Workers Vanguard No. 852	5 August 2005

AFL-CIO Split: Sellouts Fall Out

No Support to Capitalist Parties! For a Fighting Labor Movement!

CHICAGO—One day prior to the AFL-CIO's convention in Chicago, four of the country's largest unions announced a boycott of the proceedings. The following day, July 25, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) with 1.8 million members and the Teamsters with 1.4 million members disaffiliated from the AFL-CIO; four days later, the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), which has 1.3 million members, followed suit. The three breakaways have reduced the AFL-CIO membership by more than one-third. It appears that other unions—UNITE HERE, the United Farm Workers and the Laborers' Union—all belonging to the Change to Win Coalition led by SEIU head Andrew Stern may also break with the federation. AFL-CIO president John Sweeney retaliated by declaring that AFL-CIO state federations and central labor councils were prohibited from working with union locals and councils belonging to the dissident coalition.

The stated reason for the split by Stern & Co. is the continuing decline of union membership in the U.S. But neither wing of the labor bureaucracy is capable of turning the labor movement around. On the one hand, Sweeney says the unions need to spend more to elect "labor friendly" Democrats. Thus, the AFL-CIO convention featured an endless lineup of Democratic Party politicians from Senators Dick Durbin and Barack Obama to John Edwards, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy—and that was just the first day!

On the other hand, Stern calls for spending more on organizing efforts in order to increase the political clout of labor with the capitalist politicians, including Republicans as demonstrated by the fact that his allies include Doug McCarron, the pro-Bush president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. SEIU gave $65 million to the Democrats' 2004 presidential election efforts and $500,000 to the Republican Governors Association in the last election. Teamsters head James Hoffa Jr. told the New York Times (24 July): "We lost the election between Kerry and Bush because we didn't have enough members. We delivered the union vote very well, but we just didn't have enough members in the unions." Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean agreed: "If they get more people organized, that's more votes for us" (New York Times, 24 July).

The basic strategy of all wings of the labor bureaucracy is not class struggle, but to put pressure on the capitalist government, the executive committee of the ruling class, for concessions. The AFL-CIO split is an intra-bureaucratic squabble between Sweeney and Stern over tactics of class collaboration. It does not serve to advance the interests of the U.S. working class.

Everything of value that the workers movement has won has been achieved by mobilizing labor in class struggle, on the picket lines and in plant occupations, in defiance of the bosses' laws. There is a crying need to organize the millions of unorganized workers in this country. In fact, organizing the anti-union giant Wal-Mart symbolizes the tasks facing the American labor movement today. But neither side in the split proposes the all-out struggle necessary to organize Wal-Mart.

Both wings support the capitalist profit system and are tied to the capitalist state. This is exemplified by the fact that one of the most unionized workforces in the U.S. today is one that does not belong in the labor movement—cops. Both the Teamsters and SEIU as well as AFSCME in the AFL-CIO have made a point of organizing cops, as well as prison and security guards. These forces are not part of the labor movement; it is the job of the police—with security guards as their auxiliaries—to defend the interests of the capitalists over the workers, including through strikebreaking violence. The cops and prison guards, along with the courts, are part of the same capitalist state that is today threatening to take over the International Longshoremen's Association through a federal civil racketeering suit against "union corruption," which, if successful, would seriously weaken the union. By organizing such forces, the union tops are committing class treason, taking a stand for more "law and order," more jails and more racist repression. Cops, prison and security guards out of the unions!

Stressing as primary the call for "complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state," Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky noted in "Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay":

"The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat."

The trade unions are mass organizations to defend the economic interests of the working class against the capitalists and their state. To consistently carry out that role, they must be independent of the capitalists and their state. The labor tops promote collaboration and class peace with the capitalists. But the class struggle also has its own logic, and struggles that the labor misleaders may want to rein in could just as well erupt— through the workers' determination and militancy—into something that the bureaucrats can no longer control. A new leadership in the labor movement must be forged through class struggle, a leadership that begins with the understanding that the interests of labor and capital are irreconcilably counterposed.

The working class needs its own party, not the sham "independence" of tacking between the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties, but a party that will mobilize all of the oppressed behind the social power of the working class. It needs a revolutionary workers party that fights for a workers government and the abolition of the system of capitalist exploitation.

