>The End of Class Warfare
>
>By Max Green
>September 6, 2000
>
>IT HAS BEEN four years now since John Sweeney became President of the
>AFL-CIO, promising first and foremost to reverse the decline of American
>labor. The percentage of the workforce that belonged to unions had fallen
>from a high of 35% in 1956, almost all private sector workers, to barely
>over 13%, almost half of whom were public employees. The percentage of
>private sector unions in unions when Sweeney took office hovered
>precariously above 10%.
>Key to Sweeney's strategy for reviving Labor was the alliance with the
>Left, which had been a source of talented organizers and a political ally
>in the 1930s and 40s during the rise of the CIO. The Labor-Left alliance
>was ruptured after World War Two, when Labor joined the national effort to
>defeat Communism abroad and purged Communists from its own ranks. Under
>Sweeney's predecessor, Lane Kirkland, Labor had moved left, with the
>expectation that it would facilitate the rebuilding of the alliance. But
>it met with limited success. Even after the Soviet empire collapsed, the
>Left could not find it in its heart to forgive the labor movement of
>George Meany and Lane Kirkland for its anti-Communist past.
>
>But Sweeney and his team passed muster by virtue of not having
>participated in anti-Communist struggles. Too, the timing of Sweeney's
>assumption of power was propitious, in that the old radicalism that
>stressed "class" had regained favor on the left, as it became increasingly
>apparent that the "identity" radicalism of the past several decades had
>run its course.
>
>In the event, almost from the day Sweeney took office, one did sense a new
>vitality in the labor movement, in large part fueled by its recruitment of
>new labor activists. The new stirrings in Labor were duly noted in the
>mainstream press and every victory invested with great significance.
>
>But tangible results were difficult to discern -- until last year, when it
>seemed as if all the new organizing effort was paying off. There were two
>big organizing victories, a 75,000-plus unit of home care workers in Los
>Angeles and a nearly one-hundred-thousand unit of teachers and other
>public school employees in Puerto Rico. And the labor movement trumpeted
>figures indicating that Labor had organized 600,000 new members in 1999,
>for a net increase of 200-300,000, enough to stop the decline in the
>percentage of U.S. workers in unions. Thinking that it had turned the
>tide, Labor passed a resolution that committed itself to organizing a
>million members a year, which is what it would take to actually increase
>labor's density.
>
>Moreover, Labor played a crucial role in organizing the Seattle
>demonstrations against the WTO ( World Trade Organization) that were
>hailed by the Left as a milestone in building a broad movement that would
>challenge global capitalism. In an article entitled "Turtles and
>Teamsters," Nelson Lichtenstein and Stephen Frasier, two labor historians
>who never miss an opportunity for denouncing the anti-Communism of the
>"old" labor movement, declared that the Seattle demonstrations,
>represented "a turning point in the political and social history of the
>post-cold-war world..." Due to Seattle, "phrases like corporate power,
>exploitation, and even imperialism -- a whole vocabulary once consigned to
>some Museum of the Linguistically Antiquated -- has suddenly been set
>loose in the ether of public debate."
>
>However, with only a couple of months of hindsight, it appears that both
>the self-congratulation on Labor's part and the cheering on the part of
>its allies on the left were -- at the very least -- premature.
>
>Last year was nowhere near so good a year for organizing as Labor claimed.
>Neither of the two big victories were of private sector workers and
>neither were the results of new kinds of organizing. The Puerto Rican
>employees were easy pickings once the prevailing law changed and, as
>Harold Meyerson admits in the pages of Dissent, "The single most notable
>organizing victory of the past several decades -- the unionization of
>74,000 homecare workers in Los Angeles... -- was actually more the result
>of SEIU's (Service Employee International Union) political smarts and
>power than it was of any organizing legerdemain..." Through political
>lobbying and campaign contributions, the union got LA County designated as
>the employer of record and then got a board appointed with whom a union
>would bargain. Another 100,000 plus new members the AFL-CIO claimed were
>actually existing members of the heretofore independent federal employee
>union that affiliated with the AFL-CIO last year. Meanwhile, labor made
>virtually no inroads in the fastest growing sectors of the "new" economy.
>Thus, last year may just be a blip of no lasting importance. The figures
>for 2000 support this interpretation. At this point in 1999, labor claimed
>to have organized over 214,000 workers. To date, this year, it has
>organized half that number.
>
>The significance of Seattle also seems to have been blown out of all
>proportion. Seattle was supposed to be a launching pad for even bigger and
>more effective demonstrations and political efforts in the future. But
>follow-up demonstrations in Washington, at which a labor press release
>said that "union members joined green-haired students dressed as sea
>turtles..," were not only smaller; the public response to the
>demonstrations was almost uniformly negative. Moreover, Labor failed in
>its all-out effort to deny China permanent normal trade relations.
>
>This really should come as no surprise. Organizing campaigns just don't
>work when people are convinced that they can do a better job of advancing
>themselves than a union can. The fact is that Labor under George Meany and
>Lane Kirkland periodically launched massive organizing campaigns, all of
>which ended in failure. The very dynamic leader of the United Automobile
>Workers, Walter Reuther, started a new federation, the American Labor
>Alliance, with the specific intention of organizing millions of new
>members. It was a resounding failure.
>
>As for the new alliance with the Left, it is a double-edged sword.
>Radicals have proved to be energetic and dedicated organizers. But they
>have also been an even greater liability in this most middle-class of
>societies. That is why Samuel Gompers, the founder of the modern labor
>movement, eschewed association with all manner of radicals, and it is one
>reason why Labor purged its Communist leaders in the 1940s. A public
>alliance today with those who are motivated by words like corporate power,
>exploitation and imperialism and whose goal is to mobilize a class
>struggle against global capitalism can not possibly work in Labor's favor
>in the long run, and, if the reaction to post-Seattle demonstrations is
>any indication, it will not even serve it well in the short run. It also
>won't help if labor leaders feel compelled to pander to these radicals as
>AFSCME president Gerald McEntee did in Seattle when he shouted that the
>"The system turns everything into a commodity, a rain forest in Brazil, a
>library in Philadelphia, a hospital in Alberta. We have to name that
>system: It is corporate capitalism."
>
>History always surprises. But, from this vantage point, Labor's future
>looks as bleak as ever; more decline dead ahead.
>
>Max Green is author of Epitaph for American Labor, published by The AEI
>Press.
>
>http://www.frontpagemag.com/archives/leftism/mg09-06-00.htm