretations of Marxism as there are stars in the sky. Keating's is just one of many. One could easily argue that the Soviet Union under Stalin is just as illegitimate a bastardization of Marxism as a society of small shops (although the latter is actually close to the visions of Proudhon than Marx).</p>

<p>Personally, I am neither conceited or arrogant enough to pretend like I have any idea what utopia looks like, though I suspect it will be fairly complex. In the meantime, workers who achive some degree of control over the means of production will do so in a variety of ways, and one of tem might be workers' collectives. Of course, since Keating is a maximalist, and nothing short of 100% utopia yesterday is not good enough for him, workers' collectives are not good enough for him.</p>

<p>In any case, the record of workers collectives that are <i>not</i> unionized are less than stellar at best, and some workers at various NOBAWC shops have actually approached the IWW about organizing a union (and therefore establishing a layer of (currently non-existent) accountability) in the shop.</p>

<p><i>2. Ongerth mentions an article I wrote in 'Anarchy' magazine 11 years ago. The context of this was that the SF IWW Branch had a member who was a paid propagandist for the Nicaraguan Contras, and for Reagan's war policies in Central America. But the IWW was so hidebound by rules for its conduct drawn up at the time of World War One that they couldn't act in any way against this individual, for example by expelling him, or otherwise putting the word out about him. Is that the sort of thing you can expect from a valid radical or revolutionary organization?</i></p>

<p>Keating is referring to Stephen Schwartz. The incident in question happened long before I or any of the other currently active members joined the organization.</p>

<p>Schwartz was and is a complete nutcase. He is certifiable and cannot decide if he is a leftist or rightist. He is also a pathalogical liar. Keating, being young and naive, was conned and lead on by Schwartz until he discovered that Schwartz was crazy.</p>

<p>Schwartz joined the IWW (for opportunistic reasons) and meanwhile (apparently unbeknownst to the IWW) also worked at a (now defunct) new-right think tank called the Institute for Contemporary run by A Lawrence Chickering (another nut). Schwartz even wrote pro-Contra rants in the Chronicle op-ed section.</p>

<p>Having been conned by Schawrtz, Keating also joined the IWW (for equally opoortunistic reasons, because--at the time--Keating had no respect for the IWW as he stated in his "Anarchy" article) in order to "warn" them about Schwartz. While I have no minutes of the meeting that Keating refers to, it is apparent that Keating was unable to persuade the IWW members present to move to expel Keating. What happened afterwords was that Keating quit the IWW and Schwartz also quit shortly after.</p>

<p>Keating claims that the IWW "refused to act", because it was "bound to hidebound rules", but knowing Keating's lack of tact in meetings that I have attended, and having discussed the situation with one or two members of the IWW who <i>had</i> been present at the meeting in question, Keating was arrogant, boorish, and unwilling to listen to the other members present at the meeting. It's not that the IWW was <i>unwilling</i> to expel Schwartz, but rather that Keating was unable to allow the IWW to weigh the evidence first and use due process. Such attitudes are typical of Stalinists and certainly not part of any utopian society that *I* would ever want to live in.</p>

<p>Keating cites one member as having said that "working for a (right wing think tank) is not grounds for expulsion from the IWW". He doesn't specify whether or not the member who said that was aware that Schwartz was a worker (with no propagandistic functions) or an active fellow or scholar at the aforementioned think tank. Certainly the IWW wouldn't deny membership to a rank & file worker at an evil corporation, such as a logger or a miner, simply because the corporation was an evil organization (the IWW would certainly argue that taking over the corporation and ending its evil practices is one of our goals).</p>

<p>So when Keating argues that the IWW is "beholden to hidebound practices" it is clear to me that he has no patience for civil liberties or due process.</p>

<p>Of course, knowing what I know about him, Were the same incident were to happen again, Schwartz would be out on his ass in a heartbeat.</p>

<p>In fact, twice I have been party to heated debates over whether or not to accept the applications of two potential members who were suspected as being employers and not wage slaves (one of them an Earth First!er who shall remain nameless). In one case, the potential member was found to be an employer and denied membership. In the second case, it was determined, after careful investigation, that the potential member had been an employer in the past, but was not currently an employer, and therefore eligible for membership (that member has since let their dues lapse in any case).</p>

<p>Once again, Keating doesn't have all of the facts.</p>
by Steve Ongerth (intexile [at] iww.org)

Well that's better. At least Keating is actually making a half-hearted effort to address the facts (for a change). Luckily for him, I have answers to his questions:

If Steve Ongerth will briefly, very briefly, restate his main points, I'll deal with them. But I'm not plowing through a mass of words the length of 'The Brothers Karamazov' to do it.

