To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
February 11, 2022
by Tim Hall, Detroit Workers’ Voice
The strike wave that many have called “Striketober” has continued beyond October. It is time to make some general observations about it.
“Striketober” has been an inspiration to many disgruntled workers and left activists. As strike waves go, it has been a bit small – mostly small plants and healthcare complexes. Only one strike, John Deere, involved over 10,000 workers, although the threatened (but not held) strike of nearly 60,000 at Kaiser Permanente health care workers on the West Coast was also large. (1) But workers and other ordinary people had suffered through nearly two years of the Covid pandemic and worsening climate news. Politically they were demoralized by Trump's violent circus and the weakness of the Democrats, their supposed friends. The masses were starved for any sign of positive change. Many felt they needed someone, not an individual but a force of people, to stand up. And then, beginning in mid-Summer and going on through the Fall, workers at a number of facilities did! The capitalist bosses had called them “essential workers,” only to work them almost to death. Heroes – but treated like zeroes. And so these wage-slaves decided to fight back. The strike movement developed.
Strikes took place in a number of locations all through the Summer and to the end of the year. Strikes are nothing new in the U.S., but a bit of a surge right then sent a message of rebellion to the workforce. And right away a notable element emerged in this movement – a frequent rebellion against the labor leaders, the union leaderships, for misconduct of the workers' struggles. It is not new for workers to vote down tentative contracts proposed by the leaders, but now this seemed to be happening in almost every strike. At certain hospitals the workers would not pass a contract until some of their precise goals on reduction of workloads were included in the agreements. At Kellogg and John Deere, workers declared that they would not accept compromises proposed by the union leaders on the controversial two-tier wage plans that the leaders had accepted in the past, and they voted down tentative contracts that featured two-tier. And in the Seattle carpenters' strike, workers formed a militant group, the McGuire Group, named after an early militant, and it led workers to reject several tentative contracts. The McGuire Group also mobilized other carpenters to march and call out workers from sites where the labor bureaucrats had signed no-strike, peace agreements.
The labor bureaucrats began to be on the hot seat more than in recent memory. These union big shots live comfortably and prefer peace with the bosses. They have repeatedly tried to limit and destroy the workers' struggle for the benefit of the capitalist bosses. (2) This article will detail some of the ways these bureaucrats have tried to undermine the present strike movement. The success of the workers' movement depends on exposing and defeating these roadblocks to the workers' movement. “Striketober” saw struggle against these obstructionists in a number of important strikes.
Conditions last Summer and to date demanded a struggle by the workers and also helped motivate it. The capitalist bosses were everywhere rolling in dough, profiting hugely off the brutal overtime they imposed on the workers. And masses of workers, in an epidemic of quitting that some called a general strike, abandoned abusive, poverty-wage jobs by the millions. The pandemic showed workers that they are indeed essential and gave them confidence in their own power, while the stark robbery and overwork by the employers powered their rage. They began striking back.
In July 600 Frito-Lay workers voted down a tentative agreement approved by the union leadership and walked out on strike. The Frito-Lay workforce had had no strike experience since 1973, yet they managed to defeat the leaders' first attempt to hold them back and went into action. Despite the leaders, in a 19-day strike the workers won some improvements against severe 84-hour weeks, gaining one day off per week and an end to “suicide shifts” whereby the workers were called back in a few hours after leaving the previous day's shift. The strike was called off by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, BCTWGM, leaders after a mere 19 days, even though the Kansas City area began experiencing a corn and potato chip shortage within five days after the strike began. (3) Here the BCTWGM began to show its partiality to management.
Next was the Nabisco strike, where workers in Portland, Oregon, tired of delay by the same union bureaucracy, walked out on August 10 and inspired the Nabisco workforce of about 1000 around the country to join them. It was the first strike action at Nabisco since 1969. (4) In Portland, which was the heart of the strike, workers and left activists mounted a harassment campaign against the scabs and appealed to railroad workers for solidarity and got them to stop deliveries of materials to the scabs running the plant. (5) On September 7 the workers voted down a tentative contract agreed to by the union misleaders. The strike was gaining wide support in the community in Portland and from political figures. A boycott of Nabisco products gained steam. Support rallies were held in Portland. In mid-September AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler arrived to claim to support the strike but to push for a settlement. (6) The union misleaders quickly reached an agreement with management and on October 15th got approval of 75% of the workers. But 25%, mainly in Portland, disapproved and raised questions about the overtime settlement. The strike had put an end to management's plan to work the workers three 12-hour straight-time days a week, but the bureaucrats' agreement got the creation of a weekend pool of lower-paid workers, which workers feared would lead to wage-cuts via the creation of an informal second tier. (7) The BCTWGM leaders took the votes to their headquarters in Maryland, but they did announce the vote totals. That 25% of the workforce voted against the agreement was an accomplishment for a workforce that had no strike experience. In addition, the BCTWGM imposed a four-year contract on the workers, hindering their future struggles. (8) The BCTWGM bureaucracy began to make a name for itself – for over-long contracts.
