Changes- Pro and Con
This is my fifth year as a sub- scriber, and I would like to take
this opportunity to comment on
some of the changes which I have
noted over the years.
I am delighted that you have
been able to adopt a magazine for-
mat, as my old newspaper-style
copies are certainly becoming old and yellowed, and yet I want to
keep them as excellent reference
tools on various topics. The style
of the magazine has matured too,
with a little less rhetoric and a little
more substance. The documenta-
tion remains at high standards,
giving credibility to your reports, as well as help to the would-be researcher for additional sources
of information.
I am disappointed, however, with the gradual de-emphasis on
Latin American news. While the in-
depth reporting on the problems of
labor and class conflict throughout the hemisphere is relevant, NACLA does not serve, as in the
past, as the vehicle for reporting of current developments.
Thank you for the excellent
research you have brought to my door over the years and my best wishes for the continued ex-
cellence of your publication.
Crystal Graham Ithaca, N.Y.
Steel Talk
I’ve just finished reading your “Steelyard Blues” issue. My first
thought was “incredible.” I had
heard, through local newspapers, about the “import steel problem”
45update * update. update * update
but basically knew very little about
the industry otherwise. Your his-
torical perspective along with your
question-asking series of con-
nected articles is quite powerful.
Of course there are points in your
argument I’m not sure about, but I
think that your presentation is ob-
jective in presenting facts so that I
can draw some conclusions my-
self. (I would have liked more ex-
planation of the steelmaking pro-
cess.)
You speak to the question of
U.S. wages and foreign wages
(p.38), and these questions come
to mind. How do you measure
levels of exploitation? How do you
compare relative benefit of
wages? Are foreign steel workers
twelve times more exploited than
U.S. steelworkers?
It is also difficult for me to see
“any advance for the workers”
under your suggested program of
Trade Adjustment Assistance pay-
ments, financed by specialized
business taxes, because it seems
much like taxpayers absorbing the
losses indirectly. And isn’t taxing
foreign profits of multinational cor-
porations somewhat similar to
tariffs when it’s a U.S. subsidiary
import?
Michael H. Owens
Austin, Tx.
The “Steelyard Blues: New
Structures in Steel” Report docu-
ments what the current crisis of
capitalism means for the steel in-
dustry, and how the industry, the
banks, the government and the
trade union bureaucracy are all
responding to old problems with a
somewhat new face. In other
words, the Report supports and
elaborates what the steelworkers
basically already know from their
46
living experience. After all, it is
they who have borne and continue
to bear the brunt of the latest
maneuvers of capital and the sell-
outs of the union bureaucrats, who
live with the resultant speed-ups,
the deteriorating equipment and
safety conditions, the ineffective
or nonexistent means of enforcing
work rules and the general eroding
of their hard won rights. In
essence, they know they are the
ones who produce the profits for
the outrageous executive salary
increases and the costly but profit-
able diversification and restructur-
ing of the industry that you docu-
ment.
The Report upbraids George
Meany for his protectionist talk by
accusing him of wanting to turn
the clocks back, yet you have no
qualms about handing out “ad-
vice” to steelworkers to demand
such things as greater unemploy-
ment benefits, job retraining and
secured pensions to be paid by
taxing multinationals and special
business taxes; as if the steel-
workers, and the labor movement
in general, were devoid of a history
rich in demanding the very things
you suggest and more; as if that
history has not revealed the absur-
dity of appealing to our govern-
ment, employers or bureaucrats
for help or relying on their benev-
olence for satisfying those de-
mands; as if that very history has
not revealed that workers are con-
sistently more innovative, more
persistent and more astutely
radical in a struggle than their
leadership. It seems that you, as
well as Mr. Meany, have confused
today with yesterday, or at the
very least you’ve neglected labor’s
yesterdays.
The shifts in the international
division of labor and the flight of
capital that you document are
symptomatic of the international
crisis of capitalism. As your Report
states, the problems of the U.S.
steelworkers are merely one mani-
festation of these international
maneuvers, the solutions of which
must therefore also be of an inter-
national nature. Yet you reduce
this international nature of working
class interests to a common strug-
gle for parity wages, and the prob-
lem in general (by virtue of your
conclusions) to one of struggling
for immediate demands, i.e.
solvable within the framework of
trade unionism.
It is not your solutions per se
that are being objected to, for in
the proper context they each have
validity. Rather, it is the counsel-
ling of steelworkers in a Report
that documents those who create,
prolong, intensify and benefit by
the problems and conditions of the
steelworkers, and leaves a con-
spicuous void with not more than
incidental mention of the struggles
and conditions of the Brazilian,
Japanese, European or even the
U.S. steelworkers. You counsel a
strategy of solidarity while, by vir-
tue of the void, you treat the inter-
national working class and the
U.S. rank and file as passive fac-
tors in your international division of
labor and flight of capital
schemes. You counsel aggressive
tactics to put workers on the road
to controlling their own lives and
society but ignore their aggressive
history and are silent on their
essential decisive role in the pro-
duction process. Within the con-
text of your Report, your sug-
gested solutions lack the basis
needed to clarify rather than fur-
ther obscure the problem you set
out to document.
New York, NY
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