Communist Web Tuesday 28th March 2000 9.30pm gmt Workers make history Ten years ago, who would have thought that 15,000 engineers and technicians would have organized into a union, go on a 40-day strike and win against a corporate giant like Boeing? The victory of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) Local 2001, AFL-CIO made labor history as the biggest "white-collar" strike ever. "White-collar professionals" and union organizing were once thought as a contradiction in terms. Yet the trend of professionals joining unions is growing. In the past two years, computer technicians, doctors, professors, social workers, and even psychologists have joined unions. This is a vital trend for the working class and labor movement which will continue to grow and deepen. After the "Battle in Seattle" and this momentous strike you have to ask, is something in the water in Seattle? Well it may not be the water, but in the very nature of capitalism itself. Over 150 years ago Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, that class relations are becoming more and more simplified into two great hostile camps facing each other: workers versus the capitalist owners. "The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority." The ranks of the working class, they added, are constantly enlarged when members of the petty-bourgeoisie are driven out of business and "hurled down into the proletariat ..." In modern day language, it is the mega-corporate drive for maximum profit which leads to downsizing and reduced benefits. It convinces "professionals" that they are still workers with only their labor power to sell, generating profits for a boss who wants to hog it all. Like all other workers, they need a union to protect them. Through struggle and consciousness-raising the whole working class will come to see the necessity of socialism. And you thought it was just another... http://www.billkath.demon.co.uk/cw/workersmake/workersmake.html
