[The following article appeared in the January issue of Was Tun, organ of the Gruppe Internationale Marxisten (International Marxist Group), West German section of the Fourth International. It deals with recent developments in the IGM (Industriegewerkschaft Metall -- Metal Industry Union), the largest and most powerful union in West Germany.
[The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
In the latest contract poll taken among iron and steel workers, some 66 percent of those voting (and this adds up to about 52 percent of the total IGM membership in the steel industry) voted against the contract negotiated by the bureaucracy. (It provided for an 8.5 percent wage increase, that is, 46 pfennigs.)
Loderer [a top IGM bureaucrat] said the results of the vote would have "internal consequences" for the union. And when Loderer speaks of "internal consequences," he knows what he's aiming at. He means strengthening the organizational and structural mechanisms of bureaucratic control over the membership. He means intensifying attacks on trade-union democracy and, at the same time, "tightening up the hierarchical bonds."
As early as 1970, Otto Brenner expressed concern about "tightening up hierarchical bonds." It was during an executive board investigation of the causes of the September 1969 strikes. At that time, like today, bureaucratic control over the membership had been badly shaken. At that time, 10,000 workers tore off the bureaucracy's straitjacket on wage policy and conducted wildcat strikes to win wage hikes on their own.
Now an absolute majority of the organized steelworkers, with the most progressive and militant workers in the lead, have rejected the bureaucracy's wage policy in the current round of contract negotiations. In so doing, they have also rejected assaults on their wages, the politics of "social partnership," and the renunciation of the workers' immediate interests for the sake of some "stabilization policy" whose only real content is stabilizing the employer's profit at the expense of the worker's income. And if it came to a vote in the entire metal industry, the membership's judgment of the bureaucracy's policy would come through just as clearly.
But the important thing about the shaking of the bureaucracy's control over the membership during this round of wage talks is not so much the numerical result of the contract vote, but rather the potentially explosive class situation that arises from a clash of various factors: on the one hand a contract that will mean an actual cut in real wages and the employers' and SP-controlled government's efforts to come up with a stabilization pact; and on the other hand, the membership's highly developed willingness to struggle and its rejection of the bureaucracy's policies.
In 1970, the bureaucracy was able to reestablish its control over the membership -- control that had been badly shaken by the September 1969 strikes -- by advancing relatively high wage demands (on the order of 15 percent increases) and by winning relatively high settlements (on the order of 11 percent), in fact, the highest increases of the postwar period.
But this way out of the crisis, which in 1970 was completely tolerated by the ruling Social Democracy, will hardly be open to the bureaucracy anymore -- in 1973 after the challenge to its control that was raised during this round of contract talks. It's very clear what the capitalists now want from the bureaucrats: They expect them to agree to new and more subtle forms of eroding the workers' bargaining rights than presently exist under Konzertierte Aktion.*
To achieve these new forms, the capitalists will not so much aim at open stabilization pacts. They know the bureaucracy could not put them over on the membership. So they will instead go in for secret deals arranged among small circles of the union tops and backed up by state guarantees -- deals that are meant above all to lead to binding agreements on wage policy.
The ruling Social Democracy, and especially [Finance Minister] Helmut Schmidt, have completely adopted this capitalist notion of controlling wage struggles from the center, and at the same time have thought up flanking measures (like conjunctural surtaxes) in order to "tax away" any occasional wage increases that may fall outside the scope of the secret agreements.
This "stabilization program," which both the Social Democracy and the employers fully support and want to get passed as soon as possible, leaves the bureaucracy not the slightest maneuvering room to carry out a 1970-style wage policy.
Loderer knows all this quite well. That's why he and his fellow bureaucrats are not talking today (as they did after September 1969) about "grabbing a healthy chunk of the pie" to make up for the lag in wages that was created by their own policy. Instead Loderer speaks about the necessity of "internal consequences," because he is clearly aware both of the existing political situation and the miserably narrow perspectives of the bureaucracy. And he therefore knows that the reestablishing and safeguarding of bureaucratic control of the membership is possible only by pressing the demolition of trade-union democracy and the "tightening up of hierarchical bonds."
