The following is a (very) rough draft of a talk I will give to the
officers and national staff of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine
Workers of America. Comments, suggestions, criticism, etc. are most
welcome.
Michael Yates
The U.S. Labor Movement and the Role of the Left in It
by
Michael D. Yates
I.
We live in what might be called a paradoxical situation. That is, in
terms of our labor movement there are both signs of hope and signs of
despair, existing today together and without resolution. On the one
hand, certain recent events give us hope that the labor movement is in
the process of being rebuilt after many years of decline. Everyone
points to the election of new leadership in the AFL-CIO. Sweeney,
Trumka, and Chavez-Thompson certainly represent a break from the
thoroughly compromised leadership of the past. They have championed
many important changes in the Federation itself and in the member
unions. Notably, they have encouraged member unions to make
organization a priority, and a few unions have responded positively.
They have also taken encouraged steps toward supporting the struggles of
women, immigrant, and minority workers. Of great importance, at least
symbolically, the have disbanded th notorious International Affairs
Department and place a lot more emphasis on showing solidarity with
workers in the rest of he world without respect to their political
affiliations.
Around the world, working people have awakened from their long slumber
and begun to actively combat the attack upon working class living
standards begun during the first years of the onset of economic crisis
in the early 1970s and since developed into the set of corporate and
government policies known as neoliberalism. French workers took to the
streets in the hundreds of thousands to protest government attempts to
curtail the benefits of public employees and social benefits for the
general public. Despite being inconvenienced by the stoppage of public
transportation, the French rallied around the public employees and
forced the government to back down. In the face of political
dictatorship and economic depression, militant South Korean workers have
forged an independent labor movement to protect and advance the
collective power of the workers. Canadian workers, including again
thousands of public employees, have staged massive rallies and strikes
in protest of neoliberal policies, in a few cases shutting down entire
communities for a few days.
Of course, we are all encouraged by the many actions in Seattle
protesting the WTO, the very symbol of neoliberalism. In Seattle, people
from the unions and numerous other social movements actually mobilized
against global capitalism itself, expressing their disgust with its
seamy but all too visible and universal underside: Widespread
unemployment and economic insecurity, even in this booming United States
which hides at least its black unemployed in prisons; massive overwork
existing side-by-side with rising contingent work (part-time and the
like); extreme inequality, recently diminished somewhat in the United
States (though not in places like New York City) but growing worldwide
to truly obscene proportions, with the world's 225 richest individuals,
of whom 60 are Americans with total assets of $311 billion, have a
combined wealth of over $1 trillion -- equal to the annual income of
the poorest 47 percent
of the entire world's population; alienated work, with some of the
fastest-growing job categories being retail salespersons, cashiers,
light and heavy truck drivers, general office clerks, personal care and
home health aides, and teacher assistants; the privatization of public
services and the destruction of the already inadequate social safety
net; and the despoliation of the very environment in which working
people live. The awareness of the Seattle protesters of these things
led them to take bold and imaginative actions, and, most remarkably,
these actions were successful beyond the dreams of the protesters.
Let me conclude this short list of hopeful signs with one of great
significance: the survival and growth of your own union. Hounded out of
the CIO, raided by AFL and CIO unions, vilified and red-baited, weakened
by downsizing and capital mobility in your bastions of strength, your
union, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America has
not only survived, but survived with your rank-and-file, democratic, and
anti-imperialistic underpinnings intact. I can say that, without a
doubt, if every union in the United States were like the UE, the signs
of despair I am about to discuss would not exist.
The most ominous sign of despair is that despite a considerable
economic boom, with the lowest unemployment rates in a generation, and
despite all of the good things the AFL-CIO is doing, the U.S. labor
movement cannot really be said to be in a period of rebirth. In the
years following the victory of the "New Voice" slate, union density (the
ratio of union members to employees) has continued to fall. Hundreds of
thousands of new workers have to be organized just to keep union density
from falling, and many more have to unionized to make it increase.
