EDITORIAL
What’s Needed Is a “Collective Fight”

Oct 6, 2024

“Collective bargaining works”—this was President Biden’s comment when the ILA, the port workers’ union, suspended its three-day-old strike at East Coast and Gulf Coast ports.

Certainly it worked for the Democrats, caught in the middle of an election campaign. They did not want a long strike showing them up.

And it worked for the port operators, who will continue to accumulate vast amounts of profit on the higher prices they imposed during the pandemic and continue to impose today—none of which is touched by this agreement.

But what about the port workers? Despite all the talk about a 62% wage increase over six years, it didn’t begin to touch their problems.

The media, of course, flooded the air with stories about port workers who will make $300,000 a year. (And maybe they found a flying pig!)

But here is today’s reality facing dock workers. Top rate at some ports is $39 an hour—but most of the ports have lower top rates, and so do many job classifications. Port workers start at $20 an hour, and many never get beyond $20, due to mysterious rules that limit seniority.

That’s not all. While some dock workers work full time at only one company, many others have to line up every day at a hiring hall, just to see if there is work at any company that day.

But wait, there’s more. Most of these jobs carry only a minuscule pension, with none at all at ports like Houston, Miami and Philadelphia.

And still more. The jobs are dangerous. Port workers fall to their death or are crushed.

Work is intense. When a ship comes in, workers are on the job until the ship is unloaded, 20 hours or more. Not only was no stop put to this ungodly practice, the deal requires the union to take part in efforts to “improve efficiency,” that is, to squeeze more work out of fewer workers.

So no, this “wage settlement” is not a “victory” for the port workers, as the head of one of the bosses’ associations called it. Nor is it a “win,” as Labor Notes declared.

It is simply one more time when so-called “collective bargaining” disarms the workers, keeping them from using the full strength of the force they could have.

The bosses and their political agents in the two parties lined up against the workers. Florida’s governor mobilized his state’s National Guard. The Biden administration—even while pretending it didn’t want to use the Taft-Hartley law to end the strike—kept raising the possibility. Remember that Biden pretended he didn’t want to use the Railway Act—right up to the moment he used it to block the 2023 railworkers strike. And every bit of the media played on the misery caused by Hurricane Helene, trying to shame the dockworkers back to work.

The bosses do not fight alone. But with “collective bargaining,” workers fight alone.

Nothing ordains that. Nothing says workers must fight alone, one industry, even one company at a time. Everyone assumes this is how strikes go, and contracts are written to enforce it.

But something else is possible. We all face common problems, and all of us have reason to join a common, “collective fight.”

A mass mobilization is needed to change the situation facing the working class today. It can’t succeed in just one industry or just one company. But it could start at just one—IF there are militants in place, IF their aim is to spread their fight as widely as possible, IF their goal is to have the workers break free of the shackles created by the unions today, IF they push for the working class to organize itself politically.

Workers, whether in unions or not, occupy the center of the economy, making everything run, keeping everything going. Our class can use this position to take control of the economy away from the capitalist class. It’s not enough just to stop work. Workers can organize work to answer their own problems, and the larger problems of society.

This, we in Spark believe.