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From PATCO to Caterpillar

Labor at the Crossroads

10 April 1992
By the Editorial Board

1. The threat by Caterpillar management to smash the strike of 12,000 UAW members and bring thousands of scabs across union picket lines is a historic turning point for the American labor movement. The working class faces the moment of truth. The smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers' strike in 1981 opened the floodgates for a decadelong offensive by the employers against wages, working conditions and the right to a union. The breaking of the Caterpillar strike would be the signal for the wholesale liquidation of trade unions in the United States and the destruction of everything which the working class has won in bitter struggles for over more than a century.

2. The announcement that Caterpillar will hire scabs to break the strike is not simply the action of a single union-busting corporation. It is a class decision by the highest levels of big business to carry through the destruction of the labor movement and to reimpose industrial slavery on the American working class. This decision has national and international significance. It demonstrates that American workers, like their class brothers in every country, have no choice but to wage a political struggle against the class of corporate bosses and bankers and against the profit system as a whole.

3. Caterpillar boss Donald Fites has repeatedly cited the necessity to slash labor costs in order to be "globally competitive" with Komatsu, Volvo and other overseas corporate giants. He speaks not just for Caterpillar, but for every corporate employer. The driving force of all the ruling class's attacks on the labor movement is the worldwide crisis of capitalism and the worsening position of American capitalism in the struggle against its major economic rivals such as Japan and Germany. The disintegration of American and world capitalism -- underscored this week by the crash of the Japanese stock market -- has reached the point that the capitalist class is compelled to wipe out all obstacles to the extraction of profit from the exploitation of the working class.

4. The American capitalists are seeking to reorganize class relations within the United States in line with the requirements of the world slump and the intensifying trade war between the major capitalism powers, a conflict which leads ultimately to a new world imperialist war. There is no place in Wall Street's "new world order" for collective bargaining, the right to strike or the relatively high standard of living which American workers built up during the post-World War II boom. Caterpillar only reveals most starkly what workers are experiencing in every factory and workplace: the ruling class aims to drive the working class back to conditions of mass poverty and social misery unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

5. The seriousness of the crisis must be judged from the ruthlessness which the ruling class is demanding of its own representatives. Only days after Caterpillar issued its union-busting ultimatum, there was a sweeping reorganization of the management of the biggest US corporation, General Motors. The GM board, on the initiative of the chairman of J.P. Morgan and other outside directors, voted to demote two of the top executives, President Lloyd Reuss and Chief Financial Officer Robert O'Connell, and reduce the powers of GM Chairman Robert Stempel. The new GM president, John F. Smith, was given a mandate to restore GM to profitability by "a more aggressive management approach to remove excess costs." In other words, Wall Street regards as entirely inadequate the attacks on auto workers announced by Stempel last December, when he ordered the wiping out 74,000 jobs and the shutdown of 21 plants.

6. Caterpillar's frontal assault on the strikers in Peoria, Decatur and Aurora is a response to the dictates of the same bankers and corporate bosses. Sitting on the board of directors side by side with union buster Donald Fites are representatives of the elite of corporate America: Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., chairman of RJR Nabisco; James P. Gorter, chairman of Goldman, Sachs, one of the biggest Wall Street investment banks; Jerry R. Junkins, chairman of Texas Instruments; Charles F. Knight, chairman of Emerson Electric; Rawleigh Warner Jr., chairman of Mobil. On the board until two months ago was Clayton Yeutter, chairman of the Republican National Committee and a principal spokesman for the Bush reelection campaign.

7. The capitalists have never reconciled themselves to the concessions they were forced to give the working class in the course of the great class battles of the 1930s and 1940s. While the leadership of the newly formed mass industrial unions accepted the basic framework of capitalism -- the ownership of the means of production by a tiny handful of billionaires -- the fact that millions of workers were organized in trade unions nonetheless placed obstacles in the path of the corporate bosses. They were hemmed in by a system of checks and balances, amounting to a sort of "dual power" inside the factories, which provided limited protection for workers from the rapacity of the capitalists, by means of seniority systems, grievance procedures and contracts which set job classifications, wages, pensions and other benefits.

8. These historic gains of the working class were gradually undermined through the collaboration of the bureaucracy which dominated both the CIO and AFL unions. The steady erosion of the position of the labor movement became a virtual rout in the last decade, as the trade union bureaucrats repudiated one conquest after another, accepting the destruction of industrywide and national contracts, the gutting of work rules and seniority, and the slashing of wages and benefits. The union apparatus itself was transformed through the establishment of a host of joint labor-management committees in which union officials took on a corporatist role in directly policing the workers in the factories. Now, however, the capitalists want to do away with whatever residual restraints are still provided by the unions. Any semblance of independent working class power and organization has become intolerable to the bosses, who seek to liquidate the unions and establish an unfettered corporate dictatorship.

