This week is the annual AFL CIO convention, this might be the week the US labor movement splits into several pieces. There are many ways to think about it, I will post several thought-provoking pieces to consider.

Reconnecting Labor with Its Radical Roots
By David Bacon
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Wednesday 20 July 2005

For forty years, AFL-CIO leaders George Meany and Lane Kirkland saw unorganized workers as a threat when they saw them at all. They drove left-wing activists out of unions, and threw the message of solidarity on the scrapheap. Labor's dinosaurs treated unions as a business, representing members in exchange for dues, while ignoring the needs of workers as a whole.

A decade ago new leaders were thrust into office in the AFL-CIO-a product of the crisis of falling union density, weakened political power, and a generation of angry labor activists demanding a change in direction. Those ten years have yielded important gains for unions. Big efforts were made to organize-strawberry workers in Watsonville, California, asbestos workers in New York and New Jersey, poultry and meatpacking workers in the South, and healthcare workers throughout the country. Yet in only one year was the pace of organizing fast enough to keep union density from falling.

Other gains were made in winning more progressive policies on immigration, and in some areas, relations with workers in other countries. Yet here also, progress has not been fast enough. Corporations and the government policies that serve them have presented new dangers even greater than those faced a decade ago. It's important for unions to start an honest discussion of why the gains have been so limited, and what political direction is best for US workers. While the current debate over structure makes important points, there are deeper issues that need to be resolved. Simply changing the AFL-CIO's structure is not enough.

In the current debate, almost all proposals put the issue of stopping the slide in members and power-the problem of organizing-in center stage. This is not a bad place for discussion to start, so long as it takes a deeper look at why this is such a hard area for unions to make progress. Organizing large numbers of workers will not just help unions. Wages rise under the pressure of union drives, especially among nonunion workers. Stronger unions will force politicians to recognize universal healthcare, secure jobs, and free education after high school, not as pie-in-the-sky dreams, but as the legitimate demands of millions of people.

While the percentage of organized workers has declined every year for the past decade, unions have made important progress in finding alternative strategic ideas to the old business unionism of Meany and Kirkland. If these ideas are developed and extended, they provide an important base for making unions stronger and embedding them more deeply in working-class communities. But the AFL-CIO has a huge job. Raising the percentage of organized workers in the United States from just 10 to 11 percent would mean organizing over a million people. Only a social movement can organize people on this scale. In addition to examining structural reforms that can make unions more effective and concentrate their power, the labor movement needs a program which can inspire people to organize on their own, one which is unafraid to put forward radical demands, and rejects the constant argument that any proposal that can't get through Congress next year is not worth fighting for.

As much as people need a raise, the promise of one is not enough to inspire them to face the certain dangers they know too well await them. Working families need the promise of a better world. Over and over, for more than a century, workers have shown that they will struggle for the future of their children and their communities, even when their own future seems in doubt. But only a new, radical social vision can inspire the wave of commitment, idealism, and activity necessary to rebuild the labor movement.

Organizing a union is a right, but one that only exists on paper. Violating a worker's right to organize should be punished with the same severity used to protect property rights. Fire a worker for joining a union - go to jail. Today, instead, workers get fired in a third of all organizing drives. Companies close plants and abandon whole communities, and threaten to do so even more often. Strikebreaking and union busting have become acceptable corporate behavior. There are no effective penalties for companies that violate labor rights, and most workers know this. In addition, there are new weapons, like modern-day company unions, in the anti-union arsenal. Chronic unemployment, and social policies like welfare reform, pit workers against each other in vicious competition, undermining the unity they need to organize.

Meanwhile, millions of workers are desperate because they have lost jobs, or are in danger of losing them. Employers move factories and downsize their workforce to boost stock prices. The government cuts social benefits while driving welfare recipients into a job market already glutted with people who can't find work. Without speaking directly to workers' desperation and fear of unemployment, unions will never convince millions to organize and risk the jobs they still have. Government and corporations may treat a job as a privilege, and a vanishing one at that, but unions must defend a job as a right. And to protect that right, workers need laws which prohibit capital flight, and which give them a large amount of control over corporate investment. In the meantime, organizing unemployed people should be as important as organizing in the workplace.

Since grinding poverty in much of the world is an incentive for moving production, defending the standard of living of workers around the world is as necessary as defending our own. The logic of inclusion in a global labor movement must apply as much to a worker in Bangladesh as it does to the nonunion worker down the street.

