HEAVY WEATHER AHEAD FOR US LABOR
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
With the passage of crippling new anti-union legislation by the Congress that they had themselves elected, and with with no sign of a settlement, there is penetrating into the lulling euphoria in which the majority of US workers have been living in these recent years of prosperity; sobering realization that they are and generalized offensive, on both the legislative and inlustrial fronts, by the masters of American capitalism
The gravity of the situation seems not to have been sensed at first by the steelworkers' particularly class-collaborationist bureaucratic tops, who, with their businessas-usual business unionism, approached contract negotiations with the idea of ending up with a 10 cent an hour raise, while the steel companies hiked prices $4 a ton. This would have been the continuance of 1946, when the steel barons used the pretext of an 18½ cent an hour raise to boost steel about $5 a ton. Since then there have been ten wage-raises for the steelworkers and 22 price-raises by the steel companies - many of the latter even in the face of a drop in the rest of the price index.
This pattern has always served bourgeois press to howl that the wage-raises begat a wageprice spiral that was responsible for America's inflation. But this time it was harder to thump this mouldy tub because the pretext had been thoroughly disproved by evidence presented to the Kefauver Committee of the US Senate, which demonstrated that the steel companies could easily grant wage increases without any rise in steel prices. The last financial reports of the big steel companies made this dazzlingly evident. Net profits for the first half of 1959 were $254,900,000, 88% higher than 1958. Because of the recession? But US Steel's earnings spurted from $9.14 per ton in the second quarter of 1954 to $19.31 in the exactly comparable last quarter of 1958. US and Bethlehem Steel, at current market values, represent a 1,000 capital gain in ten years — while at the same time some $10,000 million of new plant was built purely out of profits. Even the conservative New York Herald Tribune revealed on 3 July 1957 that in the 1946-56 period steel prices had risen 115% while labor costs rose only 30. The steelworkers' own statistics showed that the ratio was $3 of higher prices for every $1 of wage increases. And a responsible private statistician worked out, frontation of workers' time and company profits. that US Steel is making a profit of $2.28 per man hour — while moaning that it cannot afford to give a 15 cent an hour wage increase without an inflationary boost in steel prices.
The evidence was so conclusive that even a sector of the bourgeois press called for an anti-inflationary cut in steel prices - offset, of course, by a freezing of the steelworkers' wages, already gnawed into by the inflation since the last contract. So it is understandable that the top steel union leader David McDonald went into negotiations with a feeling of confidence that the usual deal could be extracted from the companies without too long a strike.
What he ran into, on the contrary, was a complete counter-attack on the very foundations of steel unionism.
The companies' intransigence on wages was largely pro forma; but before they would even talk about wages, they demanded fundamental changes in contract provisions about schedules and working standards. The 1947 contract had standardized the complex structure of steel labor into 32 job classifications; the lowest got the minimum contract pay rate; each higher classification a differential (originally 31/2 cents an hour, now more). For anything not classifiable, the now famous Clause 2B provided that "past prac-
11 tices" would be determinant. The classifications protected workers against abusive "down-grading,"
soon turned out to be steel labor's greatest defensive weapon against the companies' indefatigable efforts to impose harder conditions on already hard enough toil. McDoestimated that, if 2B were eliminated, the companies could eventually throw out 100,000 workers "rationalizing" speed-up and overload.
And it is precisely on these protective measures that the companies are determined, and mined with a fierceness that jarred labor's negotiators. What is happening?
What is happening is that the steady increase in modernization of processes, and especially automation, is so increasing productivity per man that the workers are, under the capitalist system, working themselves out of jobs.
This situation was not unforeseen. Several years ago, when the implications of automation were sensed, there was a spate of articles on its effects on employment in publications of every level in every sector; but in the US notorious for tiring quickly of nine-day wonders, the subject dropped from sight as suddenly as it had appeared - without (what is graver) labor's reacting to the inescapable deductions by preparing concrete plans, and driving to put them into immediate and forceful application.
