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Radio Mon.: Which Way Forward for Labor?
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Traven
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Jun 20, 2008 15:54 PDT
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Please tune in to
Equal Time Radio, Monday at
1:10 p.m. WDEV 550AM/96.1FM
to hear Bill Fletcher/Fernando Gapasin on
"Which Way Forward for Labor?"
Call in your comments and questions to
244-1777 or
1-877-291-8255
Which Way Forward for Labor? A Review of Solidarity Divided
By Steven Sherman
May 29, 2008
Monthly Review
Provoked by the continuing crisis of organized labor
after the departure of the Change to Win coalition of
unions from the AFL-CIO in 2005, Bill Fletcher, Jr. and
Fernando Gapasin have produced a new book, Solidarity
Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and A New Path
toward Social Justice <
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/11121.php>;.
Hopefully the text will inspire debate, both within the
labor movement and the Left. Solidarity Divided
compliments Kim Moody's US Labor in Trouble and
Transition <sherman270308.html>, also produced after the
split. But the two books focus on different aspects.
Moody delineates the features of the current US
industrial structure to highlight where labor might
organize most effectively. On the other hand,
Fletcher and Gapasin highlight the politics of the
unions to raise questions about the fundamental purpose
of labor unions. Ultimately, they outline an alternative
labor movement that would possess only the most limited
family relation to the current national union
federations.
They foreground a number of problems with the current
union movement -- its lack of democracy and space for
debate; the inertia of its structures, which tend to
swallow reform efforts; and the limited horizon of its
political vision. All of these are related. American
unions, in a tradition dating back to Samuel Gompers <
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Gompers>;, imagine
themselves, for the most part, as fighting for the
wellbeing of their members, rather than the working
class.
The narrowness of this perspective has led unions to
accommodate themselves to racism and sexism, rather than
to undo them, and to swim with the (permanent) Cold War
tide that structures politics in the US, thus
participating in regular purges of the Left. Until
recently the unions had a wholly uncritical relationship
to US foreign policy, and that has changed in only the
most limited ways. In the past few years, US unions no
longer aided and abetted right-wing union movements
abroad (for the most part), but they still remain mute
about the role of the US in the wider world.
Fletcher and Gapasin identify a number of moments when a
political leadership could have effectively intervened
-- for example, the national union movement did
successfully back the unjustly persecuted Charleston 5 <
http://www.ilwu19.com/global/charleston/b/charleston5.ht
m>, but then did nothing to learn from the victory or
use it to energize a largely demoralized movement.
Another example is the Los Angeles Manufacturing Project
(LAMAP). This effort attempted to combine the strengths
of unions, ethnic communities, and universities to
organize workers in the strategic Alameda Corridor, the
primary access point for Pacific Rim goods and the site
of about 300,000 manufacturing jobs. The unions
ultimately offered only limit support, because this was
seen as an initiative from "outside." Yet it was
difficult to see how the inspiration for bringing
together the varied coalition envisioned could have come
from within the unions.
Katrina is another example: a political union movement
might have intervened to shape the debate about aid,
reconstruction, etc. But contemporary unions mostly
react to such disasters through depoliticized volunteer
efforts.
Fletcher and Gapasin discuss the rise of John Sweeney <
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sweeney_%28labor_leade
r%29> and the departure of the Change to Win coalition
in considerable detail. They are slightly more
sympathetic to Sweeney than to Andy Stern <
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Stern>; (the leader of
SEIU, who led the charge of Change to Win out of the
AFL-CIO), but they write with great frustration about
both (they also note that failures of leadership are
rarely simply the fault of "misleaders" but often are
rooted in the material bases of their power, though they
don't really use this to illuminate the leaders of the
unions, beyond noting the way they are often prisoners
of the bureaucratic traditions they embody).
They see Sweeney as a genuine reformer, and offer some
praise for his educational initiatives and his
willingness to move the unions into a little more
combative stance, epitomized by his speech about
globalization at the anti-racism conference in Durban.
Yet Sweeney's politics were also limited -- in that same
speech, he carefully avoided any reference to US foreign
policy.
As a political figure, Sweeney was unable to control the
narrative unfolding during his tenure. For example,
those who would later leave the AFL-CIO on the grounds
that it was not committed to organizing had earlier
attacked Sweeney's efforts to devote national resources
to organizing on the grounds that it was wasteful.
The authors seem to be less sympathetic to Stern -- at
one point, they suggest the push for "consolidation"
among the Change to Win federation is an effort to
preserve the leadership as a domain of white male
privilege. Stern is portrayed as something of a neo-
Gompersian figure who cravenly seeks only to expand his
union, while simply accommodating himself to all
reactionary political currents swirling about him.
They are dismissive of Change to Win's emphasis on
workers who are less directly affected by globalization
than industrial workers, regarding this as basically
illusory (although one could point to similar tensions
in the union movements of other countries, on which an
analysis of how union leaders embody larger dynamics,
rather than simply "mislead," might have been usefully
brought to bear).
Perhaps their greatest frustration is that the crisis
that triggered John Sweeney's ascension, and later the
split, did not produce a meaningful, inclusive debate
about the direction of the labor movement. Virtually all
the discussions were held among the top leaders, and
even those discussions were inadequate. They include as
an appendix a proposal that circulated about how to
create a productive discussion within the labor
movement, but this proposal was ignored.
