On March 28, 2002 the United Auto Workers (UAW) sent a letter to the chief company negotiator for Accuride's Henderson, Kentucky plant 'disclaiming interest in representing hourly employees' at that facility. This letter ended twenty years of union representation at the factory. The 400 workers concerned were given no warning of this action by the union that was supposed to serve and represent them. They had remained locked-out of their jobs for four years because the UAW never even tried to get solidarity action from their considerable membership in other plants. By this gesture and the effective end of any strike benefits, the union has effectively killed the struggle and done its part in ruining the lives of these 400 workers, who had made the tragic error of trusting it.

This November, the 2,200 technicians and repairmen of Vidéotron, a Quebec-based communications outfit, have been on strike for nearly 7 months. The struggle hinges on the planned transfer of 664 workers to another communications company, Entourage Solutions. These workers would lose over 30% of their present wages and their entire pension plan. This stems from pressure put on the company by the provincial government pension fund, the Caisse de dépôt et placement, to cut 30 million in expenses annually. Incredibly, the union's plan of action has essentially been limited to lobbying this same Caisse and the government to 'reason' with the company it controls. The union even implies that it is happy with the nomination of ex-Premier Lucien Bouchard as the company's new chief-negotiator. This is the same Bouchard who was the state negotiator when the nationalist government slashed 20% from the wages of government employees in 1982... While the union has touching faith in the capitalist state and its cronies, it has done nothing to mobilize its own membership, much less the rest of the working class to come out in support of the strikers. On the contrary, other workers associated with the same union and working for different sub-contractors are allowed to continue work for the company. This is, in effect, a form of the union scabbing on its own members. The fate of this strike is more than doubtful and will remain so unless the workers make a dramatic shift towards real rank and file control over their struggle.

These are just some very recent examples of unions exposing their true function, which we see as being state organs responsible for the control of workers and the effective containment of their struggles in the interest of the ruling class. Sometimes, the job is done in a ruthless and overt way that leaves even their most uncritical leftist supporters dumbfounded. Such was the case in 1973, for example, when 1,000 UAW paid goons attacked the workers at the Detroit Mack Ave sit-down strike. Other such dramatic shows of force have left their mark on the entire history of our class. One only has to think of the union-raiding operations in the Quebec construction industry or the episodic violent quelling of opposition from within union ranks that is characteristic of union practices everywhere. However, even when the unions operate in an open way and under a progressive guise, they ultimately play the same role as the openly reactionary and mafia-run operations.

A historical view

At their inception in the 19th century, the unions were indeed useful in the defence of workers' basic living and working conditions. Though never revolutionary, in spite of the illusions of some of their working class members, they often really fought for a better life. That's why they were initially banned and a good number of their militants were fired, arrested and even killed because of their union activity. Through workers' struggle and sacrifice the unions gradually won legal recognition of associative and bargaining rights. But the ruling class had its own agenda in granting this recognition. Its more enlightened representatives had started to realize that the proscription of unions did not halt labour conflicts but indeed rendered them even more dangerous and violent. Legalization only stimulated the already present moderating tendencies of union organization, by encouraging it to keep workers' struggles within the boundaries of bourgeois legality. Thus, as capitalism evolved into its imperialist phase, the unions have gradually become part of the capitalist state's regulatory and planning apparatus. They essentially exist to make deals with the ruling class and keep workers under control. The negotiations take place within the framework of the national capitalist economy and so it is only normal that they tend to defend that economy.

Thus, during World War One, the unions followed the lead of the chauvinist social-democratic parties and actively supported their respective bourgeoisie in the slaughter of millions of workers. They practiced 'national solidarity', 'social peace' and spread all kinds of nationalist illusions in order to implement the militarization of labour and the generalization of no-strike pledges. This is why as early as the end of the First World War, important organizations of revolutionary-minded workers became very critical of the unions. The unions then followed the exact same path during the Second World War. Analysing this, our international current adopted the following conclusion by the end of that massacre:

In the present period of decadence of capitalist society, the union is called upon to be an essential tool in the politics of conserving capitalism and therefore to assume the precise functions of a state organ.

