For the Class Union

Militant coal miners fined millions of dollars by US government

Approximately 1,100 miners at Warrior Met Coal, a large private firm that operates several facilities across the State of Alabama, have now been on strike for over 16 months since negotiations over a new contract reached a deadlock on wages and working conditions in April 2021. Engaging in a strike that is unlimited in duration, these workers show the way to victory for the rest of the working class.

On July 22, 2022, the regional office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), using company estimates as a basis, assessed the damages of the strike thus far at $13.3 million – hardly a dent in their skyrocketing net income, reported as $297 million in the last quarter alone – and ordered the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which represents the strikers, to pay. The decision was rightly met with ridicule by the union president, Cecil Roberts, who has committed to a legal challenge: «[w]hat is the purpose of a strike if not to impact the operations of the employer, including production? Is it now the policy of the federal government that unions be required to pay a company’s losses as a consequence of their members exercising their rights as working people? This is outrageous and effectively negates workers’ right to strike».

By the same principle, a union that truly aims to empower its members should do everything in its ability to maximize the impact the strike has on the operations of the employer – but the UMWA has not done this. Shortly following the beginning of the strike, the operator was granted a court order against pickets «interfering, hindering, or obstructing ingress and egress to the company’s properties». The union has apparently encouraged its members to respect the ruling by clearing the entrances and exits whenever the sheriff’s officer, who is posted outside the facility to enforce the injunction, requests it, which hasn’t stopped them being hit and injured while picketing by vehicles moving scabs into and out of the mines with impunity. Perhaps President Roberts should ask himself what the purpose of a picket line is if not to obstruct the flow of labor and goods!

There are more opportunities for the union to substantially improve its support for its members’ struggle. On its website, the company offers some useful information about itself: «Warrior Met Coal is a leading producer and exporter of metallurgical coal for the global steel industry from underground mines located in Brookwood, Alabama, southwest of Birmingham and near Tuscaloosa… Metallurgical coal mined from the Blue Creek coal seam contains very low sulfur and has strong coking properties, making it ideally suited for steel makers. Warrior Met Coal’s cost‑efficient operations serve markets in the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America via convenient barge and rail access to the Port of Mobile». The striking coal miners should look to amplify the effects of their action through association with the workers of other companies that either transport or productively consume coal: to begin with, the miners can track coal extracted by scabs and communicate with port, barge, and rail workers to prevent the company from completing shipments; if Warrior Met succeeds in delivering the forbidden coal to a steel mill, then the miners can inform the workers there of its origins and ask them to withhold their labor in solidarity.

Currently, the mine workers’ union in many ways acts in the interests of the employers, whether it is conscious of it or not, contributing to the collapse of the union sector. (Note: The coal mining industry used to be totally unionized in the United States, but now only 15% of all the coal in the nation is mined by union workers). But this situation is not inevitable; workers both inside and outside the existing trade unions can and should cooperate to oppose weak or opportunistic leaders and rebuild the labor movement.

Labor Notes – a reformist and trade-unionist organization with ties to the progressive wing of the union leadership (e.g. Teamsters for a Democratic Union) as well as trotskist groups like Solidarity – has reported on the strike in multiple articles freely available online. They are also planning a «Troublemakers’ School – on October 15 in Alabama – to strategize, share skills, and learn ways to organize to win», including workshops on «Beating Apathy and Turning an Issue into a Campaign», with the striking coal miners evidently being their target audience. From a materialist perspective, making action conditional on successfully raising consciousness beforehand is putting the cart before the horse: there is no better teacher than experience – in this case, of class struggle. More importantly, the miners in question have already realized the necessity of fighting capital in their workplace; what they need is critical-scientific analysis so they can overcome the different obstacles they run into in the course of their struggle.

Only a union that promotes the militancy of its members, refuses to submit to the State at their expense, and seeks to extend their struggles beyond company and national boundaries – in other words, a class union – can guarantee lasting satisfaction for the workers. Only an international party of the working class with a clear vision and independent of the State and the bosses can provide adequate leadership for such an organization.

American auto union neglects industrial workers

In Marion, VA, a town of only a few thousand residents nestled in the Appalachian Mountains, 270 manufacturing workers at General Dynamics, a major military equipment contractor for the US military, have been on strike for over a month. The plant produces lightweight, mobile shelters that are important for protecting soldiers and other equipment in varying, often harsh, natural conditions, in addition to radar and structural components for aircraft. Many of General Dynamics’ products are now being sent to Ukraine to bolster the war effort. The strikers’ complaints include declining real wages and the recently (in 2008) introduced two‑tier system.

Meanwhile, 30‑40 auto technicians at a Mercedes‑Benz dealership in San Diego, CA went on strike in mid June over the company’s wage proposal for the next contract. About one month in, 20 of the strikers were fired by the company in retaliation.

Despite the fact that the falling purchasing power of wages, multi‑tier contracts, and the right to organize and strike are hot issues for virtually all industrial workers in the union, only a small fraction of its total membership is presently being mobilized. Demands common to all the industries covered by the union, like wage increases across the board and equal pay for equal work should be advanced and directly fought for on the shop floor with the financial and organizational backing of the international union.

Judging from the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) – the union representing the strikers – and Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) – a popular reform caucus within the union – international websites, there is no sign that these strikes are even taking place; the only reports on the action come from external news sources and the regional UAW office. It is certainly odd that the union is not doing more to promote the event and link up various workers’ struggles with the resources it has at its disposal, let alone staging an apparent information blackout on the few existing sites of resistance.