Thousands of comments from union members on a message
board were not meaningfully integrated into the
discussion or used as the basis for a deeper debate. The
split itself was announced as a fait accompli before the
AFL-CIO convention when more grassroots members might
have been able to offer their opinions. And so the labor
movement has been divided, but a rich discussion about
its purpose and future has been tabled.
As a way forward, Fletcher and Gapasin advocate "social
justice unionism." This envisions unions joining
together with other working-class organizations to fight
for the broad interests of the working class, locally,
nationally, and internationally. Union membership and
contract negotiation would be considered but one element
of the picture. This movement would also enter into the
fray on such questions as health care, the uses of urban
space (affordable housing, parks, etc.), transportation,
the creation of a sustainable economy and society,
structural unemployment, and so forth.
Unions would both reach out to oppressed racial and
ethnic communities as a solidarity resource in struggle
and join the fight against racism and sexism as the path
towards a more inclusive and just society. The authors
see some hope in labor-community alliances that have
formed but argue for a much broader purpose for these
alliances than the single-issue campaigns and support
work they have typically pursued.
They believe these alliances can be remade into
"workers' assemblies" which can struggle for
"consistent
democracy" in all aspects of American life. They see the
municipal level as more amenable to this sort of
organizing than the national unions or federations. Thus
a revitalization of the Central Labor Councils is
crucial.
While heartening, this agenda begs questions of agency.
Although there is more room to maneuver at the local
level, union locals are by no means autonomous from the
nationals, and they would likely be reined in if they
departed too radically from the traditional practices of
trade unionism. Furthermore, the community organizations
unions might seek as allies are, for the most part, not
vital, grassroots social movements.
In practice, they are primarily non-profits and
religious institutions, which, not unlike unions,
bureaucratically advocate for members' interests and are
often ambivalent about triggering mobilizations and
constrained by funding considerations in the language
they use (the challenges of creating combative social
movements in this context was well discussed in The
Revolution Will Not be Funded <
http://www.southendpress.org/2006/items/87662>;).
Fletcher and Gasparin call on the Left to intervene to
make the transformation they desire, but they themselves
concede that the Left is extremely weak, fragmented, and
amorphous and that leftists acting individually are more
likely to get sucked into the status quo practices of
organizations than remake them.
I want to end by making a couple of suggestions about
how the Left can constitute itself as a more assertive
force within the US, thus perhaps creating the context
to begin to transform the current union federations into
a labor movement of the sort Fletcher and Gasparin
advocate for. A broader Left could offer support to its
members as they sought to build workers' assemblies and
could help them share nationally what is working and not
working. One step would be for the remaining anti-
capitalist/socialist groupings to enter into some sort
of umbrella organization.
This might include (but is not necessarily limited to)
the Communist Party, the ISO, Solidarity, Freedom Road,
and the Green Party (there are a few socialist
organizations which remain entirely unreformed in their
commitment to sectarian intervention and almost cult-
like in their internal organization; their participation
would not be so welcome). Although important political
questions divide these groups, creating a space for some
engagement and debate should not be so difficult (at the
municipal level, some of these groups already work
together). Regardless of how they feel about working
with the Democrats on electoral campaigns (for example),
these groups are much closer to each other in terms of
political vision than to any other tendencies in
American political life.
Surely none seriously believe that, alone, they can
constitute a vanguard or even a viable third party. An
umbrella organization would immediately expand the
networks of all involved, increase the capacity of the
socialist Left to make an impact, and make the socialist
Left more attractive to unaffiliated leftists hesitant
about adhering to a narrow sect. It would likely also
improve the quality of debate all around.
A second potential site of American Left renewal is the
US Social Forum <sherman040707.html> (surprisingly
absent from Fletcher and Gapasin's analysis). In terms
of the network of groups who mobilized for it last year
in Atlanta, it resembles those the authors see as
constituting workers' assemblies (community
organizations, unions, workers' centers, etc.).
The great danger of social forums is that they simply
turn into a pleasant retreat for those on the Left,
rather than a spur to more effective forms of
organizing. But in part because it is much less well
endowed financially than the unions, and lacks a full-
fledged bureaucracy, the question of what the social
forum can be is still an open one. If the social forum
were to act as something of a popular university, it
could help to revitalize the Left in the US.
I envision it being the site of pulling together diverse
(in terms of racial composition, geography, economic
sector, etc.) networks into working groups to examine
questions like the role of unions or the relation of
social movements to elected officials (some similar work
is taking place in contexts related to the World Social
Forum). The social forum itself would provide a
readymade public to debate the findings, so that they
would not simply disappear into the endless pile of
proposals and published books.
To transform the union federations into a working-class
movement, we do not need a sectarian Left supremely
confident in its "scientific" ability to offer answers
to all political questions; but we do need a national
network of like-minded people with the means to debate
and support each other.
**************************************
Equal Time Radio
WDEV 550AM/96.1FM - 244-1777 or 1-877-291-8255
Mon-Thurs 1-2pm
http://www.equaltimeradio.com/
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Traven Leyshon
55 E. Bear Swamp Rd.
Middlesex, VT 05602
tel: 802- 223-4172; 802-522-3484 (cell)
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