A RADICAL VISION FOR TODAY'S LABOR MOVEMENT
The Importance of Internationalism and Civil Rights
By David Bacon
Monthly Review, February 2009
During the Cold War, many of the people
with a radical vision of the world were driven
out of our labor movement. Today, as unions
search for answers about how to begin growing
again, and regain the power workers need to
defend themselves, the question of social vision
has become very important. What is our vision in
labor? What are the issues that we confront today
that form a more radical vision for our era?
The labor movement worked hard to elect
Barack Obama president, and a new Democratic
majority in Congress, creating new possibilities
for gaining labor law reform, universal
healthcare, immigration reform and ending the
Iraq war. But to win even these reforms,
promised by the Obama campaign, unions will have
to do more than simply support the liberal wing
of the Democratic Party. Labor's ability to move
forward depends on finding a new and deeper
relationship with its own members, and their
willingness to fight for even a limited set of
demands. Our history tells us that when workers
have been inspired by a vision of real social
change the labor movement grows in numbers,
bargaining strength, and political power.
At the heart of any radical vision for
our era is globalization - the way unions
approach the operation of capitalism on an
international scale. In the discussion that led
to the creation of the Change to Win federation,
the Service Employees made a proposal about how
unions should conduct their international
relationships. It called on unions to find
partners in other countries, even to organize
those unions, in order to face common employers.
AFL - CIO Secretary Treasurer Richard Trumka said
the same thing in New York ten years earlier,
when the Sweeney administration was elected. At
the time it represented a big change from the
Cold War - that unions would cooperate with
anyone willing to fight against our common
employers. It rejected by implication the
anticommunist ideology that put us on the side of
employers and U.S. foreign policy, and shamed us
before the world.
This idea is an example of pragmatic
solidarity, and a good first step out of that
Cold War past. But it is no longer radical
enough to confront the new challenges of
globalization - the huge displacement and
migration of millions of people, the enormous
gulf in the standard of living dividing developed
from developing countries, and the wars fought to
impose this system of global economic inequality.
What's missing is a response from the labor
movement to U.S. foreign policy. International
solidarity involves more than multinational
corporations. Corporate globalization and
military intervention are intertwined, and in the
labor movement there's hardly any discussion of
their relationship. In the aftermath of 9/11
this led some unions into support for the "war on
terror," and eventually even into support for the
Iraq invasion. Unless unions can begin to see
military intervention and corporate globalization
as part of the same system, many will support the
war in Afghanistan, as a new and popular
Democratic president calls for increased
intervention.
Unions in the rest of the world are not
simply asking us whether we will stand with them
against General Electric, General Motors, or
Mitsubishi. They want to know: What is your stand
about aggressive wars, military intervention and
coups d'état? If we have nothing to say about
these things, we will not have the trust and
credibility we need to build new relationships of
solidarity.
U.S. corporations operating in countries
like Mexico and El Salvador are, in some ways,
opportunistic. They take advantage of an existing
economic system, and make it function to produce
profits. They exploit the difference in wages
from country to country, and require concessions
from governments for setting up factories. But
what causes the poverty in El Salvador that they
exploit to their advantage? What drives a worker
into a factory that, in the United States, we
call a sweatshop? What role does U.S. policy play
in creating that system of poverty?
Unions need the kind of discussion in
which workers try to answer these questions.
Labor education is more than technical training
in techniques for grievance handling and
collective bargaining. It has to be about
politics, in the broadest and most radical sense.
When unions don't work with their members to
develop a framework to answer these questions
they become ineffective in fighting about the
issues of peace and war, globalization, and their
consequences, such as immigration.
When the AFL - CIO campaigned in
Washington against the Central American Free
Trade Agreement, labor lobbyists went up to
Capitol Hill to mobilize pressure on Congress.
Some unions went to their local affiliates and
asked members to make phone calls and write
letters. But what was missing was education at
the base. Had unions educated and mobilized their
members against the Contra war in Nicaragua, and
the counterinsurgency wars in El Salvador and
Guatemala (and certainly many activists tried to
do that), U.S. workers would have understood
CAFTA much more clearly over a decade later. But
because there's so little effort to create a
conscious, educated union membership, it will be
hard to get members to act when labor's
Washington lobbyists need them to defeat new
trade agreements, in the upcoming battles over
the Colombian and South Korean FTAs.
The root of this problem is a kind of
American pragmatism that disparages education. We
need to demand more from those who make the
decisions and control the purse strings in our
unions.
