strikes over oil prices

What sort of strikes are these? I don't imagine that they are strikes against the management, or in defence of worker's living standards.

They look more like 'strikes' organised by the management.

Devrim

I think you might be right about these fishermen 'strikes'. But thats a pretty crass understanding of the lorry drivers strikes. There's some interesting articles/letters on that struggle published by Wildcat in germany.

http://www.wildcat-www.de/en/zirkular/58/z58e_uko.htm

http://www.wildcat-www.de/en/zirkular/58/z58e_tru.htm

Given that most sections of the working class could be described as 'weaker', and many are in some combination of short term contracts, self-employment and the rest, when there's something as significant as the 2000 fuel protests it deserves proper attention, albeit with a critical eye, but I've not seen much other than those two (pretty decent) articles in Wildcat about those events.

I don't see anything much inter-classist about food riots. Ret's article from a month ago covered them in Bangladesh and Steven found this article which mentions them in a number of other places: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/8/stuffed_and_starved_as_food_riots

Similarly the rice riots in Japan in 1918 were country-wide, a combination of rural protest, urban riots, miners and steel workers struggles - and many, many strikes in between have been about food prices when they started out - and sometimes in cases where the management was providing the food. Now it's possible for a food riot to be quite reactionary - focussing on foreign food traders instead of landowners for example, but no less than some strikes are pushed into xenophobic or other cross-class ideological territory while having as their basis class demands.

So I think what's needed is a bit of reflection on these, simplistic dismissal on the one hand is as bad as Daily Mail-esque cheerleading on the other.

All social movements deserve a crtical eye. That doesn't automatically mean they're positive, of course. I think you're wrong about most sectors of the working class being weak in the sense you describe. Short term contracts are a reality, of course, but I'm not sure they form the majority of contracts of employment today. It would be interesting to know actually. Regardless, "precarity" (whether short-term contracts or dubious self-employment) is surely not the same as owning your own fixed capital as owner-operator truck drivers do.

Incidentally, the ICC did a piece on the fuel protests in the UK.

Leaving aside the question of "riots", which I'm not going to go over again here, I'm not saying its impossible for proletarian struggles to emerge from struggles over consumables. The initial formation of soviets in Russian Revolution began as a protest over bread rationing, I believe. But this was in a context of massive strikes across Russia in previous months. The workers were already beginning to assert themselves as an autonomous force and were able to link the struggles together. The bread strike quickly became political in that it demanded the end of the Tsarist state.

The question is what the current fuel strikes represent and, given their context, I don't see anything proletarian emerging from these. The class status of the vast majority of those involved at present is questionable to say the least. The framework is clearly that of an alliance between parts of the bourgeoisie, petit-bourgeoisie and some quasi-workers. Now, if the workers and quasi-workers were getting together and demanding better contracts to cover the price of fuel from the haulier companies that give them their contracts that might be a different story. Then, at least, there would be a clear demarcation between the haulier bosses and the truckers. There may be an increased potential for the proletariat aspect to push itself forward. But I see no prospect of this in the present situation precisely because the nature of the quasi-workers makes it very difficult for them to take up this kind of struggle and there is no visible, wider struggle of the rest of the class for this to link to.

In what way?

Devrim

In the major ports of California (LA/Long Beach, Oakland, Lathrop & Stockton) the short-haul troqueros are independent contractors in name only. When President Jimmy Carter signed off on the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, truckers who had been mostly employees unionized with the Teamsters suddenly were forced to become "owner-operators" and the number of trucking brokers nearly doubled along with them. The troqueros lease the trucks back to the brokers who compete for contracts with the shipping lines by bidding down and based on this pay the troqueros piece rates. When fuel prices spike upwards, the brokers are often able to get surcharges from the shipping lines, but rarely pass them on to the truckers.

When challenged by the Internal Revenue Service, the brokers have at times been penalized for not paying their tax contributions for the truckers who are considered their employees. In the U.S. truckers' wages are driven down because as independent contractors they are legally responsible to pay their own taxes without any employer contribution -- which the latter must do for normal employees. It's a paradox because some bourgeois bureaucracies prevent them from collectively organizing as independent business people while others, like the IRS at times, correctly see that their relationship with brokers is a wage relationship (i.e. the broker determines the time, place and manner in which the work must be performed -- the legal definitions of wage work).

