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Today's
Stories
October
6, 2003
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
October
3 / 5, 2003
Tim Wise
The
Other Race Card: Rush and the Politics of White Resentment
Peter
Linebaugh
Rhymsters
and Revolutionaries: Joe Hill and the IWW
Gary Leupp
Occupation
as Rape-Marriage
Bruce
Jackson
Addio
Alle Armi
David Krieger
A Nuclear 9/11?
Ray McGovern
L'Affaire Wilsons: Wives are Now "Fair Game" in Bush's
War on Whistleblowers
Col. Dan Smith
Why Saddam Didn't Come Clean
Mickey
Z.
In Our Own Image: Teaching Iraq How to Deal with Protest
Roger Burbach
Bush Ideologues v. Big Oil in Iraq
John Chuckman
Wesley Clark is Not Cincinnatus
William S. Lind
Versailles on the Potomac
Glen T.
Martin
The Corruptions of Patriotism
Anat Yisraeli
Bereavement as Israeli Ethos
Wayne
Madsen
Can the Republicans Get Much Worse? Sure, They Can
M. Junaid Alam
The Racism Barrier
William
Benzon
Scorcese's Blues
Adam Engel
The Great American Writing Contest
Poets'
Basement
McNeill, Albert, Guthrie
October
2, 2003
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
What's
So Great About Gandhi, Anyway?
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
The
Ashcroft-Rove Connection
Doug Giebel
Kiss and Smear: Novak and the Valerie Plame Affair
Hamid
Dabashi
The Moment of Myth: Edward Said (1935-2003)
Elaine Cassel
Chicago Condemns Patriot Act
Saul Landau
Who
Got Us Into This Mess?
Website of the Day
Last Day to Save Beit Arabiya!
October 1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Married
with Children: the Supremes and Gay Families
Robert
Fisk
Oil,
War and Panic
Ron Jacobs
Xenophobia
as State Policy
Elaine
Cassel
The
Lamo Case: Secret Subpoenas and the Patriot Act
Shyam
Oberoi
Shooting
a Tiger
Toni Solo
Plan Condor, the Sequel?
Sean Donahue
Wesley
Clark and the "No Fly" List
Website of the Day
Downloader Legal Defense Fund
September
30, 2003
After
Dark
Arnold's
1977 Photo Shoot
Dave Lindorff
The
Poll of the Shirt: Bush Isn't Wearing Well
Tom Crumpacker
The
Cuba Fixation: Shaking Down American Travelers
Robert
Fisk
A
Lesson in Obfuscation
Charles
Sullivan
A
Message to Conservatives
Suren Pillay
Edward Said: a South African Perspective
Naeem
Mohaiemen
Said at Oberlin: Hysteria in the Face of Truth
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
Does
a Felon Rove the White House?
Website
of the Day
The Edward Said Page
September 29, 2003
Robert
Fisk
The
Myths of Western Intelligence Agencies
Iain A. Boal
Turn It Up: Pardon Mzwakhe Mbuli!
Lee Sustar
Paul
Krugman: the Last Liberal?
Wayne Madsen
General Envy? Think Shinseki, Not Clark
Benjamin
Dangl
Bolivia's Gas War
Uri Avnery
The
Magnificent 27
Pledge
Drive of the Day
Antiwar.com
September
26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
September
25, 2003
Edward
Said
Dignity,
Solidarity and the Penal Colony
Robert
Fisk
Fanning
the Flames of Hatred
Sarah
Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak
Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime
Michael
S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs
Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights
Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate
Heart
Website
of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
October
6, 2003
The New Unity Partnership:
A
Manifest Destiny for Labor
By
JOANN WYPIJEWSKI
Since unions are supposed to be organizations
of workers, we at CounterPunch thought the members might like
the opportunity to review a document cobbled up by five union
presidents outlining big plans to spend the workers' money, consolidate
their unions and revamp institutional labor -- whether by breaking
with the AFL-CIO or destroying it and remaking it in the image
of this particular gang of five is not entirely clear. Members
aren't likely to get this opportunity through any formal union
channels. Published here with an assist from Carpenters
for a Democratic Union, the draft program of the New
Unity Partnership, or, less alluringly, NUP, is long on the language
of management theory ("growth", "density",
"market share") and short on such fuddy-duddy concepts
as "class", "worker participation", "social
movements" or "democracy".
That is hardly unusual for union bureaucrats.