No, Kevin, I am not going to do your work for you. You're an adult, capable of doing ityourself. Since you have a penchant for writing long diatribes and screeds, you are certainly capable of responding to me on a point-by-point basis.

1. Maybe he'll explain why the IWW has "union shops" that are actually small businesses where the owners are members of the IWW. What does owning your own business have to do with getting rid of capitalism? Marx talks about the working class abolishing itself -- after we get rid of the commodity economy. It doesn't mean we'll all become small business people instead of being exploited proletarians.

That is an excellent question (or series of questions). Here's my answer:

The IWW has no shops that are small businesses as Keating describes, unless they are workers collectives where each member has equal control over the workplace.

Currently, the IWW in the Bay Area has no presence in any collectively run shops (although the workers in two such shops were IWW members in the past, this is no longer the case).

The 30-plus collectives that are members of the organization Network of Bay Area Workers' Collectives (NOBAWC) are not IWW shops.

As for Keating's interpretation of Marxism, I'm not sure how he arrives at his conclusion. There are as many different interpretations of Marxism as there are stars in the sky. Keating's is just one of many. One could easily argue that the Soviet Union under Stalin is just as illegitimate a bastardization of Marxism as a society of small shops (although the latter is actually close to the visions of Proudhon than Marx).

Personally, I am neither conceited or arrogant enough to pretend like I have any idea what utopia looks like, though I suspect it will be fairly complex. In the meantime, workers who achive some degree of control over the means of production will do so in a variety of ways, and one of tem might be workers' collectives. Of course, since Keating is a maximalist, and nothing short of 100% utopia yesterday is not good enough for him, workers' collectives are not good enough for him.

In any case, the record of workers collectives that are not unionized are less than stellar at best, and some workers at various NOBAWC shops have actually approached the IWW about organizing a union (and therefore establishing a layer of (currently non-existent) accountability) in the shop.

2. Ongerth mentions an article I wrote in 'Anarchy' magazine 11 years ago. The context of this was that the SF IWW Branch had a member who was a paid propagandist for the Nicaraguan Contras, and for Reagan's war policies in Central America. But the IWW was so hidebound by rules for its conduct drawn up at the time of World War One that they couldn't act in any way against this individual, for example by expelling him, or otherwise putting the word out about him. Is that the sort of thing you can expect from a valid radical or revolutionary organization?

Keating is referring to Stephen Schwartz. The incident in question happened long before I or any of the other currently active members joined the organization.

Schwartz was and is a complete nutcase. He is certifiable and cannot decide if he is a leftist or rightist. He is also a pathalogical liar. Keating, being young and naive, was conned and lead on by Schwartz until he discovered that Schwartz was crazy.

Schwartz joined the IWW (for opportunistic reasons) and meanwhile (apparently unbeknownst to the IWW) also worked at a (now defunct) new-right think tank called the Institute for Contemporary run by A Lawrence Chickering (another nut). Schwartz even wrote pro-Contra rants in the Chronicle op-ed section.

Having been conned by Schawrtz, Keating also joined the IWW (for equally opoortunistic reasons, because--at the time--Keating had no respect for the IWW as he stated in his "Anarchy" article) in order to "warn" them about Schwartz. While I have no minutes of the meeting that Keating refers to, it is apparent that Keating was unable to persuade the IWW members present to move to expel Keating. What happened afterwords was that Keating quit the IWW and Schwartz also quit shortly after.

Keating claims that the IWW "refused to act", because it was "bound to hidebound rules", but knowing Keating's lack of tact in meetings that I have attended, and having discussed the situation with one or two members of the IWW who had been present at the meeting in question, Keating was arrogant, boorish, and unwilling to listen to the other members present at the meeting. It's not that the IWW was unwilling to expel Schwartz, but rather that Keating was unable to allow the IWW to weigh the evidence first and use due process. Such attitudes are typical of Stalinists and certainly not part of any utopian society that *I* would ever want to live in.