US workers, who saw jobs moving to the US/Mexico border in the 1970s and 1980s, had to learn this logic. US government policy, under Democrats and Republicans, made Mexico a great laboratory for economic reforms, enforced by loan conditions and international financial institutions. Ending subsidies and rural credit drove farmers off the land, creating vast numbers of job seekers. Thousands of workers lost their jobs and unions as state enterprises were privatized. While many traveled north as migrants to the US, others went into the foreign-owned maquiladoras. There they faced a vicious triumvirate of rapacious employers, governments willing to do almost anything to encourage their investment, and compliant unions that maintained labor peace.

But in the wake of the debate over free trade and NAFTA, many US workers found common ground between the defense of their own jobs and wages, and the pitched battles being waged by Mexican workers for genuine unions, better conditions and higher wages on the border. That experience of creating worker to worker, workplace to workplace, and union to union relationships became a model for building that global labor movement, from the grassroots up. It also challenged the old, failed cold-war policies which had betrayed workers movements in country after country, including the long term interests of workers here at home.

Nowhere is the choice between these two alternatives clearer today than in the debate confronting US workers and unions over the war and occupation in Iraq, and their relation with workers there. The occupation, at the point of a gun, seeks to transform Iraq's economy, privatizing its factories, seizing its oil and transforming its people into a low-wage workforce, in an extreme form of shock therapy. Meanwhile, the cost of this effort drains hundreds of billions of dollars from the US treasury, while schools close and Economic crisis grips workers and unions at home. Ending the war and supporting Iraqi workers as they try to reorganize their labor movement is as much in the interest of US workers as it is in that of Iraqis.

Labor's change in immigration policy was a watershed development, which put unions on the side of immigrants, rather than against them. The change provided the basis for an alliance between labor and immigrant communities based on mutual interest, and asked union members, and workers in general, to fight for a society based on inclusion, rather than exclusion. But this policy was usually implemented to win support for union organizing campaigns, and only rarely to defend immigrant communities as they were attacked in the post-9/11 hysteria. When 40,000 airport screeners lost their jobs because of their citizenship status, there was hardly any labor outcry or protest. For unions who want workers outside their ranks to feel they represent their interests, this was a terrible mistake. But it was compounded when Bush banned unions for the new screener workforce. Once again, an attack on the rights of immigrants led to attacks on the rights of workers generally-a move which called for mass opposition and was met instead with more silence.

Labor needs an outspoken policy that defends the civil rights of all sections of U.S. society, and is willing to take on the Bush administration in an open fight to protect them. If the war on terror scares labor into silence, few workers will feel confident in risking their jobs (and freedom) to join unions. Yet people far beyond unions will defend labor rights if they are part of a broader civil rights agenda, and if the labor movement is willing to go to bat with community organizations for it.

Political calculations in Washington shouldn't be the guide to labor's policy on immigration and civil rights. Workers need a movement that fights for what they really need, not what lobbyists say a Republican administration and Congress will accept. The position won at the AFL-CIO's Los Angeles convention in 1999-calling for immigration amnesty, the repeal of employer sanctions, and a halt to corporate guest worker proposals-has yet to be achieved in real life.

A new direction on civil rights requires linking immigrant rights to a real jobs program and full employment economy. It demands affirmative action that can come to grips with the devastation in communities of color, especially African American communities. Some unions, particularly the Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees (HERE), have moved from rhetoric to actual contract proposals linking immigrant rights and jobs for under represented communities. But this is just a step towards unity, and it is already endangered by proposals for new guest worker programs that will pit immigrants against the unemployed. As employer lobbyists continually point out, jobs and immigration are tied together. Corporations will either pit people against each other at the bottom of the workforce, or labor will unite them in a struggle for their mutual interest.

When Tom Donahue and the old Kirkland administration were defeated in 1995, activists on all levels of the labor movement expected that the AFL-CIO would take down the cold war barriers. Labor's cold war foreign policy separated U.S. unions from workers around the world, and often betrayed them in the interest of U.S. foreign policy.

The demand to change this policy was partly driven by the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on the both the livelihoods and consciousness of U.S. workers. For the first time in decades, pressure came from below, from local unions and rank-and-filers, demanding that the labor movement seek alliances with workers abroad based on common interest. In an era when the fate of U.S. workers is tied to the international system of production and markets, this is a survival question. A growing number of workers, both inside and outside unions, today understand that an effective response to globalization will affect their own welfare. For the first time since the 1940s, workers in the United States can be, and have been, drawn into the fight against the global free market economy, from Seattle to Miami.

The neoliberal policies imposed by the United States and other wealthy countries attack living standards, workers rights, and the public sector everywhere. Increasingly, they are imposed at the point of a gun, using the war on terror as a pretext to suppress opposition. The U.S. labor movement should be, and can be, the most outspoken advocate for peace, since eroded standards and privatization are used to attract corporate investment, and the further export of jobs and production.