In the Summer and into the Fall 2000 Seattle-area carpenters voted down four tentative contracts signed by the union leaders of the carpenters' union and went on strike for three weeks. (9) In the strike, a militant section of the workers was led by the rebel group, the Peter J. McGuire group. This marked a rising awareness of the need for organized opposition to the union bureaucracy. The militant carpenters denounced the union leadership for making sweetheart no-strike agreements with all but four of the construction work sites in the area. The McGuire group, led by leftists, aroused workers to march to no-strike sites and call on the workers there to walk out. This brought out 1500 workers. (10) In the fifth, final tentative contract, the strikers rejected a 4-year deal in favor of a three-year, keeping it coordinated with the other construction contracts in the Seattle area, thus enabling future common action. Many workers wanted higher wages from this agreement announced by the leadership, due to the extreme rise in the cost of living in the area. It passed by only 54% of the voters. (9) The militants, especially the McGuire group, pledged to continue their struggle. The construction union higher-up bureaucrats were so upset with the workers' independent action that they deposed the regional leadership of the union and put it under trusteeship, in order, they hoped, to control the militant masses. (10)
Film production workers also seemed about to strike. On October 1-3, over 90% of the 60,000 nationwide union members voted to authorize a strike over miserable working conditions, including very oppressive overtime. (11) The leadership of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) announced two tentative agreements, but worker outrage burst forth on its web site, as the agreements did not address the problem of extreme overtime and overwork that members had been protesting. Votes were finally held in November. The IATSE voting system resembles the federal electoral college: the popular vote winner doesn't always win. A majority of all individual members voted in favor of striking by a slim margin, but the votes were not counted equally. The unfair “electoral college” voting system awarded victory to the “NO” vote. The IATSE misleaders hail this contract as a victory, in that it did not give away anything, but in the eyes of the majority of workers it did not gain what they really wanted. The major issues workers had raised when voting earlier by 90+% for a strike were not solved: 14-hour days and working through lunch are still allowed. (12) This is being digested by the film workers during their continuing, three-year stint of exhaustion. Their outrage goes on, thanks to the labor bureaucrats of IATSE. (13)
On October 5, after negotiations between union officials and Kellogg management had dragged on for over a year, 1400 workers went out on strike at company plants making cereal and snacks. The workers declared their main target in the strike was the two-tier wage and benefit system. (14) This system, accepted by the traitorous labor bureaucrats of the BCTWGM, divides older and younger workers from each other, getting different pay and benefits for doing the same work. At Kellogg the older workers, many of them Black, declared they would not sell out the younger and demanded an end to the entire two-tier system. Management not only wanted to preserve two-tier but to expand the lower tier until it could embrace the entire workforce after the retirement of the older workers. The workers were not having this. (15) The strike won wide support in the community; solidarity rallies were held and other unions declared support. A boycott of Kellogg products was begun and ordinary people commented on Redditt that it was having a definite effect. (16) The workers felt that the strike was winning and they should continue to strike, so they overwhelmingly voted down a tentative contract, on Dec. 5, that was negotiated by the leadership. (17) On Dec, 16 the leadership and management presented another tentative contract to the workers. (18) This proposed contract would not eliminate two-tier, just alter it to create so-called pathways to full pay and benefits. Workers denounced these “pathways,” saying they required a young worker to remain in low-tier status for 6 to 8 years. The union leaders sold this fraud as “removing” two-tier! The five-year contract contained a miserable wage settlement that would result, if the present rate of inflation were to continue, in a loss of 18% in the workers' wages!(19, 20) Outrageous! The plant manager even admitted, in a leaked email which he later acknowledged, that the new tentative contract was no advance at all for the workers over the previous one, just “moving money from one bucket to another,” he said. (21) The leadership held the vote. Facing possible defeat, these misleaders treacherously turned to their hole card: they made no public count of the votes but instead immediately took the votes home with them from the Midwest, where the plants are located, to their offices in Maryland, counted them there with no oversight by the workers, and announced that the strike was over! (22) To date no accounting of the vote totals has been released! Workers bemoaned the settlement to the media: "To have the fight stop when we're winning is very disheartening,” one Battle Creek worker, said. “You want to find someone happy about this contract, you have to travel because nobody here feels like this is a win.” (23) This was betrayal of the workers on an astonishing scale! So by this time the labor misleaders of the BCTWGM had racked up bad contracts of 2, 4 and 5 years! Are we seeing “contract-length inflation”? Would another gang of management-collaborators beat this record? Stay tuned and see! Meanwhile Kellogg workers labor on, locked in.