9. Class conscious workers must reject the poisonous complacency spread by the UAW bureaucracy to cover its own betrayal of the strike. No UAW member should accept the assurances of Bieber and Casstevens that the trickle of scabs this week means that victory is around the corner, or that Caterpillar cannot find a sufficiently skilled scab work force to replace the strikers. The same hollow assurances were given to air traffic controllers, Phelps Dodge copper miners, Greyhound drivers and Eastern Airlines mechanics, to name only a few of the betrayed and shattered strikes of the last decade, with disastrous results. The Caterpillar strike cannot be won on the basis of isolated action in Peoria, Decatur and Aurora, no matter how great the militancy and determination of the workers involved.

10. The working class faces not merely a major trade union battle, but an all-out political struggle against the profit system. Capitalism has failed, and with it, the reformist program of the trade union bureaucracy, which seeks to convince workers that they must tie their fate to the rotting capitalist order. The working class has already paid a terrible price for the trade union bureaucracy's defense of the profit system and its subordination of the interests of workers to the capitalist politicians of the Democratic Party. The working class must drive out the bureaucracy and change the political course of the labor movement or face being thrown back decades, if not generations.

11. The unions cannot survive as reformist organizations defending the position of the working class within the framework of capitalism as they did during the period of the postwar boom. The crisis and breakdown of world capitalism spells the end for all programs based on reforming the profit system. The working class must create a new political party that unites American workers with their class brothers internationally and fights for an uncompromising anticapitalist program: a Labor Party based on socialist policies and fighting to establish a workers government.

12. Only such a political struggle can unite and mobilize the entire working class: the workers in the unions together with the tens of millions of unemployed and nonunion workers who, like the union members themselves, have been completely abandoned by the policies of the AFL-CIO and UAW bureaucracy. The Workers League calls for the convening of a Congress of Labor to bring together representatives of the rank and file of every union, the unemployed, the youth and nonunion workers, to establish an independent Labor Party based on a socialist program. Such a party must organize the political struggle of the entire working class against the profit system and the capitalist politicians who defend it, for the establishment of a workers government which will nationalize the banks and basic industry under workers control, provide jobs for the unemployed, give immediate relief to the poor and homeless, outlaw strikebreaking and union busting, and halt the drive by American imperialism toward a new world war.

13. The Caterpillar strike brings to a head the conflict between the bureaucracy in the unions, whose income and privileges have grown throughout the 1980s, and the masses of rank-and-file workers who have seen their jobs, wages and working conditions drastically undermined. The existence of unions which in any way limit the exploitation of the capitalists is incompatible with the maintenance of the trade union bureaucracy. The only alternative for workers is to take control of their own organizations, the trade unions which were established in the mass working class upsurge of the 1930s, and drive out the bureaucrats who are systematically paralyzing and sabotaging the labor movement.

14. While the bureaucracy hides its treachery behind words of solidarity and appeals to maintain "unity," workers must recognize that the UAW and AFL-CIO bureaucrats are really united with the corporate bosses and the capitalist government in a behind-the-scenes alliance to strangle and defeat the Caterpillar strike. The struggle against Casstevens, Bieber and the whole gang of procompany bureaucrats in the UAW and AFL-CIO cannot wait until the end of the present strike. By then, it will be too late. The UAW bureaucrats are the principal obstacle to the waging of a successful fight against the corporation. They are the organizers of scabbing. Bieber and Casstevens refused to call an all-out strike and even now, after five months on strike and with the company recruiting scabs, the UAW officials are keeping thousands of union members on the job producing profits for Caterpillar. The UAW and AFL-CIO bureaucrats are working systematically to maintain the isolation of the Caterpillar strike, separating the strikers from the rest of the labor movement and insuring their defeat.

15. When UAW members at Caterpillar say they are fighting to "defend the union," they mean preserving the conquests won by their fathers and grandfathers in struggle against the employers and the government. The UAW leadership means something entirely different by the defense of the union. It is only seeking to maintain the bloated bureaucracy of thousands of highly paid officials in the locals, regions and Solidarity House, who are tied to the corporations through countless labor-management arrangements, seats on boards of directors, joint funds and investment plans, etc.

