Ed Ott, former executive direc- Tor of the New York City Central Labor Council and currently Teaching at CUNY's Murphy Institute, made this address to About 150 union communica- Torso at the International Labor Communications Association's Awards luncheon. There is Some editing for length and Grammar, but not for content.
I'll start trying to describe the Labor movement's relation- Ship with the Democratic Party. There's a pop singer Named Duffy. She has a song Called "Mercy." It's about a young Woman whose lover is married, and he's got her under control. And it's against her morals, but he has her misbehaving. She knows better. He wants something on the side, and she wants to be seen in public hold- ing his hand. And I think that that's kind of the Party's attitude. They don't want to be seen in public with us, holding hands.
We're in the hole, and it's a political hole, it's an economic hole because a Democratic Congress--not in my lifetime-- never does what they say they're going to do. Democrats not our friends We have to figure this one out. We are in a situation where we have so many people who are discon- nected from possibility, that is, on the brink of social dynamite.
Huge swaths of this country have lost everything that defined their culture. Our own Congress has played a seditious role in our economy. They have used their political power to rig the tax laws to shift the wealth disproportionately to the top. And they used that same power to break the back of organized labor in the private sector by the wholesale export of our industries.
If we ran the street and someone grabbed our wallet, we would be screaming for the police. They stole our entire livelihoods. They stole entire communities. They stole everything that defined generations of hard work. And they walk around now, within blocks of this building, prepared to tell us how we're going to live for a generation. We are in the situation in New York City, as an example--and the national numbers are similar, where 72 per- cent of union members are in the pub- lic sector. That is not a good thing.
This is a movement that will live or die in the private sector. We have a working class, many of whom are working for $10 an hour and under, no sick days, no holidays, no benefits. You think about that for a sec- ond. People don't understand how the Republicans, how did the Republicans, and about a third of the Democratic Party, get traction on the notion that the teachers who teach our children are bad guys?
How did they get traction on the notion that the people who provide vital services are the bad guys? It happened because, if you're working for $10 an hour or less, and you look at somebody who has a job that, the day they're hired, they have 12 sick days, 12 holidays, five personal days, three weeks' vacation, you've got almost 40 days off the day you're hired, at any job. Some Republican or Blue Dog Democrat comes on the TV and says, "I want to take away five days," and we scream like our children are being murdered. But for a working class that has nothing, that doesn't make sense. And I could submit to you that the social base for our undoing is in an impoverished working people. Every labor person understands social wage. Increase in rent, wage cut. An increase in the cost of transportation is a wage cut. Well, a tax cut is a raise.
And the reason that Republican and Blue Dog Democrats get traction on that issue is that if you're working for nothing and somebody sends you a $600 check in the mail, and it's from the U.S. government, it's a raise. And they are seducing generations of workers.
And we need to come to terms with what the dynamic of this discussion really is. This is a period for the labor movement to take inventory. Part of that inventory has to be the political reality of what it means that our public sector is 72 percent of our union members. We need to raise wages I believe we need to reform our message to Democratic politicians. You want more revenue? Raise wages. They shouldn't be the guys running around telling people they've got to pay more taxes. When he attacks the rich, some of your own public school teachers, public sector workers, think you're talking about them. Because certainly, in some of the cities like New York, they are rich folks in a lot of people's eyes. And tax questions are not resonating with our own members, and you all know it.
Raise Social Security. Raise the minimum wage. Raise prevailing wages wherever they exist, fight for living wages where there are none. Democrats want to do something for working people? Raise wages. You want more revenue? Raise wages. We should not support any tax increases unless they raise wages. We can't afford it. The tax laws are what they are because we ... the labor movement, are weak. The tax laws are rigged. This is a casino and we're not playing.
I began to change my thinking as I engaged the organizations of immigrants.
Taxi workers in New York City are contract workers. They have no rights as workers under any law. There are unions in our city--I won't name names--that spend more money on catered food than they do on organizing. Taxi workers run around to little foundations looking for $10,000 donations. They pass the hat at the airport parking lots among the drivers to get money they need, sometimes to pay their rent. They use interns from various institutions, including the Murphy Institute of the City University of New York. They have have led two strikes. Without any union contracts. The industry negotiates with them all the time. The City, which regulates that industry, does not make a move without trying to at least neutralize them. And they are in and out of City Hall all the time. The domestic workers, who are poorer than the taxi workers, 99.9 percent women, working in isolation under the worst of conditions, consciously left out of the National Labor Relations Act for racist reasons, left out of the labor laws in 50 states for the same reason, were the only leg- islative victory we had in New York state this year with the passage of a modest Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights, and they don't have two nick- els to rub together.
Two labor movements
We work with about 18 million people in the unionized sector of this country, and we are walking around wringing our hands, "What are we going to do? What are we going to do? What are we going do?"
There are two labor movements in this country. One, based on an incredible record of struggle, and a modicum amount of security, decent incomes, they've still got some health care, although we're paying increas- ingly for it. The other works in the non-unionized sector, largely in the private sector.