Keating cites one member as having said that "working for a (right wing think tank) is not grounds for expulsion from the IWW". He doesn't specify whether or not the member who said that was aware that Schwartz was a worker (with no propagandistic functions) or an active fellow or scholar at the aforementioned think tank. Certainly the IWW wouldn't deny membership to a rank & file worker at an evil corporation, such as a logger or a miner, simply because the corporation was an evil organization (the IWW would certainly argue that taking over the corporation and ending its evil practices is one of our goals).

So when Keating argues that the IWW is "beholden to hidebound practices" it is clear to me that he has no patience for civil liberties or due process.

Of course, knowing what I know about him, Were the same incident were to happen again, Schwartz would be out on his ass in a heartbeat.

In fact, twice I have been party to heated debates over whether or not to accept the applications of two potential members who were suspected as being employers and not wage slaves (one of them an Earth First!er who shall remain nameless). In one case, the potential member was found to be an employer and denied membership. In the second case, it was determined, after careful investigation, that the potential member had been an employer in the past, but was not currently an employer, and therefore eligible for membership (that member has since let their dues lapse in any case).

Once again, Keating doesn't have all of the facts.

by Kevin Keating
It's nice to read that today the IWW would expell a guy like Steve Schwartz, but to praise your discretion in this would be like saying, congratulations on finally figuring out how to put your pants on without assistance.

I didn't join the IWW in the mid-1980's; I joined it while passing through Chicago in August 1981.

The IWW allows small businessperson -- oh, whoops, excuse me, directly-democratic collective members! -- to join because there was a big influx of hippie counter-culture types at the end of the 1960 and throughout the 1970's. The real wobblies had all died out, or were very old, the hippies brought along their deluded hippie'd-out ideology, and Ongerth knows as well as I do that in those days the IWW had no life in it as any kind of class struggle organization. People joined for the same reasons I did; nostalgia for some idea of what the IWW had once been.

Saying the working class will liberate itself from wage slavery by owning their own self-managed capitalist enterprises is only a few steps away from claiming that employee stock ownership spells the downfall of capitalism.

Maybe later we should address you defense of the counter-revolutionary role played by the CNT in the Spanish Civil War.
by K
You are right to see that the self-managed business jazz has more in common with Proudhon that with Marx.
by Steve Ongerth (intexile [at] iww.org)

Well, at least Keating is responding to (a few of) my points, it only took about six or seven responses to his insults to get him to do that (of course he still deems it necessary to lace his responses with insults).

The IWW allows small businessperson -- oh, whoops, excuse me, directly-democratic collective members! -- to join because there was a big influx of hippie counter-culture types at the end of the 1960 and throughout the 1970's. The real wobblies had all died out, or were very old, the hippies brought along their deluded hippie'd-out ideology, and Ongerth knows as well as I do that in those days the IWW had no life in it as any kind of class struggle organization. People joined for the same reasons I did; nostalgia for some idea of what the IWW had once been.

That was long before I joined (ten years ago) and it certainly has absolutely no relevance to the present day. Yet, you continue to insist that that the IWW still resembles your brief tenure of almost two decades ago. Based on that, I suspect your description of the IWW in the 1980s is equally flawed and biased.

Saying the working class will liberate itself from wage slavery by owning their own self-managed capitalist enterprises is only a few steps away from claiming that employee stock ownership spells the downfall of capitalism.

That is debatable, and it grossly oversimplifies the issue. One can achieve "ownership" of "capitalist" enterprises in at least two ways. (I must dispute your definition of "capitalism" however. Capitalism is the institutionalized theft of the product of others' labor, not the buying and selling of commodities per se, though one could argue that the latter has its own set of problems even outside of wage slavery). One could start a collective enterprise or one could gain collective control of a business enterprise.

