[PEN-L:11945] UPS/IBT provocateur

[jlgulick@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Pen-L'ers,

Now that the UPS strike is over and the IBT has more or less "won"
(although as one person here astutely remarked, the proof in the
pudding rests with whether or not militant rank-and-filers are
hired back and harassed), I wanted to throw out a few provocative
remarks/questions about the meaning of this struggle and its
"success".

I should say that during the strike I did not have access to decent
mainstream media coverage, much less "progressive" media coverage,
so much of the info I'm going on has been gleaned from the Pen-L
archives. I should also add that I worked as a part-time truck
loader at UPS in Richmond, CA a few summers ago -- not as a badge
of authority but as an experience shaping my views.

>From the purely factual standpoint of the material welfare of
workers, I concur that this is the hugest victory for the labor
movement in some time. But I fear that in the context of class
warfare-from-above waged by the U.S. ruling class in the last 20
years (which has especially intensified  during the last
economic"expansion"), what with revived rates of profit and a
booming stock market on the one side, and stagnant wages and job
insecurity on the other, much of the left has become enamoured with
distributionism, and has let the critique of work and community in
a late capitalist society go dormant.

Now I would be the first to agree that one can't maintain a lower
middle-income standard of living with one or two people in a
household working overtime for part-time wages, what with the
relative price of child care, education, housing, etc. rising all
the while. To the extent that the humane reproduction of labor-
power should be a tactical ideal for the left, then all power to
the IBT in their latest victory, what with its "ripple effects."
But I've heard nary a peep aboutthe social/ecological utility of
work -- i.e. rapid, flexible parcel delivery -- which has basically
boomed in the era of deconcentrated, just-in-time production --
i.e. work which is basically anciallary to the spatio-temporal
restructuring of capital production and realization in the last 25
years. The IBT leadership can't be accused of being "business
unionist" in the sense of corrupt hacks cutting sweetheart deals
with the employers, but I would call this strike "business
unionist" in the sense that the IBT leadership stood idly by (if
not in fact encouraged) while striking workers sought employment
from other private sector package carriers. The target was a
"greedy corporation" not the frantic disparate circulation of
capital epitomized by UPS' massive growth.

Would the left be content with a world in which the package
carrying working class could afford to purchase and consume the
mail order catalogue goods they deliver, in the private splendor
of their tract homes with a sport utility vehicle in every garage
? Somebody on Pen-L commented that the victory proved that
globalization is a ruse and that popular pressures can still force
capital to pass on productivity gains in the form of higher wages,
more stable employment, better fringes, and so on. Maybe so
(depending on sectors, firms, etc.) but this argument assumes that
the rejection of Keynesianism, social market economy, etc., is
strictly pragmatic, not political. I prefer Michael Perelman's
observation a few months ago that multiplying social democratic
capitalist patterns of work/community & standard of living &
production and consumption linkages is neither materially possible
or existentially desirable over the long-run.

My aim here is not to downgrade the salience of the victory or to
see the glass as half empty, just to use the occasion as an
opportunity for critical reflection. Ironically, insofar as truck-
loaders can't perform this sort of backbreaking labor 8 hours a
day, if these workers are upgraded to full-time status, they'll be
doing double duty as loaders and sorters (or clerical work or
inventory management or something like that), thus making variable
capital more variable on capital's terms.

Long live the red/green struggle !!!

John Gulick
UC-Santa Cruz Sociology Graduate Program