Instead, after expressing doubts before the invasion of Iraq, the AFL-CIO stood silent once it began. Some unions made opposition to the war part of their election campaign, but the official AFL-CIO apparatus accepted the false logic that speaking out on the war was the "kiss of death." The opposite proved true. Some 10.5 million voters from union households said the war was the most important issue to them. To the 51 percent who voted for Kerry, the campaign had nothing to say. And for the 49 percent who voted for Bush-families with children in the service, or reservists, or honest people affected by national security hysteria-no effort was made to convince them that the war was as bad for working families at home as it was for the Iraqis whose country is being destroyed. Silence on the war had a high price.

The AFL-CIO needs a program that opposes the effort to implement neoliberal policies internationally, taking a consistent approach from Mexico to China, from Baghdad to Bogotá. Moving away from the cold war past was a watershed development as important as the change on immigration, and related to it. But change in the labor movement's international activity has been incomplete.

A new direction in international relations should be based on solidarity, and solidarity is a two-way street. The end of labor's cold war policy has to be made explicit, as part of finding a new set of principles for our relations with unions and workers in other countries. While some of those principles are embodied in International Labor Organization's labor standards calling for the right to organize, an end to child labor, and other protections, unions in developing countries increasingly demand a broader agenda. In particular, they want greater help in defending the public sector under attack from privatization, and an international system for defending the rights of migrants. New international relationships need to be based on the ability of U.S. unions to listen to the concerns of labor in the developing world, and not just impose its own agenda, however well intentioned.

A new, more radical political program runs counter to the prevailing wisdom of our times, which holds the profit motive sacred, and believes that market forces solve all social problems. If labor's leaders move in this direction, they won't get invited for coffee with the President, or included in meetings of the Democratic Leadership Council. At the beginning of the cold war, the AFL-CIO built its headquarters right down the street from the White House, eloquent testimony to the desire of its old leaders for respectability in the eyes of the political elite. That dream may be difficult for some to give up. But labor can't speak convincingly to the working poor without, at the same time, directly opposing the common economic understanding shared by Republicans and many Democrats. The labor movement needs political independence.

To organize by the millions, workers have to make hard decisions, putting their jobs on the line for the sake of their future. Unions of past decades won the loyalty of working people when joining one was even more dangerous and illegal than it is today. The left in labor then proposed an alternative social vision-that society could be organized to ensure social and economic justice for all people. While some workers believed that change could be made within the capitalist system, and others argued for replacing it, they were united by the idea that working people could gain enough political power to end poverty, unemployment, racism, and discrimination. The poor will not be always with us, they declared.

Today our biggest problem is finding similar ways for unions to affect workers' consciousness-the way people think. A new commitment to organizing can't be simply a matter of more money and organizers, or more intelligent and innovative tactics, or structural change, as necessary as these things are. During the periods in our history when unions grew by qualitative leaps, their activity relied on workers organizing themselves, not just acting as troops in campaigns masterminded by paid staff.

For workers to act in this way today, they would have to have a much clearer sense of their own interests, and a vision that large-scale social change is possible. Does the labor movement present such a vision of a more just society, capable of inspiring workers to struggle and sacrifice? Labor's radical vision of decades ago made it a stronger movement. Losing it in the red scares of the 1950s deprived most unions of their ability to inspire. It's no accident that the years of McCarthyism marked the point when the percentage of union members began to decline.

Our history should tell us that radical ideas have always had a transformative power- especially the idea that while you might not live to see a new world, your children might, if you fought for it. In the 1930s and 40s, these ideas were propagated within unions by leftwing political organizations. A general radical culture reinforced them. Today most unions no longer have this left presence. Can the labor movement itself fulfill this role? At the very least, unions need a large core of activists at all levels who are unafraid of radical ideas of social justice, and who can link them to immediate economic bread-and-butter issues.

And since good ideas are worthless unless they reach people, the labor movement has to be able to communicate that vision to workers outside its own ranks. In an era when many unions have discontinued their own publications, or turned them into ones light on content, they need exactly the opposite.

This is a very important moment, in which a national debate and discussion can have real-life consequences for the future. It can provide a powerful impetus to organizing an anti-Bush coalition in the short term, and a more profound political realignment in the longer term.

The present period is not unlike the 1920s, which were also filled with company unions, the violence of strikebreakers, and a lack of legal rights for workers. A decade later, those obstacles were swept away. An upsurge of millions in the 1930s, radicalized by the depression and leftwing activism, forced corporate acceptance of labor for the first time in the country's history. The current changes taking place in U.S. unions may be the beginning of something as large and profound. If they are, then the obstacles unions face today can become historical relics as quickly as did those of an earlier era.