The twist here is that the NUP project is trading on the progressive
credentials of SEIU's Andy Stern, HERE's John Wilhelm , UNITE's
Bruce Raynor and, to a lesser extent, the Laborers' Terry O'Sullivan
to present itself as the vanguard of militant unionism, holding
aloft the banner "Organize or Die!", a rather ugly
slogan formulated by their rather ugly partner, the right-wing
president of the Carpenters union, Doug McCarron.
As outlined in the document, in press
interviews and in internal papers, these five raise the familiar
alarum about union decline and, as a solution, envision a drastic
restructuring of institutional labor, taking the sixty-six unions
currently in the AFL and merging them into twelve to fifteen
mega-unions, forged along industry lines and operating according
to a "strategic growth plan". The plan would be approved
at the top and advanced through the provinces with the help of
a similarly restructured network of state labor federations and
local labor councils, whose presidents would be figureheads and
whose real power would be wielded by "chief operating officers",
appointed by and serving at the behest of the national leadership.
The current messy, sometimes corrupt, sometimes vibrant system
of elections and local control would go out the window. The Organizing
Department would be renamed the Strategic Growth Department,
and the document lists every segment of the federation that bears
a name that actually has some relationship to human concerns--policy,
education, health and safety, civil and human rights--under the
column headed "Reduce/Eliminate or Refocus". Seventy-seven
percent of all resources would go toward organizing and most
of the rest to politics, both of which would be single-mindedly
focussed on growth. The culture, traditions and history of faltering
unions that, under this plan, didn't get to keep their names
and colors and identifying insignia as part of the chosen twelve
or fifteen would be swept away, the clutter of old days. The
workers, many of whom rightly or wrongly perceive the union's
relevance in just such things, would be no more than the dues
units they already too often are, though every once in a while
they'd be herded onto buses, dressed in identical T-shirts and
"mobilized" for some purpose decreed from the top.
The document, curious in that it lays
out on an agenda specific to these unions and simultaneously
foresees a new federation streamlined in their image, places
all its bets on the concept of power through density. That is,
the greater the percentage of workers unionized in a given sector
of the economy (health care, construction, tourism, etc.), the
greater the union's market share, hence its power to set wages
and conditions. It's meant to be a model, and the four presidents
still in the federation say they are not pulling out, not yet.
The idea, as Stern told Business Week, is "build it and
they will come", though just where the United Mine Workers,
say, or public sector workers faced with private outsourcing
and government repression would have to go is unclear.
From its first page the NUP plan discloses
the corporatist bent of its creators:
Multi-Union Growth Partnership
1. Private Sector--The Partnership will
be for private sector growth only
2. Sector Designation(s)--Each union will be assigned a unique
occupation and/or and [sic] industry sector(s) to concentrate
its growth efforts.
3. Capacity--Unions will demonstrate the capacity to organize
through historical efforts and current resource allocation.
4. Strategic Growth Plans--Each union will have an approved strategic
growth plan.
5. Unite Effort Common Employer [sic]--Unions will establish
plans, to unite its [sic] bargaining and/or growth efforts for
common employers or common industry sectors.
6. Capital Strategies--Create a joint capital strategies program
for growth
7. Politics--Develop common political efforts for growth--meet
jointly with Congressional leadership to discuss growth goals--meet
jointly with moderate Republicans--meet with Karl Rove -?
That final question mark leaves room
for much speculation, but the rest of item No. 7 is redolent
with the politics of the deal. And the deal, as history shows,
is a dead end--for progressive change, for the prospects of labor
in a larger social movement, for the long-term interests of the
working class and of unions. Typically the deal was made between
union bureaucrats and Democratic leaders, goodies thrown to unions
in return for not upsetting the racist balance within the party,
for not striking in war time, for not meddling in fundamental
questions of the economy, for helping to prosecute the cold war
and so on. The radical innovation here is to kowtow to Republicans,
specifically to the most antiunion administration in memory.
There's something desperate about the idea, something left too
long to boil in an overheated imagination, oblivious to real-world
dynamics. One imagines the five hastening to the longed-for meeting
with Karl Rove. What might they get, these petitioners in a position
of weakness and disunity? Labor law reform? An end to right-to-work
laws? Immigration reform with protection of civil liberties?
A ratcheting of wages and conditions up, not down? In the grand
far-away, George Meany had power, and still he leveraged it against
the needs and interests of all those groups with whom organized
labor has finally, slowly started making alliances: blacks, Latinos,
women, poor people, gay people, environmentalists, community
organizations, international unionists.
