Introduction

As I indicated in an earlier post, I attended the second session spring 2024 education conference of Socialist Action (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA-mVbaSSOc&t=4354s) since the issue of what socialists should do in unions is of prime importance- but was excluded from it after I asked a couple of questions in the chat and responded to Barry Weisleder’s response to one of my chat questions (see An Interesting Response from Barry Weisleder, Canadian Federal Secretary of Socialist Action, located in Toronto). The questions were:

1. What do socialists do to show the limitations of collective bargaining and collective agreements?
2. [Lisa,one of the presenters referred to public ownership at one point]: Can public ownership not involve exploitation and oppression just as much as in the private sector?

I also asked, as a supplement, whether social reformers and social democrats do not tend to idealize the public sector.

Barry Weisleder, federal secetary of Socialist Action Canada, then replied that public ownership is a step forward and that workers could advance through their struggles against both public and private employers. I then replied that this sounds contradictory since the conclusion that public ownership is a step forward does not follow logically from the idea that workers in both the public and private sectors could advance their struggles in both sectors.

Barry then quickly replied that this is not a debate but a socialist conference; I had little time to read any more of what he actually wrote since he booted me off not only chat but off of zoom.

I have already looked criticially in a previous post about the second presenter, Julius Arscott, to the second session (see https://wp.me/p9IiIC-5hK). 

Lisa Kreut was the first presenter for the second session. Who is she? According to the Hospital Employees Union website (https://www.heu.org/provincial-executive): 

Lisa was elected as 2-Spirit, Women & Non-Binary diversity vice-president in 2022. She sat on the 2022 FBA bargaining committee and has served on HEU’s Pink Triangle and 2 Spirit, Women & Non-Binary standing committees, the occupational subcommittee, and the CLC Solidarity and Pride committee. An HEU member since 2008, Lisa is chair at her local, and has previously served as vice-chair, trustee, shop steward, and conductor. She’s also been a labour council delegate.  

There were two parts to Kreut’s presentation. The first part was supposed to be about economic principles. The second part had to do with a grassroots organizing campaign (unclear whether she called it the math campaign) that had to do with–if I understand the issue correctly–compensating healthcare workers who had lost relative wages during governmental wage cuts  in such a fashion that pay equity was sacrificed.

Economic Theory–or Lack Thereof

Kreut claims that socialist economic principles can be used to make a tangible difference in the lives of co-workers and one of the places where we can make the strongest difference for co-workers is at the bargaining table. Unfortunately, she provides little in the way of enlightenment to regular workers about what these socialist economic principles are, let alone the economic principles that govern a society dominated by a class of employers and the associated economic, political and social structures. 

For example, she stated the following: 

I’d like to uh take a bit of time to demystify some economic theory because I think one of the mistakes a lot of newer socialists make is writing off economics. This it’s it’s a trick of the bosses, politicians and governments. They try and make us believe that economics is something that’s just for capitalists and just for conservatives and just for neoliberals and and that it’s too complicated. For them, we workers don’t need to worry worry our little heads about that, which is so far from the truth. Economics is so important;  it’s it’s at the core of what we do as socialists and once we sort of understand our economic values uh we can bring them to the bargaining table to hopefully push back against some of the tricks that bosses use to get us to not. 

She then goes on a historical account of neoliberal efforts to gut unions in general and public-sector unions in particular, as well as deregulation and privatization of public-sector services, with the consequence that economic inequality has vastly increased, labour rights have declined and the social safety net has been gutted. 

The alternative would be collective ownership of the means of production [examples?], land and factories. Economic democracy would prevail [meaning? examples?]. Economic decisions should be made by everyone but especially the workers in order to counter the top-down decision-making typical of corporations and companies. [If economic decisions are made by most workers, would employers even exist anymore?] 

She also claimed that she and others fight for strong worker rights [meaning? examples? how?], 
including good wages [can there be any such thing in the context of exploitation and oppression–see for example The Rate of Exploitation of General Motors Workers or Should Not the Radical Left Take into Account the Attitude of Workers Towards Their Own Jobs? Part Two, The Case of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC)), safe working conditions [something undoubtedly desired by workers but an impossible dream in the situation where there exists a class of employers–see for example Working for an Employer May Be Dangerous to Your Health, Part Eight) and job security [again, something desired by workers but increasingly an unrealizable goal as capital lurches from one crisis to the next].  

