Last hired, first fired?

The full title of this pamphlet is “Last Hired, First Fired. Affirmative Action vs. Seniority”. It was published in 1975 by the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP), then a Trotskyist group in solidarity with the Fourth International. Most of the articles are written by SWP members. One piece is written by the NAACP's labor secretary Herbert Hill. (Hill's problematic relationship with the SWP is outside the scope of this review.)

The SWP argues that affirmative action in the form of ethnic and gender-based quotas trumps seniority rights in the workplace. When companies sacked workers during the economic downturn of the 1970's, Blacks and women were disproportionately hit, since they were “the last hired” in many industries due to prior racist or sexist discrimination. Thus, the seniority system fought for by the labor unions mostly protected White male workers. SWP's solution is to demand that the percentage of Black and female workers after the layoffs remain the same as before the layoffs. In effect, the SWP wants to fire White male workers instead, in order to protect Blacks and women. They suggest that this will “unite the working class” and make it easier for unions to fight for full employment through a shorter workweek and other socialist-type measures. The SWP goes very far in its support for affirmative action. They support lawsuits brought by Black and female workers against companies, but also seem to support (or at least tolerate) similar lawsuits against *unions* and their union contracts, if these are deemed discriminatory.

Of course, this is not an easy question. Both affirmative action and seniority “splits the working class”. On the one hand, SWP's position (despite their denials) destroys hard won seniority rights. It's also problematic to suggest that the state can interfere in union business, at least it should be to a socialist. On the other hand, it's equally true that many AFL-CIO unions were hopelessly conservative and didn't mind excluding Blacks and women from the workplace (some even barred Blacks from membership before the Civil Rights Act). On a related note, some unions were in the hands of mobsters. It was government action, not union housecleaning, which broke the mob's stranglehold in the Teamsters. So is taking a union to court always wrong?

The SWP's position that affirmative action trumps union contracts and could be imposed by lawsuit, strikes me as radical-liberal in essence, rather than traditionally socialist or communist. It's a position that treats White (or White male) workers as a huge reactionary mass, favoring Black and female workers. However, note how it also favors Black and female middle class campaign organizations! They, after all, write the lawsuits…

I don't have any solution to this conundrum, and therefore don't offer any. Either way, this old pamphlet shows that both affirmative action and traditional unionism can be problematic, each in their own way.