The backdrop to the AFL-CIO split is the sharp decline in union membership in the U.S. and corresponding declines in union economic and political power. Union membership rose to a high-water mark of 35 percent in 1953 when there were few government, white collar or service unions. Today, union membership accounts for about 13 percent of the workforce, but even that figure masks an underlying shift—a great decline in manufacturing workers and a shift to government, white-collar and service industries unions. From the 1970s on, manufacturing jobs started to move from the Midwest (once the industrial center of the U.S.) to the South and offshore—to places such as Mexico, Asia and, most lately and massively, China.

The decline of the organized labor movement goes hand in hand with the increasing immiseration of the workers and further curtailment of labor rights. The smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981, conceived by Democrat Jimmy Carter and implemented by Ronald Reagan, was the model for what the bourgeoisie had in store for the labor movement. In turn, the supine surrender of the labor tops to Reagan's busting of PATCO has become a sad model for union response to the capitalists' drive to gut the labor movement.

With the restoration of capitalism in East Europe and the former Soviet Union, the American ruling class was emboldened to drive back social gains which had been won through decades of social struggle by workers and all the oppressed. Now, with George W. Bush occupying the White House, the smug, complacent and brittle union bureaucracy has realized that it has a problem. The decline in membership and dues combined with waning influence in an increasingly weak Democratic Party is driving both wings of the labor bureaucracy to "reform."

Unions still provide their members considerable benefits compared to non-unionized workers. That is why the capitalists spend around $1 billion per year to fight unionization. The union-busters have been very successful. Strikes have been few, victories fewer. In 1974 there were 424 major strikes; last year there were 17. The wages, pensions, benefits and jobs of unionized workers have been under attack by employers who receive the full backing of the courts and government. Yet the union tops have done next to nothing to defend their members.

One does not have to be a Marxist to see how remote the AFL-CIO convention was from the needs and concerns of most union members, who were likely not even aware of the gathering or impending split until they were informed by the union-hating capitalist press. Far from reflecting a union membership that is at least 42 percent women, 15 percent black and 11 percent Latino, the roughly 900 delegates, representing millions of members, were overwhelmingly white and male.

The decline in manufacturing has particularly impacted black jobs, especially in industrial centers like Detroit, Chicago and Flint. More than 50 percent of union jobs lost in 2004 had been held by black workers. In one of the most ambitious organizing drives currently targeting the South, Stern's SEIU recently announced a campaign to unionize the 8,000 janitors in the Houston operations of ABM, the nation's largest cleaning contractor. Unionizing the notoriously anti-union South poses the need for the labor movement to wage a determined fight against the deep racial oppression and pervasive anti-black racism that exist in this country. Yet the union tops have largely disdained the kind of labor battles it will take to organize the viciously racist, "right to work" South. The failure of the AFL-CIO to organize the South has meant that fanatically anti-union corporations like Arkansas-based Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, are now driving down wages and living standards throughout the country.

Organizing Wal-Mart, the largest private employer in both the U.S. and Mexico, will also require the active defense of immigrant rights. Immigrant workers, often bringing with them traditions of militant labor struggle from their countries of origin, have played an important role in helping to revitalize the U.S. labor movement. Yet by and large the labor tops have signed on to the bosses' anti-immigrant "war on terror"—a war on the democratic rights of the American populace whose ultimate target is black people and the labor movement itself.

How can the unions fight for immigrant rights when their leaders promote protectionist poison, which amounts to blaming the loss of jobs in the U.S. on workers abroad rather than the American capitalists? While most of the Change to Win union leaders are in service industries, where many of the workers are black or immigrant and where the pressures toward protectionism are not so strong, they stand shoulder to shoulder with the Teamsters' Hoffa, who has sought to keep Mexican truckers off the roads in the U.S., appealing to gross national chauvinism. Meanwhile, as the first day of the AFL-CIO convention ended, the union leaders handed out signs denouncing CAFTA, the equivalent of the NAFTA "free trade" rape of Mexico for Central America and the Dominican Republic, which was then awaiting a vote in the U.S. Congress. But despite occasional rhetoric about "global justice," the union tops' opposition to CAFTA is not based on international solidarity but protectionism and chauvinism.