Kreut seems to want to return to the so-called golden age of capitalism between the end of the Second World War and the 1970s:

labor protections, investing in social welfare programs, strong safety nets, publicly owned services, publicly owned businesses. Socialized. We don’t say that word enough, “socialized.” Publicly owned airlines. I think we should say socialized more–socializing. Socialism is the cornerstone to our economic beliefs:  ensuring access to healthare, education,  transport, social services. [Did we not have that after the Second World War? Was that then an example of socialism? There is no clear view of what she means here. Is it a social democratic view, or a socialist view, where not only the class of employers ceases to exist but also the economic, political and social structures associated with that class? See below for my interpretation that it is just the same economic strucure as capitalism, but more humanized.] 

Indeed, Kreut’s analysis of the nature of capitalist relations of production and exchange enlightens workers very little about the economic nature of their society in which they produce and live: 

The main kind of key point of economics in general–it’s really a belief in what
should we be doing with with the excess value that we create after wages are taken.  Neoliberals believe that that excess value should go to billionaires, that it should go to corporations. 

Or the excess should stay in people’s bank accounts or be invested in the form of
more business ventures to create more capital for the capitalist owning class, 
where socialists believe that you know if you work you make a 100 Parts you should in some way get get a share of all that value you create now whether that’s through directly through wages or through things that benefit us all in the form of public infrastructure, publicly owned corporations. 

In another post, I have already criticized a similar line of reasoning for those who implicitly or explicitly refer to surplus value and its redistribution as somehow a socialist measure. Of course, all workers should be supported in their efforts to raise their wages–but this support should be combined with placing such a struggle in a wider context in order to enlighten the workers about their situation and interests.

This is what I wrote in another post: 

The so-called Marxist referred to surplus value without addressing the issue of its nature–both the domination and exploitation of workers at present by previous rounds of exploitation. 

 

As I argued in another post (see Review of the Pamphlet “Climate Change is a Class Issue” by Sarah Glynn and John Clarke, Part Two: Exploitation of Workers as Past and Not Just Present or Future, Second Section for a more detailed explanation): 

When we consider the real accumulation of capital, where part of the surplus value (profit) produced for free by workers and appropriated by private employers (capitalists) for no equivalent is not consumed but ploughed back into further investments, not only is the original value of original capital preserved through the continued exploitation of workers but the relation between the original capital invested and the new capital invested due to the exploitation of workers increasingly becomes smaller and smaller relatively as the accumulation of capital and the continuous exploitation of workers proceed; more of more of the money advanced to hire workers originates from previous rounds of exploitation and not from the original capital. (The original accumulation of capital involves violence, robbery, murder and so forth). Given that an exchange of equivalent values occurs in the present exchange relation between workers and employers, past exploitation vanishes from sight.

The so-called Marxist, typically, looks at surplus value only as something which has been produced and now needs to be (re)distributed. The issue of the use of surplus value from previous rounds of exploitation to further dominate and exploit workers is simply ignored. 

The one-sided emphasis on a surplus reduces a theory of exploitation to a purely quantitative issue of the production of more value than what the worker receives. From Patrick Murray (2016), The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form, page 300:

Marx’s use of a divided line to illustrate absolute surplus value in terms of extending the line [using a horizontal line to illustrate the division of the working day into necessary labour required to produce the wages/salary and benefits of workers and the surplus labour performed] and relative surplus value in terms of shortening its first division(necessary labour) is a neat pedagogical stroke. However, it has its risks. It could suggest that Marx’s inquiry into surplus-value addresses solely quantitative considerations: What portion of the working day is devoted to ‘necessary labour’? What portion to ‘surplus labour’? What is the rate of surplus-value (surplus labour over necessary labour)? Concentrating on the lengths and proportions of the line segments can deflect attention from a prior question: What is the dimension of the line? Then it is easy for the bad habits of economics and everyday talk to slip in this answer: the divided line takes the measure of wealth and surplus wealth – instead of value and surplus value. In this way, the divided line can play into the Ricardian socialist misreading of Capital, which the all-consuming issue is the exploitative, class division of wealth. Because it is oblivious to the fundamental issue of the specific social form and purpose of wealth, Ricardian theory – including Ricardian socialism – fails to register the difference between wealth and value. If you overlook the fact that value is not wealth but a specific social form of wealth, then absolute surplus value looks applicable to any class society. Wherever one class lives off the labour of another, the labour of the servile class must be divided into necessary and surplus, and, holding the necessary constant, any lengthening of the working day will increase the surplus wealth appropriated by the dominant class. The division between necessary and surplus labour forms the basis of any system of exploitation, but not just any social sort of labour produces value and surplus value. Marx’s divided line measures not ‘wealth’ but a definite social form of wealth, namely value, which is bound up with special social relations and purposes.