This section bears the hoofprint of the
Carpenters' McCarron, who pulled out of the AFL in 2001and has
feted George W. at two Labor Day picnics. A cheap date, he got
a visit on Air Force One. Along with the Teamsters' president,
James Hoffa, whom the NUPsters are heavily courting, he is the
Republicans' favorite labor leader. At a recent fundraising dinner
for the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, McCarron
and Hoffa both purchased tables. So did the other NUPsters, except
UNITE's Raynor. In the midst of Clinton's betrayals, all of these
unions had vowed to steer a more independent course in politics.
"Independent" has turned out to mean "Republican-friendly".
So far in the scramble for the Democratic presidential nomination,
the Teamsters and Laborers have endorsed that towering party
nonconformist, Richard Gephardt.
Why then is the New Unity Partnership
being hailed in some quarters as the "progressive"
alternative to John Sweeney? The answer is complicated, not least
because the AFL-CIO is a lot of the things the NUPsters say it
is: tradition-bound, bureaucratic, slow to change, hard to change.
Like any federated institution--like the UN, for that matter--it
is a collection of entities, all headed by individuals with their
own quirks and interests and power bases. When Sweeney took office
in 1995 many in labor and on its left/liberal fringes had inflated
hopes: a million new members a year, a bold political program,
a vigorous international agenda detached from cold war imperatives,
cities alive with workers and others in militant coalition, a
born-again institution poised to jumpstart a born-again mass
movement.
Of course, all of that was never possible.
To begin with, the falling rate of profit, the global economy
and continued loss of manufacturing, the growing casualization
of work, the rise of low-wage behemoths like Wal-Mart, posed
unprecedented challenges. Second, labor was at a low ebb not
only in popular opinion but among its own members. And, apart
from the fallacy that institutions are capable of generating
movement, there is the nature of the institution itself. Even
with fortuitous circumstances and the best will in the world,
Sweeney could no more compel affiliated unions to organize, mobilize,
clean up and become beacons of radical resistance than Kofi Annan
could compel Saddam Hussein to play nice, or George Bush to abandon
dreams of world domination. Nor could he force local labor bodies,
the state feds and central labor councils, to get with the program
if their elected officials were, as so often, time-serving members
of the building trades disinclined to the New Voices. That's
the downside of elected leadership. The upside, which some of
the NUPsters who want to get rid of it are well aware, is that
in the even darker days before Sweeney, such leadership made
it possible to put up a fight locally when that wasn't on the
agenda of Lane Kirkland; indeed, the central labor councils were
critical to Sweeney's victory over the old guard. Now Sweeney
is the old guard, a lame duck until suddenly on September 18,
amid the din of New Unity noises, he announced that he would
not retire in 2005, as expected, but would seek re-election.
What's ironic is that all of the five
but McCarron have been on the Executive Council of the AFL, and
thus responsible for its direction, for years. Four of the five
preside over unions that, despite major overhauls, have not yet
straightened out their own houses from Mob rule (HERE and the
Laborers) or are regarded with suspicion by certain classes of
workers because of past practices (the Carpenters and UNITE).
SEIU, with 1.3 million members, is the biggest, most powerful
union in the federation, and Stern was important in engineering
Sweeney's 1995 victory. They are cozying up to Hoffa, never anyone's
idea of a reformer, whose union, despite its historic association
with truckers, has shown no interest in sectoral purity. Their
liaison to Hoffa is the oily Greg Tarpinian, listed on the NUP
document as potential staff, a former Communist who saw the light
when Hoffa and Teamsters hoary bosses started shoveling him cash
to help them knock out Ron Carey. I'll never forget a party Hoffa
threw in a New York hotel room a few years ago after Tarpinian's
Labor Research Association held a fundraiser honoring him. Tarpinian
was crooning about "leftists for Hoffa" and the great
man's visions for leading a fighting labor movement while upstairs
squirrelly guys in cheap suits were hitching up their pants,
hurrying out of bedrooms in disarray, past attractive young Latinas
who, in modified bedroom scuffs and casual street wear, definitely
weren't their dates.
Everything about this partnership is
puzzling. The names Wilhelm, O'Sullivan and Raynor had been batted
around for some time as possible successors to Sweeney and, on
the face of it, their priorities have been his. With Stern, they
were the most insistent forces that led the federation to change
its policy on immigrants, who form a huge portion of their core
membership--hotel and restaurant workers (HERE), laborers (LIUNA),
garment and laundry workers (UNITE), janitors and health care
workers (SEIU)--and of the population they seek to organize.