Partito Comunista Internazionalista Conference on the Trade Unions, 1947

So, since the very beginning of the imperialist phase of capitalism, the unions have proven time and again their value in preserving the wage-slave system. In the name of economic realism, and by means of the collective agreement (contract), they are the specialists who are entrusted with the task of integrating the working class into the capitalist logic to the hilt. They are in the business of getting workers to accept lay-offs, restructuring, 'realistic' wage demands and anything else the bosses need to make a handsome profit. With the same nationalistic logic they used to mobilize support for slaughter during past wars, their peacetime policy is to fight for import controls and protectionism. Didn't the anti-globalization demo in Seattle start off by U.S. union members dumping Chinese steel in Puget Sound? Quite a bizarre conception of workers' solidarity isn't it?

Keeping the lid on

Despite their occasional use of strikes, the unions always have their own agenda that is to completely control workers' struggles. Over the years, they have fine-tuned the art of supposedly promoting workers' rights, while in effect wrecking any possibility of real success. Though open participation in state and class-collaborationist structures and overt betrayal of strikes are the most flagrant aspects of the unions' anti-working class policies, the real betrayal starts inside the workplace itself by the establishment of the whole codification and recognition of management rights and the practice of contractual mediation rather than the promotion of class struggle.

By splitting up strikes section by section or industry by industry; by defusing and confusing the struggle through hour long 'stoppages' or 'days of action'; by using ballots as excuses for cooling down periods; by looking after their funds rather than acting outside of the law to defend their members; by preventing mass meetings and by isolating struggles and condemning solidarity action the union apparatus tries to ensure that the working class doesn't put up a serious challenge to the bosses' attacks.⁽¹⁾

Confronted with nearly a hundred years of treason, the usual leftist argument is to recognize some of these flaws while advocating either a 'democratization' of the present unions or the creation of new progressive or revolutionary ones. The leftists just don't want to admit that it is the function of the unions today, rather than the present leadership or organizational affiliations, that determines their reactionary policies. Every attempt at democratization through changes in leadership has gone down to defeat or worse: the transformation of the alternative leadership into a new bureaucracy. In the same way, recent attempts at building 'radical' unions in Europe and elsewhere have clearly shown that they very rapidly bow to the logic of contractual mediation, i.e., become what they used to denounce. Clearly, the unions have become tools of capitalist rule.

So how then are we to resist the increasing offensive against our living and working conditions? First of all, because we support the demands of the working class against capitalist attacks, it is our duty to expose the unions' true nature. The fight for our short and long-term interests has to go beyond and against the trade-union framework and logic. What are needed are strikes not unions! These strikes must unite rather than divide. They must not be led by bureaucrats but by elected and recallable delegates on strike committees responsible to mass meetings of workers. Of course, this is often not possible considering the present low-level of class-consciousness. However, this weakness must not deter us from posing an alternative strategy for our whole class and defending it wherever and whenever possible (including union meetings). In all the struggles to come, we internationalist communists will fight with our fellow workers, trying to go beyond the limitations of the immediate or economic confrontation.

In conclusion, as our British comrades have written:

Wherever possible, once a struggle dies down, we must regroup the more militant and potentially revolutionary workers in political groups connected to the revolutionary program. In this way we can keep alive the sparks of consciousness in different workplaces for the next wave of struggle. This is not a recipe for reformism but, on the contrary, points forward to the explicit struggle for political power.⁽²⁾

So that's the deal with the unions! Even though a great number of workers share our critique of union practice, we know many might be shocked by the organizational conclusions of our current. Then so be it! It's about time we finally break with the absurd and self-defeating routine of class collaboration and the murderous and mind-destroying cycle of false victories and real defeats.

(1) Socialism or Barbarism, Communist Workers Organization, 1994.

(2) Ibid.