AFL-CIO Changes Leadership — Should We Expect Different Results?

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In September, Richard Trumka replaced John Sweeney as President of the AFL-CIO. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) includes 57 national and international unions representing 11.5 million members. The new leadership pledged at the Convention to continue to put resources into organizing and to reach out to young workers, women, minorities and immigrants in an effort to reverse the decline in membership of the past period.

The new President, 60-year-old Richard Trumka, has a militant history. He worked in a coal mine before becoming a labor lawyer, and after winning office as the leader of a reform slate in the Mineworkers he led the union in a long and hard strike against the Pittston Coal Company in the ’90s.

In 1995 the AFL-CIO, then the umbrella organization for almost all the unions in the U.S., booted out the failed leadership of Lane Kirkland in favor of the “New Voices” slate, headed by Service Employees’ (SEIU) chief John Sweeney and Trumka, who was elected Secretary-Treasurer. They called for resources to be poured into organizing to reverse the historic decline of union membership.

The turn to organizing went ahead, with some unions spending as much as 30% of their operating budgets on new organizing while the Federation itself committed $20 million in the first year of the project. But union membership continued to decline, thanks to unyielding employer opposition to unions, aided by the most anti-trade union laws in the advanced industrialized world, and vastly accelerated by the globalization of trade and manufacturing under Democratic President Clinton. A leadership promise to “withdraw support” from unfriendly Democrats never materialized. Fourteen years later, millions of union jobs have disappeared while NAFTA, free trade with China, and all of those anti-union laws remain in effect.

Change to Win Split
Reflecting the deepening crisis in the union leadership, in 2005 seven of the biggest unions, based mainly in services and construction where jobs aren’t easily sent offshore, broke away from the AFL-CIO to form a new labor federation, “Change to Win” (CTW). Any hopes that the split would take a progressive direction have long been dashed. The hallmark of CTW unions, particularly the SEIU and the Carpenters, has been a strategy of cutting deals with prospective employers; limiting demands for pay, benefits, and power on the job; and starting to become virtual labor agencies for the employers in order to increase the total of dues-paying members regardless of the cost to workers’ rights.

These sellout tactics have been sharply criticized by activists. When SEIU retaliated against criticism from its premier California health care local, United Healthcare Workers West (UHW), by putting it into receivership, the leadership of the local created a breakaway union rather than submit to a corrupt receiver. (http://socialistalternative.org/news/article14.php?id=1044)

Today, Change to Win is splintering, with the Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE) rejoining the AFL-CIO while the Carpenters have split off on their own – prompting the AFL-CIO to set up a committee to defend other unions from its raids.

But neither the AFL-CIO or CTW has stopped the hemorrhaging of good jobs and union membership and, far from breaking with the Democrats or even encouraging activists to change the party from within, the unions have actually strengthened the anti-labor right wing of the party.

In the 2006 and 2008 primaries, at a time when support for the Bush regime was collapsing, the union leadership used our money and endorsements to help the Democratic Party machine fund right-wing, pro-business candidates, including the ultra-conservative Blue Dog Democrats. These are the same men who today are amongst the strongest opponents of health care and labor law reform.

Massive disappointment
The Obama administration’s dismissal of single-payer health care while continuing to spend billions on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its senseless policy of “bipartisanship” with the avowed enemies of health care reform, and its shelving of the Employee Free Choice Act are spreading a crushing sense of disappointment amongst union activists. But the nearest Trumka came to acknowledging this in his acceptance speech was this blurry sideswipe: “And, Mr. President, so long as you stand for a public option (in health care) we are going to stand with you!”

This baseless, rhetorical threat highlights the real problem for Trumka, which is that there is nothing to show for the millions of union dollars and thousands of volunteer hours that were poured into the Democrats. The union leaders seem to have learned nothing from past experience. On the contrary, they apparently believe in miracles, such as, we will somehow get quality public health care and card check union recognition from a party that represents big business. What’s worse, they attack any member who suggests otherwise, taking the least hint of criticism as a sign of disloyalty to the union or to the icon of President Obama.

The relationship with the Democrats is an abusive one, in which the union leaders act like a victim who denies the abuse. The problem is that the real victims are not the well-paid union leaders but their 15 million dues-paying members. The leadership would rather stifle free speech and internal democracy than admit that their “partner,” the Democratic Party, is worthless. This lack of democracy disarms and demoralizes the membership instead of inspiring us to fight for what we need.

Real change will mean fighting for union democracy. It will also mean recognizing the class realities: when the employers’ need for profit clashes with our interests, something has to go. But that something has to be their profits, not our wages. When union members move into struggle they won’t accept the top-down bureaucratic methods they find within the unions. They will also want to know why so much of their dues money goes into the salaries and expenses of the leadership rather than funding campaigns to organize new members and fight for better pay and conditions.

Real Change Needed
The most urgent need is for the unions to become a movement on the streets again. This can happen if the unions use their huge resources to start a public campaign, including mass demonstrations in every major city, to demand an end to foreclosures and layoffs. Unions should fight for a program of public works to create good jobs at union wages, labor law reform, and Employee Free Choice. The labor movement should fight for free health care for all, paid for by taxes on the rich and cuts to war funding. When rallying support for these measures, the labor movement should call for taking banks and failing industries into public ownership under democratic workers’ and community control.

It goes without saying that the unions should end their abusive relationship with the Democrats who are owned lock, stock, and barrel by Wall Street and big business. What we need instead is to start supporting independent worker candidates and build a mass workers’ party to end the decaying evil of capitalism.

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