The United Electrical Workers (UE) has published a short pamphlet about a return to class struggle unionism. It’s pretty good stuff and well worth a read. You can read it here.
For the past several decades labor leaders and academics have proposed a wide variety of strategies to rebuild the U.S. labor movement: from better communications work, to giving more money to politicians, to restructuring of the labor movement and its federations, to investments in staff-driven organizing efforts. But none of it has worked, because none of those strategies recognize that the core issue facing unions, today and throughout history, is the fundamental difference of interests between workers and employers in the capitalist system.
It lines up pretty well with my experience with unions, the problems with them, the reasons for these problems, and what needs to be done to make unions effective.
The labor movement we need must be a militant movement, built from the bottom up, and it must be based on clear-cut principles: aggressive struggle, rank and file control, political independence, international solidarity and uniting all workers — in other words, Them and Us Unionism.
Anyway, go give it a read.
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