In the case of the former example, I tend to agree with Keating, that such an act is not at all revolutionary. The latter example, however, is quite revolutionary (what's the alternative, Kevin? leave the boss in control? Shut down the enterprise altogether? If there is another course, please explain it to me. Yes, I know, you seek to eliminate all forms of commodity relations entirely. I agree with that goal to an extent, but such an achievement is highly unlikely without sustained, long term, mass-based organizing by workers. If a small group of workers gains collective control over a business on course to that goal, that is hardly counterrevolutionary, in my opinion).

Maybe later we should address you defense of the counter-revolutionary role played by the CNT in the Spanish Civil War.

EXCUSE ME, Kevin, but as I explained several times, the "counterrevolutionary" charge is horse-shit. What undermined the CNT was a tactical error, not a deliberate program of counterrevolutionary respression. In fact, the error committed by a specific few CNT leaders was holding true to their anarchist principles rather than taking over the government (a violation of those principles) when the opportunity was presented to them by the Socialist government. Munis sectarian screed against the CNT is a matter of trying to fix the barn door after the horse has broken through. What relevance this has to the present day escapse me in any case. The next time a socialist government offers me a chance to take it over, I'll have to consider the situation, not pull out my left-radical bible. Since even an unlikely scenario as that is entirely unlikely in the next few decades this disvcussion is utterly pointless.

by Kevin Keating
Here's an article which addresses in practice some of the issues debated in our rancorous exchange. "Anti-Capitalist Actions Around Mass Transit in San Francisco, 1993 to 1995" attempts to show how we, the wage-slave class, can fight for what we need outside of the historically bankrupt straight-jacket of the union form:

http://www.infoshop.org/myep/love2.html
by PS:
...can be found here:

Class Against Class

http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/index.html
by Steve Ongerth

As for the first link posted by Keating, I already addressed that before. Here's what I said about it then:

It's not about the IWW at all, but rather about Keating's laughable attempt to claim credit for the failed attempt to increase San Francisco Muni bus fares during the Frank Jordan administration. Even if Keating could take full credit (which is doubtful, because it's obvious to me he opportunistically added his efforts to a widespread opposition), the issue was settled by an ELECTORAL VOTE, hardly an ultra-left, revolutionary position. The last time I checked, Muni fares increased by 25% last year. Looks like we need a few more "advanced moments", eh?

Oh sure, there are a few comments about the utterly conservative attitudes of the SEIU 790 bureaucracy in regards to BART fare increases (and notice that Keating never makes a distinction between union bureaucrats as opposed to rank & file union members). The IWW would be the first to criticize these bureaucrats (and often are, though often we don't get the credit for what we do), but where are his specific comments about the IWW?!? I don't see any!

As for the second link, it's very interesting, but mostly theoretical. It's also full of treatises on a variety of subjects, including critiques of trade unions, but it doesn't directly address anything I have said in this "debate".

Keating's critique would carry more weight if he could actually articulate his own vision (even if it incorperated the ideas of others) instead of simply pointing to other wholesale treatises.

by K.K.
In the most consistent tradition of pro-union leftists, Ongerth is, once again, a liar -- or he is too stupid to read and understand the fucking article I posted. The article doesn't attempt to claim credit for sinking the attempted fare increase.

I'm interested in communicating with thinking people, not Steve Ongerth. Any takers out there?
by Steve Ongerth (intexile [at] iww.org)

Of course Keating isn't interested in communicating with me, because I will challenge him on just about every point, and Iusually will have the better argument.

My argument isn't whether or not Keating is claiming credit for stopping the fare increase.

My argument is that Keating's article is not conclusive proof that unions are useless, nor are there even any attempts in the article to argue that the IWW is in any way counterrevolutionary.

Keating doesn't like it, so he howls:

I'm interested in communicating with thinking people, not Steve Ongerth. Any takers out there?

In other words, Keating doesn't like being challenged by someone who's at least his intellectual equal (I am waiting to hear the barage of insults hurled at me for saying this, but I am willing to risk that, because this discussion serves to show how easily Keating hangs himself if given the adequate amount of rope).

Had enough Kevin?

My point is that Keating is holding up this article as a demonstration of "how we, the wage-slave class, can fight for what we need outside of the historically bankrupt straight-jacket of the union form:" (as if anyone has ever seriously even claimed that unions were the only means for doing this).

