Consider this...

Consider the state of unions today. In the US perhaps 11 percent of the workforce is in a union. In France the number is even smaller. Australia, which once had the highest rates of unionization in the world has seen its unions evaporating. Unions in a time of capitalist crisis become more reactionary. Unions like the UAW routinely make deals that destroy their own memberships in exchange for company pension funds. Unions do more to prevent strikes than to start them.

Take the biggest strike waves you can think of, for example. How many of these were initiated by unions? May 68 in France wasn't initiated by a union. The strikes in the US, the biggest wave of strikes in US history, from 43 to 46, weren't being led by unions. During most of that time the unions in the US had pledged a no-strike deal with the US president and enforced it on their memberships until their members got sick of it. If you go back far enough, say to the 1877 general strike in the US, or the 1919 Seattle general strike, there you find unions leading struggles. The small strike wave in the 1970s in the US wasn't spearheaded by unions, rather it was wildcat strikers that were at its forefront. I knew a man, whose funeral I attended this year and who was in the Schneider trucking strike in the 70s and was forced to wildcat after the company and the union stabbed them in the back. They were crushed and blacklisted from the trucking industry and the union supported the blacklisting. The New Directions movement with Ron Carey was supported by a lot of rank and file union activists and Trotskyists. They attempted to "reform" the Teamsters in the eighties failed and Carey was replaced by Jimmy Hoffa Jr.

More recently the Trotskyist coalition of union reformers here, Labor Notes was attacked in one of its meeting by SEIU thugs who literally sent people to the hospital. That's what you get for working with them. The SEIU is the worst union I have ever seen. My own experience with the SEIU involves a harassment grievance filed three times by three different groups of workers in a Health Insurance claims processing center against a supervisor I had. The union rep, who turned out to be her friend stood up at the meeting and told us flat out, no grievances against our supervisor would be looked into. I questioned this and spoke openly against it, the union rep and the supervisor. Three days later I was fired. I now can't work in any of the large health insurance companies based in my city. Often, you see, unions are closer to management than to the workers. They, even the smallest shop stewards often view themselves as co-management, or partners in management.

The leaders of unions like the old Congress of Industrial Organizations leader John L. Lewis used leftists to organize his union and when questioned about it, he replied in effect that he was using them, not the other way around. Leftists never quite got it in that regard. The leftists enter into a more powerful organization than their own thinking that they will use the union. In fact, the unions have seen leftists attempt this for decades and are used to it. The unions will use you.

I once had an exchange with one leftist from a prominent Trotskyist group, the Sparts. I realized that when he said not working in unions would be a "disaster", that meant it would be a disaster for him as he and his comrades held posts in the unions. The workers in his union weren't at any point a part of his political calculus. I've seen a generation of union organizers get recruited straight out of the schools of the elite here, places like Harvard, Yale, and Chicago University. These organizers are set up by the unions to organize unions that many, if not most, have never once been an actual rank-and-file member of.

I have been in three unions, the Service Employees International Union, The United Food and Commercial Workers and the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees. Each one of these unions are basically company unions. Partners in exploitation of the workforce. Herders of votes for the DP. Growing up in a strong union family my family essentially voted for Democratic Party members off the list of union endorsed candidates in the regional union newspaper. I've seen shop stewards who actually care about workers burn out and turn mean because the union is not a place to represent and defend your fellow workers.

Anyway, my point is that people who support unions and working within them don't often seem to have much experience with them. Workers who start becoming conscious of their situation here invariably end up being inspired by the IWW, myself included. We look back at unions that no longer exist in the way they did then and wish there was some way to turn things back and make them organizations of, by and for the defense of workers. But those days are gone forever. For over a hundred years the most skilled entryist leftists have failed to "reform" unions at all. Unions today thrive and survive only through class-collaboration and becoming integrated fully into capitalist production as a auxiliary apparatus of capitalist labor-force management.

Often in labor disputes workers aren't even allowed to see the full texts of the contracts they vote on in their unions as the union reps and management don't want them to read the fine print. Often unions here don't even want their own members to have a union handbook or to even want to let them know where the union meeting is. Unions exist as a hiring hall here, not sure if it works like this elsewhere. Companies hire prospective union apprentices who work for a few years on a substandard wage until they become journeymen. Often this process excludes most workers and is the province of nepotism and collusion with management and exploitation of young workers who'll often get laid off before they ever complete their apprenticeship.

At times you'll have no choice but to be in a union. In such a case you will have to wage a struggle against both the company and the union. Nevertheless, consider the history of failed attempts at reforming unions. Consider the role unions play as partners in management. I ask you then to reconsider unions as they are and not as we might wish them to be.