Unions continue to lose more NLRB elections than they win, and many
unions still fail to win collective bargaining agreements after they do
mange to win certification elections. Employers still routinely commit
unfair labor practices in organizing campaigns, and they still routinely
refuse to negotiate in good faith even with established unions.
The failure of organized labor to rebound can also be seen in the
continuing political weakness of organized labor. While labor has
engineered some impressive victories, such as the defeat of anti-union
propositions in California and the defeat of the MAI and fast-track
trade legislation, nonetheless, a sober assessment of the AFL-CIO's
political clout must conclude that organized labor is weaker politically
in the U.S. than in almost any other advanced capitalist nation. As you
all know, our labor laws are so porous that employers can and do drive
trucks through them. Better labor laws would change the organizing
climate dramatically; yet such laws are nowhere on the horizon. The
AFL-CIO objects strenuously to NAFTA and the WTO, yet it throws its
unconditional support to Al Gore, a champion of "free trade" if ever
there was one. Indeed, when push comes to shove, the AFL-CIO finds it
very difficult to challenge the Democrats, who only by an Orwellian use
of the language can be called friends of the workers. Here is a
quotation from my recent book, Why Unions Matter:
A friend of mine was hired by an international agency to investigate
the impact of employer threats to shut down plants on the ability of
workers to unionize. This study was funded largely by the AFL-CIO. The
report showed that employer shutdown threats had increased markedly
since the passage for NAFTA. When it appeared that the Clinton
administration was putting pressure on the Department of Labor not to
publish the report, my friend turned to the AFL-CIO for help. Such help
was not forthcoming. It appeared that powerful forces within the
AFL-CIO did not want to embarrass their good friend, Bill Clinton.
Eventually the AFL-CIO apologized to the author, but not before she
received a lot of heavy flack, especially after she decided to inform
the press of her findings. This is a very curious situation. The
AFL-CIO went all-out to prevent the passage of NAFTA, and it took
massive bribes from the President of the United States to get it through
Congress. Yet when a report showed NAFTA doing some of the things which
opponents had predicted, some AFL-CIO leaders opposed making it public.
What is going on here? In a nutshell, what is going on is business as
usual for the labor movement: stay in line with the Democratic Party
come hell or high water.
As the labor movement fails to keep pace with strong economic growth
much less expand more rapidly than the economy, the capitalist economic
system , which thrives on the exploitation and immiseration of workers,
becomes more universal, working its evil ways in the far corners of the
globe and in the most intimate parts of our lives. Although it is easy
to fall into the paralyzing trap of believing that so-called
"globalization" is an inevitable and unstoppable juggernaut driven
mainly by technological change, it certainly is true that the planet is
now more thoroughly capitalist than at any time in history. Money flies
around the globe at warp speed and physical capital in many industries
can evade unions by moving offshore. As capital internationalizes,
labor must follow suit, but to date, organized labor's efforts have not
been nearly as strong as they might have been. Part of the problem lies
in the AFL-CIO's sordid history of support for U.S. imperialism. And
despite the dismantling of the old International Affairs Department,
operatives from it are still alive and well. When striking Mexican
railroad workers reached out to U.S. workers recently, they were met
with much enthusiasm. Several U.S. unions organized a group of
delegates to go to Mexico City and then to the site of the strike in
Northern Mexico. In Mexico City they were met by the former director of
the notorious AIFLD, Jack Otero, accused by Philip Agee of being a CIA
agent. Presumably dumped by Sweeney, Otero propagandized against the
strikers, calling them communists; his agitation effectively paralyzed
the delegation. At no time did the AFL-CIO leadership denounce Otero,
and in fact worried that the delegates and their U.S. supporters would
embarrass the official Mexican Railway Workers union, which, as we know,
is just a tool of the corporation-dominated Mexican government.