The point is that not only was the issue solved through a different, though equally "historically bankrupt straight-jacket" (in this case an electoral vote), it wasn't truely solved, because recently Muni fares increased by 25% (Keating's similar attempts to thwart BART increases have been completely unsuccessful).

Again, Keating is the pot calling the kettle Black. My dispute with him onthis issue is not whether or not he takes credit for what happened in the campaign. My dispute is primarily with the way he spins this campaign as somehow vindicating his ultra-left anti-union dogma (which it doesn't). It really doesn't matter whether or not Keating is responsible for the outcome of the campaign, because either way, it was essentially reformist (though I am not opposed to a reformist solution in the short term, if that's the best you can do).

In other words, Keating is being intellectually dishonest by claiming that that I have a dispute with who deserves credit for a past campaign, when my actual dispute is how he spins it. Keating knows this, and as usual he is primarily interested in acting morally and intellectually superior, rather than having an honest discussion.

by Steve Ongerth (intexile [at] iww.org)

Of course Keating isn't interested in communicating with me, because I will challenge him on just about every point, and Iusually will have the better argument.

My argument isn't whether or not Keating is claiming credit for stopping the fare increase.

My argument is that Keating's article is not conclusive proof that unions are useless, nor are there even any attempts in the article to argue that the IWW is in any way counterrevolutionary.

Keating doesn't like it, so he howls:

I'm interested in communicating with thinking people, not Steve Ongerth. Any takers out there?

In other words, Keating doesn't like being challenged by someone who's at least his intellectual equal (I am waiting to hear the barage of insults hurled at me for saying this, but I am willing to risk that, because this discussion serves to show how easily Keating hangs himself if given the adequate amount of rope).

Had enough Kevin?

My point is that Keating is holding up this article as a demonstration of "how we, the wage-slave class, can fight for what we need outside of the historically bankrupt straight-jacket of the union form:" (as if anyone has ever seriously even claimed that unions were the only means for doing this).

The point is that not only was the issue solved through a different, though equally "historically bankrupt straight-jacket" (in this case an electoral vote), it wasn't truely solved, because recently Muni fares increased by 25% (Keating's similar attempts to thwart BART increases have been completely unsuccessful).

Again, Keating is the pot calling the kettle Black. My dispute with him onthis issue is not whether or not he takes credit for what happened in the campaign. My dispute is primarily with the way he spins this campaign as somehow vindicating his ultra-left anti-union dogma (which it doesn't). It really doesn't matter whether or not Keating is responsible for the outcome of the campaign, because either way, it was essentially reformist (though I am not opposed to a reformist solution in the short term, if that's the best you can do).

In other words, Keating is being intellectually dishonest by claiming that that I have a dispute with who deserves credit for a past campaign, when my actual dispute is how he spins it. Keating knows this, and as usual he is primarily interested in acting morally and intellectually superior, rather than having an honest discussion.

by Steve Ongerth (intexile [at] iww.org)

Of course Keating isn't interested in communicating with me, because I will challenge him on just about every point, and Iusually will have the better argument.

My argument isn't whether or not Keating is claiming credit for stopping the fare increase.

My argument is that Keating's article is not conclusive proof that unions are useless, nor are there even any attempts in the article to argue that the IWW is in any way counterrevolutionary.

Keating doesn't like it, so he howls:

I'm interested in communicating with thinking people, not Steve Ongerth. Any takers out there?

In other words, Keating doesn't like being challenged by someone who's at least his intellectual equal (I am waiting to hear the barage of insults hurled at me for saying this, but I am willing to risk that, because this discussion serves to show how easily Keating hangs himself if given the adequate amount of rope).

Had enough Kevin?

My point is that Keating is holding up this article as a demonstration of "how we, the wage-slave class, can fight for what we need outside of the historically bankrupt straight-jacket of the union form:" (as if anyone has ever seriously even claimed that unions were the only means for doing this).

The point is that not only was the issue solved through a different, though equally "historically bankrupt straight-jacket" (in this case an electoral vote), it wasn't truely solved, because recently Muni fares increased by 25% (Keating's similar attempts to thwart BART increases have been completely unsuccessful).

