>>> Tom Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 28/November/1996 09:33am >>> >Introductory remarks: Strike breaking and union busting in the >1990s: What can we learn from the past to combat it? >... "what strategies might the labour movement adopt to try to eliminate > that substantial surplus of labour?"... What I'm getting at is the need to > move from a series of isolated *tactical* withdrawals of labour to a > generalized *strategic* withdrawal of labour. Why stop at the (broadly-characterised) point-of-production? If our analysis of the crisis of K tells us that worsening overaccumulation signals capitalists not to reinvest in productive circuits but instead to switch into financial activities; and if in doing so competition heats up and capitalists take on added debt to make the switch; and if, increasingly, firm profitability flows from treasury-type activities while firm costs include higher interest repayments; and if the broader speculative activity that all this represents and contributes to generates financial sector innovations and intensified waves of mergers and acquisitions; and if, furthermore, these are financed by leveraging firms (both the acquirer and acquired) to the hilt; and if all of these phenomena mean that workers now struggle for their wage share (and rights to pension surpluses now being used as cash-cows to liquidate LBO debt) against not only management and shareholders but also financiers and the financial circuit of K (not to mention their struggle as taxpayers to avoid picking up the tab for various burst bubbles), the strategic orientation for labour is pretty clear, right? Corporate campaigns aimed increasingly at both the power and vulnerability that characterise firms' financial relationships. Aside from one mishap (Hormel), I recall that US labour strategists who have used this strategy -- with a variety of tactics linking labour to redlined communities, consumers, farmers, the anti-apartheid movement during the 1980s, and other international and local allies -- have met with some degree of success. More than if they went on strike, which often would have guaranteed incoming scab labour as permanent replacements. And more than in other secondary boycotts (outlawed by Taft-Hartley), because they often link their issues directly to genuine public interest grievances against bank consumer practices. Hanging on my office wall is a cover from The Banker magazine a few years back, picturing a huge, hairy clenched fist under the headline "Union strongarms bank" (relating to the clothing/textile workers' mauling of then-Continental Illinois during an LBO tussle in 1988-89). And the late 1980s were not unique. "...this class of parasites [have gained] a fabulous power not only to decimate the industrial capitalists periodically but also to interfere in production in the most dangerous manner -- and this crew know nothing of production and have nothing at all to do with it" (Uncle Whiskers, Vol III).