This one-sided focus on SURPLUS value is reflected in the attempt at engaging in theoretical practice of an activist here in Toronto: Anna Jessup. Jessup posted a comic depicting the exploitation of labour as one where a rich person claims to be rich through hard work, and a worker then queries: “Whose though?” (see Exposing the Intolerance and Censorship of Social Democracy, Part Five, or A Critique of Moral or Utopian Critiques of Exploitation). [By the way, Clarke, on Facebook, on December 26, 2024, posted “Some useful considerations that may help turning FB post comment sections into ugly and impenetrable swamps.” The fifth point was: “5. Have I forgotten that not everyone shares my appetite for lengthy dogmatic diatribes?” During my “debate” with Jessup over the issue, Clarke apparently had indicated his presence without entering into debate (I remember that he and Chris Hedges?, if I remember correctly, made one comment each).

The production of surplus VALUE involves a perpetual focus on the production of a surplus–value becomes a defining feature of SURPLUS value: a surplus without value is not capitalist.

The fact that the surplus assumes the form of value, however, has very much to do with the infinite nature of capitalist production and exchange relations. It could be said–and has been said–that the generalization of the production of value is tantamount to a society where production of surplus value is predominant. As John Weeks (2010) points out, in Capital, Exploitation and Economic Crisis, page 19:

Value acts as a regulator of price once the entire product, all inputs, are monetized;
until this occurs, the product is not a commodity in its entirety and all the
concrete labor time expended on it need not be replaced by money. This occurs
only with the development of capitalist production.  It is important not to
become entangled in semantics. “Value” regulates price under capitalist relations
and can be used as a tool of analysis only in capitalist society.

Value is produced by abstract labour, but abstract labour itself as a social force emerges when labour becomes private labour, labour isolated from other labours socially (but materially still forms part of the division of labour). Page 14:

The central characteristic of the capitalist mode of production, from which all others follow, is that the private labor of individuals is not directly social. It must be rendered social by the exchange of products as commodities. Labor is directly social when the status of the worker, the product he/she produces and its subsequent distribution are determined prior to production and distribution. In all societies individuals labor, but within capitalist relations of production this labor is carried out in production units that are socially isolated. Producers discover through the exchange of their products whether their individual production decisions conform to the requirement that society as a whole be reproduced in a sustained manner. This reproduction occurs via the interaction of commodity producers, in which individual labor must be integrated into a social whole. The labor theory of value is the analysis of how individual labor becomes socialized and explains this process through an analysis of how concrete, specific labor is rendered abstract.

As Moishe Postone (1993) points out in his work Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, the nature of abstract labour and the production of value tends to create a pressure on the employers and through them on the workers to produce as much as possible in as short of time as possible in an ever-increasing level of intensity.  Pages 289-290:

… Marx’s example implies that the two dimensions of the commodity form interact. On the one hand, increased productivity redetermines socially necessary labor time and thereby changes the determinations of the social labor hour. That is, the abstract temporal constant which determines value is itself determined by the use value dimension, the level of productivity. On the other hand, although the social labor hour is determined by the general productivity of concrete labor, the total value yielded in that hour remains constant, regardless of the level of the productivity. This implies that each new level of productivity, once it has become socially general, not only redetermines the social labor hour but, in turn, is redetermined by that hour as the “base level” of productivity. The amount of value yielded per unit of abstract time by the new level of productivity is equal to that yielded by the older general level of productivity. In this sense, the level of productivity, the use value dimension, is also determined by the value dimension (as the new base level).

