June / July 2005

Letter to the Editor

To editor:

Mike’s [Mike Griffin, see March/April 2005 Fight Back!, UAW workers brutalized at Caterpillar] written a terrific article here except for the solution. If it were possible to have the sort of electoral revolution in the UAW that he suggests, it would have happened a long time ago. The locals stand today as control agencies for the UAW/corporations.

History proves that the domino strategy of taking over the locals is not possible. It is not possible to systematically knock down the capitalist locals. It is not possible because for all its democratic trappings, the UAW is a dictatorial, dog eat dog, sham union that stands ready to crush any democratic movement before it gets rolling. In order to sustain a democratic solidarity movement in any organization, we need democracy - and what we have in the UAW is not real democracy. It is bureaucratic, traitorous, vertical, strong-arm, top-down bullshit reinforced at the local level by rafts of sucks, weasels, fear mongers and left/right elites.

Heroic and democratic leaders like Larry Solomon and Billy Robinson attracted good people because they led for the idea of solidarity and when the UAW got in the way of the solidarity movement they had going, they kept going anyway. They asked thousands of good folks to step outside the UAW to get things done.

If such a revolutionary electoral move was possible, it would have happened in 1946 or ‘47, when the GI’s returned home to build the greatest strike wave in American history, only to be reined in by Reutherism (in our case). We have nowhere near the level of democracy left that UAW strikers had in 1947. The locals today are controlled by fear and corporate spies and the council and convention systems are very, very bad jokes. Elections have done nothing but turn people off. The best union folks in my local see elections and contract votes as loss devices. They do their best union work on the job, trying to help each other out every day but becoming more secretive about it all the time. Now they don’t just hold their work secrets from the foreman. They cover them from most of the committeemen too.

Isn’t it time to admit that the UAW and all its intricacies are part of the problem?

So where do good, fighting, trade unionists turn today for help? Each other. We need to begin a new, free and independent and democratic solidarity movement, which is based in working class virtue. We need to find those folks in all our workplaces who have always fought, who are trying to fight today but whose numbers dwindle each day for lack of a place to go.

Tom Laney