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 Iraq
as it does to the nonunion worker down the
street. The debate over the Iraq war at the AFL
- CIO convention in 2005 highlighted more than
the effects of the war at home. It proposed that
even in the face of U.S. military intervention,
U.S. and Iraqi workers belong to the same global
labor movement, and have to find common ground in
opposing those policies that brought the war
about.
The generation of antiwar, solidarity
activists who were young marchers and war
veterans during Vietnam, and rank-and-file
militants during the Central American
interventions, today are leading unions. Some of
them may have forgotten those roots, but many
have not. They're tired of seeing their movement
remain quiet when the U.S. military is used to
prop up an economic system they're fighting at
home. The labor movement may be awash in internal
dissention, but it has grown surprisingly united
in opposition to the Iraq war. U.S. Labor Against
the War, which started as a collection of small
groups in a handful of unions, has today become a
coalition of unions representing over a million
members, and represents the thinking of an
overwhelming majority. Its resolutions, passed
in convention after convention, are the product
of grassroots action at the bottom of the U.S.
labor movement, not a directive from the top.
Iraqis themselves provided U.S. workers
with a new way of looking at the occupation.
Iraqi unemployment has been at 70 percent since
it started. Order 30, issued by occupation czar
Paul Bremer in September 2003 (and still in
force), lowered the base wage in public
enterprises, where most permanently employed
Iraqis work, to thirty-five dollars a month, and
ended subsidies for food and housing. Law 150,
issued by Saddam Hussein in 1987 to prohibit
unions and collective bargaining in the public
sector, was continued under the occupation. The
current Iraqi government still forbids the Oil
Ministry to formally recognize the Iraqi
Federation of Oil Unions (IFOU), seizes union
bank accounts, and won't allow unions to function
normally.
Iraqi unions see these moves as a way to
soften up workers to ensure they don't resist the
privatization of the country's economy,
particularly its oil. Iraqi unions, especially
the IFOU, are the backbone of the country's
popular movement against oil privatization,
without which the multinational oil giants would
have taken control of the industry long ago. In
Iraq, as in most developing countries,
privatization defies the tradition of social
solidarity. Iraq needs its oil revenues to
rebuild the country, creating a public sector
that can put people to work and ensure a self -
sustaining national economy.
So U.S. labor's call for rapid withdrawal
should mean more than just bringing U.S. soldiers
home. It should put American workers on the side
of Iraqis, as they resist the transformation of
their country for the benefit of a wealthy global
elite. This is a transformation happening in
country after country. Iraq is a place where U.S.
workers can see it clearly, if the labor movement
would give them the information and material they
need. They certainly won't get it from the
mainstream press, but they could get this
education from their unions.
That education would help workers
understand the political and economic objectives
of war and intervention. It would help them
understand the huge displacement of people caused
by the effort to maintain this unjust system.
And that, in turn, would help them understand why
we see waves of those displaced people moving
around the world, including coming to the U.S.
Opposing the war means fighting for the
self-interest of our members, and being able to
identify that self-interest with the interest of
workers in Iraq. The same money that pays for the
corrupt contracts with KBR and Blackwater is
money that doesn't get spent on schools here at
home. We won't have the money for a New
Deal-style economic recovery under President
Obama, much less a full-employment economy,
without peace. It's that simple. And to imagine
that we can produce millions of jobs at home, and
keep people in their foreclosed homes, while
fighting yet another war in Afghanistan, is a
dangerous illusion.
Union members are not ignorant. They
think about the issues of war and jobs all the
time. They are becoming more sophisticated, and
better at understanding the way global issues
from war to trade affect the lives of people in
the streets of U.S. cities. A more radical
program of labor education would not be swimming
against the tide, but with it.
At the same time, however, educating
union members alone is not enough. A radical
vision should address workers far beyond the
formal ranks of organized labor. The percentage
of union members is declining, and the
organization union members need to put their
understanding into practice is getting smaller.
Deeper political awareness alone will not create
a larger labor movement.
Just after the Second World War, unions
represented 35 percent of U.S. workers. It's no
coincidence that the McCarthy era, when the Cold
War came to dominate the politics of unions, was
the beginning of the decline. By 1975, after the
Vietnam War, union membership had dropped to 26
percent. Today only 12 percent of all workers,
and 8 percent in the private sector, are union
members. Declining numbers translate into a
decline in political power and economic leverage.
California (with one-sixth of all union members),
Hawaii and New York have higher union density
than any other states. But even here, labor is
facing a war for political survival.
