January 2003 • Vol 3, No. 1 •

From the Editors

In this issue of Socialist Viewpoint, we have focused on small but significant eruption of critical articles written by trade union activists in response to contracts negotiated by leaders of three unions, the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU), the International Association of Machinists (IAM), and the Transit Workers Union (TWU), with their respective employers. These tentative contracts, their authors argue, will, if adopted, add to the long series of attacks by their bosses and government on the living standards of American workers.

The importance of the ILWU’s tentative contract stands out as the most serious of the three likely setbacks. In addition to the important economic concessions granted maritime bosses by its leaders, their political concessions, as the reader will see, constitute a major departure by its current leadership from the ILWU’s proud history of being in the vanguard of the struggle for social and economic justice for working people everywhere.

These critical commentaries point to the growing anger and rising consciousness of the working class as a whole, which is far deeper than it appears.

We reproduce them here for the information of our readers who may not be aware of the deepening radicalization of the American working class. It’s largely hidden and stifled by the decades of setbacks and defeats. The effect of the long retreat led by the AFL-CIO bureaucracy has had the effect of undermining confidence by workers in their unions as instruments capable of defending their class interests.

A contributing factor blocking the eruption of a new wave of class struggle is the waning hope that the current economic crisis is only a passing phase and that “happy days will be here again.”

Most inhibiting, furthermore, is the mood of defeatism and demoralization instilled in the working class by bosses and their agents inside the unions—top AFL-CIO officialdom.

But everything changes, and so too will the unions be changed from instruments of collaboration between workers and bosses into what history has fashioned them to be, instruments for the advancement of the working class and its natural allies.