The John Deere strike was the biggest so far in the wave christened “Striketober.” 10,000 workers went out at the tractor-maker on October 14. They voted down two contracts negotiated by the UAW bureaucrats, the first by 90%, then narrowly approved a third (24) while many workers said the strike was winning. There was evidence for that – farmers were in their buying season (for tractors) and had money to spend, the scabs and managers were putting out poor quality products, they could not meet orders on time, and the company had trouble getting scabs. (25) Deere workers in Moline, Iowa, had held a picket at the company's national headquarters there. (26) In the third vote, management decided to tweak a controversial speed-up benefits program to further bribe a portion of the workforce and that took the vote over the top (though the Waterloo local voted it down). The strike was settled, this one with a 6-year contract. BCTWGM hacks thought they were doing something with long contracts, until they met the masters of sellout, the UAW bureaucracy! And the UAW leadership only gave the Deere workers $275 a week out of their multi-million dollar strike fund!!(27)
As these workers were fighting their battles, things were happening elsewhere.
In northern California and Oregon, 60,000 Kaiser Permanente health care workers planned a strike and announced that the two-tier system, which management wanted to impose, would be the main target. Two-tier was taken off the table and the strike was never held. Workers voted in the tentative contract, which defended their health care and pensions benefit. (28) In Alabama the Warrior Met coal miners determinedly continued their long strike that began on April 1. (29) And recently the nurses of Worcester, MA, ended their 6-month-long strike with gains on worker-patient ratios. (30)
The strike wave inspired some efforts to organize large corporations.
The very biggest, Amazon, has been experiencing a growing number of worker attempts to organize and has seen six recent strikes, two in Chicago and four in New York. Various views on how to organize exist among the Amazon activists. Two trends seem to exist among the young activists, both carrying on active struggles against Amazon management in the workplaces. One trend, active in Chicago, Sacramento, New York and elsewhere and named Amazonians United, rejects the standard trade union form and works to build fighting movements that directly confront various issues that the workforce faces. (31) The other trend, represented by a New York-based group called the Amazon Labor Union, try to organize and win an NLRB union election to establish a legal trade union, while at the same time fighting on various immediate issues. (32) These two groups were able to hold six small strikes over the Christmas holidays, four by the ALU in New York, where they also held a rally in Times Square, and two in Chicago by the Amazonians United. (33,34) Meanwhile, in Bessemer, Alabama, the Retail Workers Department Store Union (RWDSU) continues its efforts to win a union election there. (35) A new vote on unionization is underway, to end in March. Starbucks, where workers are also organizing, has seen the actual unionization of two facilities in Buffalo and attempts are underway at many others. (36) The Starbucks capitalists, desiring to keep their ill-gotten profits, have fired seven Starbucks workers who are building a union in Memphis.
There continue to be movements in various sectors. Amazon, Starbucks .... The Democrats have collapsed on raising the federal minimum wage to $15, but the pressure from minimum-wage workers will not go away, and this struggle is bound to intensify, especially with rising prices. Teachers, who have been active in recent years, now have been fighting to protect the students and themselves from the pandemic, as the recent confrontation with Chicago mayor Lightfoot showed. They're tired of being unsung heroes and want to be treated with respect. In the Seattle area 330 concrete-mixer truck drivers have generated solidarity in construction there and have been shutting down many sites, even linking up once with the longshoremen of the ILWA. (37) At the same time, the leadership of railroad workers on the big BNSF Midwest rail line are threatening to strike over a brutal attendance program that the railroad imposed on February 1. The policy makes it virtually impossible for workers to plan their lives or take any time off at all. The workers are outraged. A federal judge just blocked the strike with a temporary restraining order, leaving the workers more angry. Railroad unions are led by some of the most entrenched labor bureaucrats in the country, so it remains to be seen if the strike threat means anything, but considering the anger and the severity of the situation, our strike wave may just continue by rail. (38) But the railroad capitalists and the federal government, which is, of course, the executive committee of the whole capitalist class, will do everything to prevent a railroad strike.