David Bacon is a west coast writer and photographer, and former factory worker and union organizer. His book, The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the US/Mexico Border, was published last year by the University of California Press. His photodocumentary project on immigration, Beyond Borders, Transnational Working Communities, is due next year from ILR Press/Cornell University Press.

thanks barb.

holy shit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/25/national....html?th&emc=th

i don't know, but part of me is really concerned about what's gonna be left after this split. i never thought sweeney would be the bad guy here...
and more importantly, what the hell are the UFCW doing?

Wait and see. Steven Greenhouse is a very bad reporter, and several times in that story I had to read things twice.

It's happening as we speak.

Almost all of my friends work for unions. It's really tough.


Dianne Rheem is talking about CAFTA on her show.

If this is true, I really won't miss the Teamsters.

Sources: Teamsters, SEIU to Bolt AFL-CIO

- - - - - - - - - - - -

By RON FOURNIER AP Political Writer

July 25,2005 | CHICAGO -- The Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union, the largest AFL-CIO affiliate with 1.8 million members, intended to announce Monday that they are leaving the federation after failing to reform the 50-year-old labor giant, according to several labor officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The unions are part of the Change to Win Coalition, seven labor groups vowing to accomplish what the AFL-CIO has failed to do: Reverse the decades-long decline in union membership. But many union presidents, labor experts and Democratic Party leaders fear the split will weaken the movement politically and hurt unionized workers who need a united and powerful ally against business interests and global competition.

Two other Change to Win Coalition unions signaled their intentions to leave the AFL-CIO: United Food and Commercial Workers and UNITE HERE, a group of textile and hotel workers. But they were not scheduled to take part in Monday's news conference, said the officials who declined to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the developments prior to the news conference.

The four dissident unions, representing nearly one-third of the AFL-CIO's 13 million members, announced Sunday they were boycotting the federation's convention which begins Monday, a step that was widely considered to be a precursor to leaving the federation.


"Our differences are so fundamental and so principled that at this point I don't think there is a chance there will be a change of course," said UFCW President Joe Hansen.

Leaders of the dissident unions say the AFL-CIO was beyond repair from within. In addition to seeking the ouster of AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, they demanded more money for organizing, power to force mergers of smaller unions and other changes they say are key to adapting to vast changes in society and the economy.

Sweeney, whose was expected win re-election this week, said he had met many of the dissidents' reform demands, and suggested they had put their egos ahead of workers' interests.


"It's a shame for working people that before the first vote has been cast, four unions have decided that if they can't win, they won't show up for the game," Sweeney said. The rhetoric was unusually personal, in part because dissident leader Andy Stern of the SEIU is a former Sweeney protege.

Rank-and-file members of the 52 non-boycotting AFL-CIO affiliates expressed confusion and anger over the action. "If there was ever a time we workers need to stick together, it's today," said Olegario Bustamante, a steelworker from Cicero, Ill.

Globalization, automation and the transition from an industrial-based economy have forced hundreds of thousands of unionized workers out of jobs, weakening labor's role in the workplace.

When the AFL-CIO formed 50 years ago, union membership was at its zenith, with one of every three private-sector workers belonging to a labor group. Now, less than 8 percent of private-sector workers are unionized.

The dissidents largely represent workers in retail and service sectors, the heart of the emerging new U.S. economy. Sweeney's allies are primarily industrial unions whose workers are facing the brunt of global economic shifts.

A divided labor movement worries Democratic leaders who rely on the AFL-CIO's money and manpower on Election Day. Most experts content the split could weaken organized labor, though some competition may be what's needed to jolt the movement from its slumber.

The convention boycott means the unions will not pay $7 million in back dues to the AFL-CIO on Monday. If all four boycotting unions quit the federation, they would take about $35 million a year from the estimated $120 million annual budget of the AFL-CIO, which has already been forced to layoff a quarter of its 400-person staff.

Two other unions that are part of the Change to Win Coalition planned to remain at the Chicago convention: the Laborers International Union of North America and the United Farm Workers. They are the least likely of the coalition members to leave the AFL-CIO, though the Laborers show signs of edging that way, officials said.

The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, the seventh member of the coalition, left the AFL-CIO in 2001.

Hi Barbs, been following your posts, seems like some big decisions are being made ... that 8 percent is probably reflected across the Western world but can't find any backup figures for Europe ...

Barb, you are the first person I've known who belongs to a private-sector union (I see unionized cops & firefighters differently, but that's another story).

None of my peers are even close to joining a union. They admit that their standard of living is worse than their parents, but unions to many of them seem so inflexible, archaic and "industrial age," worried more about protecting some old fogey's seniority than a decent standard of living. Worse, many of them have swallowed the shite fed to them by the management culture - that they (and their fellow expendible white collar office drones) are empowered to be their own managers, if only they follow the rules laid down by the Successories™posters hanging on the workplace walls, when, in actuality, they share the insanely long hours of their bosses without receiving the nice pay & perks.



