Historical Legacies of the IWW and Workers Control

Howard Kimeldorf, Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, speaking in Seattle on the 90th anniversary of the Seattle General Strike. The audience cheers when Kimeldorf talks about the legacy of the IWW in the Pacific Northwest, and boos when he talks about the AFL leader, Samuel Gompers, who believed in "pure and simple unionism". Gompers described capitalism as the best economic system that ever existed.

The Seattle AFL was clearly out-of-step, however, since the only votes cast against Gompers were from the Seattle chapter. When the IWW came under attack from local employers, the AFL came to its aid. This was "unthinkable" anywhere else in the US.

Kimeldorf gives three reasons as to why the General Strike happened in Seattle - (1) the post-war strike wave, (2) the unified and radical character of the Seattle labor movement, and (3) and the international influence of the Bolshevik revolution. The Seattle AFL sent a delegation to the Soviet Union to investigate the new conditions and to offer assistance. There was so much "dry tinder" in the Pacific Northwest, and all they neeed was a spark.

Arthur Miller, IWW

Recently I had the opportunity to meet an important labor organizer with the IWW, Arthur J. Miller. A friend of mine who organizes with IWW is working on a Pacific Northwest labor history zine, in which Miller is a prominent figure for the Tacoma region.

As we drank cup after cup of coffee, Miller explained that he didn't want to be treated like a famous object in any academic historical analysis. Nonetheless, he acknowledged a deficit in labor history, especially the industrial history of South Puget Sound, and a lack of inspirational literature written by workers.

Miller stressed the importance of workers writing their own publications, because workers tend to have their own language - their own "shop talk" as he called it - with which to exchange ideas with one another. Each industry is a bit different. And with today's explosion of new service industries, it's likely that a young worker today would have experience only working with service jobs like waiting tables, or doing customer service. It's very important to organize these industries, and the workers who have experience organizing need to write about it.

My friend and I explained that, as young people ourselves, we only had experience with the service industries. We've waited tables, worked in bookstores, we taught students, we were consultants, and in every job we have been in the store-fronts rather than in the back. We've always provided a service instead of the raw material.

To get an idea for Arthur Miller's own writing, check out his pamphlets "Making Anarchist Revolution Possible" and "Principles of Solidarity". In light of anti-union government tactics in the US, such as the Taft-Hartley Act, which allows the President to suppress strikes with police power, and the various decisions of the NLRB, Miller suggests that labor, as a class, should openly defy anti-labor laws in order to break them open. As he explained to us over coffee, solidarity between industries during a strike is key to preventing scabs, thus key to winning a strike. If a business is on strike, but the delivery service workers keep delivering goods for scabs to work with, it defeats the purpose of the strike. The principle there would be for the delivery service workers to stop delivering to the strikers, being openly defiant toward the scab policy of the other business.

Miller has written longer pamphlets too, and tried publishing a book on labor organizing. But the publishing industry wasn't interested in what he had to say. Even publishers who put out leftist literature, he said, only seemed interested in what academic writers had to say. Miller is not impressed with academic leftist writing. He protested that their work is often disengaged from real worker organizing, and tends to get wrapped up in Marxian analysis. Other workers generally don't understand class struggle from the pages of Das Kapital, but through direct experience being under the thumbs of the ruling class.

The academics stay far away from real organizing, and analyze the workers as if they were ants in an anthill. He described it as a class division, but with some degree of solidarity between. The academic leftist's job is to be an academic leftist, which means nothing more than academia, and nothing less than academia. You cannot count on them to really be interested in worker ideas, worker culture, let alone labor organizing.

I can post my friend's labor history zine onto this blog when it's finished.

An inclusive recession?

The people hit hardest by the global capitalist downturn of the late 2000s are the disabled. When a recession happens, they are the first people to be laid off, they are among the first in social spending to be cut, and they are the most likely to be overlooked.

The global unemployment rate, 5.7% in 2007, could rise to 6.5% in 2009, estimates the ILO. Therefore,

"The number of working poor – people who are unable to earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the US$2 per person, per day, poverty line, may rise up to 1.4 billion, or 45 per cent of all the world’s employed."

The International Labor Organization recommends Keynesian relief policies, which are in vogue everywhere. In the United States, however, some states have decreased the number of welfare recipients by the end of 2008.



Whereas every state has increased the number of food-stamp recipients:



The reason the NY Times article gives is that cash assistance is viewed as "dependency", whereas food assistance is viewed as "nutritional support".

A big reason why people with disabilities do not obtain the rights that they have claim to in many developing countries is because the disability has not transformed the self-perception of the disabled or the workplace. Having a disability is viewed as a burden and possibly something that will prevent them from employment, stopping the disabled before they take an active stance and asserting their rights. Many of these obstacles are viewed as personal shortcomings rather than the products of discrimination.

A series of interviews from Americans with disabilities, chronicled in Rights of Inclusion, has a common theme throughout: workers and the unemployed with disabilities feel that the stigmatizing effects of receiving assistance are too problematic for them. They feel that having a disability decreases their reliability, is a burden on business, and this makes them reluctant to think about themselves as disabled people. Unwilling to modify their identities as people with disabilities, they do not receive the aid they could have under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

One disabled person remarked that his charm and persuasive skills, as opposed to explicitly invoking the law, was the key to make others appreciate the benefits of having a person with a disability as an employee or an associate. The authors, David Engel and Frank Munger, believe that "rights become active" when a formal claim is lodged with a government official, and when the person's self-perception is transformed.

