Labor from a Rank and File Perspective

Howie Hawkins, Teamster and Green candidate for Mayor of Syracuse

Gary Bonaparte, Ironworker and Green candidate for 2 nd District Common Councilor in Syracuse

Cosmo Fanizzi III, Carpenter and Green candidate for 16 th District Onondaga County Legislator

David Linton, retired Postal Worker and Green candidate for 17 th District Onondaga County Legislator

Labor Day, September 5, 2005

On Labor Day we remember the proud history of the US labor movement. We honor the solidarity of workers who stood together to fight for the eight-hour workday, for an end to child labor, for the guaranteed minimum wage, and the right to organize. And we mourn the men and woman who gave their lives in the effort to win these important struggles.

At its best, the labor movement has been a spirited social movement with high ideals, a vision of a better society, and a strategy to get there. Social movement unionism built itself upon a tripod of institutions: unions, cooperatives, and an independent labor party.

Unions would defend and advance workers' wages and working conditions in their jobs within the existing society by direct action, particularly strikes, picket lines, and worker solidarity across crafts and industries.

Cooperatives would progressively transform the economy by organizing our production and consumption democratically. We would receive the full fruits of our labor instead of being systematically exploited by a system that siphons away much of the value we create to parasitic absentee owners. Each member of a cooperative would have one vote in decisions and would receive a patronage dividend equal to their contribution to the cooperative's net earnings: refunds in proportion to purchases made through consumer cooperatives and incomes in proportion to labor contributed in worker cooperatives.

An independent labor party would organize the working class to elect its own representatives in government who could insure a legal environment where unions and cooperatives could organize and where the public sector served the public interest, not the narrow interests of well-heeled corporate lobbies.

Social movement unionism knew that struggle, sacrifice, and solidarity were essential to building a better tomorrow. But what remains of that proud legacy?

Today business unionism is predominant. With few exceptions, unions today have the culture of an insurance company, where the workers are clients and the officers are managers taking in our payments and doling out our benefits.

We have no problem with paying our union dues and receiving our benefits, but our unions must be much more than private benefit organizations if we are to advance the interests of the working class. If business unionism continues to prevail, unions will continue their decline. From the high point of 35 percent of American workers organized at the time of the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1953, today the organized portion of the work force is down to 12.5 percent (and less than 8 percent in the private sector).

The AFL-CIO Split

As rank and file workers and union members, we had as little power over the recent split in the labor movement as we did over Hurricane Katrina's recent march toward the Gulf Coast . It was not debated in our union locals and we certainly didn't get to vote on which side our respective international unions would take.

The debate at the top has little to do with us as rank and file workers. The split between the AFL-CIO unions and Change To Win unions is a fight among top labor bureaucrats over who gets to be the top dogs and who gets our union dues. In other words, it is a debate among bureaucrats about how to reorganize the labor bureaucracy.

Their debate is not about the real issues that affect us as workers: the decline in real wages, the outsourcing of our jobs, the erosion of pension security and health benefits, the legal barriers to union organizing, the lack of rank-and-file democracy in most unions, or the mounting environmental and energy crises.

Neither side in bureaucrats' debate offers a vision of how a just society should be organized. They are not debating how to organize for real solutions like fair trade, national health insurance, labor law reform, union democracy that puts the movement back into labor, or a multi-year, multi-trillion dollar public works program to create millions of new jobs building an ecologically sustainable infrastructure for our future.

Neither side in the bureaucrats debate has a real program to redress the glaring disparity between the overwhelmingly white male leadership of the unions and the lack of democracy and power for a rank and file that is disproportionately people of color and female, nor to finally eliminate the race and gender barriers still faced by people of color and women in many of the building trades.

On one side, we have the AFL-CIO, generally representing the skilled building trade and manufacturing unions, whose members make good wages – $30-$50 an hour plus benefits – but with few new jobs in their industries and therefore little room to grow.

On the other side, we have Change To Win, generally representing the less-skilled building trades and the low-wage warehouse, service, retail, garment, food, and farm workers who are lucky to make $10 an hour. These low-wage unions have room to grow because their industries are where the new jobs are, but they don't have the political or economic leverage to raise those wages.

Between the lack of room to grow for the old-line, high-wage construction and manufacturing unions of the AFL-CIO and the lack of power of the new, low-wage service unions of Change To Win to help their members, neither side of the labor split at the top has a viable strategy for revitalizing the labor movement.

Legal Barriers to Union Organizing

Any strategy to rebuild the labor movement must have a program of labor law reform. Unions have become increasingly hard to organize over the last 25 years as union-busting strategies by employers have become increasingly aggressive. They break labor laws with impunity. They illegally fire tens of thousands of workers each year for trying to organize. The National Labor Relations Board acts too slowly and leniently with employers to stem the union-busting tide.

The legal framework that made the corporate offensive against unions possible was created in 1947 with the passage of the Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act. Taft-Harley outlawed nonviolent direct action by workers in many of its forms, including sympathy and solidarity strikes, "secondary boycotts" where workers refuse to cross picket lines when they were not directly party to a labor dispute, and refusing to handle "hot cargo" coming from or going to a struck enterprise.

The major result of the Taft-Hartley restrictions on labor action has been to divert unions from direct action to cautious administration of contracts with no-strike clauses so the company will not sue the union for violating the contract.  Unions now devote most of their resources to handling grievances through "proper channels" and defending themselves from lawsuits by corporations with far more resources to go to court.

