John Catalinotto, 31/12/2022
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The
working class in the United States in 2022 burst into action. Warehouse workers
at Amazon, baristas at Starbucks, prisoners, coal miners, nurses, teachers,
graduate students organized. Some went on strike.
NYC nurses, december 2022
Will
we in 2023 see ever sharper clashes between workers in the United States and
the imperialist ruling class? Remember that these billionaire owners of
U.S.-based monopolies and banks still dominate the dollar, the weapons and the
word. Their politicians, bureaucrats and generals who serve them control the Treasury,
the Pentagon and the police. Their media hacks and bought intellectuals wield the
most effective propaganda machine in history.
That
workers in the belly of the beast might wage class war seems impossible. Yet in
2022, class struggles took place that were unseen in decades. Public opinion
grew more favorable toward unions than in the last half century. A mood for
confrontation grew as people’s lives grew less stable.
A
Gallup Poll in August showed that 71% of the population approved of labor
unions. That’s up from 48% in 2008. It’s the highest since 1965, when over 30%
of workers belonged to unions (now it’s about 10%). This happened despite constant
anti-union propaganda over that same half century.
Youth, marginalized workers
On
Jan. 1, 2022, there was only one unionized Starbucks coffeeshop — in Buffalo,
New York. By Dec. 9 of 2022 there were close to 270 stores whose workers
approved unions. Amazon Labor Union scored a historic victory by organizing the
first Amazon warehouse ever in the U.S. on April 1 in Staten Island, New York.
The ALU ran an impressive multilingual, multicultural, campaign that reached
all the workers and won more than half to the union. In both anti-union
monopolies young workers predominate, most never in unions before.
The massive U.S. prison population
is even more marginalized. Yet in Alabama, 25,000 majority-Black, incarcerated
people at 17 separate prisons withheld their labor in protest from Sept. 26 to Oct.
2. They condemned murderous conditions in the jails, where they are forced to
work. In their letters from the inside, organizers signed themselves “Alabama’s
slaves” and said that the strike is “in protest of the continued institution of
neoslavery.” (tinyurl.com/2bk43x3a)
In
the fall of 2022, more than 18,000 education workers fought either for a union
or improved contracts. This included graduate students at the University of
California, Boston University, Northwestern, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, University of Alaska and Yale. At the New School, a college in New
York City, adjunct instructors held a three-week
strike and won a contract plus substantial back pay. Adjunct instructors have
no job security or protection and, like graduate students, are the
super-exploited workers at the big universities.
Over 3,000 members of the Boston University Graduate
Workers Union (BUGWU) celebrated a 98.1% election victory for their union on
Dec. 7. Some labor researchers have characterized the 1,414 to 28 vote as “the
most lopsided NLRB election win **ever** by a bargaining unit [of] more than
1,000 people.” (In the U.S., to form a union, workers must win a vote managed
by the National Labor Relations Board.)
Traditional unions
The
mood of struggle spread from the unorganized to workers already in unions. One
sector was the unionized nurses, members of the New York State Nurses
Association. They were asked by their union leaders to authorize a strike
against New York’s private hospitals. The vote pledges to go on strike if the
existing contract expires before they reach an agreement with hospital
management. This Dec. 22, about 14,000 of the 17,000 NYSNA nurses had already
finished voting. Some 98.8 percent voted to authorize the strike. This near
unanimous vote is unprecedented. But nurses have been particularly hard hit by
the COVID-19 and other epidemics, hospitals have cut staffing to save on wages,
and nurses have been forced to work hard for long hours, under conditions
dangerous to them and to the patients. Now the nurses are angry, united, and believe
they can win.
Railroad
workers of all different crafts had been pushed to the wall by the railroad
bosses, and their many unions went to the brink of a strike. This involves the
freight trains, which carry enormous amounts of goods vast distances. The
workers move the same freight as they did in 1990 with about a third the work
force. This creates enormous profits for the owners. The freight trains consist
of hundreds of wagons. Only two engineers co-pilot the megatrains. The bosses
want to cut that number to one, a dangerous step. On top of this, the railroad
workers get no sick days.
Railroad
workers rarely strike. A federal law allows the government to intervene to stop
strikes. It has done this in the past. Transportation of goods is essential to
the national economy. This Nov. 30 the Joe Biden administration forced the unions
to call off the strike. Biden and the Democratic Congress provided no additional
sick leave. The Democrats pretend to be pro-labor. Biden’s anti-labor action
exposed the role of the president and the Democratic Party as enemies of the
working class, just as the Republicans are.
Moment of truth
The
prospect for worker upsurge still confronts many obstacles. Corporations have already
bitterly opposed the workers through brutal union busting. They harass workers,
fire some, bring court cases against unions. Capitalist owners and investors
are desperate to pile up more profits within a system in perpetual crisis. And
workers face a government that is on a war drive, feeding arms to a proxy war
against Russia in Ukraine and sending warships to the coast of China. Few
weapons are more effective in combating worker solidarity than a patriotic
propaganda campaign.
How
workers in the U.S. will react as the economic and war crisis deepens is hard
to predict. For those of us in the U.S. who despise war, imperialism and all
capitalist exploitation, there is no choice but to encourage the new
combativeness among workers and help build solidarity among the entire working
class.
