A Fresh Start At Looking At Labor And The Labor Process -- II

[Leo Casey]

This is not simply a question of a theoretical 
shortcoming; it is reflected -- and remains a live
issue today -- in the political work of workerist 
socialists, mostly Trot, who work within the trade
union movement. As good an example as any would be the
group around _Labor Notes_, because of their
significant if flawed work with the TDU and because of
their links with Solidarity, and its Draperite-left
Shachtmanite worldview. Every proposal to transform
the labor process, to democratize the workplace, is
rejected by them, carte blanche, as a capitalist ploy
to get greater "productivity" out of workers, to
"rationalize" capitalist production, to produce a
better "quality" product for the benefit of the
capitalist, not the worker -- in short, to [class]
collaborate with management. This is a particularly
destructive approach when it is applied, as they do,
to the services industries where the product which is
being produced is education or health care, and where
the lack of a "quality" education and health care in 
inner city and poor communities is an issue which
should be on the forefront of the agenda of the left.
Thus, they decry efforts to give teachers real 
democratic voice in the schools in which they teach,
as part of an effort -- among other things -- to
provide quality education for inner city kids,
insisting that this is the work of management.

Now, precisely because it is a terrain of struggle,
reorganization of work and the labor process does not
necessarily lead to more worker control of the 
labor process, more worker control of knowledge. But
the one way to guarantee that efforts in this area
will result in negative setbacks for workers is to 
stand to the side, to engage in wholesale, mindless
opposition to every effort. Allow teachers to develop
an educational mission and vision for their school,
and run it democratically? Give those teachers the
option to run a personnel committee which hires new
staff and passes on transfers into the school, rather
than having folks with no idea of or commitment to the
school be hired and transfer in on the basis of
seniority? Hell no, the response, goes: that is
management's job, and seniority must never be
compromised. Set up systems of apprenticeship and peer
review so that teachers take responsibility for the
development and quality of their craft? Hell no, the 
response, goes: that is management's job, and teachers
should never evaluate other teachers. And so on. In
this way, control over labor process and over 
knowledge is ceded to management, all in the name of
militant industrial unionism and Marxism.  

Leo Casey
United Federation of Teachers
260 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate
agitation are men who want crops without plowing the
ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning.
They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
waters.

-- Frederick Douglass --
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