It is difficult to think of a sphere of daily life not dominated by the
market. We are dependent of the market not just to earn our living but
to obtain health care, child care, recreation, care for the aged, even
funerals and burials. We are bombarded with commercials; children as
young as one year recognize McDonalds, and children of four and five at
the day care where my wife and daughter once worked looked under the
collars of each other's shirts to see the brand name. As we are
surrounded and ambushed by the market, many of us conclude that the
market is inevitable, that is, in Margaret Thatcher's famous phrase,
"There is no alternative." A weak labor movement allows this
marketization of life to proceed unabated. An individualistic,
dog-eat-dog mentality takes hold of us as the market seizes our brains.
This mentality is reinforced in schools, in families, and on the job,
and as it deepens and extends its grip onus, the very idea of solidarity
takes on a utopian or even ridiculous quality.
This would be bad enough if the weakened labor movement were at least
combating it. However, to a not inconsiderable degree, the AFL-CIO
itself reinforces it. It does this by endorsing the rhetoric of
"competitiveness," the foundation of the labor-management cooperation
endeavors frequently supported by the AFL-CIO leadership and by the
leaders of many member unions. Labor-management cooperation aims at
making an individual employer more competitive vis-a-vis other
employers. But this pits workers in one workplace against those in
every other workplace and runs counter to the entire philosophy of trade
unionism, which is that competition among workers must be replaced by
their mutual support and solidarity. The union credo, "An injury to one
is an injury to all," is forgotten and replaced by, "we are number one."
How can we expect the anti-labor individualism so rampant in this
country to lose some of its power when organized labor itself adopts it?
Organized labor has made some recent strides in combating the virulent
racism and sexism so common in this country. The AFL-CIO has a
department for women, for minority workers, and for gay workers. It has
recently reversed itself on amnesty for illegal immigrants. Executive
Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson is a highly visible symbol of the
new AFL-CIO. Yet so much more could and should be done. The top
leadership of too many unions remains white and male. Unions should be
in the forefront of defending affirmative action, but they are not.
Union leaders should be editorializing in whatever venues are available
to them against racism, sexism, homophobia, and discrimination against
the disabled. In regards specifically to race, the labor movement gives
little indication of the deeply entrenched racism in the United States,
which shows itself everywhere from housing to schools to jobs to
prisons. How will it be possible to organize the South and the
Southwest without a frontal assault on racism? Where is the AFL-CIO
when it comes to the exploding black prison population? Where was it
when the welfare system was being dismantled? The AFL-CIO speaks out
strongly against China's entry into the WTO, but how exactly is it that
China's social system treats its people any worse than ours treats
Blacks, Latinos, American Indians? We have a burgeoning
prison-industrial complex, producing many millions of dollars worth of
prison-made goods. What is more our prisons are full of working people
who have been deeply politicized by their prison experiences. Unions
should be recruiting these folks into the labor movement. What global
capitalism is doing to working people in the poor countries of the
world, it is doing to those disproportionately minority workers at the
bottom of this society. If labor does not reach out to them, how
serious can we take labor's cries for international economic justice?
My last pessimistic point is that even the opening for positive change
for workers created by Sweeney and company is by no means secure.
Reactionaries in Congress and their corporate allies would like nothing
better than to close it. Whether it be through anti-labor legislation
outlawing corporate campaigns or court assaults on alleged union
corruption, such as that which brought down Teamsters reformer, Ron
Carey (whose mistakes were serious but hardly justified denying him the
right to run for union president against a hardly pure James Hoffa,
Jr.), the enemies of labor are at work trying to prevent labor's
rebirth. More disheartening than this is the fact that reactionaries
within the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions are waiting to regain
control. A return to the Meany/Kirkland era is not out of the
question. There are all too many class collaborationist, corrupt,
and/or fiercely anti-communist and pro-imperialist bureaucrats in the
house of labor. When an AFL-CIO history of the labor movement was
rewritten by a left-of-center historian, it was savagely red baited by
the president of one of the construction unions, and it was clear that
the red baiting was aimed at the historian's AFL-CIO staff supporters
and thus indirectly at the New Voice leadership.