Barb, I wish you folks luck. It's a disgrace how this country has marginalized organized labor.

I remember getting into debates with my Republican, white-collar dad in college. He was laid off from his investment bank when I was a sophomore in college, and I was afraid that he would be unable to pay for the rest of my tuition. One year shy of retirement from his last job, at age 63, he was laid off with no severance and no retirement package. The guy's been f***ed by the Republicans for much of his adult life and he still complains about unions and the ill-named "death" tax.

It looks like it's done. Two are out, three more due.


Is anybody thinking about the members?

nope-- so far all i can see are egos.

love that. what an asshole hoffa is...

how about stop having fucking picnics with G.W. for a start.

ugh!!!

As a member of the Public Employees Federation, I am not sure about this Ralph Nader wrote an interestng piece about the 10 things Organzied Labor needs to do
My hero is the head of the California Nurses Association. She brought Arnold to his knees.

Dont f'*ck with the nurses

Here is the piece from Ralph Nader. Actually the sevice employees union are the fastest growing unions in the US at the moment.

Published on Monday, July 25, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Top 10 List for the Labor Movement
by Ralph Nader

Rose Ann DeMoro is the Executive Director of the California Nurses Association (CNA) - the country's fastest growing union. Since 1992, union membership has grown from 13,000 to the present 63,000. And it was since 1992 that the nurses became more prominent in participating in and running their own unions. No coincidence.

Whether it is CNA getting patient protection bills through the state legislature or exposing the gouging pricing of health care while the HMO bosses each take away millions in executive pay every year, this is the standard-bearer for larger stagnant unions to look up to and emulate.

With Arnold Schwarzenegger riding high last year in the polls as Governor, the nurses took umbrage at his selective cuts for people programs while performing as a corporate cyborg for corporate greed and tax escapism. When he called them a "special interest", the nurses swung into action and Arnold's polls have not stopped dropping.

Now Rose Ann DeMoro has weighed in on the clash of large labor unions coming at the AFL-CIO's convention in Chicago that starts July 25, 2005. The "Change to Win" group of dissident unions led by SEIU and UNITE are making breakaway noises from the large labor federation if their demands about succession to AFL-CIO leader John Sweeney and budgets for organizing are not met. Ms. DeMoro thinks this is a power struggle with much ado about nothing very substantive.

Here is her succinct critique labeled "Top 10 Problems with the Current Debate in the Labor Movement".


There are no real ideological disputes, in part because the current AFL-CIO leadership and programs were, mostly, put in place by those now challenging them. It appears to be more about egos and an effort by specific unions to anoint themselves as the group who should control the AFL-CIO.

No workers or rank and file union members are involved, and it is their labor movement. Much of the discussion is based on recommendations of consultants and Madison Avenue approaches such as branding, polling and focus groups, and scripted blogs, rather than engaging the membership and the public on helping shape the future of the labor movement.

No issues affecting the majority of working Americans are being debated - declining real wages, the health care crisis, the continued erosion of democracy in the workplace, outsourcing of jobs across the skill and pay spectrum, a deteriorating social safety net, declining support for public education, environmental degradation, social justice and ongoing racial and gender inequality, alienation and disaffection from the political process.

No real solutions to these problems are being proposed - curbing corporate control of the political and economic system, single payer-universal health care, a progressive tax system that restores fair share taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals, taking corporate money out of politics, a new industrial trade policy, a peace, not war economy as well as a strategy for reforming repressive/crippling labor laws and enforcement bodies.

The specific proposals by the Change to Win group are structural and bureaucratic, not programmatic - rebating union dues, forcing unions to merge, limiting the executive council to the largest unions, and claiming sovereignty for unions by industry or sector based on a union's density in that area. There is no evidence any of these changes would solve labor's problems.

The notion that the salvation of the labor movement reduces to "density as manifest destiny" is historically false, and analytically shallow. Equally, for the unions that are proposing the monopolistic changes, seemingly self serving. Some unions that have achieved density have been decimated by corporate sponsored political, economic, and social policies. Besides, forced mergers are anti-democratic.

If the issue of organizing was simply dues rebates we could all rest easy. But that notion is painfully oversimplified. Some unions in and out of the Change to Win unions are organizing within the current structure, others have not organized for years. Even if the AFL-CIO paid per capita to some of these unions they still would not or could not organize. And forcing mergers is not synonymous with organizing and in fact could silence the voice of the most active and militant unions and union leaders who are fundamental in building this labor movement.

