A crucial question to the socialist, and all working class members, is the union question. Since the Industrial Revolution began rising in leaps and bounds in the 19th century, the working class has banded together in trade unions in an attempt to gain collective bargaining power against the capitalist class, and to establish guidelines that the employer had to follow. Ostensibly, the purpose of the union was to prevent the employer from having all the bargaining power in their dealings with the employee, and to gain certain benefits and rights for the worker. Has the mission of the unions succeeded, and is the worker better off because of them? The answer to the first part of the questiion is "no," and while the second part may be "yes," the union advantage loses ground every year. What is wrong with the unions, and how may they best serve the workers? The answering of this important question is the purpose of this section, and it offers a revolutionary alternative to the way unions are organized today.
First of all, the problems of the unions are many. For starters, the unions as they are today accept capitalism as a finality. The ultimate goal of the union is "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work." They fail to see how the working class is robbed by the capitalist class at the point of production. Karl Marx pointed this out and called it the Law of Value, and the working class receives in wages the equivalent of only a tiny portion of the amount of wealth that it has produced. A portion of the wealth earned goes into supporting the particular company as maintenance fees, and another to support the capitalist political government in the form of mandatory taxes. The huge portion left over--beyond that what is paid to the workers as wages (and the workers are considered an operating expense, which is why corporate layoffs and "downsizing" is continually done)--is kept as profits by the owning capitalists. No work is done by the capitalist; the workers do all the labor, yet receive the tiniest fraction of the value of the entire product produced or distributed. The modern trade union accepts this unfair tenet of capitalist production, and sees capitalism as an eternal system. Thus, the battle for better wages leaves aside the important point that workers shouldn't be limited to a "wage" in the first place, but deserve the equivalent of the full fruit of their labor. Unions make no attempt to utilize the unemployed members of the working class, and the ones who are working are divided into seperate unions that often rival each other on the labor battlefield rather than uniting the entire class. The union "leaders" have become careerists who feather their own nests and work the unions as a labor market, the same way meat producers work their industry as a meat market, or the record company works the market for CD's. Workers become living commodities, the unions are run non-democratically from top to bottom and the union leaders often have a tremendous salary far above and beyond what the workers in the union are paid. This turns the leaders into careerists who have little interest in the moral issue of advancing the workers' interests.
Union leaders also spread the dangerous myth that labor and capital are "brothers" with interests in common that can be mutually worked out, and they favor contracts which curtail the right of the workers to strike, or to warn the company before doing so. Hence, the capitalist becomes the true beneficiary of the union. Thus, the union leaders have become little more then "labor lieutenants of the capitalist class." Further, the increasing advances in technology have resulted in labor power being worth less and less to the capitalist employer, reducing the strength of even the biggest union exponentially, prompting the organized unions into receiving the axiom of the "rear guard of a retreating army." What needs to be done to change the paltry condition of the unions today?
The union question was worked upon by the great American Marxist Daniel De Leon (1851-1914) who built on many of the socialist ideas of Marx and Engels. The Socialist Labor Party is today the largest party espousing De Leonism, and the New Union Party also supports De Leonist principles (with the addition of a few new ideas of their own), but the only other political party supporting true Marxian socialism, the World Socialist Party, eschews De Leonism, believing that his notions of unionism are too close to making a specific blueprint of how the Socialist Republic will operate, thus undesirably casting it in stone. The SLP, however, points out that the De Leon program of socialist industrial unionism is not intended as a blueprint for the future socialist society, but simply offers guidelines of how modern workers can utilize the contemporary order of workers' relations to industry as a method of abolishing capitalism and setting up revolutionary unions. Since this is the only specific program offered by the socialist camp on how to capture the industries with the principle of unionism, and because I personally believe the De Leonist program to be a viable one, and fully support it myself for the same reasons that the SLP and NUP do, I will present it here on this site (even if this will result in the WSP declaring that I'm not a true socialist but a "De Leonist"). De Leon was a true genius, and his easy-to-understand SIU program being just as relevant today as it was in 1901 is further testimony to that fact.