One of the federation's biggest projects this fall was HERE's
cross-country Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, which the AFL supplied
with money, staff and coordination. The federation's biggest
single organizing priority, proclaimed ceaselessly and heavily
bolstered with money and staff, is the nationwide Cintas laundry
campaign, involving UNITE and the Teamsters. (A further irony
in that this campaign, so dependent on federation support, was
identified by Business Week's rather toadying reporter, Aaron
Bernstein, as the kind of organizing we're likely to see "if
the partnership gets off the ground".) And the federation's
longest-running moral preoccupation, the right to organize, is
the same one the NUPsters proclaim. Back in 1997 Sweeney's first
organizing director, Richard Bensinger, held conferences all
over the country that were part doomsday scenario, part revival
meeting, in which he preached the gospel that the fight for labor
rights had to be the new civil rights movement. AFL HQ is still
heavily pushing that, and another strategy of action will kick
off on December 10 in conjunction with the community-labor coalition
Jobs With Justice, but the NUP document lists this as if it were
a new idea. Bensinger, meanwhile, is now with NUP, also included
in the document as potential staff.
Bensinger was always particularly good
at massaging the press--Bernstein is one of his boys--and particularly
good at trying to steer progressive journalists toward writing
love letters about "my guys", the "organizing
unions", and heaping sewage upon the heads of union dinosaurs.
It wasn't surprising, then, that Harold Meyerson of the American
Prospect wrote a fawning piece on the NUP, much circulated over
the Internet, titled "Organize or Die". The funny thing
is that Bensinger used to affect to care about such things as
democracy, social movement orientation, etc. Now he is flacking
for the progressive credentials of a partnership whose most blustery
exponent, McCarron, told an association of employers, "We're
serious about reorganizing the industry. We're serious about
customer service." By that formulation, the union is a business,
the workers servants, but as a slogan "Serve or Die"
might be a difficult sell. Union carpenters have had no say in
the NUP venture (neither have any rank and file), just as they
had no say in the matter of their union's exit from the AFL and
have almost no say in the way their union is run. They don't
elect their leaders; most of them don't even get to vote on their
contracts. McCarron has stripped their locals of power, investing
authority in regional councils, most of whose leadership he has
manipulated into place.
This is a template for the NUP, but it
would be a mistake to credit it all to McCarron. The actual document
appeared in two different fonts, one seeming to have come directly
from the laptop of SEIU strategist Steve Lerner, whose earlier
confidential paper on "Reorganizing and Rebuilding the Labor
Movement" contains some of the same material. Lerner, too,
has fatted off various AFL calves before now turning in an apparent
attempt to slay the mother cow. He was a central player in one
of the Sweeney team's first splashy, and disastrous, organizing
campaigns, in support of the United Farm Workers, focussing on
the strawberry workers of California. I'll never forget the kick-off
rally in Watsonville in 1997. It was huge and vibrating with
the rhythms of Mexico and street-level America, just the kind
of thing leftists hoping for a resurgence of labor as the spark
for a broader movement were waiting for. Back then, too, everyone
was talking "Organize!", "Mobilize!" "Si
se puede!" Lerner's wife, Marilyn Schneiderman, had become
the AFL's director of field mobilization, a position she still
holds, though the NUP would eliminate her department. The field
mobe staff metastasized, as did the strawberry campaign staff
in Watsonville--the infusions of money and people, organizers!,
blinding the strategists to what was most important. They didn't
understand the fields, didn't understand the workers, didn't
understand the power of history. In the end their inspiring rally
and go-go efforts were worse than nothing. The more money Lerner's
team got and the more energy it expended, the more it seemed
to prove employers' claims over the long, bumpy run of the UFW
that See, the union doesn't belong to the workers; it's an outsiders'
thing.
Of course, employers play dirty, but
when workers are convinced by Chicano foremen leading an anti-union
drive that they are more representative, that they are the hometown
team (as happened with the strawberry workers), even the brainiest
organizer ought to ask, What went wrong? Similarly, back in the
early nineties one of the most galvanizing organizing efforts,
SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles, took a surprising
turn after workers signed on with the union and then mistakenly
thought it was theirs. John Sweeney was president of SEIU at
the time, and Andy Stern the architect of the janitors campaign.