It is fairly obvious where the hierarchical bonds are most eroded. It is above all where the economic struggles of the working class, uninterrupted and still growing since the September 1969 strikes, have had their most direct internal effects on the unions -- namely, the shop-steward committees, the membership meetings on the state of the contract negotiations, and similar rank-and-file bodies that are subject to control by ordinary workers.
The bureaucracy's systematic twenty-year-long campaign to depoliticize and even liquidate these institutions has today been largely defeated. More and more, these bodies are becoming the centers of political discussion, training, and action inside the unions. In these bodies, the class-conscious workers are waging a struggle against the bureaucracy's careerist hacks and are fighting for the implementation of a struggle-alternative to the bureaucracy's policy.
There is no doubt about it: Loderer's "internal consequences" will be consciously directed against these bodies, will be aimed at bringing them under the bureaucracy's control.
The Crisis of Bureaucratic Control and the Need to Build a Left Tendency in the Unions
The fact that the bureaucracy's control over the membership is more and more often being thrown into crisis is just as little an accident as the fact that it was able to raise itself above the membership in the first place. The underlying conditions that account for its ascendancy were the economic and political stability of the postwar reconstruction period, sticking to the status quo in wage negotiations, and the almost imperceptible amount of motion that existed in the working class up until 1969. The fading of these factors is the direct cause of the bureaucracy's crisis.
As a force maintaining the integration of the unions and preserving order, the bureaucracy is ideologically and politically bound to the capitalist system. On the other hand, to play this role it must be accepted by the workers as the direct representative of their interests. For the reasons we have laid out, the bureaucracy was able to live with this contradiction pretty much without any great difficulties until the 1966-67 crisis.
But because of the need to increase the rate of exploitation and because of the sharpening of interimperialist competition, the capitalist class had to centralize its regulation of wages, and this was carried out through Konzertierte Aktion, with the participation of the Social Democratic government and the agreement of the trade-union bureaucracy.
This brought masses of trade unionists to the understanding that their leadership was in no way concerned with their immediate interests but, rather, that the bureaucracy's wage policy was aimed at safeguarding the profits of the capitalists, directly against the interests of the membership.
The steelworkers' response to this was the September 1969 strikes, and this in turn set off a continuously developing process of struggle in the factories and conflict in the unions, carried out through the reactivated rank-and-file bodies.
Through this process, the bureaucracy's whole wage policy -- its aims, its basic execution, and its practical effects -- increasingly became the subject of criticism. The bureaucracy, pressed by the ever more conscious articulation of the membership's interests (to which the bureaucracy, because of its obligation to this system, cannot and will not do justice), found itself compelled to try to throw the workers off the track with new tricks and maneuvers aimed at cutting off the class-conscious movement at its base.
By resorting to this policy of deception the bureaucracy has, from 1969 to today, succeeded in maintaining its control over the rank and file during the decisive phases of the wage movement -- even if only at the cost of big shocks, as at the present time.
But this should not obscure the fact that the bureaucracy's maneuvering room has gotten narrower as each successive bargaining campaign has developed. It gets narrower because, given a bourgeoisie in the situation we've described and given a Social Democratic government, the bureaucracy is consistently held accountable on questions of centralized state regulation of wage and incomes policies. And of course the membership learns something from each of the bureaucracy's surprise maneuvers.
With this background, the enormous importance of the bureaucracy's impending attack (couched in rhetoric about "internal consequences") on the class-conscious rank-and-file movement becomes doubly clear. The bureaucracy is aware of the fact that this movement can be most easily disoriented and its leadership can best be broken while it is still in an initial phase -- isolated on a local and factory level, having attained uneven levels of development in different locales and factories, and having access to no adequate means of communication.
So long as the movement lacks a cohesive alternative to the bureaucracy's policy, the bureaucrats have the chance of putting over what they are aiming at in the way of "internal consequences."