According to the De Leon model, the true mission of unionism should be to abolish capitalism altogether, not simply to fight for "better" wages and hours for the working class. To concentrate solely on the latter eternally damns the worker to the chains of wage slavery, continues class divisions indefinitely, honors the "right" of the capitalist to collect the lion's share of the wealth and the continuation of the labor "leader" as a privileged and corrupt careerist. Further, the union should unite all workers, employed and unemployed, and regardless of occupation, on the battlefield against the capitalist class. The name of the progaram is Socialist Industrial Unionism (SIU), and it represents the makeup of the union of the future. Below, I describe how this revolutionary union will work:
As stated above, the SIU's will unite all workers, regardless of their job and craft, whether they are full-time or part-time employees, or whether they are presently employed or not. The SIU's will democratically elect their leaders, whose sole purpose will be to represent the SIU to the capitalist, they will be recallable anytime a simple majority of the union decides to do so and they will receive no more monetary compensation than the regular worker (which will ensure that they are battling on the basis of ideological principle for the common good of their fellow workers, and not simply as a personal career move, or to receive a position of power and privilege for themselves). These SIU's will be class-conscious and aware of the workers as a distinct class. They will not maintain the fiction that workers and capitalists are "brothers" with interests in common, but will recognize the capitalist class as an enemy of the workers.
Although, in the beginning, the SIU's will indeed fight the day-to-day battle for better wages and benefits, the ultimate purpose will be to seize the industries from the capitalist class and use them to serve the interests of the workers, who do all the useful labor. During this time, a socialist political party will exist, and will educate the workers as to their true interests; however, the SIU's will command the political party, not the other way around.
Marxism-De Leonism is adamant in its stance that while the economic and politcal organization of workers will work in tandem to achieve socialism, it will be the economic organization of labor, and not the political, that will ultimately take control of the industries for the working class. That is a very important detail for all workers to remember. The socialist political party will be working for its own demise; once socialism is established, it will vote itself out of existence. Not so with the SIU's. They will remain in operation after the revolution is completed, and they will become the new government. Class divisions will cease to exist, and the former capitalists will then join the SIU's and take their places among the useful producers. The elected representatives of the unions will become the all Industrial Congress of the Socialist Republic, recallable at any time a majority of the people decides so, and elections will be a day-to-day activity, and will not be a once every four years formality. See the section on How To Establish Socialism elsewhere on this site for more details on how the Industrial Democracy of socialism will function.
This should be the true mission of unionism. In no other way can the unions serve the purpose of uniting the working class against the capitalist class. Unions must unite the entire working class for the eventual and prompt overthrow of the capitalist class' stranglehold on the economy. A new form of union is required to do this, however. De Leonism paves the way for this, and it will be this revolutionary type of union that will ultimately lead the working class to victory over the capitalists, according to the SLP and NUP, and I believe this assessment to be a sound one.
It should be noted here that the WSP does not support the SIU program, since they believe that it will cause dissension between the workers and the community, and because it exists as a specific blueprint for socialist society to follow, which is not considered desirable for socialists to formulate before the revolutionary change and without the consent of the entire working class. They also state that the prime force in society is political, not economic, and that only political organization is necessary, and that it is unadvisable to create a "blueprint" on how socialist society will function before the revolution. Still, the SLP insists that the SIU model is not a blueprint, but merely a suggestion based on today's industrial makeup. Further, as stated above, the New Union Party also supports De Leonism. Since it is a very coherant program, and since I agree with the SLP and NUP that the main despotic power under capitalism is indeed economic, and because I am a Marxist-De Leonist myself, I decided to include extensive details on the SIU program here. See the WSP site for details on why it does not support De Leonism. A link to the site is included in the links section.