Sweeney came to office in 1995 promising to turn things around through a massive organizing effort. Yet the unions continued to decline. Ten years later, Stern is now claiming that the split by the Change to Win Coalition is "a dramatic step that we hope will open up opportunities similar to the surge in worker unity and organization when the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was created in the 1930s" (Los Angeles Times, 26 July). This is simply cynical. The struggles to organize the mass industrial unions of the CIO were born out of the three citywide general strikes of 1934 (Minneapolis, San Francisco and Toledo)—all led by "reds"—and were built through militant class-struggle tactics like the sit-down strike. The right to organize was not won by lobbying Washington, but through pitched battles with scabs, cops and National Guard troops. But the reformists, the social democrats and the Stalinized Communist Party channeled the turbulent class battles of the '30s into support for Franklin D. Roosevelt's Democratic Party and its "New Deal" coalition (which included the die-hard Dixiecrat segregationists of the Deep South). The current impasse of labor goes back to that betrayal and the McCarthyite purge of reds and other militants from the unions beginning in the late 1940s.

One of Stern's organizational gimmicks is to merge most of the AFL-CIO's unions into about 15 "mega unions." This has nothing to do with industrial unionism, the principle that workers in an industry should be organized into a single union regardless of their particular skill or craft. A case in point is last year's merger of UNITE, representing apparel workers, with HERE, representing hotel and restaurant workers. When formerly UNITE laundry workers at the Wilshire Grand Hotel in Los Angeles were locked out last September, formerly HERE workers continued to work in that hotel, scabbing on their UNITE HERE union brothers and sisters.

Stern's program is one of business unionism based on a model that the union is simply a service organization for workers, something like a welfare agency rooted in a mythical alliance between workers and their employers. Stern himself said that the unions "should be elastic and expandable to meet different employers' needs. Unions created barriers to change as the world changed. We became a drag on change. Now the question is how do we become strong voices for workers. We need a new set of ideas that aren't going back 70 years" (Chicago Tribune, 31 July).

What the workers need is a militant labor movement that can challenge the bosses' continual assaults. The reality is that most of the unions on both sides of the split are "general unions," like the Teamsters or Communication Workers, seeking to encompass groups of workers from various unrelated industries. The AFL-CIO still includes craft unions that are organized on the basis of a particular skill and are likewise inimical to industrial unionism. Change to Win has trumpeted the necessity for organizing in a union's "core industry" in order to increase the power of the union. Yet the Teamsters organize everyone from printers to pharmacists while FedEx remains non-union. In Sweeney's camp, the United Auto Workers have been busy organizing graduate students while tens of thousands of jobs in auto remain non-union.

Rather than striking for union recognition, the union tops push "neutrality" agreements with the employers, as though companies are going to stand by and let the unions organize without interference. Unions seeking recognition through "neutrality" agreements often foreswear such fundamental rights as the right to strike, their most effective weapon against the employers. Rather than mobilizing in struggle, they petition the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to authorize an election while pro-union workers suffer harassment and firings. Both wings of the bureaucracy are busy lobbying for an "Employee Free Choice Act" to allow employees to get union recognition without employer interference. Each Democrat at the AFL-CIO convention solemnly pledged his support for this measure, which will pass the capitalist Congress just after hell freezes over.

To go forward, the trade unionists must break with any illusions in the Democratic Party as a "friend" of workers and be won to the understanding that a fight for their class interests requires complete independence from the bosses' parties and the capitalist state. The labor movement must stand for international working-class solidarity, fight for black rights, women's rights, full citizenship rights for immigrants. As we wrote in "Labor: Organize Wal-Mart!" (WV No. 851, 8 July):

"Working-class struggle must be consciously waged as an international fight. And it must be based on the understanding that the interests of labor and capital can never be reconciled. The only way to guarantee good living conditions for everyone, jobs for all and an end to capitalist exploitation and racist oppression is through the expropriation of the capitalist class through socialist revolution. As Trotskyist internationalists, our watchword is not the deadly dangerous trap of 'defending American jobs' against foreign competition, but the words which Marx and Engels inscribed on their banner: 'Workers of the world, unite'."