Photo – The Nation
THE REAWAKENING OF THE AMERICAN WORKING CLASS – YouTube
WIN Discussion September 2022, focusing on the resurgence of working-class militancy in the USA.
Listen to on the spot reports from veteran trade union activists Jack Gerson (Teachers’ Union) and Richard Mellor, editor of the famous blog Facts For Working People.
Last June we discussed the growing crisis in US society: the sharp decline in its share of world production; its horrific death toll in the pandemic; the fact that this year alone hundreds of people have been shot dead by police, 53 people a day on average die of gunshot wounds, and there are on average eleven wanton massacres a week, including mass shootings of children at school. Almost half of Americans believe that the USA is heading for a second civil war. A tidal wave of protest has swept across the country: Black Lives Matter, Me Too, school students’ gun control marches, women’s protests against the reimposition of anti-abortion laws, and a surge of trade union recruitment among previously unorganized young workers.
A wave of strikes has swept across the entire country. Payday Report’s “strike tracker” lists 1,350 strikes since the start of March 2021, with strikes now running at 100 per month. The movement encompasses a combination of those already organised in trade unions, and workers fighting for the right to organise in the workplace, including fast food chains like Starbucks, led in many cases by young workers and even teenagers, and the brutal fight in Amazon warehouses. Among the strikers are a high proportion of women, for instance teachers and nurses. In many cases the strikes have constituted a revolt against the AFL/CIO union bureaucracies and other encrusted unions, with workers voting down agreed contracts, then walking out and facing attacks from both unions and management. Recent examples include Caterpillar, Volvo, CNH, John Deere, the huge supermarket chain Kroger, teachers’ strikes and nurses’ strikes, with workers voting down deals already concluded by their unions. Two big outstanding issues at this point are in logistics. The West Coast ports have been working without a new contract for over two months, with the bosses desperate to avoid action which would strike at the heart of the US economy. The situation is if anything more acute on the US railroads, where the workforce is enraged by the intolerable work schedules enforced by the bosses, the toll of workers killed and maimed in unnecessary “accidents”, and the erosion of pay over several years. A major landmark railroad strike has only narrowly been averted by the last-minute granting of substantial concessions