A-Infos (en) US, WSA Anarchist Ideas and Action - Labor Day: What America Needs: A New Labor Movement

Why? Not just because the organized labor movement today is full of self-serving 
bureaucrats who are out to enrich their pockets or their prestige at our expense. After 
all, there are many hard-working, sincere people in the ranks of union officials. But no 
matter how well-meaning they are, there are some fundamental flaws in the way the unions 
are structured today that makes them at best limited in what they can achieve. ---- The 
problem with the unions today starts with the way they function, with so much of the power 
in the hands of paid officials and not with the workers themselves. We say the alternative 
to this is direct democracy, with all decision-making flowing from the workplaces and 
local organizations, with elected delegates acting under direct mandates from those they 
represent, subject to immediate recall when they fail to carry out their mandates.

Take away the concentrations of power and privilege and the careerists in the labor 
movement will have to find some other way to earn a living.   Another problem we see is 
the reliance on politicians and the electoral system that typifies so many unions today. 
Yet most union members know that the politicians in the end only serve the interests of 
the rich and powerful and that the electoral system in this country is a stacked deck. 
Real political power lies in our ability to control the system of production of goods and 
services, in building a movement for social change in our communities, and in fighting 
against all forms of oppression and domination, be it racial, sexual or whatever.

It is also not nearly enough to talk about things like raising the minimum wage, getting 
better health care, or equal opportunity. Not that there is anything wrong with those 
things, but why should workers settle for a little bit bigger slice of the economic pie 
when we should be fighting to control the whole bakery? In the meantime, the labor 
movement could be addressing issues like shortening the work week as an alternative to 
unemployment and downsizing, more control by workers of the workplace itself, and 
challenging many of those areas of decision-making that have been conceded to the bosses. 
To accomplish this, we need more militant and innovative tactics.

It's nice that some union leaders are now talking about things like civil disobedience and 
are willing to employ some more tactics of confrontation than before. But we will need to 
go much, much further, particularly if we are at all serious about bringing new sectors of 
unorganized workers into the labor movement. We need to consider new forms of on-the-job 
action, including occupations and sit-ins, and to begin ignoring the labor laws that were 
put in place to control workers in the first place. In the final analysis, the labor 
movement needs a new vision, one that doesn't accept the current inequality and class 
divisions in society as inevitable.

We need to look toward building a society without power, profit and privilege, in which 
working people in their workplaces and their communities make the decisions about how our 
work is done and what we want from it. We need a movement that fights for real gains 
within the context of this society while using its own organizations as the basis for a 
new one. We call this vision anarchist unionism or anarcho-syndicalism. What matters most 
however, is not what you call it, but the types of hopes and aspirations for working 
people we believe it embodies. We of the Workers Solidarity Alliance are men and women, 
like other working people, from different backgrounds, but united in a single vision. It 
is a vision we hope you will get to know more about.

New York-New Jersey Workers Solidarity Alliance
339 Lafayette Street — Room 202
New York, New York 10012
wsany@hotmail.com

http://www.workersolidarity.org
http://ideasandaction.info/
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