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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Feb. 27, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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AFL-CIO says: "No to slave labor"

Unions pledge to organize workfare workers

By Shelley Ettinger

"Are workfare participants really 'workers'? Our answer is: yes. Everyone who works should enjoy the same rights and have the opportunity to join a union."

With that assertion, the AFL-CIO Executive Council opened its annual mid-winter meeting on Feb. 17 in Los Angeles. As the first item of business, the 54-member council voted to "support and encourage aggressive organizing campaigns among these new workers."

National union leaders-including AFSCME President Gerald McEntee, Service Employees President Andrew Stern, and Communications Workers President Morton Bahr-announced that workfare organizing campaigns will soon begin in New Jersey, Alaska, California, Maryland and New York.

Workfare workers themselves have already been organizing in New York. William Mason of the group Workfairness called the AFL-CIO announcement "a huge development."

"This is great news-for workfare workers and for the labor movement," Mason said. "It may be the break we've been looking for.

"All along, Workfairness has said that this struggle is not going to get off the ground until the labor movement with all its resources and might wholly embraces the struggle of workfare workers. Now it's beginning to happen."

In a Feb. 17 statement, the AFL-CIO Executive Council said, "We in organized labor know that the establishment of a sub-class of workers without labor protections will bring down the wages and working conditions of all workers."

The statement concluded: "The AFL-CIO, working with affiliates, will support efforts to organize former welfare recipients by integrating them into bargaining units, organizing new units, and defending the living standards and working conditions of all employees, whether engaged in work programs through welfare or otherwise."

Big business and government are united on using the welfare "reform" law that President Bill Clinton signed last August to drive down workers' wages, weaken unions and divide workers. By committing itself to this bold new course of action, the labor federation takes on the ruling establishment.

Yet, at the same time, the union officialdom signaled its intent to maintain close ties with the Clinton administration. The Executive Council met with Vice President Al Gore on Feb. 18, and held a joint news conference with him that afternoon.

At the news conference, Gore said, "The right to organize and the right to strike are fundamental rights, and nobody's tax dollars should be spent undermining those rights." This came not four days after President Clinton had denied the right to strike to 9,300 workers-pilots at American Airlines.

New and old strategies

The contradiction inherent in the AFL-CIO is thus sharply apparent at the Los Angeles gathering. On the one hand, the moves to organize new workers are on time, on target and vital. Organizing workfare workers and immigrant workers in the strawberry fields, and pushing special campaigns among women workers-another new initiative President John Sweeney announced-are just what labor needs.

On the other hand, however, the only organized body representing the workers of this country remains politically tied to representatives of the very class that exploits, impoverishes and oppresses the workers: the capitalist class.

Workfare is a clear example. The whole reason the AFL-CIO has to take up the task of organizing workfare workers is because Clinton signed the law forcing welfare recipients into workfare.

The AFL-CIO leaders seem to think that staying close to Clinton and Gore will win labor a few crumbs. It has actually had just the opposite effect. Confident that they won't face a fight from the labor movement, Clinton, Gingrich and the rest keep driving the anti-worker juggernaut forward.

The union leaders say they will fight any moves against Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But their ability to wage an effective battle is limited by their alliance with the Clinton administration-which, along with the Republicans, is mounting these anti-worker attacks.

Now, even as it funds new organizing drives, the AFL-CIO remains in the grip of the same two contradictory trends that have been in evidence since John Sweeney won the AFL-CIO presidency in October 1995. One is new and wholly progressive: organizing the unorganized.

The other trend-relying on the Democratic Party-is an old one that has undercut labor. Being tied to an administration like Clinton's, which keeps yielding to the right, stands in the way of mounting independent working-class struggle to force concessions from the capitalist class.

Events in the three days leading up to the meeting dramatically highlighted the challenge facing the house of labor.

Newspaper and airline strikes

Sweeney and the Executive Council were confronted with a stark demonstration of how big capital's ongoing war against the workers is intensifying. First, on Feb. 14, the unions representing workers at the Detroit News and Free Press announced an unconditional end to the strike. The Detroit strikers had struggled for 18 months against the country's two biggest newspaper companies, Gannett and Knight-Ridder.

These media giants set out two years ago to break the unions. To do so they spent over $200,000 for every striking worker-- far more than meeting the unions' contract demands would have cost.

The newspaper industry and the entire capitalist class backed the Detroit bosses to the hilt. Still, until the international unions shut down the strike, the rank and file fought valiantly.

Then, shortly after midnight Feb. 15, President Clinton revealed himself as a raw union buster when he intervened to stop the strike American Airlines pilots had just initiated.

American's parent AMR Corp., airplane manufacturer Boeing, the Chambers of Commerce of Miami and Chicago, and former Democratic Speaker of the House Tom Foley-now a lobbyist for the airline-all told Clinton to stop the strike. The airline and related companies stood to lose an estimated $200 million a day if the pilots walked out.

So Clinton invoked the 1926 Railway Labor Act to order the Allied Pilots Association back to work minutes after the walkout began.

By ordering American Airlines pilots to work, Clinton abrogated the right to strike. In an era when enlightened labor-management relations are supposed to be the rule, this Democratic president openly aligned himself with the police-state tactics of bare-knuckled strike breaking.

More to the point, he showed which side the government is on. Starting with the White House, the government's role is to administer the capitalist system for the business class. That only means making concessions to the workers when it's forced to.

That's why independent working-class struggle is the most effective route to drive back the anti-labor attacks. The unions should be a central component of such struggle.

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