> I'm still a proud member. I'm not throwing out the baby
> with the bathwater. Nonetheless, I don't buy the "slowly
> getting better" claim, which is now 15 years old. Until
> there's a true revolt and housecleaning (e.g., direct
> grassroots election of convention delegates and "international"
> officers) from within, Denmark will remain rotten. Sweeney,
> McEntee, et al. are old wine in partially new bottles. Why do
> left labor supporters continue to imagine otherwise? Look at
> the basic operations. Nothing of substance has changed.
Gee, let me tell you, I'm really looking forward to another abstract, half-informed, know-it-all discussion by know-nothings. I think it started with Munson's characteristically clear, crude, and doltish statement of his inability to distinguish between unions' political action money and their general funds, and now continues with Michael Dawson's contention that he is a "member" of the AFL-CIO, when no individual person is a member of the AFL-CIO, anywhere.
Only unions are members of the AFL-CIO, as affiliates, and it is arguable that therein lies much of the problem. Direct election of AFL-CIO convention delegates, or of the president of the AFL-CIO, would mean exactly jack-shit so long as the president of the AFL-CIO has almost no power whatsoever aside from what he tells his direct staff to do. The affiliates make all of the decisions that are worth anything, and in the end people like Sweeney and most local labor council presidents (with a few valiant exceptions) end up pandering to the lowest common denominator among the affiliates, not wanting to offend any of them. There's no way for an AFL-CIO president (national, state, or local) to hold affiliates accountable to a common program; he or (rarely) she would have to rely on the voluntary compliance of the elected presidents of local or international unions, who have the actual base and the real power. Therefore it's at the level of the affiliates that any real change has to be made, and it's an indication that someone is not at all involved in or serious about the struggle for such change if all they talk about is how "the AFL-CIO" needs to change, with no concrete explanation of what that would mean.
Saying that there has been no change at the AFL-CIO is not at all true in the first place, but even though it isn't, the significance of those changes is minimal so long as most of the affiliates remain backward. A precious few of the international unions (and a precious few local unions in other internationals) are breaking new ground and getting aggressive with organizing, corporate campaigns, and political program. (Needless to say the leaders of these unions are not dumb, so they also recognize the necessity of defeating reaction on election day, which is why the clueless bleatings of people like Chuck Munson who have never organized workers ever in their lives sound so ineffably stupid.) But something tells me that if these unions ever led an attempt to remake the labor movement in a more militant image, and tried to clear out the backward time-servers and the lazy staff and local officers ensconced in their sinecures, we would hear bleatings from CounterPunch, Labor Notes, and people like Munson about how it was all an "undemocratic" coup against "local control" and "rank-and-file democracy."