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Title: Workers’ Democracy Author: Staughton Lynd Date: 2002 Language: en Topics: democracy, syndicalism, workers’ control, Serbia, Zapatistas, Mexico Source: Retrieved on 2nd September 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/workers-democracy-staughton-lynd Notes: Originally appeared in WorkingUSA, vol. 5, no. 4, Spring 2002. pp. 84–94. ISSN 1089–7011.
Conventional definitions of union democracy are too limited to encompass
the broad majority of people in and outside unions who are struggling
for control over their workplaces. In particular, denotation of U.S.
labor law and trade union perspectives of union democracy are far too
narrow to give workers participatory power. Thus the concept of union
democracy must be reinterpreted to include workers of all kinds
(unionized workers, nonunion workers, and farmers); protection of the
rights to strike, picket, and slow down; and the demand for
worker-community ownership. This article examines two recent examples of
workers’ democracy: the Serbian revolution of 2000 and the Zapatistas’
ongoing struggle in Chiapas, Mexico.
What kind of democracy do workers need? Those who answer, “Union
democracy,” generally mean by that term the free exercise of rights
protected by Title I of the Landrum-Griffin Act, together with the right
to elect union officers and ratify contracts by referendum vote of the
rank and file. (A referendum vote is protected by Title I only if
provided in the constitution and bylaws of the union to which the
com-plaining worker belongs.)
“Union democracy,” thus defined, is critically important for the one
worker in eight who belongs to a union. The right to speak your piece at
a meeting, to belong to a caucus without retaliation, to circulate
leaflets and petitions, and to run for office represent labor law
equivalents to many of the rights protected by the First Amendment.
Even for the worker who belongs to a union, however, union democracy
understood in First Amendment terms does not encompass all the democracy
that a worker needs. Labor law in the United States as expressed in the
National Labor Relations Act as amended (otherwise known as the Labor
Management Relations Act) has a number of features that are found in few
other countries and that are a threat to democratic values.
In the United States, federal labor law as interpreted by the National
Labor Relations Board and the courts provides that:
“exclusive” representative in collective bargaining of those who work
there.
unit, and the collective bargaining agreement negotiated by that union
so provides, all members of the unit must pay dues or equivalent fees to
the union. Typically these dues or fees are “checked off” so that the
money never passes through the worker’s hands on its way to the union.
collective bargaining agreement, workers covered by the contract are
understood to have agreed not to strike or engage in other forms of
collective self-help (whether or not that prohibition appears in the
contractual language) except, perhaps, in the case of a safety and
health problem that threatens imminent bodily harm.
members’ fundamental right to engage in “concerted activity for mutual
aid or protection” otherwise guaranteed by Section 7 of the act. Workers
who engage in strikes, slow-downs, and even picketing in disregard of
this prohibition may be discharged by the employer and will have no
legal redress. Almost all union contracts in the United States give up
for the duration of the contract at least the right to strike.
To my mind, the four constraints just enumerated take away much more
democracy than any federal law such as Landrum-Griffin can give back. It
is a sad fact that in our country the worker who does not belong to a
union or whose union has not yet achieved recognition may have more
legal protection to engage in the classic forms of working-class
self-activity—strikes, slow-downs, and picketing—than has the union
member.
Thus, “union democracy” should be understood in a much broader manner
than has been the practice of those mainly con-cerned with union
elections. Union democracy requires protection of the worker ’s right to
engage in self-activity and self-organization from below, even when
these activities are not approved or are even bitterly opposed by union
officials.
But we have thus far only scratched the surface of the worker’s need for
democracy. What does democracy mean when a company unilaterally decides
to close a plant? Labor law protects the company’s action by excluding
investment decisions from the so-called “mandatory subjects of
bargaining.” This means that a union that seeks to ensure in its
bargaining that a given workplace—or all workplaces represented by the
union—will not be closed during the duration of the contract cannot
legally insist on such language.
Moreover, like the no-strike clause present in most contracts, in almost
all contracts the union agrees to a “management prerogatives clause”
that expressly gives management the right to close plants, transfer
work, get out of any particular line of busi-ness, go to Mexico, or
whatever the company may in its infinite wisdom decide to do with the
surplus value that workers produce. (Example: The largest employer in
the Youngstown area is Delphi Packard, which makes electric assemblies
for vehicles. In 1980, the company had 15,000 workers in the Youngstown
area and no workers in Mexico. Now it has 4,800 workers in Youngstown
and 80,000 in Mexico.)
Is this democracy? What do we mean by democracy anyhow? The Port Huron
Statement adopted by the Students for a Democratic Society in 1962
advocated a “participatory democracy,” whereby the “individual [would]
share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of
his life.” Is closing a plant such a decision? Of course it is: Ask the
young worker forced to leave his or her community of origin in order to
find work; the middle-aged worker with a mortgage, children ap-proaching
college age, and no transferable skills; or the older worker, as at
Enron, worried about whether his or her pension and (especially) health
care benefits are still there. No kind of decision in our society has a
greater impact on the lives of individuals than corporate decisions to
shut down facilities, to relo-cate production, to merge, to declare
bankruptcy, and the like. If the democracy we say we believe in is
participatory democracy, workers must have a voice in such decisions.