16. The strategy of the UAW bureaucracy is to throttle the strikers, insure their isolation and prove to Caterpillar management that the union apparatus still has a role to play, even after the crushing defeat of the strike, in disciplining the workers. It seeks to convince the bosses that they can combine union busting -- i.e., the destruction of the union rights of the workers -- with the preservation of the positions and salaries of the union bureaucrats, who would assume the role of functionaries in a company union. This is the logical outcome of the whole corporatist policy of the bureaucracy over the past 15 years, in which it has more and more sought to base its material privileges, not on the union membership, but on its direct relationship with corporate management.

17. The UAW leadership seeks to convince the bosses that they can more efficiently exploit the working class with the union bureaucracy than without it. Last weekend the UAW published a full-page ad in many Illinois newspapers, addressed not to the working class but to Caterpillar stockholders. Casstevens and Bieber pointed to the "enormous productivity contributions" of the corporatist "Plant With A Future" program, which has raised productivity in parts processing by 317 percent. Caterpillar has responded with assurances that it will continue to recognize the UAW bureaucracy even if it succeeds in smashing the strike.

18. The bureaucracy's willingness to accept outright union busting was most graphically displayed in the comments by Casstevens at a Monday press conference in East Peoria, when a Bulletin reporter compared the confrontation at Caterpillar to the 1981 air traffic controllers' strike and asked the UAW Secretary-Treasurer what the union would do to prevent a repetition of this devastating defeat for the labor movement. Casstevens replied, "Since that, the air traffic controllers have gone back and now got themselves a union." This reference to the formation of a union by the scabs now working in the air traffic control towers shows that the UAW bureaucrats are already considering how they can safeguard their own interests, while the striking workers lose their jobs and their homes and see their families devastated.

19. Under no conditions, even if Caterpillar moves to dispense with the union structure outright, will the UAW bureaucracy mount any serious struggle. Solidarity House regards the destruction of the Caterpillar locals and the loss of 16,000 dues-paying members as preferable to an eruption of working class militancy, triggered by the Caterpillar strike, which would threaten the corporatist relations it has built up with the auto bosses over the past decade. At the Monday press conference, Casstevens explicitly rejected calling for a national strike, on the grounds that the union had to honor its contracts with other giant corporations which are backing Caterpillar's union-busting onslaught.

20. Workers made a catastrophic mistake when they permitted the bureaucracy to isolate the PATCO strikers in 1981. Every worker knows that the mass firing of the air traffic controllers, with no resistance from the labor movement, was the signal for the union-busting assault of the 1980s. The AFL-CIO bureaucracy refused to call a general strike to stop the unprecedented destruction of an entire union by the federal government. This betrayal was justified with references to the illegal character of the strike, the impossibility of fighting the government, the supposed popularity of Reagan, and other pathetic excuses to cover up the AFL-CIO's collaboration with the ruling class and the capitalist government.

21. In the course of the 1980s, the AFL-CIO and UAW bureaucrats betrayed one major struggle after another. When Arizona copper miners struck in 1983, the United Steelworkers refused to fight the union busting by Phelps Dodge, backed by 1,000 national guardsmen and state police sent in to protect the scabs. In 1985-86, the Hormel meat packers strike in Austin, Minnesota was smashed when Democratic Governor Rudy Perpich sent in the National Guard. The bureaucracy of the United Food and Commercial Workers put Local P-9 into trusteeship, removed the elected leaders of the strike and then brought the scabs into the union. In the Eastern Airlines strike, the IAM bureaucracy repeatedly offered to cut the wages and benefits of mechanics if union buster Frank Lorenzo would give the union leaders seats on the company board of directors. At Pittston Coal, the United Mine Workers leadership deliberately isolated the walkout, worked to bring an end to the wildcat sympathy strike by 50,000 miners and then sent the strikers back to work with a contract that authorized Pittston to set up nonunion operations and impose a seven-day work week.

22. These defeats have been accompanied by the revival of the methods of frame-up, violence and murder which the capitalists employed against the working class on a large scale before the building of the CIO. Four Kentucky coal miners were framed up and imprisoned for long jail terms in the A.T. Massey strike. Another Massey striker, John McCoy, was shot dead while picketing a non-union mine in 1990. Strikers were murdered on the picket line in the 1989 telephone workers' strike and the 1983 and 1990 Greyhound strikes. Today Greyhound striker Roger Cawthra is fighting a six year jail term imposed in a Connecticut frame-up. In every case, the AFL-CIO bureaucracy has refused to defend workers victimized by company and government frame-ups. This spineless capitulation has only encouraged the corporate thugs and murderers. In 1985, gunmen from Vance Security were employed against the Massey miners in remote mountain hollows in southern West Virginia. Today they are on the Caterpillar picket lines in Peoria, and they have been hired for use against an expected newspaper workers' strike in Detroit, one of the main centers of the industrial labor movement.

