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Tuesday, May 03, 2005 |
How can small groups of workers, or even large groups of disorganized and misled workers, exert power against behemoths like Wal-Mart or the nations rail carriers? Perhaps one answer involves industry's so-called "logistics revolution" with its "just in time" production and distribution. While this revolutionary success has resulted in incredible efficiencies for business, it has also produced incredible opportunities for organized labor to focus their actions on the choke points of the system. Here is a Labor Notes article discussing this new situation and its potential for redefining and revitalizing direct action.
Finding Workplace Power
Position in the Workplace Can Trump Size, Density
by Chris Kutalik
The recent AFL-CIO debates have generated much smoke and thunder. What's lacking is a short- to medium-term strategy that gets at how workers and unions can tap the strength they find on the job.
Unions and workers have always had the power to stop the wheels of industry. But with traditional "all-out" strikes on the decline in the United States, the labor movement has had to find new ways to exercise this power.
One of these places can be found in what the business press calls "the logistics revolution" - the expanding system of docks, railways, trucking barns, intermodal yards, warehouses, distribution centers, dispatch offices, and other workplaces that keep massive amounts of goods flowing into retail outlets.
Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer and employer, pushed its way into market dominance in large part due to its mastering of this revolution, according to a paper by Tom Reifer, a researcher specializing in logistics. Making use of technologies that track goods all the way from the factory to the point of sale (including the world's largest privately-owned satellite communications network), Wal-Mart has refined its "just-in-time" distribution much as manufacturers have refined lean or "just-in-time" production. Suppliers and competing retailers have been forced to adopt, in part or in whole, similar systems.
But while these supply chains are becoming hyper-efficient, they are also increasingly exposed to potential disruption.
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10:42:52 AM 
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A brother comments on a lost opportunity to merge organizations (UTU, BLE) and crafts (trainmen, engineers) while resulting in a big raise. Why was this win/win opportunity for working rails rejected? He goes on to raise questions about the dark side of the Railway Labor Act.
Rail Operating Crafts United
Many of us have recognized the carriers past success of divide and conquer tactics in every contract, but have failed to exert sufficient pressure on the organizations themselves to merge. The Lake Erie Plan advanced by John Sytsma was but one lost opportunity in 1985 for a single craft and one organization, with full attrition-protection and a 75% raise. But the results of engineer/co-engineer would be self evident today if all realized what was at stake. More than just idle talk of what might have been, is an issue of misrepresentation when the primary focus of any union must be job preservation. So when we refused to make the conductor a more productive member of the crew, ultimately because we failed to merge the organizations on terms all could live with, we actually rejected the vision of co-engineer and in effect insisted on two conductors (one FIT) for a total of three on the head end during engineer training. Anyone with half a mind knew damn well we were baiting the carriers to attack crew-consist, especially in the light of future retirements.
And so they have, in the form of RCO and now engineer-only. An anti-labor Washington gives the game an all or nothing twist, anybody paying attention to the last 45 years of crew reduction could expect. The current risk of leaving the conductors fate up to a federal judge appears to be blundering ourselves into a no-option corner, where almost half our jobs could ultimately be lost. Lets hope for a favorable result of course, but if the above doesn't capsule the potentially disastrous results of short term self-interest at the top of the organizations at the expense of the members, then just look at the failure of rail labor to amend the Railway Labor Act. When have they joined forces to remove the dictatorial power from the President in the appointment of NMB and PEB members? An easy fix along the lines of the arbitration selection process could force the President to solicit labor and carriers for balanced boards. But instead, rail unions remain separate, weak, bickering and back stabbing while railroad funded politicians stack the boards that "recommend" terms we complain about, resulting in self-defeating loss of wages and the very jobs that makes dues possible in the first place!
In 1968, when first experiencing my road crew working on Christmas Day for straight time, an old head who hired out in the 1924 told me the 1926 Railway Labor Act allowed rail unions to organize, but prevented workers form exacting any economic advantage over the railroads and the small, weak craft unions just kept attacking each other to the carriers delight. He said our agreements ended up in the hands of politically funded agents of carriers, or so-called third parties that always favored those who put them in office with campaign dollars unions couldn't hope to match. According to him, the once powerful unions were relegated to nothing but policing agencies for the railroads to keep the troops in line, and the troops had to pay for the cops! After all these years, when the unions still so clearly refuse to act in our advantage, it seems like he knew very well what he was talking about.
BW Trainman, Los Angeles
9:53:00 AM
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