Advance portents were not wanting. The most serious was the way in which industry climbed back out of the recession in terms of production while leaving unreabsorbed a high proportion of those the recession had made unemployed. This should have been a shrieking alarm signal to The pians of maopy canital, rhermore, had been
The plans of monopoly capital, furthermore,
The authoritative Business Week in early July published a widely-quoted admission that, way back in 1957, there was a series of round-robin talks among the labor relations officials of the electric manufacturing, steel, and auto industries. These set the stage for the "tough" bargaining that has come to a climax
Talks among these industries are continuing. Within the past week, spokesmen in the electrical manufacturing and auto industries have acknowledged that their companies are keeping in close touch with the steel talks in New York. One put his hand to his chin, commenting: "We're involved up to here."
The practical preparations for the implementation of this policy were quite openly made. As we noted at the the tremendous spurt in steel production was far beyond the rhythm of recovery from recession. Its purpose was plainly stockpiling in preparation for a showdown. Steel inventories already held by customers are now revealed to have reached 21 million tons. while more than three and a half million were stocked by the steel producers themselves. And though a survey the 21 September Times of London shows numerous smaller steel users forced to reduce production, it seems probable that the major users, especially auto with its seasonal shutdown for model changeover, will be able to hold out till near the end of the year.
Furthermore. if union militancy holds out, as it should, the bosses still have in reserve the weapon of the TaftHartley Act's provision whereby the government can force the workers back to work for an 80-day period, rhich, by operating at near-capacity the steel industry an again build up stockpiles. And Washington's attitud in the titanic struggle is perfectly obvious from the recent
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Autumn, follows immediately after number 6, Spring. We have not, however clature, and the explanation is as follows. The current series of Fourth International began on a schedule of:
n which the current number, appearing at the end of September ummer issue; Winter issues hereafter will appear at the end of December; Spring issues at the end of March
12 passage by Congress of one of the worst anti-union bills in all its dishonorable history.
Belatedly, very belatedly, the leaders of US labor are beginning to recognize that this is not just one more strike, but probably the most critical strike since the stormy '30s, and that the steel barons' demands for the elimination of the protective provisions about schedules and working tandards are the opening broadside of a merciless longterm attack aimed at the complete taming of US labor. The labor leaders' first reactions were in the form of practical solidarity: a gift to the beleaguered steelworkers of one million dollars (with another million promised) trom
United Auto Workers, and the decision of the A FLCIO Conference at San Francisco to contribute one hour's pay a month trom each ot its 12,500,000 members - an aid that might total a million dollars a day. But measures of solidarity, though sound enough, are quite inadequate in the present extremely grave situation. What is needed is an end to business unionism and class collaborationism and their replacement by a fighting class policy on both industrial and legislative fronts. tempt to use the technological unemployment from automation and other advances in productivity fire workers and smash unions, is to impose the sliding scale of hours — specifically, in the concrete circumstances "30 hours' work for 40 hours' pal betrayal"
of the US A,
On the legislative field, the answer to the of the "friends" whom labor itself voted into office at the last elections, and the probable coming use of the vicious
• The an issue, ac, there will bet
and Summer issues at the end of June.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL strike-breaking, provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, is weeping and hand-wringing, but an abandonment of the false policy, proven again and again to be hopeless, of sup-
"lesser-evil" capitalist candidates, in favor of immediate practical steps to create a Labor Party based on the unions.
proposals, which have repeatedly arisen from more militant sectors of the rank and file, have been dismissed as "impractical," "too advanced," "utopian," by the top union bureaucrats. Now that the results of the bureaucrats' "practicality" are becoming, grimly evident, the ranks of labor are going to do some hard rethinking, and the revolutionary USA must make clear to them that "30 for 40" and a Labor arty are the answers — not just as long-range propaanda goals, but as urgent agitational slogans f US labor is not to be demoralized by a severe defeat.
To those of other nations to whom it may appear that the sleeping giant of Us labor cannot be aroused in time, it should be recalled that one of its national characteristics has always been the abruptness and violence of its awakenings. For example, millions of men who in 1934 had scarcely heard of unions, by 1936 had not only poured into forming the then tremendously militant no d, bat mascine hase dayide trikes, sprengtat one bound, to what was in revolutionary step, the full occupation of the struck factories. It is, as we hope the steel barons will soon find to their own discomfiture, too early to cross off the American workers.
1959. The matter is one only of seasonal nomen-
Trotsky 80th Anniversary Memorial Section