>
>I'm waiting to see how labor fights this assault. I'm betting it'll
>be with ads, campaign checks, and lobbyists and not with any kind of
>popular mobilization. I'd love to be proved wrong.
>
the real problem i have with much of this discussion is that it tends to define "labor" as the labor beauracracy in its most hollow form (i.e. john sweeney, gerry mcentee, junior hoffa, etc.). the reason i worry about that is i feel it takes away a certain agency from the rank and file.
its true that the AFL-CIO is heaping 45 million hard earned union member dollars on the undeserving democrats.
but i don't believe that its fair to define the politics of the rank and file by the way they vote for president. its important for us to remember that through all of this, what rank and filers want is very different from what democrats and republicans offer. their support for democrats should be understood as a symptom of a blackout and smear campaign by the major parties against third parties. simply, its an inability to make informed political choices in presidential elections in the atmosphere of our corporate political system.
on a local level, powerful labor unions can and usually do put signifigant pressure on local and state candidates to pony up to workers in exchange for money or endorsements or votes. in my work in upstate new york and in the south as an organizer, i have seen countless examples of unions sweating democrats to do the right thing for workers that were in tight contract negotiations or on the line.
a great example of this is in seattle, where the democratic u.s. senator from that distric intervened and helped settle the newspaper strike for the union, and mayor schell encouraged his staff to refuse interviews to scab reporters. the point here is that where labor is strong, it has the luxury of being tough on politicians and kicking ass for its members. but where labor is weak, like on the national level, it forges some pretty dispicable alliances and latches on to worms like al gore to try to preserve what little influence it can in the public policy arena.
the solution here is to organize more workers and make labor strong again. and that takes a lot more than just simply organizing workers into the mass, but also reworking popular mythology of labor, creating a new social space for labor, redefining labor not as union brass but as rank and file workers, so that more workers can self-identify with what these days is thought of as a hollow icon than a social movement.
dave hill new york city _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com