Part 1: On The Shop Floor
I work as a loader at UPS. This means, simply, that I load boxes into trucks, which carry these boxes to various locations along the East Coast. As a Northerner―a Yankee―doing this job in a major city, in a large circulation hub, I am unionized by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. When asked by a friend, usually one off in some far-off liberal arts college, what this feels like―to be one of the last unionized workers in America, is the implication―I usually tell them that my interactions with the union are minimal. I receive from them a magazine every once in awhile; the magazine is filled with triumphal declarations of various successes and changes of leadership, usually in other countries, I notice. Once, I even received a ballot for the union elections, which I never got around to filling out. Why would I? I don’t have any real connection to this organization. My pains are not its pains; my anger is not its anger.
This was demonstrated fairly clearly to me by a recent experience. During the winter holidays, UPS goes into “peak season”, a period in which the main thing is to ensure that all those consumers paying for two-day shipping get their shit in two days, whether it be a book or a printing machine. As a result, the company pushes us loaders to just pack in as many packages as possible as quickly as possible, then they make us do it again on Sundays. There is little regard for the stated safety rules during peak season―you wanna stand one foot on a package, the other in the air? Go for it, tiger! I have never heard of anyone getting fired during peak. The demand for workers is sky high, so even the monkey-wrenchers can keep their jobs. However, once peak ends, the company begins checking the metrics again. Looks like Pete isn’t doing 300 an hour, he’ll have to go. Every safety violation becomes a point of contention with management; every misload puts you on a probationary list. I was declared a dyed-in-the-wool misloader. As a result, the building manager had “a talk” with me.
“A talk” means, in short, that the company has found a reason they can fire you, and they’re going to keep track of your metrics now. As a requirement of the contract, a Teamsters steward is required to be there for the proceedings―here we return to the union! The steward who attended my “talk” was a guy we’ll call “R”. I had worked with R in a number of trucks, in various parts of the building. He was a kind person with whom everyone got along, even the managers (something will be said about this arrangement later). Nonetheless, at no point did I know that he was a union steward. My first direct contact with the union, then, was in the person of a guy I just happened to work with, for the purpose of overseeing a threat. The whole experience was miserable, all the worse for the courteousness of everyone involved.
When it was over, I returned to work, now suddenly conscious of my misloads, adding extra work to an already heavy-load job. Despite my best efforts, I had four more misloads by the end of the week. Essentially, I was beginning to fear that I might be fired. The weekend brought with it a letter, done up in UPS branding. This was, by itself, disconcerting, however the letter within was far worse. The gist of it was that I’d fucked up, and that should I continue fucking up, I would be fired. It was signed, not by the company, but by a bureaucrat within my local. I was being threatened, not by my employer, but by my union. The result was me, crying in the presence of my mother, trying to explain to her how betrayed I felt. To her credit, she had been a public sector worker in the nineties. She had experience with the SEIU. We spoke of our experience with unions.
Part 2: The Union and its Discontents
“And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95.”
Marx, The 18th Brumaire
Just as revolutionaries of the past looked to inscribe upon their banners the dead words of revolutions past, the popular left today looks to resurrect dead forms. Necromantic rites are, even now, being performed for the SPA (by the DSA), for the Bolsheviks (by the PSL and Jodi Dean), and for the unions (by a number of writers for Jacobin, especially Amber Frost and Vivek Chibber). If the zombies have anything in common, it is that all of them are in such an advanced state of decay, that the ritual performed on them cannot be but failures. Such a claim will strike any member of the popular left, or anyone sympathetic to their ideas, as being perhaps questionable or rash. In order to assange these reactions, we will present lines of both theoretical and historical critique against them. Here, we deal specifically with the unions.
As communists, Sunder will make reference the vast historical knowledge that comes to us from Marx and his successors. There is much to be found here on the topic of unions, viewed from every possible angle, critiqued from each of these. Personal accounts, like the one above, are found alongside objective weighing of the union-form, in every era of the capitalist mode of production. A full picture of what the union-form entails at this moment in history will require an account of both the critiques of the form from the historical ultraleft―towards which any decent theoretical collective will need to orient itself, even if only so as to critique it―and a fuller historical account of the form in the context of the US (as most members of the Sunder collective are based Stateside, it is to our own history that we should turn). The combination of these threads will allow us to critique the current obsession with the unions to be found among the popular left, as well as to show the historical inadequacy of these forms as a solution to the problems of proletarian organization and struggle.