The UPS strike victory was followed by a strong ideological reaction from the big-business media and conservative politicians in the United States. In the wake of the strike, the court-appointed officer who had overseen the 1996 election that put Carey back in office by a 52 percent vote declared the election invalid due to campaign funding irregularities she had uncovered earlier. Although Carey himself was not implicated, consultants he had hired had in fact broken the rules. For the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other papers, this was a heaven-sent opportunity. They published a barrage of anti-Carey editorials and articles, often recycling the same news, in an attempt to discredit Carey and pressure the court into disqualifying him, thus in effect throwing the election to Hoffa. The media barrage was joined by pro-Hoffa Republicans in Congress—a chorus of ruling-class outrage at the effectiveness of a rank-and-file leadership that had actually been able to fight effectively for its own side. Yet, while the negative publicity was bothersome, it did not reverse the sense of achievement or the deeper class understanding gained by many UPS workers over the past couple of years.
The argument here is not that workers are not susceptible to appeals for labor–management cooperation or the superiority of business efficiency. There are too many examples of company successes to deny that, and, of course, these ideas abound across society as today’s common sense. The point is, workers are no more possessed of these ideas than they are of the working-class alternatives, which tend to already be present. When they are in struggle even over simply economic demands, the alternative ideas can make more sense. When, as in the unusual case of UPS, the ideas have an organized rank-and-file advocate and a leadership committed to them, it can be the working-class “common sense” that prevails. In this case, the working-class “common sense” became a counterhegemony that allowed the union to buck what many thought to be an irreversible trend toward low-wage contingent work.
A similar scenario—or what, with conscious organization, had the potential to become one—was suggested in the 1996 strike by British postal workers against the introduction of “teamworking” by their employer, Royal Mail. While these rank-and-file trade unionists fought the Royal Mail “Employee Agenda” proposals with a tenacity that might suggest (as indeed much of the media darkly hinted) an explicit political agenda, the reality is that their struggle was rooted in basic material resistance to proposals that ultimately threatened their job security, working conditions, and living standards.35
“Teamworking” (as team concept is usually called in Britain), along with many similar programs, has of course been accepted by countless union leaderships despite these implications.36 In the case of the postal workers, an unusually clearheaded and determined rank-and-file leadership, particularly in the London area, made a conscious effort to alert an already combative membership to the real meaning of the proposals in terms of their concrete effects on working conditions, in contrast to the “empowerment” gloss invoked by management: “The truth is it is not a case of workers having more control, but managers being in total control and workers just having to accept ‘flexible’ working but never having it really defined what they are accepting, because the parameters are so enormous and totally defined by the business.”37
The series of strikes carried out by postal workers during the summer of 1996 succeeded, through a level of unity and cohesion similar to that at UPS, in removing every line of the “Employee Agenda” from the bargaining table. The dispute is by no means over, of course; a management philosophy that has been in clear evidence since the 1980s suggests that temporary worker victories are now met by more concerted attacks, rather than consolidation. London Underground workers’ combined resistance—uniting two normally rivalrous unions—to the company’s “Action Stations” plan in 1988 was followed by wave after wave of management offensive until the proposals were finally implemented, a melancholy example of the success of this retrenchment policy. To maintain the kind of conscious class approach shown by the postal workers’ local leadership in the face of such management aggression and strategic clarity requires more than simple “militancy,” although the mobilization of the membership and its willingness to fight are of course central elements.38 It also requires a level of awareness of the overall meaning and direction of management strategy that in effect exposes its roots in capitalist production relations centering on exploitation. Such a perspective is, of course, the opposite of the “cooperation” and “social partnership” approaches with which British and American trade union leaderships forlornly aspire to court the employers’ nonexistent benevolence. It denotes a sharp awareness of which sides you and they are on; an undeviating cleavage to independent, class-based forms of worker organization.
This kind of explicit class perspective cannot be left to chance. It requires a strategy of grassroots activist organization of the kind that informs Labor Notes and similar projects in other countries and, more immediately, the sort of rank-and-file organization exemplified in the example above. But it is also important to be clear that the possibilities of class “consciousness-raising” invoked in such activity are not the product of socialist wishful thinking but of the material roots of resistance arising from class relations and conditions themselves. The political implications of “everyday” working-class struggle are not imposed from without, but are inherent.
Looked at from a purely “political” perspective, the implications of the postal workers’ resistance to teamworking, for example, are remarkable. Not only did they succeed in thwarting the goals of a multimillion-pound “corporation” in a struggle based on workers’ rejection of supposedly all-powerful management ideology, they also resisted teamworking in direct defiance not only of their own union leadership but of the closely aligned “modernist” perspectives of the (then) prospective Labour government.39 The tradition of rank-and-file militancy that made this struggle possible was itself rooted in a series of spontaneous walkouts by postal workers that consistently flouted the draconian anti-union laws introduced by the Conservatives but stoutly backed by “New Labour.” For workers supposedly colonized by (if not ruling-class then at least reformist) capitalist ideology, this stand must carry massive potential political significance. It remains to develop ongoing organizational vehicles through which such potential can be realized.
We have already referred to the impact of cataclysmic, long-fought struggles like the Staley dispute in transforming the consciousness of their participants—in a small number of cases, with permanent effect. Yet less prolonged and dramatic strikes like the postal workers’, and more recently, that of British Airways cabin crew and catering workers, are linked to the same dynamic of detachment from both the material and ideological constraints of capitalism. Such “breaks” in hegemony, which can be acknowledged to be an ordinary fact of capitalist class relations, do not stem from any preexisting opening up of consciousness among the workers concerned. Rather, in many ways they reflect the ongoing nature of working-class consciousness in its many-stranded character, which both resists and admits the potential of a wider conceptualization of existing socioeconomic structures.
British Airways staff, particularly the cabin crew involved in one dimension of the dispute, are hardly the standard cast of working-class rebellion. Yet, like countless other groups of workers propelled into struggle, they were forced to transcend subjective conformity and conservatism by the brutal reality of (in their case) a “Business Efficiency Program” based on a £1 billion cost-saving pay and conditions package that effectively froze pay and removed overtime enhancements. In the words of one senior cabin crew member: “We are being forced to strike for our basic rights.”40
The point here, then, is not that workers need to be “incited” to resist capital by a corps of eager socialists. Rather, what is required of socialists is a commitment to focusing on and developing the implications of existing, contradictory, conflictual worker consciousness. The observation made by Lenin, among others, that the working class is ultimately far more revolutionary than any