by Vinnie Gangbox
In 1965, Jim Haughton and Charles Epton were the only African Americans in the leadership of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), a Maoist oriented communist political party that had split from the more mainstream Communist Party, U.S.A. in 1958.Haughton and Epton wanted to win Black workers to support revolutionary communist ideas, and to fight against the exclusion of Black workers from New York City's largest blue collar industry. So, they started an organization called Harlem Fightback.
Fightback was organized as the ashes of the 1964 Harlem riots still cooled. PLP had helped start the riot, but their leaders had gotten scared when they got served with a New York State Supreme Court injunction, so they bailed out of the insurrection. But, there was still enough millitancy among Black workers in Northern Manhattan and in PLP's small African American membership to inject a revolutionary spirit into the group.
Since, at the time, PLP had a strategy of tailing behind Black nationalists, Fightback was set up as an all Black organization. Their tactic was to invade an all-White jobsite with a busload of red armband wearing unemployed Black workers. The Black workers, some of whom had light weapons like bats and chains, would prevent the White tradesmen from working until the contractors agreed to hire some minority workers.
Since electrical and mechanical contractors had closed shop agreements with their unions, usually the only bosses on a site in a position to hire off the street were those who employed carpenters, laborers or bricklayers, trades with open shop contracts. This worked out just right, since the bulk of Black tradesmen in New York were in those crafts. In the south, where most of these workers were migrants from, a large portion of carpenters, laborers and bricklayers were African American, which had been the case since slavery.
This tactic, which is still used today, is very effective against contractors, since they finance their jobs with short term loans. They get paid by the property owner as portions of the job are done, but they have weekly payrolls to meet and suppliers to pay on a daily basis. So they set up high interest, short-term revolving credit accounts (which work sort of like credit cards)with their banks, and pay the bank when they get paid by the owner. The problem is, when they lose time (like, for instance, when production is stopped by a bunch of armed, angry workers) they still have to make those payments as if they'd gotten some work done that day. Lose enough days, and a contractor (most of whom are thinly capitalized mom and pop operations) could go bankrupt.
During the late '60's, the coalition began to really have an impact on integrating the trades in New York City. It even had a national impact. By the early '70's, the Nixon Administration set up a number of programs to integrate the building trades (the New York Plan, the Philadelphia Plan, the Seattle Plan, etc...). Of course, these programs were set up principally to help contractors, especially minority contractors, and to shield these bosses from the pressures and dangers of jobsite invasions. The "trainees" under the plans would be excluded from the unions until their "training" was complete, were paid less than White apprentices, recieved 60% less classroom instruction and in some trades, attended segregated trade schools. Of course, even this racist scheme wouldn't've happened withoud the rumblings of social explosions at the jobsite.
The coalition itself began to change in the '70's. As the PLP became more and more a middle class, largely White group, it had less and less influence over Fightback. Although much of PLP's influence on Fightback had been negative, without any revolutionary influence, Fightback began to behave more and more like a reformist trade union. They even began to have some patronage, in the form of site coordinators. These guys were something like union shop stewards, and they, like stewards, got full pay for little or no work. This was the money aspect that caused a series of splits in Fightback.
Eventually, "the coalition" fragmented into over 60 different groups(which are still refered to collectively as "the coalition" to this day on New York jobsites)most of whom can trace their roots to Fightback. Also, the middle class Chinese American Maoists in the Communist Workers Party set up a coalition for Chinese workers, the Chinese Construction Workers Association (CCWA), led by one of their leaders, Wing Lam.
Generally, these groups had little of Fightback's political legacy (the only vestige of the communist influence is the red armbands the workers wear when they board the busses to go out and raid sites, a custom that is still practiced today). The leaders of these coalitions see themselves as "E.E.O. consultants" for the employers, and have a mentality not unlike union leaders.
The coalitions of today have become bourgeois labor organizations, and despite strained relations with the N.Y.P.D. and the developers, have an often cordial relationship with the contractors and the mafia and a sort of arms length diplomatic relationship with the union bosses. The "leftist" coalitions, Fightback and CCWA have gone a step further. They actually get corporate foundation grants and Haughton goes so far as to publically advocate an alliance between Black contractors and Black workers against the unions, the White bosses and White workers.
Altough they are somewhat broader racially today than in 1965, these groups are still basically nationalist. There are Latinos in the coalitions and of course Asians, but most coalitions are either all Black, all Latino or in CCWA's case, all Chinese.
Since the late '70's(when working class women fought for the right to be employed in heavy industry), there are also Black, Latino and Chinese women in the coalition, but they face a lot of sexual harassment and sex for jobs deals from the site coordinators (and in CCWA's case, they only have one woman in their entire organization, Yu-Xun "Susan" Deng,a female carpenter).
And the workers still ride the busses, although there has been a noticible decline in coalition activism in the last 3 years, with Unique Mulder, the Sims brothers and many other coalition leaders in prison for racketeering.
But, where did the coalition go wrong? First, nationalism, although understandible in an all White industry that minority workers were trying to break into, in a city with major racial tensions, limited the coalition from day one. Despite the racism in the trades, there was a left history among White construction workers in New York.
There was a left tradition among Jewish carpenters and painters, although it was a Communist Party, U.S.A. (CPUSA) tradition that had largely been channeled into getting closet CPUSA members elected Buisness Agent, and was largely a spent force by the '60's. There was also some very limited CPUSA influence among the Italians in all the trades and the Irish workers (especially the carpenters and laborers) had a long Irish Republican quasi-socialist revolutionary nationalist tradition.
But, there was no way to tie into this due to the coalition writing off the entire White trades workforce as a reactionary mass. And, by writing off the White workers, that guaranteed that the only ideological influence on these workers would come from the union bosses and the contractors.
Beyond the nationalist limitation, the coalition also suffered from not having a program around any job issues beyond discriminitory hiring. The fact is, construction tradespeople have some of the worst job conditions in this country, even on union jobs. Seniority and job security are non existant, the only people who have anything even remotely resembleing a full time job are the bosses' relatives, foremen or snitches, basic sanitary conditions on sites are minimal and it's the most dangerous job in America.
To top that off, since the contractors are in a race against bankruptcy to pay off their revolving credits with the banks, the pace on many jobs is brutal (and New York, with it's high cost real estate, has the fastest paced jobs in the U.S.A.).
And, to rub salt in the wound, non union workers often have more job stability and better conditions (and, in some cases, even better pay) than union members.
But, seemingly to the coalition, as long as the job was 28% Black, Latino and Asian and 6% female (federal affirmative action guidelines for construction in the New York Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area), all these other conditions were not an issue. By not calling for anything further than "jobs for minorities", the coalition insured that even minority workers would see them as just a jobs agency, much like the union hiring hall.
By far, the greatest weakness of the coalition was the fact that, despite the revolutionary origins and tactics, there was no possiblitiy of building a revolutionary party. In Fightback's case, the PLP refused, in the name of "Black self-determination", to give ideological leadership to the group (probalby a blessing in disguise, since PLP was overwhelmingly composed of middle class students and professionals, who's ideas would've probably been counterproductive in organizing unemployed workers). But, there was no good Marxist influence to counterpose PLP's bad.
In CCWA's case, the CWP was largely composed in New York of middle class left wing nationalist Chinese American professionals. Their lasting influence on CCWA was the virtual exclusion of actual workers from leadership in the group. To this day, all of the leaders in CCWA (and it's sister organization, the Chinese Staff and Workers Assoication, a garment and restaurant workers group) are middle class college students or professionals.
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