Again, Keating is the pot calling the kettle Black. My dispute with him onthis issue is not whether or not he takes credit for what happened in the campaign. My dispute is primarily with the way he spins this campaign as somehow vindicating his ultra-left anti-union dogma (which it doesn't). It really doesn't matter whether or not Keating is responsible for the outcome of the campaign, because either way, it was essentially reformist (though I am not opposed to a reformist solution in the short term, if that's the best you can do).

In other words, Keating is being intellectually dishonest by claiming that that I have a dispute with who deserves credit for a past campaign, when my actual dispute is how he spins it. Keating knows this, and as usual he is primarily interested in acting morally and intellectually superior, rather than having an honest discussion.

by Steve Ongerth (intexile [at] iww.org)

Of course Keating isn't interested in communicating with me, because I will challenge him on just about every point, and Iusually will have the better argument.

My argument isn't whether or not Keating is claiming credit for stopping the fare increase.

My argument is that Keating's article is not conclusive proof that unions are useless, nor are there even any attempts in the article to argue that the IWW is in any way counterrevolutionary.

Keating doesn't like it, so he howls:

I'm interested in communicating with thinking people, not Steve Ongerth. Any takers out there?

In other words, Keating doesn't like being challenged by someone who's at least his intellectual equal (I am waiting to hear the barage of insults hurled at me for saying this, but I am willing to risk that, because this discussion serves to show how easily Keating hangs himself if given the adequate amount of rope).

Had enough Kevin?

My point is that Keating is holding up this article as a demonstration of "how we, the wage-slave class, can fight for what we need outside of the historically bankrupt straight-jacket of the union form:" (as if anyone has ever seriously even claimed that unions were the only means for doing this).

The point is that not only was the issue solved through a different, though equally "historically bankrupt straight-jacket" (in this case an electoral vote), it wasn't truely solved, because recently Muni fares increased by 25% (Keating's similar attempts to thwart BART increases have been completely unsuccessful).

Again, Keating is the pot calling the kettle Black. My dispute with him onthis issue is not whether or not he takes credit for what happened in the campaign. My dispute is primarily with the way he spins this campaign as somehow vindicating his ultra-left anti-union dogma (which it doesn't). It really doesn't matter whether or not Keating is responsible for the outcome of the campaign, because either way, it was essentially reformist (though I am not opposed to a reformist solution in the short term, if that's the best you can do).

In other words, Keating is being intellectually dishonest by claiming that that I have a dispute with who deserves credit for a past campaign, when my actual dispute is how he spins it. Keating knows this, and as usual he is primarily interested in acting morally and intellectually superior, rather than having an honest discussion.

by Steve Ongerth
That bug is back again.

The order of the paragraphs in my response were somehow rearranged. The Fifth through Eighth paragraph as shown belong after the last paragraph as shown.

Of course, I suspect that only Kevin and I are reading this at this point anyway, but there's always hope.
by aaron
There's going to be a community flying picket in support of the hotel workers, starting at Union Square (Powell and Geary) at 7:00PM on Sunday, October 17.

the first flying picket, held last Sunday, was splendid. let's make this next one even better than that.
_________

by tran
the so cal strike was a long time ago and in a diffrent economic time frame. to expect the same results would be foolish. with so many out of work and ready to make some fast cash this union is in big trouble
by joe hill
If you just want to earn some quick cash why not become a temp worker. Than you can be paid for having your head up your ass.
Afterall the economic times have not changed so much between the So Cal grocery strike and the most recent 2 week strike and subsequent lockout of workers, and workers still have the choice of whether or not to scab. Even day laborers in the Mission have refused to work as scabs for the hotels. Although Culinary Academy students have been fooled into working for less than the union cooks regularly get paid for, and have probably even not really thought about how they are also screwing themselves as they screw the hotel workers in becoming the lowest of the low - a scab.

solidarity forever - the ghost of joe hill
by temp slave
Temp workers have their heads up their asses? What a jerk you sound like. You wobblies are seriously fucked up.
by Steve Ongerth (intexile [at] iww.org)
I'm not sure whom this guy calling himself "Joe Hill" is, but he is not speaking on behalf of the IWW in any official way.

The IWW has no problem with temp workers joining and organizing. If the IWW has any opposition to temp workers, its directed at the employing class who created the "temp" in order to deny workers benefits and job security.

'nuff said.
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