It is the task of our Party to win the broad masses of workers in the trade unions to socialist revolution and communist leadership.
The U.S. working class has a long history of militant class struggle against the capitalist system. The courageous struggles of the U.S. workers have played a major role in the international workers’ movement. Their fight for the 8-hour day was the origin of May Day, the international workers’ holiday. The U.S. working class has produced countless heroes of the world proletariat. The fight to build and defend the trade unions has been an essential part of the history of working class struggle in the U.S.
The trade unions are the broadest and most basic organization of the working class and have served as centers for organizing the class as a whole. We build the unions and defend them from the capitalist assaults, for they are indispensable weapons of the class struggle.
The trade unions developed spontaneously out of the struggles of the working class to defend itself against the capitalists and to fight for better working conditions. Through these struggles, the workers learned of the necessity to unite against the capitalists.
However, spontaneous struggles do not in themselves develop communist consciousness within the working class. Without the interjection of communist consciousness through the fusion of communism with the workers’ movement, the spontaneous trade union movement gives rise only to the ideology of trade unionism, a bourgeois ideology that restricts the workers’ struggle to reforms within the confines of the capitalist system.
The bourgeoisie has recognized the strength of the organized resistance of the working class and tries to destroy the trade unions by promoting violence and corruption. Through imperialist superprofits derived from the plunder of colonies and oppressed nations throughout the world, the bourgeoisie is able to bribe a small upper stratum of the working class.
This labor aristocracy is composed of the full-time labor bureaucrats and those pro-imperialist, chauvinist, mainly skilled workers who receive exceptionally high incomes and numerous economic and social privileges and whose mode of life is divorced from that of the majority of workers. The world outlook of the labor aristocracy is thoroughly bourgeois. While small in comparison with the working class as a whole, the labor aristocracy is the social base of reformism and revisionism in the workers’ movement. These labor aristocrats are all enemies of the working class, and their influence among the masses must be smashed.
The trade union bureaucrats who currently run the unions are imperialist agents, labor lieutenants of the capitalist class. They promote the bourgeois ideology of trade unionism and reformism and channel the working class into acceptance of capitalism. They are spokesmen for imperialist aggression, chauvinism, and class collaborationism.
The CPUSA revisionists are a dangerous enemy within the trade unions. Their goal is to turn the trade unions into social-fascist organizations, defenders of Soviet social-imperialism.
At the same time, they support and collaborate with the U.S. imperialists and reformists. We must expose and drive these agents out of the workers’ movement.
Within the workers’ movement we must direct the main blow against the revisionists and the trade union bureaucrats.
The trade union bureaucrats help the bosses impose speedup, forced overtime and job overloading as well as supporting other attacks on the whole working class. In order to maintain their hold over the workers’ movement, the imperialists and their labor lieutenants try to keep the working class unorganized and divided. As a result of their policies, a great majority of the working class in the U.S. today is not organized, particularly women workers and oppressed nationalities. The labor lieutenants have historically excluded oppressed nationalities from the trade unions and aided the capitalists in keeping minorities in the lowest paying and most dangerous jobs. The historic areas of Afro-American and Chicano concentration–the Black Belt South and the Southwest–suffer the lowest wages, the poorest working conditions, and the lowest level of unionization.
The bourgeoisie and the bureaucrats engage in chauvinist attacks on immigrant workers and countries of the second and especially the third world, attempting to blame them for the capitalist crisis. They support deportation raids and promote chauvinist campaigns like “Be American, Buy American.” The bourgeoisie and their agents use national and women’s oppression, the lack of unionization of the majority of the working class, and the reserve army of labor, which is growing with the crisis, to pit one section of the working class against the other, keeping the workers divided and driving down the working and living conditions of all workers. They have turned the unions into instruments of class collaboration used to attack the rank and file and smash the class struggle in the plants and unions.
The labor lieutenants have aided the U.S. imperialists in their aggression overseas, working hand-in-hand with the CIA to topple third world governments and sabotage the trade union movements. They have set up “free trade union” schools in Latin America, Asia and Africa to infiltrate and wreck the labor movements in these countries.
In addition, they support war preparations as a way of providing jobs. The revisionists and liberal sections of the trade union bureaucracy also preach that “detente” will provide jobs.
Both are pushing the working class into a new world war and spreading jingoism to help the imperialists use the workers as cannon fodder in their war.
We oppose the dual unionist views that would abandon the trade unions to these bourgeois agents. Our Party wages a relentless struggle to isolate and expel these traitors from the workers’ movement and replace them with genuine representatives of the working class. Their ouster is a necessary element for turning the trade unions into fighting class-conscious organizations.
In order to strengthen the unity and fighting strength of workers and gain access to the rank and file under the leadership of the bureaucrats, we might at times make tactical agreements with certain union leaders or sections of the union bureaucracy. But we must utilize these alliances to expose the labor bureaucrats and sever the workers from their opportunist leadership. We must always maintain our independence and initiative, rely on the rank and file, and never compromise on questions of principle.
The trade unions must be turned into schools of class struggle. The trade unions, under the leadership of the Party, must fight to organize the unorganized, unite men and women workers, the employed and unemployed, and workers of all nationalities.
The trade unions must raise the special demands of oppressed nationalities and women and link them to the demands of self-determination, regional autonomy, and full democratic rights. They must educate workers that it is in their class interests to oppose national oppression, chauvinism, and discrimination. They must take up the struggle against war preparations and support the struggles of the third world against imperialism.
The struggles within the trade unions must be an integral part of the battle of the working class for political power. We oppose the syndicalist view that confines the working class struggle to the taking over of factories. Syndicalism liquidates the fight to overthrow the bourgeois state and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Under the leadership of the Party, which educates workers about the final aims and objectives of the working class movement and recruits the best class fighters into its ranks, the trade unions will be transformed into revolutionary class struggle organizations which fight for the complete emancipation of the working class.
Under socialism, the broad masses of workers will be organized in the trade unions, which become a reserve of proletarian state power. The trade unions will serve as schools of communism and as schools for training workers to manage production and advance socialist construction.
The CP(M-L) further demands: an end to speedup, compulsory overtime, layoffs, and all unsafe working conditions; stop runaway shops; repeal all reactionary right-to-work laws; organize the unorganized; full union rights, including the right to strike for all workers; strike out the reactionary anti-communist clauses in all union rules; full cost of living increases in wages, pensions, and social security; a shorter work week with no cut in pay; affirmative action in hiring, training, and promotion of women and minorities; compensative seniority for women and minorities; full employment benefits for every striker; fully paid medical benefits; translation of work rules, contracts and union meetings.