This process of the reciprocal determination of the two dimensions of social labor in capitalism occurs on the level of society as a whole. It is at the heart of a dialectical dynamic intrinsic to the social totality constituted by commodity determined labor. The peculiarity of the dynamic—and this is crucial—is its treadmill effect. Increased productivity increases the amount of value produced per unit of time—until this productivity becomes generalized; at that point the magnitude of value yielded in that time period, because of its abstract and general temporal determination, falls back to its previous level. This results in a new determination of the social labor hour and a new base level of productivity. What emerges, than, is a dialectic of transformation and reconstitution: the socially general levels of productivity and the quantitative determinations of socially necessary labor time change, yet these changes reconstitute the point of departure, that is, the social labor hour and the base level of productivity.

This treadmill effect implies, even on the abstract logical level of the problem of the magnitude of value—in other words, before the category of surplus value and the wage labor-capital relation have been introduced—a society that is directionally dynamic, as expressed by the drive for ever-increasing levels of productivity. As we have seen, increased productivity results in short-term increases in the amount of value yielded per unit time, which induces the general adoption of the newer methods of producing; however, once these methods become generalized, the value yielded per unit time returns to its older level. In effect, those producers who had not yet adopted these new methods are now compelled to do so. The introduction of still newer methods of increasing productivity
bring about further short-term increases in value. One consequence of the labor time measure of wealth, then, is that as the temporal constant is redetermined by increased productivity, it induces, in turn, still greater productivity. The result is a directional dynamic in which the two dimensions, concrete labor and abstract labor, productivity and the abstract temporal measure of wealth, constantly redetermine one another. Because, at this stage of the analysis, we cannot explain the necessity that capital accumulate constantly, the dynamic outlined here, does not represent the fully developed immanent historical logic of capitalism. It does, however, represent the initial specification of this logic and delineates the form growth must take in the context of labor-mediated social relations.

The reciprocal redetermination of increased productivity and the social labor hour has an objective, lawlike quality that is by no means a mere illusion or mystification. Although social, it is independent of human will. To the extent that one can speak of a Marxian “law of value,” this treadmill dynamic is its initial determination; as we shall see, it describes a pattern of ongoing social transformation and reconstitution as characteristic of capitalist society. The law of value, then, is dynamic

When the production of value is generalized, then such production involves the production of as much surplus as possible, and the production of value becomes denser and denser as the standard of value becomes higher and higher.; the roduction of a surplus of value and the production of value go hand in hand.

Kreut’s claim that she would enlighten us about economics is hardly justified in her presentation; she leaves the workers with little understanding of the nature of their exploitation and oppression.

Let us now turn to the second part of her presentation–which deals with so-called socialist practice. 

Socialist Practice–Or Lack Thereof

The campaign (called, perhaps the math campaign–I could not understand the word used before the word “campaign”). Here is what Kreut says, in part, about the campaign: 

It was not an official campaign from the hospital employees union. It started
as a populist grassroots initiative. It was driven by frustration and struggles of workers who were tired of seeing their wages lag behind the rising cost of living. And many of the workers were also workers who had suffered pay cuts or layoffs under the liberal government

The main goal was to reverse the Campbell Cuts [Campbell was the Premier of British Columbia]. But what drew everyone together was the idea about increasing wages and also fighting the public sector bargaining that we have in British Colombia–creating an argument to sort of bargain outside of this mandate bargaining that the BC liberals have. And so the campaign helped highlight the gap between workers and wages [gap between workers and wages? Does this make any sense? Perhaps gap between what workers receive and what they perceive as fair?]. Specifically in healthc care 
began as sort of a committee at Vancouver General Hospital by spreading
the message through social media, through word of Mouth, and then we started
getting feedback from workers sharing personal stories of when they were laid off or when their wages were cut, and the things that they do to make ends meet, on the wages we had.

We’ve heard from members. We heard from a member who was squatting at their work site. We heard from members living in tents.  So the grassroots mobilization created a ground swell of support and brought  the campaign to the attention of the organization of the Union. The campaign did gather a lot of traction, and we created petitions. We sent them to different workers around the province, and we had them faxed back to my office at Vancouver General Hospital. We ended up receiving thousands of responses.  About 10% of our bargaining unit responded that they supported the campaign.

The response from the union was not so great. It’s when you–and this is something that you’re going to bump up to if you try and do grassroots campaigns–is that the union quite often will ignore you and then fight you, and then they’ll pretend it was their idea. That’s unfortunately how you win; you kind of let them have to take
control over it in the end. that’s how you end up winning as it becomes union policy.

So what ended up happening was we did have some people elected to the
bargaining table, and I was one of them. And we were able to bring the campaign’s message and the supporters to the bargaining table, share it with staff,  share it with the employer.  And the fact that we had such a ground swell of support meant that it eventually became the union’s policy and which they now call the wage comparability review [my emphasis]. 

Once it became the union’s official policy, we were able to mobilize staff : I mean by this point the organization had taken over, organized staff did research to show the disparity
between wages and the cost of living, which we could bring to the employer and bring to the public sector employers council.

Ultimately we were able to bring to the employer’s suggested wage increase of–I believe it was about 2 or 3% over 3 years–up to just over 14% over 3 years and were able create a wage comparability review with the employer, where they gave us additional top-ups just for HEU members. And then we began creating a back channel campaign [A back channel campaign refers to an informal, often secretive effort to influence outcomes—typically in politics, diplomacy, or corporate settings—without going through official or public channels] to prepare for our next round of  bargaining

But really it was the power of grassroots activism, it was the power of socialists at a committee organizing around this cause to influence the union’s policies and and create something that would ultimately become the union’s policies. But we did face barriers, people trying to manage us, personal phone calls asking what’s going on, and people telling us it’ll never happen. we had activists being contacted, activists that the union thought were sort of key organizers, telling people not to talk to us and not to sign petitions. It got a little bit dirty,  but we were persistent and we kept our message positive. Some of the barriers we had were around: some interpersonal conflict around not staying on message, especially around social justice issues. We had people leave over social justice issues.  These are important issues but it is important when you have a campaign like this to make sure that you know what your target is. You identify your target, and you stay on
that target until your campaign is done. Don’t let yourself be sidelined. Check your ego. Check your fragility. If something’s irking you in a committee meeting, just try and figure out if  now is the time.

On the Hospital Employees Union website (https://www.heu.org/collective-agreements/facilities/new-wage-comparability-working-group), we read the following about the wage comparability review: 

New wage comparability working group

Image

February 1, 2023

Today, one of the landmark provisions negotiated in the 2022-2025 Facilities Bargaining Association (FBA) collective agreement started moving ahead as a new working group began its work of reversing the BC Liberal’s 2004 rollbacks to Facilities members, imposed as part of an unconstitutional use of back-to-work legislation that wiped out decades of progress toward achieving pay equity.

To recap, in the renewed contract the FBA bargaining committee secured an agreement to allocate $10.64 million in wage increases effective April 1, 2023. On April 1, 2024, this annual allocation will rise by an additional $5 million to $15.64 million. 

This funding marks the beginning of the latest chapter in the union’s efforts to right this historic wrong under the BC Liberal government. The first step in this process is to establish a working group within 90 days of ratification made up of FBA representatives, health employers and government. 

The FBA committee consists of:

• Meena Brisard, Secretary-Business Manager
• Chris Dorais, Coordinator of Public Sector Servicing; 
• Bill Pegler, Manager, Training & Administration;
• Lou Black, Director of Research and Policy; and
• Angela Wong, Acting General Counsel.

The FBA committee will be supported by Dr. John Malcomson and a bargaining committee member-reference group which includes:

• Chena Binns, Care Aide;
• Lisa Kreut, Inventory Supply Technician; 
• Barb Owen, Carpenter; and
• Jesse Winfrey, Cook.

The Health Employers Association of BC’s (HEABC) committee representatives will be:

• Hanna McMullen, Strategic Negotiations Lead, HEABC;
• Jon Fraser, Compensation and Classification Services Lead, HEABC;
• Denise Woo, Compensation and Classification Advisor, HEABC;
• Kostia Thomas, Leader, Work Design and Compensation, Fraser Health Authority; and
• Robert Pauliszyn, Executive Director, Public Sector Bargaining and Compensation, Public Sector Employers’ Secretariat.