23. On Wednesday the UAW announced it was initiating a "corporate campaign" against the company. This is the bureaucracy's kiss of death for the Caterpillar strike. Every defeated and betrayed strike of the 1980s -- Continental Airlines, Phelps Dodge, Greyhound, Eastern Airlines, Pittston, the Chicago Tribune, Hormel -- has had its "corporate campaign." Each involved consumer boycotts and protest stunts like Casstevens' appearance at a Caterpillar shareholders' meeting, which the AFL-CIO bureaucracy employed to cover for its refusal to mobilize the strength of the working class against union busting and strikebreaking. Striking workers were given the illusion that their struggle was being escalated, while they were told to appeal, not to the working class, but to the consciences of bankers and corporate directors.

24. The working class must draw the most far-reaching conclusions from the bitter defeats of the 1980s. If workers do not drive the bureaucratic traitors out of the labor movement, the bureaucrats will destroy the unions. The trade unions can only be revived as instruments of the class struggle by building a new, revolutionary leadership. The decline of the unions, however, is not simply the product of the corruption of the bureaucrats, but reveals the inherent limitations of organizations based on a reformist and nationalist program. The revival of the American labor movement requires not merely new personnel in the old offices, but a new program which takes as its point of departure the international unity of the working class in the common struggle to put an end to the capitalist system and establish socialism.

25. The UAW bureaucracy has sought to tie the working class to the corporate bosses by means of economic nationalism. Solidarity House preaches the unity of American workers and American bosses, standing shoulder to shoulder against foreign competition. It justifies the destruction of jobs, wages and working conditions and the imposition of the most barbaric forms of exploitation in the name of making American capitalism more competitive. It declares that the struggle of workers against the employers -- out of which the trade unions themselves arose -- has been superseded by the struggle of American industry against its foreign rivals. Union-busting employers like Caterpillar only take this policy to its logical conclusion, demanding the destruction of the UAW in the name of remaining "globally competitive."

26. As an ideology economic nationalism is as ignorant and stupid as the belief that the earth is flat. The development of capitalism and the technological revolution in communications and computerization has created a globally-integrated economy in which production is organized across national boundaries. Caterpillar is a case in point, as the second largest US exporter of industrial goods, with 60 percent of its production bound for foreign markets. The company operates plants in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, France, Mexico, South Africa and England. It has majority interests in plants in Italy and Indonesia and production affiliates in India and Japan. The global integration of production is an entirely positive development, not only because it gives an enormous impetus to the world economy, but because it links the workers of the world into a single process of production, creating the possibility and necessity for them to combine their efforts in the class struggle against the multinational capitalist employers.

27. The trade union bureaucrats, however, who serve as the most reliable defenders of the "national interest," regard such international unity of the working class with revulsion. In each country, they seek to pit workers against their class brothers internationally in competition to determine who will work most cheaply for the capitalist masters. This fratricidal struggle is a never-ending process: first American workers against those in Mexico and Japan, then auto workers in Texas against those in Michigan, then worker against worker in every plant. The American working class must reject this poisonous nationalism and fight for the unity of workers of all countries in a common struggle against the bosses.

28. The UAW bureaucracy's chauvinist campaign goes so far that it cites the sympathy strike by Caterpillar workers in South Africa, not as an example to be followed by American workers, but as a warning to the corporate bosses! Last weekend's newspaper ad purchased by Solidarity House calls on Caterpillar shareholders to demand "what plans does top management have to keep such protests from expanding into its facilities in other parts of the world?" The frenzied nationalism of the UAW serves as a gigantic diversion. While the UAW bureaucracy was throwing dust in the workers' eyes, telling them their enemy was in Japan, Germany or Mexico, the most vicious assault on the UAW since its foundation was being prepared in the all-American city of Peoria, Illinois, by a homegrown company which presents its union busting as the prerequisite for the defense of "American jobs."

29. On the basis of their defense of American capitalism, the UAW and AFL-CIO bureaucrats subordinate the working class to the big business politicians of the Democratic Party. The alliance with the Democrats is the union bureaucracy's greatest betrayal of the independent interests of the working class. This political straitjacket has left the working class effectively disenfranchised in the face of the bipartisan assault against the labor movement by the Reagan and Bush administrations and the Democratic-controlled Congress and Democratic-controlled state and local governments. It has given big business a free hand to carry out the destruction of social programs and create the massive army of unemployed who can be driven by economic desperation to serve as strikebreakers.