"Rights are the vehicle for achieving equality, but to invoke rights one must first identify oneself as unequal - in a sense that one's abilities fall short of an imagined 'norm'."

Martha Minow, at Harvard Law, says that "disability" has no inherent meaning because what is considered a disability in one setting is not a disability in another. It is meaningful only as a comparison. An exclusion based on a disability is a signal that someone has not been provided for as others are. The blame is on the institutions that create the disadvantage. So when rights are thought about in terms of social relations, their effect on identity are - in theory - no longer stigmatizing.

The latest BLS jobs report found that unemployment is 7.6 percent in the U.S. and 13.2 percent for those with disabilities.

Impatient job-searching

"Individuals who are more impatient search less intensely and set a lower reservation wage. The effect of impatience on the exit rate depends on the relative strength of the two contrasting forces: lower search implies lower exit rates, while a lower reservation wage implies higher exit rates."

On-the-job Search and Wage Distribution, Journal of Labor Economics: 2005.

The less money you have, too, the more impatient you'd probably become. In this job market, if you thought working at a union-busting Starbucks would be a last resort in a pinch, it turns out Starbucks is laying off over 6,000 employees and are closing or already closed about 1,000 stores.

The recession and the bad job market have led to more college graduates turning to "altruistic" jobs, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, like Peace Corps, Americorps, WorldTeach, Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and Teach For America. More and more applicants are turning out.

"The Peace Corps is expecting a 16% increase in applications for the [2009] fiscal year ending Oct. 1."

As this recession prolongs, unemployment rises, it would seem more job-seekers become impatient with the process. They would set a lower reservation wage, and eventually take jobs that are available. But as college graduates are becoming more impatient at job-searching, they take more jobs that aim at alleviating these woes. So joining the Peace Corps is like lowering a reservation wage? I think these concepts are related, perhaps not in the exact way the authors in Labor Economics suggest.

Since actions of an individual are largely determined by socio-economic class, for college graduates, impatience with a job market might not result in lowering a reservation wage so much as looking for a new line of work. Government jobs become particularly more attractive, and so it seems, do 'altruistic' jobs.

The Executive is Always Right

Amidst the tempers flaring now about the current state of the economy, and failing mortgage firms, I pulled up a video discussion about outrageous executive pay from 2002 on PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

George Akerlof (him again!) says in the video,

"The public thinks that this is an issue of left versus right. We should have either free markets or regulated markets."

I think Paul Solman makes a good point against the market enthusiasts who say, as does minarchist philosopher Robert Nozick, that the market chose to pay these CEOs exorbitant amounts of money because it values what they do. Solmon shows that while the firm the CEOs work for may be valued in the market, the CEOs themselves choose their own pay. They're only accountable to themselves. It's the firm as a whole that is valued by the market. Moreover, CEO pay has no easy correlation with stock performance or firm performance.

Capitalist-Worker-Owned Capital

I found this comic strip on a communist discussion board. Can you believe this dirty capitalist pig? Sucking the surplus value of labor right off their backs, what nerve.


Don't get me wrong, I love propaganda. But would the workers necessarily have higher wages if they were the owners of that capital? No, I think even a worker-owned production plant would have the same interest in paying average expenditure wages instead of wages that coincide with the marginal expenditures from each additional worker. That is, essentially, the claim that the comic makes.

A more important side-stepped fact in the comic is that there is more to a firm's cost structure than labor alone. Assume the workers bought out the capitalist and paid for the machines themselves - what would happen differently? I believe (a) they would still allocate labor and wages at a profit-maximizing equilibrium if they are at all concerned about keeping their spreadsheets and accounting balances in order, and (b) they would essentially be entrepreneurs and venture capitalists themselves, renting capital that other workers had made.

And isn't the point of the worker revolution so that workers own capital, thus becoming capitalists too?

Worker-owned production is a very positive way to organize labor and capital. Yet the arguments like the one above are evidence of nonsensical misunderstandings of factor markets and marginal productivity. It assumes way too much about the current allocations. Maybe I am just picking bones with the simplified version I see above.

Capitalists and workers are pitted against each other in non-collusive ways such that each worker has the incentive to extract as much from total revenue in the short run as possible. If the firm fails, workers can typically find new jobs; on the other hand, capitalists still have sunk costs to loathe and fixed costs to pay for. Unless workers are themselves capitalists or share interests with the capitalist class, their interests will always be in direct conflict with the capitalists over the firm's cost structure. So long as they have no stake in the long-term decision making process.

Union Busters

TACOMA - on Thursday February 21st, 2008 a picket line was staged at the Port of Tacoma APM terminal to push the administration of Maersk, the largest ship supply vessel in the world with its North American headquarters in Tacoma, and Securitas, its contracted security department, to free its workers from strict union controls which led to a union organizer's firing earlier in the month.

Watch the video about the November picket line here: