Analysis of Strike Activity in the Second Half of 2023

“At least 453,000 workers have participated in 312 strikes in the US”, continuing a years-long trend of rising worker action.   

June 2023: “the union organizing Starbucks workers said Monday that a strike timed to Pride month closed 21 stores over the weekend, including the company’s flagship Reserve Roastery in Seattle.

The strike will continue through this week and is expected to disrupt operations at more than 150 stores, Starbucks Workers United said.”

In Southern California, 16,000 Hotel Workers also went on strike. They sought less excessive workloads, better pay and benefits, and a housing fund to help workers deal with the  high rent where they work and hours-long commutes. 

July 2023: South Carolina Waffle House workers went on strike. Since then, Waffle House workers in other parts of South Carolina, as well as North Carolina and Georgia, have organized and held rallies. Workers demanded ‘round-the-clock security and a say in natural disaster safety (Waffle House is notorious for remaining open during extreme weather), an end to mandatory employee meal deductions (which they pay whether they eat or not), and a $25 hourly wage. 

September 2023: 12,700 Auto workers went on strike in Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio. “A week later, on Friday, September 22, the UAW announced that parts distribution workers at 38 GM and Stellantis locations in 20 states would go on strike”. 

The UAW pursued a strategy called the stand up strike:

“the Stand Up Strike is a new approach to striking. Instead of striking all plants all at once, select locals will be called on to ‘Stand Up’ and walk out on strike. 

As time goes on, more locals may be called on to ‘Stand Up’ and join the strike. This gives us maximum leverage and maximum flexibility in our fight to win a fair contract at each of the Big Three automakers.”

October 2023: 85,000 Healthcare workers in California, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon went on a three day strike against Kaiser Permanente. “The strikers include licensed vocational nurses, home health aides and ultrasound sonographers, as well as technicians in the radiology, X-ray, surgical, pharmacy and emergency departments”. Workers said that they’re understaffed and underpaid, and that the company is not negotiating in good faith.

This selection of struggles illustrates the sharpening contradictions within key sectors of the US economy. 

The Service Industry 

Prior to the decline of manufacturing within the US, service industry jobs were considered marginal work for the reserve army of labor. As the number of workers in the service industry grows, more and more of them are coming to understand that they will have to stay in these jobs permanently, and that the wages are dangerously close to — or even below — the cost of reproduction.

Nevertheless, these workers exist at the junction between production and consumption. It’s their work that actually enables the realization of profit for the ruling class. The masses too cannot access necessary goods without service industry workers. While wealth is generated by commodity production, those Marxists who bemoan the difficulties of revolution in the US because of the hollowing out of manufacturing, have no conception of the complexities of commodity production, distribution, sales, and consumption. A disruption at any of the first three points would be catastrophic for capitalist profit-making (as profit is taken from the surplus value created in the production process, seizures in consumption are only fatal when there is already a crisis of overproduction). 

It is impossible at our current stage of technology for capitalists to remove workers from the process of commodity sales and therefore, it is impossible for capitalists to escape the steadily closing jaws of revolution. 

Agitation and propaganda must emphasize the central role played by service workers in commodity distribution, money circulation, and capital investment. Agitprop which explains this must go further and say that those who facilitate these processes should control them. 

If workers determine whether or not capital can circulate and be reinvested, then workers should determine how said capital is invested and for what purpose. If workers determine whether necessary commodities can be distributed, then they should determine how commodities are distributed. If they are not permitted to decide these questions then the answer to “whether we will circulate capital” or, “whether we will distribute commodities” must be a unified, deafening ‘no’. This must be explained to the workers and the workers must explain this to the world. 

The Auto Industry

As the bulwark of US manufacturing, and therefore industrial unionism, autoworkers were specifically targeted by the Obama administration, having their wages and retirement plans dismantled. “When the US government decided to bail out the auto industry after the 2008 financial crisis, that came with a lot of company restructuring, as well as changes to the union’s 2007 contract… restructuring the wages to try to be closer to what the non-union companies were making”. 

In other words, the bourgeoisie attacked the entire working class by cutting auto worker pay, dropping the floor for everyone else. 

The Healthcare Industry 

Private health insurance has allowed for the explosion of healthcare costs. As a result, healthcare is seen by Wall Street as one of the most promising sectors of the economy in which to invest. 

However, healthcare is not a commodity. In reality, healthcare isn’t even a service, it’s an aspect of social reproduction. Caring for the sick is an integral part of all human societies and is necessary for survival. 

In order to be profitable, caring for the sick had to first be turned into a service — into ‘healthcare’ — so that the various activities involved (surgeries, lab tests, rehabilitation, etc) could be isolated and turned into services to be exchanged for money. This process is how healthcare was commodified. 

Consequently, those who care for the sick are transformed into employees who provide a service, i.e. ‘healthcare providers’. With this transformation underway, the extraction of profit becomes relatively simple. Healthcare providers are directed to provide specific, quantifiable, purchasable services. The more specific services they can provide in a given working day, the greater the rate of profit. 

Profit is further increased by reducing the number of healthcare workers relative to the quantity of services exchanged. At the same time, healthcare workers are paid hourly rather than by service rendered, allowing wages to be suppressed relative to the labor expended. 

In practice, this results in “short staffing”, “long hours”, and “low pay” — the specific concerns cited by healthcare worker unions. 

For healthcare workers, the union argument that better pay will result in reduced stress for workers and better care for patients is insufficient. We must explain how healthcare transformed from a facet of social reproduction into a commodity, and how the socialist revolution must further transform it into a social service — decommodifying it and making it once again a facet of social reproduction, but on a new and higher level with the advancement of centrally controlled productive forces. 

In practical day to day terms, we must use the mass line to formulate demands for the separation of healthcare services from profit extraction. The workers must demand that, so long as the capitalists maintain control of the means of production, that specific medical procedures be financed at the expense of the capitalists. The list of procedures, determined by the workers via the mass line, should of course be ever expanding. 

Action

In spite of this struggle, the communist movement has lagged to a shocking decree. Over the last century, US communists have transformed from a vanguard to a rearguard. Worse still, they are a rearguard asleep at their post — the proletariat, who spontaneously surged into battle with the bourgeoisie, is beset on all sides. 

We could decry opportunists, tailists, adventurists, and agents-provocateur. But to set the indictment of such individuals and cliques as our first priority would only be to flatter ourselves. We would be presuming we were the first revolutionaries to face such obstacles. 

Yes, distorters of Marxism must be debated fiercely, exposed, and disregarded like rusted parts in a worn-down engine. But this must be done at the same time as we conduct full scale campaigns of workplace investigation and organization. The organization and mobilization of the working class towards economic and eventually political strikes must be our central, most-jealously held task. Openly communist agitation and propaganda must be brought to the workers. 

Of course, we can hear the aforementioned opportunists, cowards, and court jesters of the Marxist movement lamenting that the workers will shun us should we reveal ourselves as communists. But like a child who fears monsters under the bead, these tailists recoil at monsters of their own imagination. We in the Multinational Communist Party opted to simply look under the bed and we found no danger. We, after engaging in real-world investigations of the working class have instead discovered workers hungry for an accurate analysis of their conditions and a clear path towards victory. The state has yet to rally its forces against open communism. We must seize this opportunity with the utmost urgency.