They stopped traffic and blocked bridges; they won, and hopeful
leftists, with visions of movement a-dance in their head, thought,
This might be it! How it came to pass that when the newly organized
janitors had a chance to vote on the make-up of their local they
repudiated almost the entire sitting leadership is not a simple
story, but no one seemed interested in answers involving the
workers' will. Sweeney put the local under trusteeship, and Stern's
tenure as SEIU president has been marked by the creation of giant
locals, statewide locals, multi-state locals, locals that belong
less to the workers than to the staff.
It is hard not to be impressed by SEIU
staff. They tend to be young, educated, tireless, possessed of
a knowledge of movement history, labor and left political history
far beyond their years. It seems they are more often than not
smart white men with middle-class roots, but that could be my
bias. They are known for an all-consuming dedication that isn't
likely to be envied by SEIU janitors or orderlies trying to find
time for the kids and the bills and a little rest. They work
for a union that has signed up half a million new members in
the past few years and that is not content simply to weigh union
revenues against expenses and leave it at that. SEIU seems to
be on a mission from God, and that is part of the problem.
In the NUP document the gloomy portrait
of the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy and labor's
failure to address that shift echoes Lerner's earlier paper.
The choice is clear: "make history by fundamentally changingSto
respond to today's employers, orSpreside over organized labor's
continued decline". The favored reference is to the CIO,
whose "bold leaders found the AFL structure inadequate"
when mass-production industries changed the shape and organization
of work. At a party recently a fervent young SEIU staff guy argued
to a friend of mine that SEIU itself could be the new CIO, but
the NUP is a partnership, so grandiosity is tempered: SEIU and
the other four horsemen could be the new CIO.
A few things are missing from the NUPsters'
analysis.
Their strategy doesn't address the complexities
of the new economy any more than anyone else's. The shift from
high-wage manufacturing to low-wage services is only part of
the picture. These unions represent low-wage work in industries
that can't move offshore (UNITE has pretty much given up on organizing
garment and textile workers). As a plan without pretensions to
do any more than coordinate actions among themselves--say, to
organize tall buildings in an urban core, which carpenters and
laborers help build, which maids, restaurant and retail workers,
janitors, custodians and doormen service, and whose dirty rugs
and linen industrial laundry workers clean--it might be fine.
But there still are manufacturing workers in America, more than
5 million of them unionized, and about their problems the plan
is mute. For the average worker who asks, "What happens
if they move my job?" the NUPsters have no more of an answer
than the AFL-CIO. And now that calling centers, high-tech work,
research and development, are being moved off shore, things aren't
even as straightforward as the manufacturing/services binary
suggests. In thirteen pages of their document there's exactly
one sentence on developing "long-term strategies with union
members in other countries who work for the same employers or
industries". How this might be conceptualized when workers
in Honduras and Nicaragua are making wage concessions to keep
production from moving to China is anyone's guess. There's not
a word about prison labor, now building furniture and taking
reservations, among other things, here in the US and elsewhere.
Nothing about the explosion in casual labor, the extension of
social relations between worker, labor contractor and employer
that once pertained only in farm work and is now common in garment
work, tourism, construction, cleaning, you name it. It's not
even clear the NUPsters have an answer to so conventional, if
brutish, an employer as Wal-Mart, which is rich, repressive and
totally unconcerned about maintaining a stable labor force. How
do you organize a company that has 700,000 new people churning
through it each year, representing an annual turnover rate of
70 percent? The point is not that the NUPsters should have figured
all of this out, just that their arrogance in the absence of
having done so is rather breathtaking.
The CIO didn't just happen because John
L. Lewis marched his troops out of the AFL. Of course, the gang
of five know this; at least Stern, Raynor and Wilhelm, all Ivy
League grads well-versed in movement history, know it. But they
appear to be moved now by a sense of destiny as products of the
sixties and as organizers in a milieu too ready to accept the
notion of the organizer as hero, by a feeling, expressed frequently
in their speeches at AFL conventions, that it is their generational
duty, their turn. "If not us, who?" Charitably, one
could say they have a passionate impatience. The problem is that
real change in this country has never happened because of a few
smart guys. It took at least fifty years for workers to figure
out industrial organizing. When it finally had lift-off it was
as part of a mass movement. In the meantime locals developed,
as the name implies, locally, through a combination of job actions,
mutual aid, cultural activities, political education, party activity,
target practice, newspapers, picnics, the warp and woof of life.