They are making $10 an hour or less, and huge pieces of the old U.S. industrial workforce is descending toward that number. And yet these organizations, deeply rooted in their communities, are creating new forms of struggle, new forms of organization, and they are winning fights. That working- class, largely immigrant, noncitizen, is the new labor movement. Immigrants are not helpless. Who the hell were our grandparents and great-grandparents who built this building that created the movement that allowed this to happen? Well, these folks in those communities, in those kinds of organizations, they are our great-grandparents all that many years ago. We in the movement, we need to sidle up alongside of them, support them, nurture them, fund them. Let them organize the rest of the working class. They will build great, great legacies. And we will change the politics of this country.
If our response to this immediate period is to circle the wagons, and try to hold on to what we've got, they will continue to chip away at us.
Three weeks ago, front page of the Wall Street Journal, an article about "the victory"... and the last line of that article is some whack governor who says, "Well, now we can have a real discussion about whether we should have collective bargaining and unions in the public sector at all."
If you're in the public sector, you've got a bull's-eye right here. And don't think that they will not put the boot to us. This is their moment. The one big difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, for all the wrong reasons, I might add, is that the Republicans, since Ronald Reagan, have consis- tently stated up front what they want- ed to do and they have done. And if they're talking about taking away collective bargaining in the public sector, you can believe that there's at least a substantial number of them that are going to try it.
You will see governors trying to abrogate contracts, eliminate pensions. In New York State, we're going to fight to try to stop a constitutional convention from hap- pening, because the only thing that guarantees the public-sector pensions in our state is a little line in the state constitution which says, "... membership in any pen- sion or retirement system of the state or of a civil division thereof shall be a contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired." [Article v, Section 7]
If they can convene a constitutional convention and knock out that one line, they'll stop funding these pensions and then let them bleed out. And I would assume that that's the same thing that goes on in other places.
And yet, there is this other working class that has very little protection under the law. Government statistics say there are about 15 million people who work and live in this country without full legal status as citizens, or even visitors. Now, I would argue that if there were 150 folks who snuck across the border in El Paso, we've got a legal problem. Maybe at 15,000, we've got a bit of a social problem. But at 15 million, it was public policy that brought them here. Employers wanted them and employers needed them. And the government facilitated them getting here.
Where do we go?
And we've got to be stupid not to recognize that that is a poten-tially powerful force that should be part-- a full partner of the labor movement. Taxi workers were the first workers' center of its type to affiliate under the AFL-CIO's Worker Center Program to a central labor council. I consider that work, the work that I did with the domestic workers, to be the best work I have done in 42 years in the labor movement. You, who are a huge piece of our intellectual talent, need to engage this, study this. I'm going to say this--some people are going to be offended by it--we cannot finish the civil rights movement unless we organize immigrants. It is not possible. It will be the unanswered labor question on the table.
For our enemies--and they are our enemies, this is not the Republican Party of the Scrantons and the Rockefellers--this is a mean-spirited, class-conscious group of haters. Those of you, and I respect the fact that 40 percent of our members are Republicans and describe themselves as such, they need to understand that this is not that old Republican Party.
There are elements of potential violence in that Tea Party move- ment. There are elements of reason. Some of our own members are sympathetic to the Tea Party. But in the end, we have seen some of this before. We have seen this in the history books. Some of us have experienced it at the dinner table. They did this in Germany. This is a movement that will lend itself out to the worst elements, and they will try to put the boot to us. I argue right now that this labor m ovement needs to rethink what we do best. What we have done best in our history is raise wages.
There has to be a component of this movement in the public sector who has fabulous wealth even in this downturn that needs to think what has to be done to organize in the private sector. Forty percent of the construction work- ers--unionized construction workers in New York City--are not working today.
We haven't seen numbers like that since before World War II. If we don't figure this out, we don't do it at our own peril. There are risks that need to be taken. There are things that need to be changed. But most important, we need to understand this other labor movement and forge with it, and we will reshape this country for gen- erations to come. If we reduce these next two years to a fight over budgets, we lose. The solution to the public sector budget problem is not in the budget process. It is in the economy, and the private sector economy, we need to make demands on. You could raise wages in this country by employing the really 20 percent of people who don't have either full-time jobs or work. There's a middle-strata organiza- tion in the city of New York called the Freelancers Union.
I say middle strata because they tend to represent people who have particular skills or education that they can sell. But they are offered work, not jobs, and the Freelancers Union has developed strategies so that they can get health care. They, in fact, have an organiza- tion that chases down people who buy their skills and don't pay them.
Work, not jobs
We have those traditions in our movement. The actors' unions, the arts' unions, were basically set up for the same reasons. They were offered work, not jobs. They found strategies to survive within that. This is a new moment.
This is a new moment that was dropped at our feet by defeat. When I teach my students at the Murphy Institute, I tell them there's always two questions yo
____________________________________________