III.
So, then, the current state of the labor movement is a mixed bag; there
are both positive and negative signs. The question is: how can the
positive achievements be strengthened and deepened and how can the
negative forces be defeated? In a word, what we need is a "Labor Left,"
not a "Labor Progressive" or an alliance between the Sweeney leadership
and progressive intellectuals, but a "Labor Left," rooted in the
unions. To me, a "Labor Left" has at least the following
characteristics:
1. It is class conscious and takes seriously what the IWW said:
Employers and workers have nothing in common and that an injury to one
is indeed an injury to all.
2. It is uncompromisingly democratic, especially insisting that the
unions themselves operate with maximum democracy.
3. It is willing to vocally condemn all forms of discrimination: by
race, by gender, by sexual orientation, by disability, both within the
labor movement and in all of society's institutions.
4. It is anti-imperialist, opposed to the oppression of the world's
poor nations and peoples by the rich nations, especially the United
States.
A strong labor left provides us, in my opinion, with our best hope to
prevent the reactionaries from regaining power in the labor movement, to
widen the opening for progressive unionism provided by the New Voice
leadership in the AFL-CIO, and to begin to envision and to implement a
worker-centered system of production and distribution.
Now it might be said that a cry for a labor left is just so much
whistling in the dark in a nation in which Al Gore can be accused by his
opponents of being too far left. However, underneath the glow of
prosperity in the United States there is widespread unhappiness and
insecurity among working people, as evidenced by the events in Seattle.
Working people do not believe that the large corporations are beneficent
entities serving the public interest. Nor do they believe that we are
headed for some glorious period of prosperity which will as they say,
"lift all boats." Instead they know that they are working too hard,
that their jobs could suddenly disappear, and that consumption alone
does not make them feel any better. They are disgusted with traditional
politics and know that those who run the nation are in the pockets of
the rich and powerful. What is more, there are many thousands of
leftists in our unions and in every important social movement, and there
are even leftists in the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. Monthly Review magazine
has been sponsoring meetings around the country with labor activists and
the results have been encouraging. A surprisingly large number of labor
union activists are interested in and receptive to a radical analysis of
capitalism and radical solutions to its inherent defects.
So, if a labor left is needed and conceivable, how can one be built?
Let me offer in a spirit of humility and lack of pretension some
thoughts. First, leftists in the unions should consider making union
democracy their primary concern. Not only will this be the best vehicle
for them to gain power in their locals, but it is also an excellent
educational tool. The fight for union democracy has the potential to
not only rebuild the labor movement but to make it an integral part of
the attempt to create a radically different society. This is because
the struggle for
union democracy might lead naturally toward other struggles:
1. Employment as a right, fully on a par with other civil rights such
a the right to free speech. A movement based upon solidarity
and democracy cannot easily abandon those who are unemployed or for some
reason not in the labor force. Anyone working today can easily find
himself or herself out on the street, on public assistance, or even in
prison. So many good things happen when people are secure in
employment. It is easier to overcome divisions in the workplace, and
the overall power of the working class increases.
2. Work as meaningful, with a maximum integration, in every job, of
our uniquely human capability to conceptualize and carry out
work tasks, and a sharing of society's more onerous tasks. A democratic
union will naturally turn its attention to the workplace, and the
hierarchies found there will be no more tolerable than those in the
union. Workplace hierarchies are based, in part, upon an inhuman
division of labor, which divides up our jobs and doles them out to us in
little mechanical pieces, unfit for truly human labor. From democratic
unions to democratic workplaces seems a natural progression.
3. A good deal of consumption fully socialized: education at all
levels, health care,
including care for the aged, child care, transportation, and recreation
(libraries, parks,
playgrounds, gyms, etc.). In a real democracy, peoples' basic needs
must be socially provided. Otherwise it will be difficult for some to
fully participate in making decisions, in unions and in other
organizations, and democracy will be defeated.