Here's the FedEx case:

I think something similar happened in Britain with truck drivers. (To be honest this isn't something I know a lot about these the lorry drivers thing, I was 15 when they happened.) Anyway, the first wildcat thing I linked to above includes this:

I don't see any indication or possibility of any directly employed truck drivers (food, chemicals, etc) joining this strike (nor did I see it in 2000). If they did they would taking action for a number of bosses who may or may not have been workers at one time.

I think you're missing the point entirely. It's not that workers will be turned into petit-bourgeois, it's that workers will be given the trappings of self-employment (mainly negative) in order to cut the costs of long-term employment. Similarly, pointing out that many low-paid jobs, especially in service industries, increasingly take on some form of supervisory role doesn't mean that those workers are suddenly 'managers' in any real sense. In both cases the responsibility is pushed down the hierarchy and used to divide workers and break up certain working practices.

I agree with much of what you say here. But what has all that got to do with the owner-operator truck drivers who own their means of production? Turning workers into "self-employed" individuals as part of the general attack on wages and conditions, is not the same as turning them into petit-bourgeois individuals.

The thing which separates the owner-operators from the working class is precisely the fact that they own their own means of production. At best, they exist on the outer fringes of the working class. In that sense, their current action has exactly the content that Alf pointed out at the beginning of the thread: it represents a revolt of the petit-bourgeoisie against the increased pressure of the economic crisis.

The working class needs to respond on its own terrain rather than this kind of populist movement.

I agree with catch in that some of you are still missing the point. The "owner-operator" truckers in the U.S. are doing exactly the same work that they had done as employees in the Teamsters union until Carter passed the Motor Carrier Regulatory Reform and Modernization Act of 1980. This movement to deregulate the trucking industry had its origins with Nixon as a reaction to the 1971 Steelhaulers Strike. Saying that truckers are petty bourgeois because they own their trucks would be the same as saying that taxi drivers, bicycle messengers and building trades workers are petty bourgeois because they own their vehicles and tools. This simply is not true because it misconstrues what the means of production are.

I have my own example. Last year a friend fell ill with a serious heart condition and needed someone to fill in for her as a teacher in a county administered welfare program. Thinking that I would help her save her job when she recovered, I offered to do it on a temporary basis. The pay as stated wasn't too bad, but after working a few days the boss had me fill out tax forms. She placed in front of me a 1099 tax form for independent contractors and evaded my questions when I explained that the work I was doing didn't fit that category. The next day I printed out the IRS definition of independent contractor and showed it to her. The boss tried to guilt trip me by saying I should be willing to "sacrifice a little" for the students, but fired me when I refused to go along with her moral appeal. Later I found out that that particular county tries to make all workers, especially at remote sites like where I was working, into independent contractors because they cut their own contribution to employee costs (for things like income taxes, medicare and workers comp) by as much as 30%. So, I would have had to pay my own taxes, making my income 20% less than the purported rate of pay.

I've met the troqueros at the Port of Oakland and talked extensively with them. They have to file the same 1099 tax form for the IRS that the boss was trying to force me to accept in the above example. But with the competitive nature of the piece rates work they do for the brokers that employ them, they earn very little. When fuel prices spike up and the brokers increase what they charge shipping lines, the truckers get very little of this and at times operate at a loss. But they are like indentured servants because they bound to their work by their debt obligations for buying their trucks. And they can only work for the broker that leases their truck back from them, who often co-signed the loan for them to buy the truck. So they are trapped. They clearly are not self-employed business people, but instead are wage workers entangled in convoluted labor relations that essentially allow they employers to exploit them more thoroughly by saddling them with the cost of the maintenance of the trucks.

Below is a link to an excellent article by the LA Weekly that explains how bureaucrats at the LA/Long Beach port complex are trying to revamp the trucking system with new trucks using cleaner burning fuels because of the severe health problems caused by the older diesel fleet. But in so doing they want to rationalize the labor relations to eliminate possibly explosive situations like the May Day strike in 2006 where the port was 90% shut down by the troqueros (and LA/Long Beach handles something like 40% of imports coming into the U.S.). They want to do this by gradually returning the truckers to employee status. So in the U.S. the class relations of truckers aren't as simply black and white as some of the above posters make them out to be. Here's the link.