Perhaps because the corporate right is so extreme, some "progressive" analysts have been portraying the dues rebates and proposed forced mergers as core issues. But more troublesome are those pundits who write glowingly about the Change to Win group's greater expansion of labor-management partnerships with their corporate-friendly cost savings schemes, worker speed up programs, explicit endorsement of globalization, deskilling, outsourcing and privatization as Labor's salvation. These proposals can only serve to further alienate the American worker from the labor movement, further erode labor's power and harm the very society wide communities with which labor needs to align and nurture.

Limiting the executive council to the biggest unions would further reduce the influence and voice of women and people of color in labor leadership.

No discussion of non-bureaucratic strategies are on the table - including expanded coalitions with non-labor community, religious and environmental groups; active grassroots education and mobilization campaigns to challenge the corporate/far right agenda; building genuine political independence and holding the democratic party accountable to worker and public interests, and serious consideration of - imagine, a labor party for a labor movement."
For more information, visit www.calnurses.org.

###

Barbara Erenrich wrote a great piece for the Progressive this month, rings a similar bell.

I'm just dealing with the fallout now. I mean, the convention is going on as we speak, the other unions haven't officially quit yet, but two of my friends have been laid off their jobs at the Metro AFL CIO at 2pm, directly because of the news. Two people who are wonderful, jiggy union activists. Fuck.

barb, thats bloddy awful

Damn.

I don't know who makes me the angriest. I agree with a great deal of the Change to Win proposals, and I honestly think John Sweeney should have resigned. But to actually break up the federation, I didn't think it would get that far. Plus, anywhere James P Hoffa goes, I head in the opposite direction.

Barbara, I am so sorry for your friends. I wish I had an answer. PEF is one of the largest and most powerful unions in NY State. That and the UFT and 1199 (Hospital and Service Union Denis Rivera)
As a PEF memmber, we get discounts on travel and amuement partks (I took advantage of the Zoom Flume water park discounts when Justin was young) Mind you, that is not the reason you have a union.
We Americans have lost the concept of solidarity

Another view:

Divorce, labor style
The breakup of the AFL-CIO may turn out to be a good thing, especially for workers.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David Moberg



July 26, 2005 | With the Service Employees and Teamsters unions leaving the AFL-CIO at its convention in Chicago on Monday, taking away nearly a quarter of the federation's members and dues, the months-long debate over strategy for the labor movement finally turned into a full-fledged fracture. Two other unions are boycotting the 50th anniversary of the labor federation's founding merger, and there's a good chance for at least two more defections from the federation in the coming months.

As one of their major constituencies unravels, Democratic politicians are worried -- and with good reason. But even if it's obviously not good news for Democrats, the split might turn out to be a manageable problem, maybe even delivering some benefits in the long run.

The initial anxiety is well founded, however. Unions lopsidedly support Democratic candidates with money, troops for the political ground war and votes. Although only 13 percent of America's workforce are union members, exit polls showed that 24 percent of voters in the last election came from union households. And polls taken for the AFL-CIO, still the umbrella federation of most unions, showed union members to be far more Democratic than comparable voters with a similar profile -- even those members who were white males, gun owners and regular churchgoers.

Although unions split all over the map in the Democratic presidential primary last year, variously supporting Howard Dean, John Kerry, Dick Gephardt and John Edwards, they were remarkably unified in support of Kerry in the general election. Such unity magnifies the labor movement's influence, and AFL-CIO president John Sweeney mourned its loss. "At a time when our corporate and conservative adversaries have created the most powerful anti-worker political machine in the history of our country, a divided movement hurts the hopes of working families for a better life," he told convention delegates Monday. About an hour later Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa and Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern broke away.

The main issues in the fight between Sweeney supporters and the SEIU-led Change to Win Coalition centered on organizational changes that the dissidents argued would increase organizing of new members. But the coalition's moves were also seen as "nothing but a disguised power grab," in the words of Steelworkers president Leo Gerard, who supported Sweeney. Both sides insisted that unions need both to organize and to do political work. But the Change to Win unions criticized the Sweeney camp for increasing the AFL-CIO budget to create a year-round political education and mobilization program but not providing the massive dues rebates for organizing that it proposed.

The Change to Win Coalition, now on its way to becoming a rival labor federation, also attacked the AFL-CIO for being too close to the Democratic Party and simply "throwing money at politicians" in hopes of solving labor's problems, especially its continually declining share of the workforce. "I think workers want an AFL-CIO program that's not an appendage of any political party," argued John Wilhelm, the hospitality division president of UNITE HERE, which represents textile, laundry and hotel workers. "We should support Democrats when it makes sense. We should challenge Democrats in the primary." His colleagues and some of Sweeney's supporters argue that unions should reach out more to Republicans, despite the rightward and anti-union trend of the Republican Party.

