Organize, don’t split

One thousand AFL-CIO delegates will converge on Chicago July 25-28 to debate the future of the labor movement. The convention comes at a critical time for 13 million members, especially the low-paid workforce in service industries that is multinational and largely women. They face a relentless war at home perpetrated by Wall Street and “corporate America.”

Backed by a monopoly-minded capitalist government, its agencies, its courts and legislative arms comprising Republicans and Democrats alike, the war has been disastrous for the laboring masses.

Here lies the essence of the crisis: the dispute in the labor movement has created an unfavorable relationship of class forces fraught with danger for the AFL-CIO. The leadership should be planning a strategy of resistance to this war. Instead, hanging over the convention is the threat of a split over how the organization should be restructured.

This issue will not advance the economic and political interests of the rank and file or attract the millions of unorganized workers. Yes, an objective debate is a welcome development, and structural changes need discussion among the rank and file. But unfortunately, bureaucratic, top-down factions have developed around this issue. The word “split” is recklessly thrown around by one faction, which is relentlessly pushing for the changes.

Called the Change to Win Coalition, it is led by Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), with 1.8 million members. Joining him are leaders of the Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers, UNITE HERE! which includes garment, textile, hotel and restaurant workers, and the Laborers union. These unions are among the largest in the federation and would control the AFL-CIO under their structural proposals. Supporting them, but outside the AFL-CIO, is the Carpenters union.

The primary target of this coalition is John Sweeney, president of the 13-million member AFL-CIO for the last 10 years. There is every indication that he will be re-elected for a fifth term. As yet, he is running unopposed on a program of making some bureaucratic changes in structure and maintaining political alliances with the Democrats and moderate Republicans.

On foreign policy, in a shameful display of subservience to U.S. imperialism, the AFL-CIO accepts funds from the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front.

While Sweeney has mobilized a majority of the 57 affiliated unions in a call for unity, his 10-year leadership has been on a trail of retreat.

The federal minimum wage of $5.15 has not risen in seven years. Millions of immigrants work for less under conditions that violate labor laws.

Some 45 million people lack health insurance. For those who have it, premiums and out-of-pocket medical expenses have skyrocketed.

Rising inflation in the cost of food, housing, transportation and social services has wiped out meager wage increases.

Pensions and other gains won by the sweat and blood of years of struggle are down the drain.

Hard hit are the unemployed, along with people of color and their children who face racism and national oppression. The laboring masses are engulfed in a vicious downward spiral, which is pauperizing more and more of the unorganized workers and oppressed.

A false parallel

The Change to Win Coalition has confused its members by drawing a parallel between the situation today and the 1930s, when the Congress of Industrial Unions broke from the American Federation of Labor. SEIU President Andy Stern presents his strategy as a similar model for progressive change. But this is a stark misrepresentation.

The 1930s were characterized by militant, revolutionary class warfare, which forced “corporate America” to recognize a union movement that was recruiting millions of unorganized industrial workers and also forced a reluctant government to pass progressive labor and social legislation.

Before the CIO split from the AFL in 1938, three general strikes in 1934 and the historic General Motors sitdown in 1937 had helped organize industrial workers. The San Francisco longshore workers, led by Harry Bridges—a socialist-minded, class-conscious and militant leader—shut down the West Coast ports.

Today, that tradition is very much alive in Local 10 International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU). Their Black leadership initiated the Million Worker March Movement (MWMM), which set a splendid example during the last presidential election. They organized a march on Washington on Oct. 17, 2004, calling for independent political and classwide struggle against the wars abroad and the war on the workers and oppressed at home.

Other general strikes of the 1934 upsurge were organized by auto workers in Toledo, Ohio, and truck drivers in Minneapolis, Minn. Led by socialist-minded and progressive leaders, they too shut down the cities.

It wasn’t until 1935 that the Committee for Industrial Organization was born. It remained in the AFL until 1938. By then, following the historic seizure of General Motors plants, the CIO had recruited millions of industrial and unorganized workers. Black, white and other oppressed nationalities signed cards.

