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.
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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.
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