4. Maximum democratic control of production, whether by workers
or communities or both. As democratic
control spreads from our unions to our workplaces, it will ultimately
know no bounds. For what good will democratic and solidaristic unions
be if decisions over the allocation of capital are made by a privileged
few, intent on making maximum profits? Then, members of the most
democratic union in the country will still be thrown out of work if
their company shuts down or moves away.
5. Hours of work as low as possible, and no special reward is given to
those who toil longer. If we controlled our own destinies, doing
interesting work for the good of our communities and societies, perhaps
this would not be such an important issue. Then extra work might be
something people would just do, out of social responsibility of for the
sheer enjoyment of it. But for now, we cannot be working ourselves to
death; democracy is simply not possible if we do.
6. Work seen as part of our being in the world and every effort made
to make work
as nondestructive of nature as possible. If we are going to show
solidarity with one another, then shouldn't we show solidarity with the
earth itself? The degree of environmental destruction is much greater
than most of us imagine, and we had better stop it or we will have the
solidarity of the imprisoned, the solidarity of the shipwrecked.
7. No discrimination of any kind. An injury to one must be an injury
to all, no matter who the one is, that is, irrespective of any person's
race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. And we cannot
say, as many have, that we will attack discrimination after we take
power, because such a view really means that we will never do it. We
must make the fight for democracy in our unions a fight for equal rights
for all.
8. Equality, and not just some sham equality of opportunity, seen as a
good in itself. When we think about it, it is very difficult to justify
any significant differences in reward among human beings. Why should
anyone make a great deal more money than another or have more wealth
than another? Inequality is the great underminer of democracy.
Second, leftists in the unions should push for regular member education
programs, and these programs should be based upon the idea that what a
union should promote is helping workers to realize their capabilities as
human beings. Sam Gindin, formerly chief economist for the CAW, has
helped to engineer such education programs for CAW. He tells us that in
one educational members are put into two groups and asked to examine a
set of problems. One group uses the concept of "competition" (the basic
ideology of all labor-management cooperation programs) to address the
problem, while the other uses the concept of "developing workers'
capabilities." Needless to say the groups have completely different
solutions to problems like unemployment, plant closings, NAFTA, etc.
Third, leftist in the unions should see the labor movement as an
integral part of a mass movement, made up of many separate but
independent movements. We should support on principle all progressive
social movements, participate in them and try to promote worker
leadership and strength within them. It should be our goal not just to
gain more union members but to change society and to see other groups
not just as supporters of us but as legitimate allies in this grand
struggle. Bill Fletcher, special assistant to AFL-CIO president Sweeney
says that only when there are a number of social movements developing
and interacting with and feeding on one another do we reach a sort of
critical mass which makes radical change appear normal and necessary. A
radical black movement, a radical movement of American Indians, a
radical prison reform movement, a radical Chicano movement, a radical
women's movement, a radical environmental movement, these and many
others must be built up simultaneously if we are to get the radical
synergy needed for revitalizing the labor movement and the larger
society.
Finally, if it is true that we need an international labor movement to
confront a rapidly internationalizing capitalism, then it is certainly
also true that we must have an independent labor politics. It is just
not imaginable that we will be able to d o anything very positive by
continually tying ourselves to the Democratic. This is wishful thinking
in the extreme. I know that the UE has been strongly supportive of the
Labor Party, and I hope that this party grows and prospers. In my view,
though, it will have to gain the real commitment of the many labor
leaders who say they support it but practice business as usual in
day-to-day politics. Either that or rank-and-file leftists will have to
hijack it and move it further left or found some other political party
to advance the cause of the left.
Let me close by saying that I am optimistic about the future of the
labor movement and the left within it. If we work hard and do not
compromise our values, we have a good chance to succeed. Yet, we must
also remember that the time to act is now. It will take many, many
years of struggle to build a labor left, but if we do not start now, we
will find the window of opportunity closing and the forces of reaction
leading workers down the path to ruin.