Women played an important role in those general strikes, but they faced discrimination by employers and were shut out of the industrial work force—which diminished their leadership in the CIO from the beginning.

Compare that upsurge with the conditions facing the laboring masses today. They are on the defensive, in retreat, awaiting a call from their leaders for resistance and struggle. It hasn’t happened. Dissension and demoralization has set in among the top AFL-CIO officials. Their inability to develop a strategy of struggle has led to this bureaucratic factional wrangling and threat of split.

Both factions are led by white men who have not consulted with their membership. They have muddied up the issues, yet both factions are demanding loyalty from their rank and file. The ruling class, as always, is united against the workers and the oppressed.

A split in the unions is a dangerous idea. There is still time for the Change to Win Coalition to pull back from the brink. However, regardless of the outcome of the factional fight, the convention will not be the last word.

Objective basis for optimism

According to a poll taken in Febru ary by Peter D. Hart and Associates, “Some 57 million non-union workers in the United States would form a union tomorrow if given the chance.”

In response to the poll, Stewart Acuff, director of the AFL-CIO Organizing Department, wrote an article dwelling on the perils facing the campaign to organize the unorganized. Says Acuff, “For many of them, especially women and people of color, having a union is often the difference between living in or out of poverty. Yet the truth is that a sophisticated and systematic effort to deny workers their basic freedom of association is rampant in this country.” (The Nation, April 18)

Acuff is considered to be a progressive leader within the AFL-CIO. He concludes that legislation would solve the problem.

In November 2003, the Employee Free Choice Act was introduced. This proposed law would oblige an employer to recognize a union when a majority of workers simply signed union cards, free of coercion from the boss. The act was signed by 210 members of the House of Representatives, less than eight short of a majority.

After two years it is still languishing in Congress. The AFL-CIO has relied on lobbying and collaborating with Democrats and moderate Republicans. But these legislators must feel the breath of mass struggle to act.

The AFL-CIO leaders are dreaming if they believe continuing on the lobbying road will get it passed and signed into law by Bush. Perhaps they are waiting for the 2008 presidential election. The Change to Win Coalition has not challenged this notion.

If either faction wants to follow the splendid example of the 1930s, they have to prepare for a class-wide, all-out, independent struggle that will shake the foundations of Congress and the White House. That is what forced the corporate bosses and the Wall Street financiers in the 1930s to bend to the will of the unorganized, bringing huge gains to the CIO and the AFL.

The coming AFL-CIO convention will not be the arena for a revival of the class struggle. Unity and struggle, not bureaucratic divisions, are what is necessary. Neither faction will take a stand against the Iraq war or call for the end of the occupation and bringing the troops home now. The AFL-CIO has given silent approval to this imperialist war, which has diverted hundreds of billions of tax dollars from social services.

There is growing opposition to both capitalist parties brought on by the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is true among rank and file trade unionists and particularly workers of color who have joined the military to escape poverty.

Militant, class-wide solidarity among the workers, immigrants and born here, can attract and inspire anti-war activists and the militant global anti-imperialist movements, and can coalesce with the struggle of women and the lesbian-gay-bi-trans movement. Very important are the Black and Latin@ movements and others fighting national oppression. The face of unity will bring forth solidarity from abroad with those who are fighting the empire.

There is a model for this development. The MWMM, led by Black trade union leaders and their allies in the oppressed communities, is for broad unity. They have set a splendid example in protests and demonstrations that have attracted people of color and white workers.

As the crisis of monopoly capitalism intensifies and the empire continues to decline around the world, movements like the MWMM will grow and come together with other movements with a collective will to change the relationship of class forces, inaugurating an era of social, political and economic change.

New leaders will rise in the stormy days ahead. The AFL-CIO leadership is no longer homogeneous. However the faction fight turns out, there will be doors opened for independent and class-wide unity. All profound and progressive change begins with organizing from below. The laboring masses will begin to build for a massive struggle in their own name.

Neidenberg belonged to Steelworkers Local 2604 and was a member of the negotiating committee for Teamsters Local 840. He is now retired.