Defend the labor movement from the assaults by the bosses and the twin parties of big business—the Democrats and Republicans!

These are demands that workers and farmers should make their own. Their immediacy is highlighted both by the avalanche of employer assaults on wages, benefits, and working conditions and the working-class resistance to this offensive.

The recent decision by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to review, and possibly eliminate, the “card check” procedure for union certification—the latest of many antilabor rulings by this government board—speaks volumes about the need to back these demands.

Declining profit rates worldwide are intensifying capitalist competition for markets, sources of raw materials, and domination of low-wage “export platforms” in the oppressed nations. Many capitalists are slashing prices to the point of near bankruptcy to push their rivals to the wall. At the same time, the bosses are trying to put the entire burden of the crisis of their system on the backs of working people. They are carrying out unrelenting warfare—sometimes open, sometimes disguised—against the livelihood, the health and safety, and the very humanity of the working class.

The employers keep pushing to cut wages and benefits. They are expanding overtime work, as well as part-time and “temporary” jobs with low pay and no benefits. They are intensifying speedup, increasing differentiation among employees hired for the same jobs, and raising the eligibility requirements for pensions. Throughout the imperialist world, the ruling families are conducting a fierce assault on the social wage—the elementary, government-funded social security programs the working class has fought for and won in order to safeguard the class as a whole by protecting the most vulnerable.

That’s why the bosses are stepping up their efforts to curb the liberties that workers need to organize to resist this onslaught and fight for livable wages and job conditions. Organizing a union is among the most elementary of these rights. The recent NLRB ruling puts more obstacles in the way of workers trying to use their strength, which lies in their numbers and their ability to band together to defend their interests, in order to push back the exploiters.

In these struggles the government is not neutral. Its function is to serve one class—the ruling billionaire families—against another class, ours. The employers also have two parties—the Democrats and Republicans, who jointly enforce the interests of the bosses.

As a government agency, the NLRB serves as a tool of the bosses—just like labor mediators and the courts. For example, the NLRB ties up workers in red tape to delay union elections for years and to intervene in labor disputes on the side of the bosses. Dependence on the good graces of the NLRB is always a dangerous trap. The lessons of the past 150 years of the working-class movement show that the only way working people have been able to make gains, and not lose them, is by relying on our own collective strength and capacities.

Pro-Democratic Party politicians argue that the problem is the 3-2 Republican majority on the national labor board, and that the solution is to rally working people to “defeat Bush”—that is, to vote for John Kerry. But the Democrats have had a similar, if not worse, record, from President James Carter who invoked the strike-breaking Taft-Hartley Act against the United Mine Workers of America in 1978, to William “end welfare as we know it” Clinton.

The only way to reverse the attack on the card-check process and other antilabor NLRB rulings is to mobilize working people independently of the NLRB, the courts, or big-business politicians.

When workers organize effectively for these goals, they can force—and have forced—the NLRB to issue rulings that register what working people have already conquered on the picket line and through mobilizing labor solidarity. A case in point is the breakthrough in the UMWA organizing battle in Utah. These coal miners are pointing the way forward in the defense of the labor movement by showing miners throughout the West, and thousands of other workers, that sí se puede: we can fight to win!
 
 
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NLRB rulings create obstacles to unionization  
 
 
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