While the percentage of organized workers
has declined, unions have made important progress
in finding alternative strategic ideas to the old
business unionism. 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 it's a
huge job. Raising the percentage of organized
workers in the United States from just 12 to 13
percent means organizing over a million people,
and our goal should be to double that percentage.
Only a social movement can organize people on
this scale.
Gaining a fairer process for winning
union recognition and collective bargaining
agreements, and real penalties on employers for
anti - union firings, puts the Employee Free
Choice Act deservedly at the center of labor's
political agenda. But a legal process alone will
not create strong unions. Only a movement among
workers themselves, in which rank-and-file
members play a much more active role, can build
unions that will survive an employer offensive,
and that can fight effectively for social
reforms, from single-payer health care to true
legalization and equality for immigrants.
In addition to labor law reform and
structural reforms to make unions more effective,
the labor movement needs a program that will
inspire people to organize on their own. Unions
need to lose their fear of radical demands, and
reject the constant argument that any proposal
that can't get through Congress next year is not
worth fighting for. One big part of that program
is peace. Another is reordering economic
priorities.
Today working-class people have to fight
just to keep their homes. For the last several
decades, many were driven out of cities to
lower-cost suburbs, often disproportionately
workers of color. Now the families forced into
unpayable loans in order to buy houses are losing
them to the banks. This certainly calls for a
return to the direct action of an earlier era.
If we don't mobilize to keep our members in their
homes, what good are we? But beyond direct
action, unions and central labor councils need to
have a concrete program for economic development,
housing and jobs. That would start to give us
something we lack, a compelling vision, and a
militant movement in the streets demanding action.
That's where millions of people have been
for three May Days in a row now, in the largest
street outpourings since the 1930s. To its
credit, the labor movement helped raise the
expectations of immigrants when the AFL-CIO
passed a resolution in Los Angeles in 1999,
putting forward a radical new program - amnesty
for the undocumented, ending employer sanctions,
reunification of families, and protecting the
rights of all people, especially the right to
organize. The marches and movements of
immigrant workers of the last decade demonstrate
convincingly the power of this radical political
vision.
Congress, however, moved in a different
direction, criminalizing work and migration, and
proposing huge guest worker programs. While the
Congressional bills failed, states passed laws
that were even worse. Mississippi made it a state
felony for an undocumented worker to hold a job,
with prison terms of up to five years. And the
Bush administration simply began implementing by
executive order the enforcement and guest worker
measures it couldn't get through Congress. In the
wave of raids that followed, hundreds of workers,
including union members, have gone to federal
prison on bogus criminal charges of identity
theft, for inventing a Social Security number.
And when non-union workers have stood up for a
union or a higher wage, raids have been used to
terrorize them.
It is time for the labor movement to
fight to stop this wave of anti-worker
repression, and propose a freedom agenda for
immigrants that will give people rights and an
equal status with other workers on the job, and
with their neighbors in their own communities.
Instead of holding its finger to the political
wind, labor has to convince a new administration
that passing that program is not only politically
possible, but also politically necessary to hold
and expand Obama's own electoral base.
Instead of an alliance with employers
based on Washington political calculations,
winning immigrant rights requires an alliance
between unions, immigrants, and other communities
of color. The common ground for building that
alliance is linking immigrant rights to a real
jobs program and full employment economy, with
affirmative action that can come to grips with
the devastation in communities of color,
especially African-American communities. And
without challenging the war, the resources for
building that alliance will be lost on guns and
more intervention.
The labor movement must inspire people
with a broader vision of what is possible.
Workers' standard of living is declining, and
they often have to choose between paying their
rent or mortgage, and going to the doctor.
There's something fundamentally wrong with the
priorities of this society. Workers know it, and
unions have to be courageous enough to say it.
Working families need a decent wage, but
they also need the promise of a better world. For
as long as we've had unions, workers have shown
they'll struggle for the future of their children
and their communities, even when their own future
seems in doubt. But it takes a radical social
vision to inspire that wave of commitment,
idealism, and activity.
It's happened before. The 1920s were
filled with company unions, violence,
strikebreakers, and the open shop. A decade
later, those obstacles were swept away. An
upsurge of millions in the 1930s, radicalized by
the depression and left-wing politics, forced
corporate acceptance of the labor movement for
the first time in the country's history. Changes
taking place in our unions and communities today
can be the beginning of something as large and
profound. With more radicalism and imagination,
the obstacles we face can become historical
relics as quickly as did those of that earlier
era.
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
Just out from Beacon Press:
Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates
Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California,
2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
Internet group address: http://groups.google.com/group/ChicagoMayDay
To send e-mail: [email protected]
To unsuscribe: [email protected]
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
