If you like seniority, you should like affirmative action

by Denise Winebrenner

This article was reprinted from the September 1.1995 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

Affirmative action slashes into corporate America's complete control over the lives of working class people. When workers organized unions they negotiated seniority systems. Management's dictatorship over wages, benefits and work assignments was curtailed. U.S. management was losing its grip. (This helps to explain why unions were illegal for almost half a century.)

Unions fought for and won seniority systems -- rules governing promotions and upgrading, bidding procedures, training, benefits, layoff and recall. This regulated heretofore unlimited company power. Seniority cracked corporate domination and enabled workers to bring a modest degree of democracy on the job.

In less than a generation, seniority became a sacred right. It spread from unionized facilities into non-union factories, mills, mines and even white-collar workplaces. Unions forced the private and public sectors to install some kind of a seniority system to prevent workers from organizing.

Seniority stands as a remarkable working class democratic achievement. But it did not end racism, sexism, discrimination, favoritism and finking -- in short, it drove a nail into the coffin of corporate dictatorship, but the box was far from shut or buried.

Working class people, in many instances led by the Communist Party, fought to expand democratic rights on the job with affirmative action -- to cut into corporate absolute rights over hiring and job assignment. Since the founding of the industrial unions during the Great Depression, progressive, militant workers -- including Communists -- struggled against segregation in the workplace.

When the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination in hiring by any business dealing with the federal government, it marked another milestone working class victory. But owners were not just sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop. They were busy, up nights, figuring out how to regain their former position of total control on the job. They conducted -- through their finks, stool pigeons, foremen and those workers influenced by racism and sexism -- a vicious campaign based on the notion that "the Blacks, the Mexicans and the women are coming to take your jobs."

The stakes are high. A split work force produces superprofits for owners, and busted unions, declining wages and layoffs for workers. A wage differential based on race or gender produces superprofits for a few and mere survival for the many.

And then there's the issue of control. Affirmative action cuts into the companies' total say-so in hiring and their ability to promote "company men" into key positions. It reduces the power of the boss to place his brother in-law or some fink into a decision-making position regarding production. It denies companies a potential pool of trained scabs who could successfully run the facility during a labor dispute.

Affirmative action undermines a long-standing corporate hiring policy of "it's not what you know, but who you know." It makes it possible for merit -- not preferential treatment or a worker's ability to grovel -- to become a job qualification. It is another landmark nail in the coffin of corporate dictatorship.

In the relatively short period since it's been in effect, affirmative action has had a positive impact. A Lou Harris poll conducted in April found a 68 percent majority in support of affirmative action.

The survey put the question as follows: "The state may use affirmative action programs designed to help women, minorities and others who have not had equal opportunities in education, employment, and in receiving government contracts to achieve equal opportunities." Interestingly, results of the survey showed that by a 65 to 26 percent majority, whites reject the claim that affirmative action means giving one race or one group an advantage they don't deserve.

A recent study commissioned by the U.S. Labor Department at Rutgers University concluded, "... of the 3,000 federal district and appellate court decisions involving discrimination from mid-1990 to mid-1994, fewer than 100 court opinions involved reverse discrimination. There were only six cases in which white or male employees were successful in individual claims that they were discriminated against in favor or minorities or women."

Seniority rights and affirmative action are like peanut butter and jelly -- they work together to help form a worker's bill of rights on the job and to a job. Times are hard, and corporations with their politicians have singled out African Americans, Latinos, women and unions for the first line of attack. Affirmative action helps lay the basis for militant, working class unity in 1995 even greater than that which built the CIO.

-- Denise Winebrenner is Western Pennsylvania district organizer of the Communist Party USA.