Labor Needs A Radical Vision
LABOR NEEDS A RADICAL VISION
By David Bacon, ILCA Associate MemberFor forty years
Excerpts from article
AFL-CIO leaders George Meany and Lane Kirkland saw unorganized workers as a threat when they saw them at all. They drove leftwing activists out of unions, and threw the message of solidarity on the scrapheap. Labor's dinosaurs treated unions as a business, representing members in exchange for dues, while ignoring the needs of workers as a whole.A decade ago new leaders were thrust into office in the AFL-CIO - a product of the crisis of falling union density, weakened political power, and a generation of angry labor activists demanding a change in direction.
Those ten years have yielded important gains for unions. Big efforts were made to organize - strawberry workers in Watsonville, asbestos workers in New York and New Jersey, poultry and meatpacking workers in the south, and healthcare workers throughout the country. Yet in only one year was the pace of organizing fast enough to keep union density from falling.Other gains were made in winning more progressive policies on immigration, and in some areas, relations with workers in other countries. Yet here also, progress has not been fast enough. Corporations and the government policies that serve them have presented new dangers even greater than those faced a decade ago.....
As much as people need a raise, the promise of one is not enough to inspire them to face the certain dangers they know too well await them. Working families need the promise of a better world. Over and over, for more than a century, workers have shown that they will struggle for the future of their children and their communities, even when their own future seems in doubt. But only a new, radical social vision can inspire the wave of commitment, idealism and activity necessary to rebuild the labor movement.Organizing a union is a right, but it only exists on paper. Violating a worker's right to organize should be punished with the same severity used to protect property rights. Fire a worker for joining a union - go to jail.Today, instead, workers get fired in a third of all organizing drives. Companies close and abandon whole communities, and threaten to do so even more often. Strikebreaking and union busting have become acceptable corporate behavior. There are no effective penalties for companies that violate labor rights, and most workers know this. In addition, there are new weapons, like modern-day company unions, in the anti-union arsenal. Chronic unemployment, and social policies like welfare reform, pit workers against each other in vicious competition, undermining the unity they need to organize......
Since grinding poverty in much of the world is an incentive for moving production, defending the standard of living of workers around the world is as necessary as defending our own. The logic of inclusion (solidarity) in a global labor movement must apply as much to a worker in Bangladesh as it does to the non-union worker down the street.While the percentage of organized workers has declined every year for the past decade, unions have made important progress in finding alternative strategic ideas to the old business unionism of Meany and Kirkland. If these ideas are developed and extended, they provide an important base for making unions stronger and embedding them more deeply in working-class communities......
A new direction in international relations should be based on solidarity, and solidarity is a two-way street. The end of labor's cold war policy has to be made explicit, as part of finding a new set of principles for our relations with unions and workers in other countries. While some of those principles are embodied in ILO labor standards calling for the right to organize, an end to child labor, and other protections, unions in developing countries increasingly demand a broader agenda. In particular they want greater help in defending the public sector under attack from privatization, and an international system for defending the rights of migrants. New international relationships need to be based on the ability of US unions to listen to the concerns of labor in the developing world, and not just impose its own agenda, however well intentioned.
A new, more radical political program runs counter to the prevailing wisdom of our times, which holds the profit motive sacred, and believes that market forces solve all social problems. If labor's managers move in this direction, they won't get invited for coffee with the President, or included in meetings of the Democratic Leadership Council. At the beginning of the cold war, the AFL-CIO built its headquarters right down the street from the White House, eloquent testimony to the desire of its old managers for respectability in the eyes of the political elite. That dream may be difficult for some to give up. But labor can't speak convincingly to the working poor without, at the same time, directly opposing the common economic understanding shared by Republicans and many Democrats.The labor movement needs political independence.
To organize by the millions, workers have to make hard decisions, putting their jobs on the line for the sake of their future. Unions of past decades won the loyalty of working people when joining one was even more dangerous and illegal than it is today. The left in labor then proposed an alternative social vision - that society could be organized to ensure social and economic justice for all people. While some workers believed that change could be made within the capitalist system, and others argued for replacing it, they were united by the idea that working people could gain enough political power to end poverty, unemployment, racism, and discrimination.The poor will not be always with us, they declared.Today our biggest problem is finding similar ways for unions to affect workers' consciousness -- the way people think.
A new commitment to organizing can't be simply a matter of more money and organizers, or more intelligent and innovative tactics, or structural change, as necessary as these things are. During the periods in our history when unions grew by qualitative leaps, their activity relied on workers organizing themselves, not just acting as troops in campaigns masterminded by paid staff.For workers to act in this way today, they would have to have a much clearer sense of their own interests, and a vision that large-scale social change is possible.
