The following leaflet was written and distributed by the MLC in October, 1976.
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Plumbers Union leader Joe Mazzola was recently impeached from the San Francisco Airports Commission by the Board of Supervisors. They charged him with having a “conflict of interest” because of his duties as an Airports Commissioner and his activities as a leader of striking city workers, including airport plumbers, in April-May, 1976. The trial got a lot of publicity, and the SF Labor Council voted to censure the Board. But did this trial really represent an attack on working people?
In municipal debt per capita, San Francisco is second only to New York. What does this crisis, part of the general crisis of monopoly capitalism, mean for workers? First, it means that the Board of Supervisors, fronting for the SF monopoly capitalist class, is no longer in a position to grant hefty bribes to all the trade union bosses and the labor aristocrats (higher-paid craft and government workers)–in the form of well-paying jobs, cushy and prestigious positions on city commissions, etc.. This was made clear in the retaliation against police and firemen on the November, 1975 ballot, and throughout the long strike of city crafts workers in April-May, 1976 over cuts in wages and benefits. Mazzola’s impeachment merely proved that in a financial crisis, even the labor bureaucrats can’t serve two masters. Mazzola and his cronies are nothing but bourgeois agents in our midst; but during the crafts workers’ strike, Mazzola, Jensen, Evankovich and the rest were forced by their membership to fight for the particular interests of the crafts-workers, putting themselves in opposition to the San Francisco ruling class at the time.
Secondly, and most important, the crisis means that the ’city fathers’ must do whatever they can to shift the burden onto the backs of working people. Just recently, Muni drivers were forced to accept cuts in hospital and pension benefits. Poor and working people throughout the city are suffering already from fewer Muni runs, cuts in hospital, social services, educational, library facilities. And now the Board is talking about raising Muni fares and making 5-7% budget cuts in all city departments. In fact, Mazzola’s trial is a cover-up for the bourgeoisie’s attacks on the masses of workers, and prepares the ground for the November ballot measures by arousing public sentiment against working people. Eight anti-labor measures are on the ballot, including Proposition B (making strikes by city workers illegal), and 0 (destroying collective bargaining by submitting city workers’ wage demands to voters). Even the ’friends of the ruling class’ – union leaders and some of the highest-paid workers – are now forced to shoulder some of the burden, underscoring the crisis of monopoly capitalism.
For the California AFL-CIO, it took this trial to pass a resolution condemning the SF supervisees as “enemies of the working people” (SF Chronicle, 9/23)–a truth already well-known to all workers. To wage a struggle against the growing attacks on workers, the proletariat needs leadership–but not the opportunist leadership of these traitors heading the unions. When they fight at all, they do it only in the name of the narrow stratum of labor aristocrats. These well-paid misleaders have to be driven out of the unions and replaced by democratic, rank-and-file leadership that fights for the interests of the majority, and especially the lower-paid workers, against anti-labor propositions, against cuts in the city budget that mean greater hardships for working people. At the same time, class-conscious workers armed with Marxism-Leninism must build a genuine communist party independent of the Democratic and Republican parties, independent of the opportunism and treachery of the labor bureaucrats. Only such a party is capable of truly leading workers in the class struggle and to socialism, instead of selling them out to their exploiters!
NO ON PROPOSITIONS B, D, E, I, J, L, M, O!
EXPEL THE LABOR TRAITORS FROM THE UNIONS!
BUILD A GENUINE COMMUNIST PARTY!