The only labor/union threads that seem to get picked up on here are ones bashing labor and unions, including Mr. Henwood's complaining about that the AFL-CIO wasn't embracing the spotted owl. The another one upset that the UMW didn't give knee-jerk, reflexive support to a Democrat because his support of gay rights and gun control was felt to be too radical for that region of the country.
This seems like the living embodiment of the limousine liberalism that is bashed nightly on Fox News. The enlightened liberal intelligensia on college campuses, in New York and San Francisco become upset when their proletarian marionettes don't obey their commands. How come mine workers in Mississippi aren't out on the street, hoisting up the rainbow flags and marching down the street hand-in-hand with homosexuals during Gay Rights parades?
It's self-apparent that popular support is the bedrock of strength for the labor movement, for gay rights, and for any progressive movement. In case you haven't noticed, the percentage of Americans in labor unions has been declining since the 1950's, and if you take public sector unions out of the picture, decline has been even more rapid. The Gallup poll question "Do you think homosexual relations between consenting adults should or should not be legal?" - has been answered "should not" by 39% in 1982, 57% in 1988, and 42% in 2001. I'm sure those percentages are much higher in mine worker areas, and probably among the mine workers themselves. A union is a democratic organization, and it's primary duty is to support it's memberships financial interests, not to throw support to the New Republic issue du jour. Embracing too many, too socially progressive causes just alienates the socially conservative working class from unions. If rural voters are voting no to gay rights ! in democratic political elections, I don't see why there's such shock that the same thing happens with the democratic labor unions.
Labor unions are fighting to keep alive, and getting homosexuals into the Boy Scouts, marriage rolls and adoption agencies is definitely a back-burner issue. Being advocates for these issues in rural areas would amount to political suicide. Only someone who cared about social issues but not socialism would advocate such a suicidal tactic. Aside from plunging membership, anti-labor laws have been passing just as regularly in state and federal legislatures and "defense of marriage" laws have been. Wal-mart, Kerr-McGee and the lot just got an RTW law passed in Oklahoma, 51% to 49%. Color in another state in the U.S. where it is now as difficult to start a labor union as it is to get an abortion.
LBO-talk is billed as a list where labor and unions among other things is discussed. All I've seen is a lot of bashing of labor unions by people in shock that they aren't reflexively supporting your liberal social agendas. Why not just complain that they're not accepting some way-out social libertarianism - a call for them to support atheism, free love, legalization of all drugs, blah blah blah. Labor unions are democratic organizations primarily concerned on economic matters. It seems to me that labor unions have more of a friend in Pat Buchanan, who bashes the WTO, GATT, and the Fortune 500's control of immigration policy.
Labor unions connection to social issues is tenuous at best. I think if you want to look at an important social and economic issue, it's more important to do away with divisions within the working class than to divisions between the working class and socially progressive issues. The right's attempts to divide the white and African-American working class into one of white workers against African-Americans, who are characterized as criminals and "welfare queens", and who keep the white working class down by taking up slots in good colleges their children could have filled, and jobs that they could have taken, who dilute working class neighborhoods with bussing and moving into them, causing "white flight".
The attempts to create (or solidify) an African-American underclass seems a big enough issue to chew on for unions, besides their usual duties of looking after members, keeping things like Fast Track bogged down, organizing and so forth. And this is mostly because black issues blend between the social and the economic. There's the issue of a Hispanic underclass too, but then we bring immigration questions into this which complicates things. Unions are slowly disappearing and their own survival is their current issues, not social issues that are considered far-out and radical in the parts of the country they are in.
I agree with the Wilhelm Reich type view that says that the person who has an authoritarian family, who goes to an authoritarian church that interprets God in an authoritarian, fire-and-brimstone fashion, and who holds conservative views on social issues, is less likely to challenge an authoritarian workplace, or a repressive, authoritarian government, than someone with more socially libertarian ideas, who does not have these authoritarian-heavy perceptions. Thus, non-pyrrhic victories for left wing social causes has a beneficial effect on non-pyrrhic labor causes, and vice versa. Nonetheless, there is a separation, and official support should be peripheral and tenuous. I'm just fine with union guys going to the gay rights meeting after work, but I don't think it should be high on the AFL-CIO and UMW's agenda. Organizations which are struggling to survive as it is, with ordinary citizens just not wanting to join up on one hand, and state/federal law making it harder and ha! rder to do so on the other hand.
With all that said, I have seen one topic discussed here - globalization and the issues under that banner (fast track, the WTO, World Bank, sweatshops, GATT, and so on). It's good to see some support in line with the interests of the labor movement within America. I just don't like how the only posts about the American labor movement that get picked up on here are the ones bashing it. Lots of important things have been happening - there was a big battle over RTW laws in Oklahoma a month ago, which labor lost, the first filing for a store-wide Wal-Mart union election ever was sent to the NLRB a month ago, Congress is sending another half a billion to Colombia to put down left-wing movements and bailing out the airline industry and other corporations while leaving the over 1 million people laid off so far in 2001 high and dry.
If you don't care about the hourly salary the brown-skinned Mexican who bags your groceries is making, why should he care about your gay rights issues? And why should he listen to you when you go in and pontificate to him aboutthe UFCW (or UMW, or whoever) not reflexively backing some politican pushing gay rights or some other socially progressive legislation?
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