Under the guidance of arbitrator Jacquie de Aguayo and classification expert Vicki Averill, this group held an initial case management meeting today. Over the course of its work, the group will be focused on two main tasks:

1. It will make recommendations to government in advance of the next round of bargaining to address wage comparability issues, following its review of the impact of these historical wage cuts, and especially their impact on previous pay equity adjustments; and
2. It will allocate interim annual ongoing funds over the next two years to boost the wages of lower-wage Facilities members, with the first permanent wage adjustments to be effective April 1, 2023.

This initiative to right this wrong for our members has been over 20 years in the making.

From HEU’s 2007 Supreme Court of Canada win to uphold bargaining rights for all workers, to the 2018 repeal of Bills 29 and 94 by the BC NDP government, HEU and its allies have continued the fight against the injustices we experienced during some of the darkest moments in British Columbia’s labour history. And we are now reaping the benefits of that decades-long struggle.

We will continue to keep the Facilities membership updated on this priority and others arising out of the recently ratified Facilities Subsector agreement.

I asked artificial intelligence what wrong was to be righted and how it was to be corrected. The answer: 

The “wrong” referred to in that passage involves historical wage cuts and the erosion of pay equity for health care support workers—particularly lower-wage Facilities members—in British Columbia (BC), Canada. This injustice spans over two decades and is rooted in government-imposed legislation and austerity measures from the early 2000s that targeted unionized public-sector workers, especially those in health care.

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1. What Was the “Wrong”?

The “wrong” refers specifically to:

a. Wage Cuts and Contract Stripping under Bills 29 and 94

• Bill 29 (2002) and Bill 94 were passed by the BC Liberal government under Premier Gordon Campbell.

• These laws nullified key provisions of collective agreements, allowed for privatization of hospital services, and resulted in mass layoffs and outsourcing of jobs like housekeeping, food services, and laundry.

• Wages were dramatically cut, jobs were contracted out, and job security was eliminated.

• The Hospital Employees’ Union (HEU)—which represents many of the affected workers—saw its lowest-paid members (often women, immigrants, and racialized workers) bear the brunt of these cuts.

b. Disruption of Pay Equity Gains

• Prior to these cuts, there had been progress toward pay equity, which aims to ensure that women-dominated job classes receive pay equal to men-dominated classes with equivalent skills, effort, and responsibility.

• The cuts reversed many of those gains, disproportionately impacting women and racialized workers, thereby reinforcing systemic wage discrimination.

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2. How Does the Wage Comparability Review Right This Wrong?

The wage comparability review, under arbitrator Jacquie de Aguayo and classification expert Vicki Averill, is designed to repair the damage done by those policies in several ways:

a. Assessing Historical Impact

• The review looks at how those historical wage cuts affected current wages and undermined previous pay equity adjustments.

• It ensures that the consequences of those policies are clearly documented and that any wage gaps are identified based on comparability to similar public-sector work.

b. Recommending Equitable Wage Increases

• The group will recommend actions to government to close unjustified wage gaps, especially ahead of the next bargaining round.

• These recommendations will focus on restoring fair compensation to workers whose pay was unfairly cut or stagnated.

c. Providing Interim Wage Increases

• The review also includes a funding mechanism to provide immediate, permanent wage increases (starting April 1, 2023) for lower-paid workers—not waiting for the full round of bargaining to begin.

• These interim funds are a tangible and urgent step toward rectifying the injustice.

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3. Broader Context: A 20-Year Struggle

This review is the culmination of over two decades of struggle:

• 2007 Supreme Court of Canada victory: In Health Services and Support – Facilities Subsector Bargaining Assn. v. British Columbia, the court ruled that Bill 29 violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, specifically the right to collective bargaining.

• 2018 repeal of Bills 29 and 94: The BC NDP government finally repealed these laws, undoing some of the structural attacks on public-sector unions.

• These changes paved the way for HEU and its allies to push for wage comparability reviews and restorative justice for affected workers.

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Conclusion

The “wrong” is the systematic dismantling of fair wages and bargaining rights for hospital support workers, disproportionately affecting marginalized groups. The wage comparability review, in this context, is both a technical process to correct inequities and a symbolic redress for years of injustice and struggle.

Would you like a short summary or a timeline of these events?

Workers, again, should certainly struggle to oppose wage cuts and strive to achieve pay equity. However, if such goals are to be socialist, should they not be tied to challenging the class power of employers in some way? What was achieved in the way of developing the class consciousness of workers? 