The AFL-CIO's leaders argue, however, that they've always been willing to back moderate Republicans who support some key worker issues, like Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, who addressed the convention by video. There are just fewer of them these days. And labor's political operation does not give money to politicians, as many individual unions do with their voluntary contributions, but rather educates, registers and mobilizes union family voters.

Unions in general are also clearly frustrated that many Democrats rely on their backing but then neglect their key economic populist issues. Yet despite their internal conflicts, leaders from both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win insist that any Democrat who votes for the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement should not get labor backing.

So the differences in political strategy and policies may not be as great as the rhetoric suggests. AFL-CIO political director Karen Ackerman argues that "unity in the labor movement is always critical, and anything that serves to undermine that unity hurts the program." What's more, there have always been divisions in organization and policy in the labor movement: The biggest union, the National Education Association, is among the unions outside the AFL-CIO. And even within Change to Win there's a gulf on environmental politics between the SEIU and UNITE HERE, which oppose drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the Teamsters and Laborers, which support drilling.

One of the biggest challenges to unity concerns the state and local federations of unions that are, in the best cases, important political powerhouses. The most aggressive central labor councils have worked hard to pull together local unions in active coalitions. Stern and Hoffa pledge to continue supporting these groups, which in some cases rely heavily on SEIU dues in particular, but official AFL-CIO policy prohibits such participation by unions not in the AFL-CIO. Lamenting that central labor councils are like the children hurt by a divorce between parents they love equally, John Ryan, leader of the Cleveland Federation of Labor, is not alone in hoping to maintain as many ties as possible, even with defectors, while still following the rules.

Like other Change to Win leaders, Stern says, "We intend to cooperate with the AFL-CIO politically. We hope they will cooperate with us." And Harold Schaitberger, the Fire Fighters union president who is critically loyal to Sweeney, says, "Politics will remain similar, if not identical ... It doesn't bode disaster if these unions choose to disaffiliate."

In the end, the split has the potential to make union politics only a bit more fractious than usual, with the Change to Win unions simply outside the well-honed political apparatus of the AFL-CIO.

Is there an upside? Although there's a chance that Republicans will attempt to leverage the divisions within labor, cutting narrow deals for endorsements while maintaining conservative policies, there's also a chance that a fractured labor movement will force candidates to work harder for endorsements. "I think it's good for Democrats and good for Republicans, if they're promoting worker rights," UNITE HERE's Wilhelm said. "But if union membership declines, it's bad for worker [friendly] candidates."

The main potential benefit is if the competition between the two rival federations and strategies ends up generating union growth -- instead of expensive, destructive fights over who represents whom. And the growth of the labor movement would be one of the best possible developments for Democrats, especially in swing states like Ohio and Florida. As Ackerman told delegates at the convention, "If we had just 100,000 more union members in Ohio last fall, this country, this world, would be a different place." Ultimately, if there is much greater growth, the current disunity may be worth the very real political risks.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer
David Moberg is a senior editor at In These Times.

Barbara: Today, I met iformally with our shop stewarts and mobilizers (I am a mobilizer who may run for shop stewart next year but thats another dabate)
The feeling among the stewarts is this is a good thing. It seem that John Sweeny and the AFL-CIO leaders have been engaged in a failing strategy of using union funds to back candidates Most of the time, these were Democratic candidates who ofter did not have the unions best interest's at heart. For example, many supported NAFTA. So whats the point. The California Nurses have shown it is possible, even in this political climate, to grow and attain power and evern, take on some "media crown jerk like that Nazi from Austria Arnold "Whats his name"
swartz - translated from the German Black tiller.

Anyhow, its time for the rough and tumble work of organizing signing up. it means some of us are going to be harrassed, some of us are goiong to be "spit upon" some of us may have to go to jail But ALL OF US ARE GOING TO WIN!
You get nothing for nothing. To borrow another phrase from another singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn
"Nothing thats worth having comes without some kind of fight"
You have to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight"
We are lovers in a dangerous time.
ON with the fight.

Holy Cow. Something good happened.

AFL-CIO CONVENTION CALLS FOR TROOP WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ
By David Bacon

CHICAGO, IL (7/26/05) - On the second day of its convention in Chicago, the AFL-CIO took an historic step, calling for the rapid withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, and an end to the country's occupation. Public attention has focused largely on the split in US labor, and the decision by two of the federation's largest unions to leave. Yet the impact of this call will reverberate for years, with as profound effect on the future of US workers and their unions.