Does the labor movement present such a vision of a more just society, capable of inspiring workers to struggle and sacrifice? Labor's radical vision of decades ago made it a stronger movement. Losing it in the red scares of the 1950s deprived most unions of their ability to inspire. It's no accident that the years of McCarthyism marked the point when the percentage of union members began to decline.
Our history should tell us that radical ideas have always had a transformative power - especially the idea that while you might not live to see a new world, your children might, if you fought for it. In the 1930s and 40s, these ideas were propagated within unions by leftwing political organizations. A general radical culture reinforced them. Today most unions no longer have this left presence. Can the labor movement itself fulfill this role? At the very least, unions need a large core of activists at all levels who are unafraid of radical ideas of social justice, and who can link them to immediate economic bread-and-butter issues.And since good ideas are worthless unless they reach people, the labor movement has to be able to communicate that vision to workers outside its own ranks. In an era when many unions have discontinued their own publications, or turned them into ones light on content, they need exactly the opposite.This is a very important moment, in which a national debate and discussion can have real-life consequences for the future. It can provide a powerful impetus to organizing an anti-Bush coalition in the short term, and a more profound political realignment in the longer term.
The present period is not unlike the 1920s, which were also filled with company unions, the violence of strikebreakers, and a lack of legal rights for workers. A decade later, those obstacles were swept away. An upsurge of millions in the 1930s, radicalized by the depression and leftwing activism, forced corporate acceptance of labor for the first time in the country's history. The current changes taking place in U.S. unions may be the beginning of something as large and profound. If they are, then the obstacles unions face today can become historical relics as quickly as did those of an earlier era.
Solidarity Forever"last verse"
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,greater than their mighty armies magnified a thousand-fold. We can bring to birth a new world form the ashes of the old, for the Union makes us strong."
This song should have more properly been named:"Radical, Democratic, Rank & File, Unionist Solidarity Forever"
We, the Rank and File, have the ability to change the face of the Labor Movement here in the US of A, but first we must regain the control of Our movement. The future of our children and our grandchildren, the future of our country and the future of our class depend upon it.
Get up, stand up!
By David Bacon, ILCA Associate MemberFor forty years
Excerpts from article
AFL-CIO leaders George Meany and Lane Kirkland saw unorganized workers as a threat when they saw them at all. They drove leftwing activists out of unions, and threw the message of solidarity on the scrapheap. Labor's dinosaurs treated unions as a business, representing members in exchange for dues, while ignoring the needs of workers as a whole.A decade ago new leaders were thrust into office in the AFL-CIO - a product of the crisis of falling union density, weakened political power, and a generation of angry labor activists demanding a change in direction.
Those ten years have yielded important gains for unions. Big efforts were made to organize - strawberry workers in Watsonville, asbestos workers in New York and New Jersey, poultry and meatpacking workers in the south, and healthcare workers throughout the country. Yet in only one year was the pace of organizing fast enough to keep union density from falling.Other gains were made in winning more progressive policies on immigration, and in some areas, relations with workers in other countries. Yet here also, progress has not been fast enough. Corporations and the government policies that serve them have presented new dangers even greater than those faced a decade ago.....
As much as people need a raise, the promise of one is not enough to inspire them to face the certain dangers they know too well await them. Working families need the promise of a better world. Over and over, for more than a century, workers have shown that they will struggle for the future of their children and their communities, even when their own future seems in doubt. But only a new, radical social vision can inspire the wave of commitment, idealism and activity necessary to rebuild the labor movement.Organizing a union is a right, but it only exists on paper. Violating a worker's right to organize should be punished with the same severity used to protect property rights. Fire a worker for joining a union - go to jail.Today, instead, workers get fired in a third of all organizing drives. Companies close and abandon whole communities, and threaten to do so even more often. Strikebreaking and union busting have become acceptable corporate behavior. There are no effective penalties for companies that violate labor rights, and most workers know this. In addition, there are new weapons, like modern-day company unions, in the anti-union arsenal. Chronic unemployment, and social policies like welfare reform, pit workers against each other in vicious competition, undermining the unity they need to organize......
Since grinding poverty in much of the world is an incentive for moving production, defending the standard of living of workers around the world is as necessary as defending our own. The logic of inclusion (solidarity) in a global labor movement must apply as much to a worker in Bangladesh as it does to the non-union worker down the street.While the percentage of organized workers has declined every year for the past decade, unions have made important progress in finding alternative strategic ideas to the old business unionism of Meany and Kirkland. If these ideas are developed and extended, they provide an important base for making unions stronger and embedding them more deeply in working-class communities......