Democrats Take Labor for Granted

After Taft-Hartley passed Congress, organized labor counted on the Democrats to repeal it, but with no success for decades. The Democrats gave lip service to the repeal of Taft-Hartley by putting it their national platform from 1948 to 1992. But they did not repeal it when they had the chance with congressional majorities under Truman, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton. Instead the Democrats have worked with the Republicans to crush labor's ability to organize.

The turning point was the busting of PATCO, the air traffic controllers union, which was planned by the Carter administration and executed by the Reagan administration. After that, the implicit union/corporate partnership of the post World War II period was broken by a growing corporate union-busting campaign. Rather than stemming this tide, the Clinton administration accelerated it with anti-labor polices such as NAFTA and WTO and the repeal of federal welfare guarantees, anti-labor policies that went much further than the Republican Reagan and first Bush administration had been able to go. Even Robert Reich, Clinton's Labor Secretary and his cabinet's most liberal member, accepted the pro-corporate trade policies and pushed job training instead of fair trade and labor laws, as if workers' declining standard of living was due to our lack of skills rather than union busting and corporate outsourcing of our jobs to labor markets kept cheap by repressive regimes often buttressed by the US military.

The Change To Win coalition rightly criticizes the AFL-CIO for 'throwing money at Democrats' who then take them for granted. Since 1980 when the anti-union offensive began in earnest, unions have spent $8-12 billion supporting the Democrats, according to Jonathon Tasini, president emeritus of the National Writers Union and president of the Economic Futures Group.

But rather than building an independent labor party, Change To Win unions like the Teamsters and SEIU think the alternative is to throw money at Republicans, too. The Teamsters gave 11 percent of their federal contributions to Republicans in the 2004 elections cycle. SEIU spent 15 percent in 2004 on Republicans. Their contributions ranged from a $575,000 contribution to the Republican Governors Association to many contributions to Republican candidates, such as the $7500 contribution to our local Republican congressman, James Walsh.

Worse, SEIU spent considerable resources attacking Ralph Nader's independent pro-labor candidacy in 2004, from sending SEIU staffers to heckle Nader speeches in New York to sending lawyers in Oregon to intimidate Nader petitioners in house visits with warnings about prosecution for fraud for any mistakes they made on petitions they witnessed.

The Potential of Independent Labor Politics

Imagine if labor had responded to the anti-union offensive over the last 25 years by spending $8-12 billion building an independent labor party and movement, as the labor movement has done in almost every other industrial nation.

We could have scores of labor party organizers in every state supporting a broadly based party of working people. We could have caucuses of independent labor representatives sitting in the municipal, county, state, and national legislatures. We could have a national labor daily newspaper and a Labor News Network on radio and cable presenting the public with an alternative to the corporate media's slant.

The two corporate financed parties, the Democrats and Republicans, would no longer monopolize US politics. Public policy would undoubtedly be more pro-labor and the majority of working people would not have seen their real wages and living standards decline over the last 25 years.

The Green Party as a Labor Party

The Green Party is best known for its environmental and peace advocacy. But in the absence of an independent labor party here, the Green Party has also taken on that role. We have taken up the labor demands the Democrats won't, from fair trade to labor law reform.

As Green Party candidates in local elections as well as rank and file workers and union members, we want to bring back the emancipatory program of labor as a social movement building unions, cooperatives, and an independent politics of labor.

Thus, we support project labor agreements on public projects and oppose contracts, tax breaks, and corporate welfare for companies with a record of union busting and labor law violations such as the Pyramid Companies.

We support expanding the living wage law from a narrow ordinance benefiting just 50-100 workers into a local minimum wage law that brings all low-wage workers in our community up to a living wage.

We support targeting public economic incentives to cooperatives and other forms of democratic local ownership so public investments are anchored to our community by their ownership structures for the long-term benefit of our community.

Time for a Declaration of Independence by Labor

The key to this whole program – from fair trade and labor laws at the national level to living wages and cooperatives at the local level – is labor's political independence. It is time for workers to declare their political independence from the corporate-financed Democrats and Republicans.

Labor can elect its own people to office by standing up for itself independently. It cripples itself when it takes the cautious business union strategy of being junior partners in the major-party coalitions where the shots are really called by their corporate sponsors. Labor surrenders the power of its own voice when it relies on corporate-sponsored politicians to speak for it in politics. Labor surrenders the power of its numbers when it surrenders its votes to the candidates of the corporate parties.

Decades of defeat for labor's demands have proven the bankruptcy of this political approach, which has allowed the Democrats to take the labor vote for granted while acting to benefit their corporate financial sponsors.

The practice of fusion or cross-endorsement in New York does not offer any short cut around complete political independence by labor. Cross-endorsements between the Democrats and a second satellite party line only serves to keep labor politically dependent on the corporate-dominated Democrats. It is the same coalition with corporate interests in which labor is subordinate, only it is now on the ballot twice instead of once. The experiences of the American Labor, then Liberal, and now Working Families parties in New York have demonstrated that conclusion repeatedly since the 1930s.

It is time for workers to push our unions to support independent labor politics and, in the meantime as individuals, support independent pro-labor candidates. This is a political strategy that can work. After all, working people are the majority of voters.