Brooks Sunkett, vice-president of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), started a train of passionate speeches on the convention floor, saying that the government had lied to him when it sent him to war in Vietnam three decades ago. "We have to stop it from lying to a new generation now," he implored. Henry Nicholas, a hospital union leader in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, told delegates that his son, who has served four tours of duty in Iraq, is now threatened with yet another.

Speaker after speaker rose to condemn the war and occupation, and to demand the return of the troops. No one dared defend a policy that has caused revulsion throughout US unions.
Watching from the visitors' gallery was a handful of Iraqi union leaders. One of them had traveled to the US two months ago, with five other union activists, to plead the case of Iraqi workers. For 16 days they traveled to more than 50 cities, often speaking before hundreds of angry workers, demanding an end to the occupation. The Iraqis urged their US union counterparts to take action.

The resolution at the convention was the answer to this call. It was the culmination as well of an upsurge that has swept through US unions since before the war started two years ago. From the point when it became clear that the Bush administration intended to invade Iraq, union activists began organizing a national network to oppose it, US Labor Against the War. What started as a collection of small groups, in a handful of unions, has today to become a coalition of unions representing over a million members.

The network organized the tour of the Iraqi unionists, to provide them a chance to speak directly to US workers. "We believed strongly that if unions in our country could hear their Iraqi brothers and sisters asking for the withdrawal of US troops, they would respond in a spirit of solidarity and human sympathy," said Gene Bruskin, one of USLAW's national coordinators. "We were right."

Resolutions calling for troop withdrawal poured in from unions, labor councils, and state labor federations across the country. But as the convention began, AFL-CIO national staff tried to substitute another resolution that called for ending the occupation "as soon as possible." This was the same position as that put forward by the Bush administration.

Delegates at the convention, who belong to the USLAW network then called for using instead the phrase "rapid withdrawal" of the troops. At a strategy-planning session attended by over 150 delegates, US and Iraqi unionists joined together to plan a fight on the convention floor to win that language. Before it could take place, however, CWA Vice-president Larry Cohen went to the AFL-CIO executive council, the federation's ruling body, and asked them to accept the change.

Knowing that a fight was in store, and suddenly unsure of their ability to win it, the council agreed.

The resolution was put on the floor of the convention Tuesday afternoon, two days before the scheduled debate on Iraq. When the proposal for rapid withdrawal was introduced by Fred Mason, head of the AFL-CIO in Maryland, it was obvious what he meant by the words. His call to "get out now" became a chorus thundering from speaker after speaker. The new language was adopted with the votes of an overwhelming majority.

The resolution marks a watershed moment in modern US labor history. It is the product of grassroots action at the bottom of the US labor movement, not a directive from top leaders. The call for bringing the troops home echoes the sentiments of thousands of ordinary workers and rank-and-file union members, whose children and family have been called on to fight the war. A growing number, who now form a majority in US unions, believe the best way to protect them is to bring them home.

The resolution represents a deeper understanding that is making its way into thousands of discussions in workplaces and union halls. The war in Iraq never had much credibility as an effort to find weapons of mass destruction, since none were ever found. The administration's claim that it is fighting to bring democracy to Iraqi people inspired a similar disbelief. After five years of administration attacks on US workers and unions, none but the most diehard of its supporters have much faith left in its pro-democracy pronouncements.

Over the last year, however, the Iraqis themselves have provided a new understanding of the occupation's anti-democratic impact. American military authorities, they told US union members, have banned labor organization in oil fields, factories and other Iraqi public enterprises. Meanwhile, Bush political operatives have begun to engineer the sell off of those enterprises to foreign corporations, with a potential loss of thousands of jobs and the income needed to rebuild the country.

"This is not liberation. It is occupation," said Ghasib Hassan, a leader of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, one of the unions that sent its members to speak in the US. "At the beginning of the 21st century, we thought we'd seen the end of colonies, but now we're entering a new era of colonization."

In the many meetings and discussions that finally led to the resolution, union members understood the purpose of the occupation in a new way - as the imposition, at gunpoint, of Bush administration free market policies on Iraq. After the resolution's passage, the Iraqis called on delegates to act on that understanding, and asked the AFL-CIO to bring its members out to coming national demonstrations against the war.

Rapid withdrawal means more than just bringing US soldiers home. Calling for it puts American workers on the side of Iraqis, as they resist the transformation of their country for the benefit of a wealthy global elite. Brooks Sunkett, Vietnam vet turned union leader, spoke powerfully for this renewed unwillingness to wage wars based on lies and greed. His call for rapid withdrawal breathes new life into the Vietnam syndrome - so feared by US administrations intent on military intervention to defend their free market policies around the world.

hmmm hmmm pork chops

http://www.nysun.com/article/17461

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/nyregion/01nyu.html

it will be interesting to see how this pans out...