A large part of the union’s attention remains fixed on the Constitutional Convention which just closed in early August without any major changes to the sclerotic union structure. Although the rising internal opposition of UAWD indicates an uptick in combativeness among members, both factions vying for union leadership have effectively channeled rank-and-file energy into the relatively innocuous avenue of voting for reforms of their own organization, as opposed to organizing and supporting action in the workplace.

Another contributing factor is the evolving composition of the union. Non‑union manufacturing has rapidly overtaken its union counterpart since the 1970s, with the free flow of capital – from urban union strongholds in the east and north to more rural areas with lax labor regulations in the south and west, from the US to foreign countries, and from foreign countries to the US (as it’s mainly the domestic auto companies that are bound to collective bargaining agreements with American workers) – playing a crucial role in the latter’s decline. But UAW has done little to counteract the trend, for instance by expanding its territory to organize non‑union workers and striking to prevent manufacturers from exploiting more vulnerable labor pools; instead, they have offered a number of concessions to the employers over the years so that union workers can compete in a race to the bottom with non‑union workers.

Naturally, this has led to a drastic loss of members in the auto industry, which the union is attempting to compensate for by recruiting white collar workers like graduate students, who disproportionately belong to the activist left. Several other unions have used the same tactic of organizing outside their jurisdiction, especially among the middle classes, to shore up their collapsing organizations, so they compete against one another for potential recruits and exhibit remarkable redundancies rather than rationally dividing up their tasks in cooperation to prepare the working class for struggle.

The proletariat is the only class capable of opposing the efforts of capital and its State to depress the living and working conditions of the vast majority of the population – because it alone, by its labor in the industrial core of the economy (e.g., manufacturing, construction, maintenance, transportation, agriculture and natural resource extraction), is responsible for creating the surplus-value which is the exclusive purpose of capitalist production. We communists focus on organizing the industrial proletariat into class unions so that workers can control the most strategically-important sectors and exercise maximal power when they take militant action.

US Postal Service propped up by workers’ sacrifices

A plan to consolidate the operations of the United States Postal Service (USPS) has rankled workers across the nation. In the hopes of reducing the costs of doing business and making US mail a financially viable enterprise, the top management has decreed the opening of new, large facilities specializing in sorting and delivery covering an extensive geographical area, taking over and centralizing the duties that were once distributed over many post offices scattered across the same region. This move is supposed to save on both equipment and labor expenses, making a great deal of post office employees redundant and enabling staff reductions.

The postal service is designed to bear the burden of meeting the needs of capitalism which promise the least profit. One illustration of this fact is that the USPS is legally required to deliver to and from everyone in the country at a uniform low price, regardless of how difficult it is to actually provide service and despite falling demand (including, for example, a mailbox at the bottom of the Grand Canyon which is only accessible by mule). Meanwhile, corporations like Amazon, UPS, and Nordstrom are granted de facto government subsidies in the form of USPS contracts to complete their most inconvenient orders for pennies on the dollar, throwing absurd workloads on the broken backs of postal workers. As a result, the USPS lost $87 billion in the period 2007‑20, including around $10 billion annually in recent years, a deficit that has been filled by immense emergency loans from Congress that merely prolong the crisis.

Due to ballooning debt and the desire to remain competitive on the world market, the US government has over a long period of time progressively reduced real wages as well as the quantity and quality of services provided by the USPS. Postal managers at the plant level are notoriously abusive as they drive employees into the ground, contributing to the apparently immense challenge of retaining employees. Chronic staff shortages and overwork (entry-level positions often entail 72 hour work weeks – six days a week, 12 hours per day of mind‑numbing manual labor!) are then added to the factory despotism, which helps explain the shockingly high number of suicides and mass shootings committed by current and former postal workers – a phenomenon charmingly named “going postal” in American slang.

Postal unions only won collective bargaining rights in 1970 after a massive and extremely effective illegal national wildcat strike organized clandestinely by rank-and-file associations. However, this remains the only notable example of a postal strike in the entire history of the United States, and the freedom to strike is still denied in this critical branch of industry. Thus, the only officially-recognized recourse workers have is grievance, mediation, and arbitration procedures, leaving many problems unresolved while dissipating tension with the bosses and asphyxiating any independent militancy. Further, the unions are divided into four separate crafts, each of which usually asserts its own sectional interests rather than their common interests against the exploiting employer: clerks, mail handlers, rural and non‑rural letter carriers. Worse yet, the union leadership adopts the interests of the employer by endorsing Democratic Party politicians who are slightly more generous with support and campaigning to prevent the privatization of the USPS, if not blatantly pursuing co‑management.

It means little to postal workers whether the boot that steps on their neck is public or private. Whoever is in office, no matter their ideology or party affiliation, will be compelled by economic competition and strategic concerns to run the State machinery as efficiently – and therefore as ruthlessly with respect to the lower-level workers it employs – as possible. The USPS cannot help but bleed money and deteriorate due to the nature of the services it is obliged to provide and the prevailing economic conditions, although the experience of working there demonstrates that it is hardly an institution worth conserving anyways. Postal workers can only save themselves through autonomous organization and combative action, whether legal or not, that rises above craft and company divisions, striving to extend their association until it encompasses not just all the workers of the supply chain but the entire working class – a real class union front.