So after this round of wage talks, it is the prime task of all progressive, socialist, and communist workers to effect their own "internal consequences": to stubbornly work to overcome the rank-and-file movement's local and factory-level isolation, to build strong communications structures linking the various rank-and-file bodies that the movement has thrown up, to strive through these structures toward trade-union unity in the political sense, and thus to develop a strong, united, class-conscious, and militant alternative to the bureaucracy's policy.
The struggle for this class-struggle left tendency in the unions is now on the agenda in the IGM.
Coming Tasks After This Bargaining Campaign
The struggle against Loderer's "internal consequences" and the struggles for a left tendency will unfold and develop around the practical questions raised by the course and outcome of this bargaining campaign. It is clear to nearly every worker that the average increase, 8.5 percent, represents in reality a wage cut. It is also clear that the decrease in real wages now at hand will be exacerbated in the course of this year by constant or even accelerated price increases.
At the same time, it can be assumed that during this year the federal government will impose a nonrepayable conjunctural surtax that will cut wages down even further. The conclusion is inescapable: This must be a year of permanent struggle against wage robbery.
In this struggle, militant employees must not content themselves with winning raises in this or that factory, but must be the spearhead of regional and centralized struggles. Only in this way will it be possible to throw out the whole contract. Only in this way will it be possible to decisively repel the bureaucracy's splitting maneuvers (to which they have already resorted) aimed at pacifying the most militant workers, especially in the steel industry, by offering them supplementary wage agreements.
The coming struggle against wage robbery must be a united one. If it is conducted in unity, and not on a factory-by-factory basis, then it will be possible to turn this unity into massive public actions against the threatened surtaxes -- and this will have an effect on all similar measures the capitalists are planning.
It will take a fight to make this struggle a united one, because the bureaucracy will do everything in its power to block it, to make this 8.5 percent contract last for its specified duration, and to protect the government's anti-working-class "stabilization policy."
The Perspective of Qualitative Demands
The bureaucracy has been especially successful in the steel industry in its attempts to disorient and divide the workers over the question of linear wage increases. For every class-conscious worker the principle of across-the-board wage increases is too important -- because of its role in fostering solidarity and counteracting wage differentials that provoke competition among workers -- to be left as a mere routine demand.
It is necessary to explain on the one hand that across-the-board wage increases are one element of a proworker wage policy, but on the other hand, that the full effects of these increases can be brought to bear only in the totality of all the other elements of such a wage policy. In this totality, it must be a foregone conclusion that united demands for wage increases are raised so as to assure that everyone get a real increase in income.
On the other hand, all the bureaucracy's attempts to distort these demands or to co-opt them into its own dead-end wage policy through all sorts of trickery -- which they tried to do in this round of negotiations -- must be fought.
In the steel industry, the bureaucracy has consciously provoked the anger of the skilled workers by proposing the far too low 60 pfennig increase and then settling for a 46 pfennig contract. In this way the bureaucrats sharpened the division over the question of across-the-board wage increases by initiating new negotiations for additional increases for the higher-wage groups. The steelworkers will be able to defeat this maneuver only by waging a united struggle to overturn the entire agreement.
If a permanent struggle against wage robbery does take place this year, then our essential tasks will be to see that a sliding scale of wages is demanded, and to become a component of this struggle. The struggle against permanent wage robbery through price increases also involves fighting for means of defense against wage robbery through inflation, that is, it is nothing other than the struggle for the sliding scale of wages.
So, in the coming period, we must prepare for struggles looming up. The main tasks of our intervention will be to generalize and unify the struggle, to strongly root qualitative demands among the masses, to propagandize for the necessity of transforming the class-conscious but isolated rank-and-file movement into a united left tendency in the unions, and to engage in concrete work to build this tendency.
Notes
* Konzertierte Aktion, literally, concerted action, is a system providing for government intervention into wage disputes between unions and employers. -- IP