The lesson to be drawn would seem to be that no amount of conservative social ideology in the heads of workers is, ultimately, proof against their intermittent propulsion in an entirely different, and contradictory, direction. Yet it is the economic circumstances of these workers, rather than their initial consciousness, that propel them into resistance with the potential to challenge some of their most basic assumptions about the nature of the world. In this sense the struggle is not chosen, but neither is it, in certain circumstances, avoidable. Ideology may have lifted these workers out of their actual position in capitalist production relations; economic contradictions put them firmly back again.
Our focus on working-class consciousness or “common sense” in terms of an absence of ideology, a “pragmatic acceptance” of existing structures in contrast to any more positive endorsement of ruling-class ideology, needs to be complemented by a recognition of the impressive capacity of basic economic struggles for opening up, as it were, an “epistemological break” in working-class consciousness. This has been testified to over and over, from the revolutionary upheavals of 1905, sparked by a dispute over compositors’ piece rates, to late-twentieth-century class insights gained by Midwestern American workers through their involvement in struggles such as the strikes and lockouts at A. E. Staley in Decatur, Illinois, the Detroit newspapers, and elsewhere.28
For well over a decade, a new “common situation” (to borrow Marx’s phrase in describing the formation of the early working class) has been experienced by ever-wider sections of workers in both industrial and semiindustrial nations through drastic upheavals in the organization of work, labor markets, and even capital itself. Mergers, acquisitions, and transnationalization have produced ever more universal and visible organizations of capital. On the other hand, downsizing, contracting out, work intensification, and generally “lean” norms of work organization now affect most working-class people directly or indirectly across the world.29
This “common situation” has had its impact in a measurable rise in class consciousness. A recent British survey showed the proportion assenting to the question “Do you think there is a class struggle?” rising from 48 percent in 1964 to 81 percent in 1995.30 In the United States, the attitude toward strikes appears to have changed dramatically. While a 1984 poll showed that 45 percent of those questioned about strike situations supported management and 34 percent the strikers, in 1996 a nearly identical poll found a reversal of opinion as 46 percent sided with strikers and only 25 percent with management. More specifically, the recent wave of strikes at General Motors plants and, above all, the 1997 strike by 185,000 Teamsters against the United Parcel Service (UPS), gained majority “public” support as more and more working people saw themselves in the same situation; polls indicated that 55 percent were for the UPS strikers and 27 percent for management. The fight for full-time jobs had become a social issue for much of the working class.
Conflicting Ideologies
The story behind the successful fifteen-day strike at UPS in August 1997 provides an almost laboratory-style example of the impotence of explicit capitalist ideology in one of its most contemporary and “hegemonic” forms—when the company launched a concerted ideological offensive in preparation for 1997 collective bargaining—and, in contrast, of the impact of an alternative agenda of ideas and organization among rank-and-file activists.
The UPS workforce includes just about every level of the working class. The drivers, although not exclusively white or even male, are among the highly paid full-time workers described as “Reagan Democrats” or “C2s,” while the sorters and loaders are racially diverse, mostly part-time, and fairly low-paid. The company believed that unity among these workers would collapse in the event of a strike and large numbers of part-timers would cross the picket lines. What happened was the opposite. The strike was characterized by high levels of participation and mobilization and a unity the company could not comprehend.
In the two years preceding the strike, the company mounted an ideological offensive meant to assure that disunity would be the order of the day. In 1995 they launched a new team concept program, which like all such programs was meant to win key sections of workers over to the company’s ideology of “competitive” goals—or at least to promote internalization of this piece of up-to-date bourgeois ideology among enough workers to head off an effective strike. The company overestimated the degree to which UPS workers would buy into this view of the world and of the company because it underestimated a process that had gone on among these workers for years—specifically, the long-term role of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and the more recent dynamic of reform within the Teamsters as a whole in preparing the workforce for a fight.
When it was formed in 1976, UPS workers were already a major constituency for TDU. The number of UPS workers who became active TDUers over the years was small in relation to the rapidly growing workforce, but the group provided a core of knowledgeable rank-and-file leadership among both full-timers and part-timers.31 UPS workers were no less likely to accept the pro-company logic of team concept than any others, but they had access to an alternative “common sense” in the form of the TDU activists, the regular publications of TDU, and the critical literature on the topic developed by Labor Notes, an independent trade union magazine and education center in Detroit that was widely used by TDU and later the Teamsters Union. At the same time, the broader reform process, with TDU as its backbone, brought an entirely new leadership, headed by former UPS worker Ron Carey, to power in the Teamsters and initiated a process of change across the union that affected many UPS workers.32 The new leadership was one of the few in the United States to explicitly reject the “team concept” and the whole “partnership” notion.
Mike Parker tells how TDUers reacted to the launch of the UPS team concept program:
In January 1995, UPS moved a trailer into its yard at the Ceres center (outside Modesto, California) to be used for Total Quality Management (TQM) and self-directed work teams. Activists responded by getting Labor Notes and TDU material (which arrived promptly overnight via UPS, they point out) and prepared to deal with the programs from the beginning. Although the company controlled how the workers were divided up, the activists had sufficient numbers and training that they were able to effectively counter management in every team it set up.33
The union itself soon took up the TDU-initiated opposition to the team concept offensive. It directly confronted the pro-company ideological assumptions of the team concept and in effect turned the entire company initiative around—against the goals of management. Teamster staffer Rand Wilson described the impact on the 1997 contract fight: “The team concept campaign foreshadowed the contract campaign. UPS geared up its team concept activity as its preparation for the contract and by necessity we had to take them on as part of our preparation.”34 Capitalist ideology not only failed to carry the day, it actually allowed or forced the union to campaign for a higher class consciousness.
The strike itself was not about team concept ideology, but about decidedly material issues and demands—above all the transformation of thousands of part-time jobs into full-time jobs, the reduction of the gap between part-time and full-time wages, and continued union influence over the pension plan. While there was a pay increase for the drivers, they had much less to gain in the most immediate sense than the part-timers, who composed about 60 percent of the workforce. Yet they were as fervent as the part-timers.
Equally interesting in this respect was the more remote, yet sharply ideological, fight over control of the pension plan. UPS workers in much of the country were part of a broader, multiemployer Teamster pension plan. UPS demanded its workers be taken out of the “inefficient”