Workers' Control #4
The Past, Present, and Future of Workers' Control Struggles
Recap:
In Workers’ Control #3, I examined how NYC transit workers sought to exercise some level of control over their work in a large industrial repair facility, the more self-directed crews on the subway roadway, and among highly decentralized and autonomous bus operators. A union leadership far removed from the daily experiences of the shop floor gradually ceded these rights to management.
In Workers’ Control #2, I showed how the idea of workers’ control might prove expansive beyond the type of shop floor struggles we saw in Transit. When Ford sought to move production out of the Rouge auto plant to other less-militant facilities, the union there asserted “the inalienable right to a job.” Nevertheless, because today most workers are two generations removed from successful workers’ control struggles, they have become largely resigned to having little or no say in the organization of work.
In Workers’ Control #1, I argued that the resignation that results when command is dispensed from on high, trains workers to be spectators, without confidence in their own “agency” – the ability and right to act. The potential of workers’ control is not only that work might be more humane and even joyful, but that the responsibilities it entails and the voice it bestows, and the participatory activity it demands make us more conscious and holistic human beings. “Workers’ control is beautiful, wrote Staughton Lynd, “because it can only come about by the creation of human beings capable of administering it.”
So, I’ll finish by presenting a few of the key ideas developed by David Montgomery in The Past and Future of Workers’ Control.
Montgomery writes primarily about industrial production, but I think his ideas are generally applicable to all sorts of work. Montgomery himself was a machinist before he was a labor historian; this was an occupation notable for believing that there were still brains under the workman’s cap. He was also a communist, and while throughout we see his concern with preventing alienation, in the last selection, we’ll see his critique of the ideology upon which capitalism rests most strongly. In each passage, I’ve mixed paraphrase with exact quotes.
Even in the setting of modern technology and large-scale production, it was possible to have collective direction of the way in which jobs were performed. But control struggles cannot be explained by workers’ knowledge alone. Technical knowledge was embedded in a moral code, governing behavior on the job, a code which was not individualistic, but one of mutuality, of the collective good. The practical and ideological aspects of this contest were inseparable from each other.
As we have seen throughout these posts, alongside expropriating the knowledge of organization, capitalists denounced and subverted this moral code; that was as much a key to it being lost as the practical steps they took to seize the technical knowledge.
Molders (they made molds to cast machine or other metal parts) collectively regulated the technique and the relations among themselves. But these molders did not contest their owners’ ownership and direction of the enterprise as a whole. They drew a chalk line around “their” territory within the boss’s factory, and they demanded that the boss deal with them from the other side of that line.
Montgomery is insistent throughout that workers’ control is not anarchy. You can have planning of production and even high levels of technical skill without the metaphorical time and motion study. Still, the ceding of ‘direction of the enterprise as a whole’ ultimately proved a weakness in their struggles, as capitalist power grew and theirs ebbed. That led to a change of approach by some workers during and immediately after World War I.
When struggles became more intense, they often became linked to far-reaching political demands. The munitions workers of Bridgeport, seasoned by four years of industrial battle by 1919, petitioned the President of the United States for national agencies to assure in all industries a living wage, right to union organization and collective bargaining; the collective participation of the workers in control of industry; extensive necessary public works to create jobs; the abolition of competition and profiteering in industry; and substituting cooperative ownership, and democratic management of industry, and the securing to each of the full product of his toil. This was the age of the Plumb Plan for the nationalization of the railroads, the miners’ pamphlet How to Run Coal, and the convention of striking miners in Illinois, who voted to make as a condition of returning to work the collectivization of the mines.
Montgomery’s footnote for this section cites a single petition: note how the demands extend from the traditional ones for union and collective bargaining that might clear a space for better working conditions; to those partially addressed during the New Deal such as a living wage and public works to create jobs; and then to far more radical ones heretofore wholly unachieved and today difficult even to imagine. We see a range, then, of what might be conceptualized as workers’ control. So we can admire what transit workers were able to achieve – and mourn when they lost it – while still recognizing the limits of their gains; that management still largely retained direction over production.
Today, the problem is to cross the lines of the “bargaining units” defined by the National Labor Relations Board, so as to mobilize technical and clerical employees (and possibly even portions of local management) along with the production workers. Like their predecessors, they must undertake through self-education, to learn the whole business so as to overcome the gulf between mental and manual labor, which scientific management has spawned.
Although mental/manual springs from the notion of the assembly line, here is where we can most clearly see how Montgomery’s conception of the future of workers’ control goes beyond basic industry, and even beyond unionized workplaces. We should be able to imagine how our workplaces could be reorganized, collectively, without management. In describing an admittedly short-lived worker-controlled Wisconsin newspaper, Montgomery tells of a group who went to a seminar on “workers’ participation in management.” Their response was that these ideas were foreign to them, since they had found, “we don’t need management’s participation.” The problem, Montgomery concedes, for that Wisconsin newspaper and elsewhere, is that the more far-reaching attempts at workers’ control – like most efforts at workers’ cooperatives – run into the problem of competing against capitalist enterprises which have access to capital, hold down wages, and speed up work. But it could be otherwise; more than a technical question – how to run workplaces without management – it’s an ideological one.
In our current economic system, the bottom line in determining what production methods are to be used and what is to be produced, is the profitability of the enterprise, accumulation, and cash flow rather than the quality of working life, the utility of the articles created, or the standard of making life more satisfying during our brief stint on this earth.
Should we think of ourselves primarily as consumers, appreciative that Walmart and Amazon and Uber try to minimize labor costs, or as workers who suffer from the consequences of this economic system? Why must productive efficiency always be the highest end? Who decides? Ultimately, Montgomery argues that we our time on earth would be improved with the type of socialism where self-management is prized and striven for; where in our actual workday practices, we went about creating those holistic human beings.
…But I believe the inverse is also true. It’s in our struggles for the more mundane form of workers’ control – those within our reach and imagination right now – that we create the conditions for those greater victories by making ourselves the human beings capable of striving for more.
Other Notes:
I wrote last week about how labor unions don’t seem interested in actually organizing and mobilizing their members to fight. Here’s another example: It seems a number of unions - 1199, 32BJ, UAW District 9, and a few others - are against ICE “flooding the zone” in NYC. They have issued a statement. They “sound the alarm.” So what do they propose to do? “We call on all of our elected leaders to protect and defend working New Yorkers.” Sigh.
Police arrest 474 people at protest over Palestine Action ban in London. The Labour government of Britain, headed by a former human rights lawyer, declared Palestine Action a terrorist group after several members snuck onto a air base providing logistical support for Israel and splashed red paint on several airplanes. That makes membership of, or support for, Palestine Action a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison under the Terrorism Act 2000. 800 people risked arrest by holding up placards reading, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” The 474 arrestees now subject to those penalties are the largest mass arrest ever by the Met Police at a single protest.
Speaking of Israel, this article exhaustively catalogues the destruction wrecked on Gaza and Gazans.
Undoubtedly, you have heard about the changes at the Smithsonian related to text on Trump’s impeachment and the decision not to hang a painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty. Here, unfortunately, is more. White House official Lindsey Halligan reports to Fox News that she is “working with leadership at the Smithsonian to audit and review all content at the museums.” She criticized existing text in the American History Museum about Mickey Mouse, the Lone Ranger, and Star Wars, among others. You have to click the Fox link to read the full article.