Issues continue to confront the workers, and their anger and frustration are not going away. Recent strike activity shows how it can be organized, but also shows valuable lessons about the need for workers to be organized independently of the labor bureaucrats and and watch out for and fight their undermining activity. <>
Notes
1) Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Striketober and Health Care Dive, Dec. 10, 2021
https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/kaiser-permanente-workers-ratify-contract/611297/
2) Time, Oct. 25. 2021 https://time.com/6110014/worker-anger-unions/
3) Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Frito-Lay_strike
4) Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Nabisco_strike
5) Willamette Week, Sept. 22, 2021
https://www.wweek.com/news/2021/09/22/the-nabisco-strike-grew-radicalthen-ended-in-compromise-how-do-portland-bakers-feel/
6) Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Nabisco_strike
7) The Eater, Portland, O\R, Sept. 21-2021 https://pdx.eater.com/2021/9/16/22676416/nabisco-strike-mondelez-portland-workers-contract-agreement
8) Portland Mercury, Sept. 18, 2021
https://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2021/09/18/36322063/union-vote-ends-nabisco-strike-despite-portland-workers-protest
9) The Seattle Times, Sept. 16, 2021
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-area-carpenters-on-strike-slowing-construction-projects-across-the-region/
10) ENR Northwest, Nov. 10, 2021 https://www.enr.com/articles/52949-washington-state-carpenters-union-in-trusteeship-vote-fraud-probed
11) Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Alliance_of_Theatrical_Stage_Employees#Averted_2021_strike
12) Jacobin, Nov. 15, 2021 https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/iatse-contract-union-basic-agreement-area-standards
13) Left Voice, Nov. 22, 2021
https://www.leftvoice.org/we-feel-angry-we-feel-unheard-iatse-workers-speak-out-on-the-betrayal-of-their-leadership/
Variety, Nov. 15, 2021 https://variety.com/2021/film/news/iatse-contract-vote-razor-thin-margins-1235112711/ and
14 ) Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Kellogg%27s_strike
15) Jacobin, Nov. 5, 2021 https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/kelloggs-strike-bctgm-union-tiered-contracts
16) Reddit, Dec. 9, 2021, Kellogg's Megathread (strike info, boycott, and more)
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/rclj27/kelloggs_megathread_strike_info_boycott_and_more/
17) Detroit Free Press, Dec. 5, 2021
https://www.freep.com/story/news/2021/12/07/kellogg-co-union-workers-reject-contract-strike-enters-third-month/6418644001/
18) Detroit Free Press, Dec. 17, 2021
https://www.freep.com/story/news/2021/12/17/bernie-sanders-rallies-striking-workers-outside-kellogg-co-hq/8942689002/
19) The New York Times, Dec.21.2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/21/business/economy/kellogg-union-strike-contract.html
20) Summary of Tentative Agreement, December 15, 2021,
https://kelloggsnegotiations.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Tentative-Agreement-Overviews-2021.12.15.pdf
21) Detroit Metro Times, Dec. 18, 2021
https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/kellogg-offer-gives-no-gain-overall-for-workers-per-plant-managers-leaked-email/Content?oid=28763112
22) WSWS, Dec. 21, 2021, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/12/21/kel1-d21.html
23) News Channel 3, Battle Creek, MI, Dec. 21, 2021,
https://wwmt.com/news/local/some-battle-creek-kellogg-workers-feel-betrayed-by-new-union-deal
24) Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_John_Deere_strike
25) Des Moines Register, Nov. 8, 2021
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2021/11/08/john-deere-uaw-strike-contract-dispute-increased-overseas-production/6303495001/
26) See note 24.
27) Des Moines Register, Nov. 18, 2021
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2021/11/17/uaw-john-deere-strike-2021-vote-results-contract-end/8619898002/
28) Health Care Dive, Dec. 10, 2021 https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/kaiser-permanente-workers-ratify-contract/611297/
29) The Nation, Jan. 7, 2022 https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/alabama-miners-strike-warrior-met/
30) Associated Press, Jan. 4, 2022 https://www.foxnews.com/us/massachusetts-longest-nurses-strike-ends-10-months
31) Amazonians United, https://www.amazoniansunited.org/
32) Amazon Labor Union https://amazonlaborunion.org/
33) New York Post, Dec. 23, 2021 https://nypost.com/2021/12/23/amazon-workers-in-staten-island-walk-out-during-holiday-rush/
34) CBS News, Dec. 22, 2021 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-workers-walkout-pay-working-conditions/
35) NPR, Nov, 29, 2021 https://www.npr.org/2021/11/29/1022384731/amazon-warehouse-workers-get-to-re-do-their-union-vote-in-alabama
36) Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F40q8SR9L7U
37) The Guardian, Jan. 26, 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/26/seattle-cement-industry-workers-strike-unfair-wages
38) KFYR TV, Jan. 26, 2021 https://www.kfyrtv.com/2022/01/27/bnsf-employees-react-judges-ruling-that-blocks-strike/ <>
Picture: On the Nabisco picket line in Portland
https://media2.fdncms.com/portmerc/imager/u/large/36322064/1632005330-dsc_6461.nef.jpg
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