Here's an excerpt from the LA Weekly article (linked above) about the conditions of a troquero:

admin: made link more visible.

It seems clear that truckers in the U.S. have different conditions, but don't you think the trend is towards what's happening here?

Having been a taxi driver at one time myself, I have to point out that it's not the same everywhere and it has changed over time. I was employed, but it was in the days before cell phones, so you had to get work by being contacted by a radio dispatcher (I had been a bike messenger before that and it was almost exactly the same). But in the U.S. it's now more like the situation with the truckers. The trend of capital is towards proletarianization and as my example of the independent contractor teaching job shows, it often involves manipulating labor and tax laws so that the boss is able to transfer more and more of the cost onto the worker -- further driving down wages.

I think the examples above of lawyers and doctors are true in the U.S. as well; they are becoming increasingly proletarianized. I have a friend who recently finished medical school $200,000 in debt. There's no way that he could hang up a shingle and start his own business. He had to leap at the first shitty HMO that offered him a steady job, although his dream was to open a low-cost clinic in a poor working class neighborhood. And it's like the speed-up in production, he has quotas about how many patients he sees per hour. He's on salary so he works ungodly long hours, sometimes 7 days a week, that begin to make his seemingly high salary seem not so great when you compute how many hours he works -- and how hard he works. The assembly-line nature of the medical industry seems more alienating than many other types of work, which is compounded because it's more stressful.

The buying of pretty much any capital is financed by credit. MNCs borrow, Goverments borrow, everyone borrows but that doesn't mean MNCs/the governement/everyone is proletarian!!! How a capital purchase is financed is close to being irrelavant.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but this seems to imply you think there's a mass movement to this kind of arrangement. The whole point about being a worker is that you don't have capital. Now, I'm not saying that capitalism can't (and doesn't) try and change purely juridicial aspects of social relationships while the fundamentals remain unchanged. And that's why I've described some elements of the owner-operator trucking community as "quasi-workers" or being on the "fringes of the proletariat".

Nonetheless, it remains the case that this condition does change the nature of their economic interests and makes them easy prey for this kind of campaign which is of a purely populist nature.

But, again, as I pointed out above it's simply not viable for capitalism to generalise this condition throughout the proletariat and the general trend is to push the petit-bourgeoisie into the ranks of the proletariat while "lumpenising" the most impoverished layers of the latter.

I think you're also confusing different sectors of the labor market here. There are considerable differences between agricultural small-holders, peasant farmers, semi-proletarians that live on a mixture of temporary work, small handicrafts and petty crime (particularly common in third world slums and sinkhole estates in the developed countries), and owner-operator truck and taxi drivers.

I think georgestapleton's point was well made. So far your definitions of petit-bourgeois seem to orientate around their level of "independence", rather than their relationship to means of production. Independence from who? Even the big bourgeoisie aren't really independent - manufacturing is largely in hock to the bankers and the bankers are largely dependent on the state. This has become abundantly clear in the current crisis.

I also think part of the problem here is that there's a tendency to assume the petit-bourgeoisie are better off than workers. While this is generally true for "professionals" and functionaries, it's certainly not always the case for your average small businessman who are the petit-bourgeoisie proper. Part of my job forces me to mix with these types and while on paper they may have much more income than me, the amount that is actually dedicated to their personal consumption is often quite small. This is partly compensated for the fact that some of their capital - such as cars, PCs etc can also be used for personal rather business use, of course, and some may still have a higher standard of living than me. However, my general impression is that they work all the hours that god sends, are in hock up to their eyeballs and usually prime candidates for a stress-induced heart attack. Rather them than me! And in periods of crisis, the pressures on these people are enormous.

The petit-bourgeoisie is a class in a state of permanent disintegration. Capitalism is a damaging to their class interests as it is to the working class. More so, in fact, because while capitalism can live quite happily without them it can't live without workers.

Are owner operators in europe all that different in terms of class from their US counterparts?
Effectively we're talking about classifying them into who we as communists should or should not support, depending on whether we see them as working class or petit-bourgeois and their revolutionary potential. When the original qeustion that arose is whether the protest taking place is worthy of our support, isn't the problem that the protests is /are populist.
By the above (devs point 2) we need to be looking at bike couriers in the same context?