I am not talking about adding an international union officer to a
corporate board of directors, nor do I have in mind requir-ing the
company to give a sixty-day notice of what it has unilaterally decided
to do. Workers (and their communities) must have an effective veto. When
a company decides that it no longer wishes to make steel in, say,
Youngstown or Cleveland, the workers of that community must be given an
opportunity to do the job themselves. For such an imagined right to be
made real, there must be a public source of funds permitting public
entities to exercise the same right of “eminent domain” with respect to
an abandoned industrial facility as they routinely exercise with respect
to abandoned residential structures. In Anglo-American law, exercise of
the right to eminent domain requires payment of fair market value.
Absent the financial assistance to make such a “taking” possible, the
right itself is only a cruel hoax.
Still, we have not gone far enough. A society in which workers can
acquire the plants that their employers abandon, and run the plants
themselves, is not the society in which we presently live. Socialism in
one steel mill is not going to happen. What can happen in one steel
mill—as at Weirton Steel in West Virginia, where workers engaged in an
employee stock ownership plan—will not be socialism or workers’
democracy either. To have a society in which workers can realistically
come to view a facility as “theirs” because they mix their labor with it
over a long period of time and securely look forward to working there
until retirement, there must be deep structural changes. Democracy, it
would appear, is going to require revolution.
But what kind of revolution? And how can it happen in a way that will
not destroy democracy in the process? The twentieth century offers many
cautionary examples as well as many hopeful ones.
The new movement for change emerging in the LacondĂłn jungle of southern
Mexico, and in the streets of Paris (in 1995), Seattle, and Quebec City,
is a movement that draws on both Marxism and anarchism. The Marx it
looks back to is the author of The Civil War in France (1990) about the
Paris Commune of 1871. The Lenin to which it relates is the author who,
in State and Revolution (1993), demanded that all power pass to
improvised central labor bodies known as soviets.
Where can we find examples of this libertarian socialism in practice?
And what is the role within it of workers’ democracy?
In fall 2000, Serbia had what can fairly be called a nonviolent
revolution. A political movement won an election. When the incumbent
regime initially refused to recognize the election results, an outraged
populace poured into the streets. On the evening of Friday, September
29, the coal miners of the Kolubara region, who produce the coal
required for half of Serbia’s out-put of electricity, declared an
indefinite general strike. The general in charge of the armed forces,
and police from the Interior Ministry, showed up at the mines on
Tuesday, October 3, and Wednesday, October 4. The miners adopted a dual
strategy. On the one hand, they removed vital parts from the mine
ma-chinery and challenged the soldiers to mine coal with bayo-nets. On
the other hand, they summoned 20,000 supporters from nearby communities.
The police held their ground but made no arrests. The next day,
Thursday, October 5, hundreds of thousands of people in Belgrade—forty
miles away—seized the parliament and the state TV station, and the
police in Kolubara melted away.
The Kolubara strike was coordinated not by a “trade union” but by a
“workers’ committee.” All over Serbia, following Vojislav Kostunica’s
accession to power, local committees of workers displaced hated factory
managers. I realize that a cynic might say that this was a transition
from socialism to capitalism, not the other way around. But surely
Serbia also shows us that fundamental social transition, revolution,
remains possible in the twenty-first century, and that neutralizing the
armed forces by mass nonviolent direct action on the part of workers and
their supporters can be a critical component of the process.
The Zapatista movement in Mexico for indigenous self-determination seems
extraordinary in at least the following ways.
1. Without participating in electoral politics, the Zapatistas have
ended seventy-one years of uninterrupted government by the Institutional
Revolutionary Party, or PRI. How have they done this? One critical
component is a vast effort at popular education. Mayan peasants, who had
never before left their native villages, traveled all over Mexico
meeting with popular organizations such as the network of independent
trade unions, the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT).
2. The Zapatistas are not nonviolent in any traditional sense. But
neither are they a traditional Latin American guerrilla movement.
Without giving up either their arms or the principle of armed struggle,
they have carried on for the last five years an essentially nonviolent
resistance.
For example, the Mexican government has sought to build roads into the
LacandĂłn jungle, which is the Zapatista strong-hold. The government
claimed that this plan was to help farmers get their produce to market.
The real reason, obviously, was to be able to move soldiers and military
gear into the area.
At the western edge of the jungle is a village named AmadĂłr. During the
summer and fall of 1999, the soldiers seeking to build the road were met
each day by a cordĂłn (a picket line) of women from AmadĂłr. Since many of
the soldiers were indigenous, the women appealed to them to recognize
their true interests and to put down their weapons. To prevent this
dialogue, the government played music through loudspeakers.
After Vicente Fox became president, he announced the abandonment of a
number of military bases in Chiapas. The first base to be abandoned was
at AmadĂłr.