A new direction in international relations should be based on solidarity, and solidarity is a two-way street. The end of labor's cold war policy has to be made explicit, as part of finding a new set of principles for our relations with unions and workers in other countries. While some of those principles are embodied in ILO labor standards calling for the right to organize, an end to child labor, and other protections, unions in developing countries increasingly demand a broader agenda. In particular they want greater help in defending the public sector under attack from privatization, and an international system for defending the rights of migrants. New international relationships need to be based on the ability of US unions to listen to the concerns of labor in the developing world, and not just impose its own agenda, however well intentioned.
A new, more radical political program runs counter to the prevailing wisdom of our times, which holds the profit motive sacred, and believes that market forces solve all social problems. If labor's managers move in this direction, they won't get invited for coffee with the President, or included in meetings of the Democratic Leadership Council. At the beginning of the cold war, the AFL-CIO built its headquarters right down the street from the White House, eloquent testimony to the desire of its old managers for respectability in the eyes of the political elite. That dream may be difficult for some to give up. But labor can't speak convincingly to the working poor without, at the same time, directly opposing the common economic understanding shared by Republicans and many Democrats.The labor movement needs political independence.
To organize by the millions, workers have to make hard decisions, putting their jobs on the line for the sake of their future. Unions of past decades won the loyalty of working people when joining one was even more dangerous and illegal than it is today. The left in labor then proposed an alternative social vision - that society could be organized to ensure social and economic justice for all people. While some workers believed that change could be made within the capitalist system, and others argued for replacing it, they were united by the idea that working people could gain enough political power to end poverty, unemployment, racism, and discrimination.The poor will not be always with us, they declared.Today our biggest problem is finding similar ways for unions to affect workers' consciousness -- the way people think.
A new commitment to organizing can't be simply a matter of more money and organizers, or more intelligent and innovative tactics, or structural change, as necessary as these things are. During the periods in our history when unions grew by qualitative leaps, their activity relied on workers organizing themselves, not just acting as troops in campaigns masterminded by paid staff.For workers to act in this way today, they would have to have a much clearer sense of their own interests, and a vision that large-scale social change is possible.
Does the labor movement present such a vision of a more just society, capable of inspiring workers to struggle and sacrifice? Labor's radical vision of decades ago made it a stronger movement. Losing it in the red scares of the 1950s deprived most unions of their ability to inspire. It's no accident that the years of McCarthyism marked the point when the percentage of union members began to decline.
Our history should tell us that radical ideas have always had a transformative power - especially the idea that while you might not live to see a new world, your children might, if you fought for it. In the 1930s and 40s, these ideas were propagated within unions by leftwing political organizations. A general radical culture reinforced them. Today most unions no longer have this left presence. Can the labor movement itself fulfill this role? At the very least, unions need a large core of activists at all levels who are unafraid of radical ideas of social justice, and who can link them to immediate economic bread-and-butter issues.And since good ideas are worthless unless they reach people, the labor movement has to be able to communicate that vision to workers outside its own ranks. In an era when many unions have discontinued their own publications, or turned them into ones light on content, they need exactly the opposite.This is a very important moment, in which a national debate and discussion can have real-life consequences for the future. It can provide a powerful impetus to organizing an anti-Bush coalition in the short term, and a more profound political realignment in the longer term.
The present period is not unlike the 1920s, which were also filled with company unions, the violence of strikebreakers, and a lack of legal rights for workers. A decade later, those obstacles were swept away. An upsurge of millions in the 1930s, radicalized by the depression and leftwing activism, forced corporate acceptance of labor for the first time in the country's history. The current changes taking place in U.S. unions may be the beginning of something as large and profound. If they are, then the obstacles unions face today can become historical relics as quickly as did those of an earlier era.
Solidarity Forever"last verse"
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,greater than their mighty armies magnified a thousand-fold. We can bring to birth a new world form the ashes of the old, for the Union makes us strong."
This song should have more properly been named:"Radical, Democratic, Rank & File, Unionist Solidarity Forever"
We, the Rank and File, have the ability to change the face of the Labor Movement here in the US of A, but first we must regain the control of Our movement. The future of our children and our grandchildren, the future of our country and the future of our class depend upon it.
Get up, stand up!
posted by T. Scott Brineman at 7:47 AM
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