***** from _The Nation_ <http://www.thenation.com/1996/issue/960708/0708baco.htm>
Will the Labor Party Work?
At the founding convention, questions of identity, strategy and soul.
By David Bacon
At the height of debate around the most contentious issue before some 1,300 delegates at the founding convention of the Labor Party last month in Cleveland, San Francisco longshoreman Dick Mead summed it up bluntly. The main question, he said, was "Is you is, or is you ain't?" Is the Labor Party an electoral party, or isn't it?
>From the beginning of the marathon four-day meeting, there was little doubt
that a new organization would arise from this discussion, or that it would
have the support of a significant section of the country's labor movement.
The issue was whether to run candidates, and Mead's fellow delegates from
the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union were at one pole
of the debate. Luisa Gratz, president of Los Angeles I.L.W.U. Local 26,
introduced a proposal from her union that would have allowed Labor Party
chapters and organizations room to field independent candidates at the
local and state level, where that seemed feasible; many delegates
interpreted the suggestion as applying to the elections this fall. "A Labor
Party has to be an identifiable organization," she argued, "with candidates
who commit themselves body and soul to our program." The I.L.W.U.'s
approach was shared by delegates from numerous local unions and area-based
chapters of Labor Party Advocates (L.P.A.), the party's predecessor
organization, which built the movement leading to the convention.
Most of the international unions represented in Cleveland opposed the I.L.W.U.'s position. Speaking for the United Electrical Workers, Carl Rosen, president of U.E. District 11 in Chicago, pointed out that the Labor Party "doesn't have a base anywhere right now. We have to organize first, and then run candidates. That's what works in organizing drives -- organize the workers, form committees, then challenge the boss for power. If we run candidates now, we'll get slaughtered and we'll never recover."
If the new Labor Party were simply an organization of self-appointed progressive union activists, the debate wouldn't have had to take place. As Tony Mazzocchi, L.P.A.'s founder and organizer for more than a decade, put it, "If we just went out and recruited everyone who agreed with us, we would hold this convention in a telephone booth."
But the convention wasn't held in a phone booth. At an added cost of $75,000, it had to be moved out of the Sheraton Hotel into Cleveland's convention center to accommodate the flood of delegates who registered in the weeks before it opened. The hall may have been filled with contentious people, "but at least it shows we're alive," said one smiling delegate. Almost all delegates were elected representatives of unions and area-based L.P.A. chapters, with a membership base of more than 1 million. The vast majority were from the nine affiliated international and independent unions that supplied the convention's resources and people power. They included, in addition to the I.L.W.U. and the U.E., the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (a railroad union) and the California Nurses Association (C.N.A.). One union, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (O.C.A.W.), brought more than 200 delegates. Two others endorsed the Labor Party in the week before the convention: the United Mine Workers and the American Federation of Government Employees (federal workers).
This is the Labor Party's strength. But it comes with conditions. All U.S. unions already have their own political action apparatus, as do labor councils, state labor federations and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. itself. They interview candidates, make endorsements, hand out campaign contributions and mobilize union members to work phone banks and walk precincts. The Democratic Party overwhelmingly gets that support.
Unions organize, bargain, strike and represent their members not just against the boss but against a hostile political system. They try to kill bad legislation and initiate proposals of their own, and to elect politicians willing to listen to their needs. This is the system founded by Samuel Gompers, who headed the American Federation of Labor at the turn of the century. Gompers's line was "reward your friends and punish your enemies." He not only shaped the goals and methods unions have used since, he defined what labor would not do: run its own candidates and establish its own political party and structure.
No union can afford or intends to give up its present structure without an alternative. So while unions affiliate with the Labor Party, they are all still maintaining their own electoral apparatus. They will pay dues to the Labor Party, recruit members to it and will have the largest voice in its deliberations. But they can still endorse and campaign for Democrats. It is the tension between the failure of Gomperism and the fact that the alternative to it is only in its infancy that shaped the convention's debate over electoral strategy.
...What makes Labor Party advocates even more bitter is the tacit assumption by Democrats that labor has no other place to go. "This is the only movement where they'll give you money, you can kick them in the ass, and they'll come back and give you more money," Mazzocchi said. "That's the history of the labor movement and people who've betrayed it. They were never afraid of us." In Mazzocchi's bitter words, it is not only the Clinton Administration that failed workers. NAFTA never even made it onto the agenda of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s New York convention last October. Clinton was given an early endorsement this March, despite calls from within the labor movement to negotiate with the Administration over his antiworker economic policies and on his trade, welfare, Medicaid and other watered-down Republican proposals.
After two days of wrangling over the constitution, a compromise was put on the floor -- "A New Organizing Approach to Politics." It called for recruiting members based on year-round political activity focused on the party's program, forcing elected officials and candidates to respond to it, and running candidates only after "recruiting and mobilizing hundreds of thousands of workers with sufficient collective resources to take on an electoral system dominated by corporations and the wealthy." In 1998, the Labor Party will hold its second convention, where it will decide on an electoral strategy.
Debate was originally cut short by a motion to call the question, leaving unions like the I.L.W.U. and the Service Employees International Union with their alternatives unheard by delegates. After a storm of protest, discussion resumed, and S.E.I.U. delegates succeeded in eliminating a requirement to sign up hundreds of thousands of party members before mounting candidacies. The I.L.W.U. introduced its alternative but couldn't get the votes to pass it.... *****
I'm just wondering why the Labor Party doesn't want to use electral campaigns _as_ a great recruiting strategy. Though the Bacon article above is a bit old, I don't think that the LP's stance has changed much. (See an article by Jane Slaughter in the December 14, 1998 issue of the _Nation_ also.) Anyway, why join an oxymoron -- an electral party that doesn't run candidates? Run independent candidates, and then lots of people will come, I think. Otherwise, the LP will run out of steam, missing a chance to build on the existing momentum (it may have already missed it).
I sometimes suspect, though, that the Labor Party is not actually designed to become an independent electral party. I think that it may be better understood as a creation of liberal labor officials who wanted to have their own miniature political machine to negotiate their place within the existing framework of labor officialdom and the Democratic Party. It can also end up functioning as a safety valve for discontented rank and file unionists, liberals, leftists, etc. who may otherwise create a party of their own.
Yoshie