3. When my wife and I briefly visited San Cristobal, Chiapas, in 1999,
we talked with Teresa Ortiz, who for years has worked with indigenous
communities in the area. She was completing a book of interviews titled
Never Again a World Without Us: Voices of Mayan Women in Chiapas, Mexico
(2001). She told us that in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, three
historical forces prepared the way for Zapatismo. The first was Mayan
tradition, according to which, she said, “Everything is done through
assemblies.” The second was the Mexican Revolution of 1917, which
declared a right to land. No one was supposed to own more than a certain
amount. Poor people were authorized to form associations called “ejidos”
and to acquire land as a community that no individual could sell.
The third historical force was the Second Vatican Council and Catholic
Liberation Theology. Base communities were formed—Mayan base
communities, in which there was a “marriage of traditions.” The key
demand that emerged from this confluence of traditions (we were told)
was for autonomy, that is, self-admin-istration by the indigenous
according to traditional law, “uso de costumbre.” When Marxists showed
up in Chiapas in the mid-1980s, a movement formed by these forces was
already in exist-ence. The movement influenced the Marxists, we were
told, more than the Marxists influenced the movement.
The way it works in an individual village is as follows. The village may
be wholly “autonomous” (the word the Zapatistas use to describe
themselves), or it may have some autonomous families and some families
loyal to the PRI.
In the assembly of the autonomous, trusted individuals are asked to
perform certain full-time functions; for example, as storekeeper or as a
worker in a health clinic or a school. These persons “lead by obeying.”
Someone else cultivates their corn-fields so they can perform their new
tasks. The store, the clinic, and the school serve all the families in
the village, even those that are pro-PRI.
The Zapatista communities make joint decisions by a representative
process. Each local assembly of the “autonomous”—whether it is composed
of all or some of the families in a particular village—is open to
persons above a certain age. Each assembly comes to a consensus and
sends delegates to the next level. The delegates are bound to be
spokespersons for the decisions of the local assemblies they represent.
It is an honor to be chosen as a representative, just as it is an honor
to be chosen as a storekeeper or teacher. Consensus is sought at every
level. A “straw vote” may be taken to give par-ticipants a sense of how
widely particular outcomes are desired.
In Ortiz’s opinion, the Zapatista movement does not resemble other
guerrilla movements. The movement it most resembles is the civil rights
movement in the United States in the 1960s.
To respond to this new movement, to take part in it helpfully, to give
it leadership in a direction promising results, requires those
interested in workers’ democracy to start thinking outside traditional
boxes. If we pursue only traditional models—for example, waiting for
trade unions (however democratic they may become) or Marxist vanguard
parties to make the revolution—we may be waiting a long time. By
contrast, workers who act on their own initiative to refuse overtime or
to take part in a wild-cat strike speak of their sense of liberation,
their experience of literally getting “outside the box” represented by
the plant and the daily routine.
I advocate an alternative perspective that I call “solidarity unionism.”
It asks workers to reach out to other workers hori-zontally, rather than
relying on higher bureaucratic levels of the unions to which they may
belong. It proposes that workers seek ways in which they can begin to
act together without waiting for approval from their international union
or even their local union. It suggests that, as needed, they form their
own organizational structures outside of (or, as in the case of a
stewards’ council, overlapping with) traditional unions.
For example, suppose I work in a plant owned by a company that operates
another plant in which you work. The company discontinues a shift in
your plant, and you and your colleagues begin to experience layoffs. The
workers at my plant, me included, find ourselves working overtime to
compensate for the loss of production at your place.
Historically, workers confronted with such cutbacks in
production—whether or not they belonged to a union—have often resolved
to share whatever work was available, regardless of seniority. The legal
services office where I worked in the 1980s did this when President
Reagan cut our budget by 20 percent. Without touching the compensation
of secretaries, who were underpaid to begin with, all the lawyers
reduced their work-week to four days. A group of visiting nurses, whom
my wife and I helped to organize an independent union, did likewise. And
in a book Alice and I edited, The New Rank and File (2000), Mia Giunta
tells how women workers of many nationalities in a Connecticut
electronics plant that Mia helped to organize adopted the same practice.
In a shutdown or cutback situation for a fellow worker in another
workplace owned by the same employer, I can express solidarity unionism
by refusing overtime. (The collective bargaining agreement may mandate
overtime, or be silent. Each situation will present a somewhat different
tactical challenge.) Hopefully I won’t act all by myself. When our group
becomes stronger, we may be able to strike in your behalf should you
decide to hit the bricks. Our slogan then would be “If you go, we go.”
I think workers’ democracy means improvising such small steps of
resistance as workers can take without excessive danger of being fired.
I think it means trying to learn from what is going on around us. It
means, I believe, affirming with students and workers in the streets
that another world—a qualitatively different world—is possible.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. 1993. State and Revolution, trans. Robert W.
Service. New York: Viking Penguin.
Lynd, Staughton. 1997. Living Inside Our Hope: A Steadfast Radical’s
Thoughts on Rebuilding the Movement. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Lynd, Staughton, and Alice Lynd. 2000. The New Rank and File. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Marx, Karl. 1990. The Civil War in France. New York: International
Publishers.
Ortiz, Teresa. 2001. Never Again a World Without Us: Voices of Mayan
Women in Chiapas, Mexico. Washington, DC: Epica.