When I worked in Prince George, British Columbia  for School District No. 57, as a bilingual library technician, I was a union steward for the board office and participated in union negotiations during the early 1990s. The president of the union, Marilyn Hannah, was for pay equity, and she wanted a “fair and equitable formula” for negotiating wages. This was her primary goal during negotiations. She had no intention of fighting against employers as a class–and she never did. 

 We had a collective agreement between support staff and the district that was coming up for negotiations. I volunteered to be part of the negotiating team because I wanted to learn about the process first hand.  We bargained in the usual way, with a small group of union negotiators engaging in demands in the context of meetings with the negotiating team of the employer.

When our bargaining team was ready to present the results of negotiations to the members, I volunteered to draft the list of demands that we had made in a two-column set of papers, with an x beside the demands that we did not get and a check beside the ones that we did get. The union business manager was obliged to read this out during a public ratification meeting (she, however, noted that my presentation was very negative). When she sent out the ballots for voting to those who were not able to attend (School District No. 57 is a large school district geographically), she only sent out the demands that we obtained. The agreement was ratified.

The point is that I wanted to demonstrate the limitations of collective bargaining (and the corresponding collective agreement) while not rejecting any changes in the collective agreement. Furthermore, the demonstration of the limitation of reforms–or the politics of exposure as Mathiesen calls it–forms an essential element of the politics of abolition. From The Politics of Abolition Revisited, page 143:

Here lies the significance of the exposing or unmasking policy which the above-mentioned sequence of events illustrates. Let me repeat: By unmasking the ideology and the myths with which the penal system disguises itself – for example through political work of the kind described here – a necessary basis for the abolition of unnecessary and dangerous systems of control is created. The example illustrates the struggle involved in such a work of exposure. The system continually tries to adopt new disguises. We must continually try to unveil them.

My own efforts during negotiatons was to try to expose to the members the limitations of the collective-bargaining process. 

What was Kreut’s and other so-called socialists’ efforts in exposing the limitations of collective bargaining? She provides no evidence that her efforts aimed to expose the real nature of the collective-bargaining process and thereby its limitations. What would workers involved in the wage comparability review have learned about the limitations of the collective-bargaining process? About the limitations of the legal process? Would they have concluded that they cannot really achieve any fair results by means of such processes (only fairer results but never fair results since the whole process is tainted with exploitation and domination)? 

Kreut seems to identify grassroots organizing with socialism. If socialists had not been active (including her), then this organizing around the issue of righting the wrong of lower wages and thereby undermining pay equity. It may well be that her and other so-called socialists were a necessary aspect of such organizing, but such organizing does not necessary involve any socialist element to it. The union, because it had more resources, ultimately co-opted the grassroots organizing and converted the process into a legal battle.

What might the lessons learned by rank-and-file workers concerning this whole process? Would they have advanced to the understanding that they need not only organize to achieve certain goals but develop the goal that they needed to challenge the class power of employers? 

It is highly likely that the whole process led to further co-optation of workers into the legal process rather than the opposite. Since Kreut provides no further information, it is impossible to tell with more precision the actual result, but she provides no evidence that the workers’ class consciousness has been advanced by means of such grassroots efforts. 

Idealizing organizing efforts–as if organizing around issues that do indeed personally concern workers–does a socialist movement no good. The left tends to idealize organization of workers–as if such organization will magically lead to a socialist challenge of the class power of employers. There is little evidence to support such an implicit view. The issue is what kind of organizing and how it is linked to a socialist vision (which includes gaining a much clearer view of the nature of capitalist society) and, ultimately, a socialist movement. Without such a vision, organizing may well end up reinforcing the capitalist system by legitimating limited forms of struggle (such as collective bargaining and legal processes).

Conclusion

At the level of theory, Kreuz provides workers with little understanding of the nature of the kind of society in which they work and live. At the level of practice, her and other so-called socialists’ efforts at grassroots organizing probably ended up being co-opted by the union, with the consequence that the workers’ class consciousness did not develop. 

Just as in the case of Julisus Arscott’s efforts, Kreuts’ efforts do not seem to lead to any real socialist advance. Both of their efforts generally failed to advance a socialist agenda that challenged the class power of employers.