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.