[PEN-L:29519] Union Leader Yokich Dead

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BY JOHN GALLAGHER
DETROIT FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER

Stephen P. Yokich, who was born into a union family in Depression-era Detroit and rose to lead the United Auto Workers by impassioned oratory and savvy negotiating skills, died Friday following a stroke. He was 66 and had retired from the UAW's presidency just two months ago.

Yokich was having dinner with his mother, Julia, on Thursday evening when he complained of a headache and collapsed. He was treated at St. John Hospital but died at 9:45 a.m. Friday. Friends knew that Yokich had been treated recently for heart problems. But at the UAW constitutional convention in Las Vegas in early June, he projected the same vigorous and larger-than-life persona he always had.

One union colleague called him a "force of nature." Leading his union during a period of intense stress, Yokich won better pay and benefits for his members, even as he helped major domestic automakers achieve a leaner workforce for greater efficiency. He pushed hard for ever-greater safety standards in auto plants. He also calmed worker anger after the merger between Chrysler Corp. and Daimler-Benz by praising the new German owners as saviors instead of denouncing them as villains.

His greatest accomplishment may have been pushing the UAW beyond its industrial base to include nurses, casino workers, college teachers and other groups. He often said that with the automotive workforce shrinking, the union had to look elsewhere to grow. "Some people question the wisdom of this," he said last year of the nontraditional organizing drives. "The wisdom is very simple. We have to change with the changing times."

Ron Gettelfinger, who succeeded Yokich as UAW president in June, expressed the union's shock and grief. "Words cannot begin to express the sadness and loss the UAW family feels over the death of our friend and brother, Stephen P. Yokich," he said. "Our union lost a powerful and eloquent leader today, and working people all over the world have lost a tireless advocate for economic and social justice." Buzz Hargrove, president

(complete article at freep)



I of course remember "Steve" and his rise through the union a tad bit different, especially during the period of 1974-1980, which would set the political basis for his ascendancy to President of the union.

Nevertheless, to his very day I keep the picture taken with Steve from the last national meeting between the Chrysler Group and the union on my mantle because it is history, no matter what ones particular interpretation.

Steve faced a very difficult situation in the last few years of his administration. How to expand the union's base or organized new sectors of the working class into the union. Steve could not solve the problem because what is involved is a certain surrender to the proletarian strategist - many who are Marxist, and we have most certainly learnt the lessons of history.

During the last UAW Convention where Steven passed the mantle of leadership and later retired, the administration quietly proposed to rewrite the union history to include the organizing activity of the old League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Steve's administration considered this a political compromise to open the door of the top leadership of the union to proletarian strategist.

The reason is to overcome the sectarianism of the union which prevents it from leaping from one base to another, which requires recruiting the people who can recruit the leaders of new social forces. This requires consolidating strategist with inexhaustible energy and insight into the historic moment. Some of the strategist accepted Steve's offer and others did not, without any hard feelings between the different opinions.

The Marxist core of proletarian strategist under stood why a political association cannot "leap" from one base to another without a relentless purge of the ranks as the basis for incorporating new energy or social forces. This is so because a political association is not a military organization and cannot "turn."

Further, our era is radically different from the 1930s and the building of the CIO.  The CIO could not have been built the way it was unless a strong sector of capital agreed with the consolidation of a section of industrial unionism and the old CPUSA's fate was sealed by the time of Roosevelt's famous dinner with Earl Browder, then leader of the party. Many of the radicals, left-wingers and communist actually thought they had a friend in Roosevelt and he had been won over to their "cause."

This kind of thinking is unworthy of anyone embracing a class doctrine and gives meaning to the conditions of the absurd in which our working class has evolved as history. Unfortunately, Roosevelt died and proved that Shakespeare wasn't totally correct. Here the good that a man did lived after him while the evil was interred with his bones. To this very day the entire so-called "Marxist movement" espouse the most personalized and subjective view of our history in which the individuals are abstracted from the historical movement as class represented and cast on the stage of history as individual actors not bounded by specific economic configurations.

To this very day the progressive movement seeks to rekindle a new Roosevelt type Coalition, which under out present circumstances means kowtowing to George Sores, in as much as he personify the dominant sector of capital more then less writing the agenda for the world total social capital.

Unorganized workers must of course be organized into unions and other political associations. The problem is that the unions are tied to the politics of capital and the Democrats as well as the Republicans are not respected by the peoples of our country. Further, the ideological rot of the unions is such that the workers correctly perceive the top union leaders as capitalist - not simply agents of capital. Not simply "business unionism" but indistinguishable from capitalist.

Further, in the effort to organize new workers the old union craft contracts based on their experience and legal frameworks and enormous problems surface amongst the newly organized workers who needs do not express industrial relations. It is only the climate of the city of Detroit is deep working class traditions and instinct that prevent the Casino's workers from ousting the UAW. Their contract is horrible and modeled on the basis of industrial relations.

Union organizations and political associations do not "turn" or can simply "leap" from one base to another and the process of drawing in new forces actually splits the existing organizations. This dialect of development is elementary and describes the CIO's emergence from the restrictions of craft unionism.

It is true that we are only at the beginning stages of a process in which industrial unionism gives rise to and becomes the platform from which emerges a from of unionism consistent with this phase in the evolution in the decay of capital. Hence, those who accepted Steve's offer are not "wrong" and those who rejected Steve's offer are not "right."

The real issue is always a strategic view of economic logic. Stated another way one must acquire a sense of the velocity and direction of capital and the changes in the material power of production and on what basis the new social forces come to the fore.

Steve had only been retired for two months. I got out alive and have been retired for all of 10 months.   

It's amazing that the discussion of sectarianism has been brought home and flushed out into the open as a feature of the working class movement and not the ideological bent of some tiny "movement" group.

If nothing else Pen-L discussions capture the historical moment unraveling for all to see.

Brother Steve was not a bad man, although I hated his politics concerning everything in life; his lifestyle and Florida retreats that he dragged the union reps through.  Rather he was a product of a distinct historical period, incapable of raising class demands and class concepts. But, then again, that is the job of the Marxist not the union leaders. Nevertheless, Steve was a man of the people - at the very top of the social ladder and has to his credit the fundamental stagnation of the union.

And many of us were supposed to do the unions footwork? Not in this lifetime. One would do better contacting the CPUSA and movement groupies. Steve represented the retrogressive impulse in the phase process and could not purge himself and his cronies. Then again, no one gets out of life alive.


Melvin P.

PS

Perhaps, it makes sense now why I took a job at one of the Casino's - organized by the UAW, and not in the organizing department, which pays the same thing and offers a not insubstantial second pension. This does not make one "right" or "wrong." Those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat its follies. Follow the money - capital.