Socialists are in the forefront of labor struggles because we see the importance of the working class in achieving fundamental change, and the history role of labor in achieving domestic reform. Socialists have definite ideas about what will make an effective labor movement. But there can be no doubt that working conditions of working people both organized and unorganized have been much improved due to labor unions. The following are some fundaments of a Socialist approach to labor:
1. Defense of bona fide labor unions. Socialists oppose union-busting. We oppose concessions. We see one of the major problems of U.S. labor as its failure to organize the unorganized – less than one fifth of the workforce in the U.S. is under union contract.
2. Union democracy. Much of labor’s difficulties are due to internal problems. The labor movement cannot be a force for democratic change until it is democratic itself. The SP approaches change until it is democratic itself. The SP approach to labor supports rank and file insurgent movements built from the bottom up. Some labor leaders are progressive, but they can be really effective in promoting widespread change only if they are there as democratic representatives of a militant and progressive rank and file.
3. Solidarity. We see the solidarity of all workers as the key to building an effective labor movement. The old IWW slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Springing from this idea of solidarity is the idea of industrial unionism, as opposed to craft unionism: that all workers of a particular industry be organized together regardless of specific occupation. Eugene Debs, one of the founders of the Socialist Party of the United States of America, recognized from his experience as a railway workers union leader that craft unionism provides an opportunity for employers to play one craft against another. Some socialists would carry this to the conclusion that all workers be organized into “one big union,” such as the Industrial Workers of the World.
Also stemming from the idea of solidarity is the preference for internationalist to nationalist unions. The theory that the North American working class has been brought off in the post-WWII era, being offered relatively high wages in exchange for the acceptance of the present system, as the expense of workers in Third World countries, helps to explain the lack of international solidarity in U.S. labor. But now the situation is changing. Jobs in the U.S. are being lost to cheaper labor markets overseas, often places where U.S. working people’s tax dollars are being used to prop up right-wing dictatorships that limit or outlaw unions and strikes. Socialists have the job of educating the working class that wars are fought against their own interest – that the working classes of different countries have much more in common with each other than with their rulers
4. Open promotion of Socialist principles is thus a goal of Socialists within the trade union movement. There are times when the tactics of militant unions make this easier – e.g., it is a short step from the occupation of factories to the idea that workers themselves should own and control the factories. But slow, careful work in non-crisis situation is necessary to prepare for such a situation and makes them possible.
We ought not to leave a discussion of the working class without at least mentioning some problems of definition. Third world revolutions with peasants rather than wage-earners as the motivating force have helped to broaden our perspective on what constitutes a revolutionary class. Some theorists even see Third World countries as occupying approximately the same place as the working class did in Marx’s theory of revolution. More recently, other theorists have reexamined modern capitalist society and seen the emergence of a “professional-managerial” class between capital and labor, but still with wage-earning characteristics.