When the famous "spurt" occurred in the 1930s, the
workers' organizations that emerged didn't follow some checklist
that a few national leaders had drawn up years before in closed
meetings. They took the shape people needed them to take, and
remained workers' organizations truly only so long as people
were on the move. While that was the case, the old AFL unions
grew too, significantly, despite their structure. In the draft
of his confidential paper, Lerner notes that "we can't create
a spurt or movement out of sheer will" but argues that institutional
structure plays a critical role in creating the conditions for
it. "If we could start from scratch", he asks, "and
weren't handcuffed by history, tradition and protecting individual
leaders [sic] domains, would we create a labor movement that
is structured like this one?" Apart from anything else the
question ignores the fact that in periods of upsurge, whenever
people have slipped the handcuff of history they haven't filed
neatly into existing structures; they've created their own. In
the next spurt, whatever the NUPsters hatch, they are likely
to do the same.
Density does not automatically equal
power, at least for workers. If it did, Mexican workers, mustered
in the CTM, would have First World wages and conditions and would
have successfully resisted the rise of maquiladoras, the looting
of the private sector, the explosion of millionaires and the
general misery. French workers, often toiling beside others affiliated
with totally different unions in the same workplace, would be
utterly disabled. Unions have to be more than columns of numbers,
grouped by industry sector. One of SEIU's biggest "organizing"
coups recently came through a deal cut with Tenet Healthcare
Services, the second-biggest for-profit hospital chain, recently
mired in lawsuits, financial scandals, government investigations
for fraud and unnecessary surgeries. Tenet called the deal, which
also involves an AFSCME affiliate, a "strategic alliance",
a "powerful new partnership" to "achieve labor
peace". Workers in the forty-two hospitals involved could
accept or reject the deal but had no hand in shaping it. The
California Nurses Association, which had been organizing in a
number of the hospitals, would be out of the game. A four-year
contract was agreed upon even before the workers voted. SEIU's
pitch to workers has been all in the language of density, arguing
the benefits to be accrued from belonging to the nation's largest
health-care union. The workers will get raises, but will they
have power? Will patients have power? Is this "choice"
the best choice? Drafted into an organization they did nothing
to build, will workers care about it? If we can't peg how institutional
structure contributes to mass movement, we do know how it contributes,
or not, to individual consciousness. We do know how things work
when they work as monopolies. We know how they work absent class
solidarity, rank-and-file participation, a broader sense of social
engagement. Some SEIU staff say straight up, "This isn't
a workers' organization. If it was left to the workers there
wouldn't be an organization." In his paper, Lerner dispenses
with the question of democracy saying, "It is too narrow
to talk of union democracy only--the question of how a union
is governed--we need to talk more broadly about how unions are
strong enough locally and nationally to win economic justice
and democracy for workers. If only 10% of workers in an industry
are unionized it is impossible to have real union democracy because
90% of the workers are excluded." This is clever, but, like
the NUP, it shouldn't masquerade as novel, progressive or a rosy-edged
dawn for the working class.
JoAnn Wypijewski, former managing editor of The Nation, writes
about labor and politics for CounterPunch. She can be reached
at: jw@counterpunch.org.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 26 / 28, 2003
Tim Wise
The
Other Race Card: Rush and the Politics of White Resentment
Peter
Linebaugh
Rhymsters
and Revolutionaries: Joe Hill and the IWW
Gary Leupp
Occupation
as Rape-Marriage
Bruce
Jackson
Addio
Alle Armi
David Krieger
A Nuclear 9/11?
Ray McGovern
L'Affaire Wilsons: Wives are Now "Fair Game" in Bush's
War on Whistleblowers
Col. Dan Smith
Why Saddam Didn't Come Clean
Mickey
Z.
In Our Own Image: Teaching Iraq How to Deal with Protest
Roger Burbach
Bush Ideologues v. Big Oil in Iraq
John Chuckman
Wesley Clark is Not Cincinnatus
William S. Lind
Versailles on the Potomac
Glen T.
Martin
The Corruptions of Patriotism
Anat Yisraeli
Bereavement as Israeli Ethos
Wayne
Madsen
Can the Republicans Get Much Worse? Sure, They Can
M. Junaid Alam
The Racism Barrier
William
Benzon
Scorcese's Blues
Adam Engel
The Great American Writing Contest
Poets'
Basement
McNeill, Albert, Guthrie
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