30. The bureaucracy's alliance with the Democratic Party has direct consequences for the Caterpillar strikers. The AFL-CIO and UAW bureaucrats fear that an explosion of the class struggle nationally touched off by the strike at Caterpillar could disrupt its campaign for the election of a Democratic President in 1992. They are perfectly prepared to sacrifice the Caterpillar strikers to preserve their relations with the Democrats. The frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, is a defender of "right-to-work" laws and a faithful stooge of viciously antiunion companies like Tyson's Foods and Wal-Mart. Nonetheless, he has been endorsed by a large section of the trade union bureaucracy and was paraded on the Caterpillar picket line Wednesday as a supposed friend of the workers.

31. In the most cynical fashion, the bureaucracy seeks to exploit the hardship of the Caterpillar strikers to boost its efforts to hustle votes for the Democrats. Thus the response of AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland to Caterpillar's announcement that it would begin hiring scabs was to declare that this proved the necessity for the congressional passage of legislation against replacing strikers and the election of a Democratic president who would sign it. The so-called striker replacement bill is a political fraud whose sole purpose is to allow even the most right-wing Democrat to assume a "pro-labor" coloration for the duration of the election campaign. The bill would do nothing to stop the tidal wave of union busting. It would not prohibit Caterpillar from hiring thousands of scabs. It would simply require that Caterpillar call these scabs "temporary replacement workers" instead of "permanent replacement workers." In either case, after a year on strike, the company would be permitted to stage an NLRB-sponsored election to decertify the union.

32. While the AFL-CIO bureaucracy preaches pacifism and submission to the dictates of the capitalist government, the ruling class is waging war against the labor movement. The capitalists are under no illusions that they can impose the destruction of trade unions and all the gains won by the working class through peaceful methods. The direction of capitalist political rule is towards Bonapartism -- the elevation of the executive branch above the legislative, the uncontrolled operations of the military and CIA revealed in the Iran-Contra affair, the racist and anti-Semitic campaigns of David Duke and Patrick Buchanan, which prepare the ground for a mass fascist movement. The unrestrained dictatorship of capital in the factories must correspond with a government structure to crush all resistance by the working class to brutal exploitation.

33. The labor movement must launch a political struggle against the union-busting offensive of big business, but the precondition of such a struggle is that the working class break from the Democratic Party and establish its political independence from every section of the capitalist class, through the building of a Labor Party based on a socialist program, and fighting for a workers government. The Labor Party must bring together all the struggles of the working class against union busting, evictions, unemployment, budget cuts into a political struggle against the government. Only such an independent political struggle can unify the entire working class -- employed and unemployed, union and nonunion, black, white and immigrant -- against the tiny handful of capitalist bosses. At the same time, by advancing a socialist solution to the myriad of social evils produced by the disintegration of capitalism, the Labor Party can rally behind the working class its potential allies among small businessmen, family farmers and other exploited sections of the middle class.

34. The precondition for this mobilization is an uprising against the privileged union officials to break down the walls which the bureaucracy erects to divide and isolate the struggles of the working class. Rank-and-file Caterpillar workers should demand emergency meetings of every local to take the conduct of the strike out of the hands of Casstevens, Bieber and their local stooges. They should vote to remove Jerry Brown, John Yarbrough and the rest of the Central Bargaining Committee and replace them with trusted militants who will defend the interests of the workers. In every union local, rank-and-file workers should establish factory committees to lead the struggle to drive out the company stooges in the union bureaucracy. Auto workers must link the fight against plant shutdowns at Willow Run, Tarrytown and Flint to the struggle against union busting at Caterpillar, through an all-out rebellion to drive out Bieber, Casstevens, Yokich and the entire gang of traitors in Solidarity House and launch a nationwide auto strike and the preparation of a general strike of the whole membership of the AFL-CIO.

35. The working class requires a new organization to conduct this struggle for workers power and socialism: an international revolutionary party, the Fourth International. The Workers League fights in political solidarity with the International Committee of the Fourth International to rally American workers to the program of world socialist revolution. This is the basis of the Workers League's campaign in the 1992 elections, in which the party is running Helen Halyard for President and Fred Mazelis for Vice President. Our election campaign advances three essential principles: the international unity of the working class, the building of a Labor Party based on socialist policies, and the establishment of a workers government to carry out this socialist program. We urge Caterpillar strikers and all class-conscious workers to support this campaign and join the fight to build a new, revolutionary leadership in the working class.

See also:
Caterpillar workers reject sellout contract
What is the UAW and whom does it represent?
[25 February 1998]

The Lessons for All Labor
Caterpillar Workers Betrayed
[17 April 1992]