Socialist Viewpoint

On the same day, Dec. 3, that 1,500 delegates and guests to the AFL-CIO’s Convention gathered in Las Vegas “to stand up for workers,” a New Jersey local judge began carrying out his threat to jail 1,000 public schoolteachers. He jailed the educators in alphabetical order. The teachers union, without taking a vote of its members, threw in the towel after five days. By then, the judge had reached the “Rs,” and 228 defiant teachers were behind steel bars.

The strikers too may have thought that they were standing up for workers when they rejected the Middletown, N.J. school board’s attempt to impose a concessionary contract that would raise the teachers’ share of their health insurance premiums to $860 a year from $250 the first year of a new contract, then by 7 percent in the next two years. In any case, the teachers unexpectedly got a harsh lesson in class warfare they’re not likely to forget.

No doubt the Las Vegas conventioneers felt sympathy for the teachers. If there had been time, they probably would have passed a resolution expressing their sympathy. Perhaps the AFL-CIO tops may still do so. Unfortunately for all U.S. workers what the AFL-CIO leadership won’t do is tell governmental authorities—and the bosses that front for them—that involuntary servitude is unconstitutional, and jailing strikers to enforce involuntary servitude merits a tough response by all labor leaders worthy of the name.

Back in 1865, the necessary states ratified the Thirteenth Amendment that clearly states that, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” In other words for over 135 years, involuntary servitude, that is forcing workers to labor at the point of a gun or its judicial equivalent violates the nominal law of the land. It’s not clear if the teachers had the Thirteenth Amendment in mind when they struck. Maybe they just assumed that the right to strike in order to resist the erosion of their standard-of living is a natural right, a human right as necessary to modern civilization as air is to human life.

If so, what must the teachers think today? What in all sincerity can they now teach their students about the rule of the law in the land of the free? Perhaps some teachers will feel the need, perhaps the duty, to alter their lesson plans and teach their students that while the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, their experience suggests that involuntary servitude in various other guises is a critical condition of life under the capitalist social order.

The men and women who are in command of this nation’s unions know that workers, including their 13 million or so members, are subject to involuntary servitude. They surely must know that organized labor gave up the fight to resist forced labor when its officialdom “humbled” itself before the dictates of the Taft-Hartley Law of 1947, rightly called the “Slave Labor Act.” No less an authority than John L. Lewis, chief leader of the industrial workers’ upsurge during the Great Depression roared that the labor tops by complying with the Taft-Hartley Act were “… repealing the [AFL’s] 1919 injunction policy … and you are humbling yourselves in abasement before the return of government by [anti-labor] injunction.” When they refused to get off their knees before the “Slave Labor Act,” Lewis skewered the Federation’s leaders with his famous wrath. “As far as I’m concerned, on this particular issue, I don’t think that the [AFL] Federation has a head. I think its neck has just grown up and haired over.” Sadly, Lewis’ often quoted judgment about the AFL officialdom also applied to the then-separate CIO.

A notable Teamsters leader put down his insights into the law, the courts, unions and workers in his first-hand account of Teamsters struggles, victories and defeats. Farrell Dobbs, a leader of the 1935 Minneapolis general strike, and chief strategist of the organization of long-haul truckers, observed that:

“Basically, the judicial process is designed to serve ruling-class needs. The only constant involved is the upholding of constitutional guarantees extended to capitalists—the right to private property in the means of production, and comparable matters. On paper, the Bill of Rights is just as explicit as the constitutional protection of capitalist property. But the high cout’s history shows that supposedly inviolable guarantees to the exploited masses have been undermined and whittled down through a variety of legal devices, each one designed to meet specific capitalist needs at a given juncture. Workers’ rights have been infringed upon through court action, then partly restored, only to be violated anew; and this consistent pattern of inconsistency has been attuned to the ebb and flow of the class struggle. Taken as a whole, judicial interpretation of the Constitution has reflected two opposite trends: increasingly specific protection of capitalist interests, and ever-deeper erosion of the workers’ democratic rights....” [Emphasis added] (Teamster Bureaucracy, 1977).

The ever-deeper erosion of the workers’ democratic rights that Dobbs observed reached a new low for tens of thousands of workers regulated by the Railway Labor Act, and supplementary laws passed in 1988. Those laws allow the government not only to strip those workers of their right to strike but also write and impose on them the contract under which they’re to labor.

Veteran railroad trade unionist, Lynn Henderson, had described the severity of the bipartisan stockades that the politicians have constructed for rail and airline workers in the May 2001 issue of Socialist Viewpoint: “But to accomplish the breaking of the unions they [the rail owners] knew they had to undercut and erode the real power of labor—a power which flowed from its demonstrated ability to effectively strike and shut the carriers down.” When the Railway Labor Act wasn’t enough, the politicians of both capitalist parties turned the screws much tighter.

In 1988, a board appointed by then-president Ronald Reagan gave the Chicago & North Western managers “virtually everything they were demanding, including a conductor-only crew size and the elimination of the attrition principle in the subsequent slashing of thousands of jobs.” The United Transportation Union rejected the board’s decisions and struck. But “before the strike was hours old, an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, under the leadership of Democratic Senator Paul Simon of Illinois (elected as a pro-labor liberal), in collaboration with the Reagan administration, unanimously passed a special act which ordered the striking workers back on the job, and imposed Reagan’s horrendous…recommendations on C&NW railroad workers as their legal contract.”

Then again in 1991, “Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch took the lead in the passage of the special legislation (H.R. 222) stripping (UTU) workers of their right to strike, forcing them back to work and imposing a government written contract on them.” Henderson noted that president George W. Bush that year “preemptively stripped aircraft mechanics, in the process of negotiating a new contract with Northwest Airlines, of their right to strike.” To be fair, President Clinton in 1997 abrogated the right to strike of American Airlines pilots. (Lynn Henderson, “Gov’t Attacks Right to Strike of Transportation Workers,” Socialist Viewpoint, May 2001.)

The defeated teachers went back to work as ordered by the judge. Now they await the outcome of court-ordered mediation. The union had earlier agreed to proposals by mediators that the board rejected. Since the new mediator’s proposals are not binding on the board, it’s not clear what the union will do should the board reject them as it did the others. Since New Jersey and its neighboring state, New York, are two of the most heavily unionized states in the nation, perhaps the labor officialdom of those states will extend their solidarity to the isolated teachers. After all, if labor doesn’t use its power where it has it, where will it use it and for which workers?

And in the same vein, if the labor movement doesn’t defend the Thirteenth Amendment who in the hell will?