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News :: Labor |
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Beyond the Split: Re-Energizing the Labor Movement |
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by Ricky Baldwin
Email: baldwinricky (nospam) yahoo.com (verified)
Phone: 217-328-3037 |
29 Oct 2005
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Area unionists met Saturday Oct. 22 to discuss this summer's AFL-CIO split and what steps the labor movement must now take to address what may be its historical nadir. For more on this important conference/workshop, see this month's Public i. |
(Champaign) The boilermakers in Meredosia and the Unit 4 teachers in Champaign are members of the AFL-CIO. Terry Davis, Gene Vanderport and many other unionists at the October 22 labor conference/workshop here in Champaign are not. But that division isn’t stopping them from supporting one another, just as union locals on both sides of the divided house of labor are doing all over the country.
No sooner had embattled AFL-CIO President John Sweeney declared that secessionist unions, which had started their own “Change to Win” coalition, would not be allowed at Central Labor Council meetings in towns and cities nationwide, than the hew and cry within his own ranks forced the aging labor federation to backtrack. “Solidarity charters,” officials announced, would allow a kind of working partnership among loyalist unions and others. Especially since local unions were going to do it anyway.
How much difference the recent fracture in organized labor really means was the starting point of “Beyond the Split”, an all-day Saturday workshop sponsored by the UI’s Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations (ILR), the local Living Wage Coalition, Independent Media Center and the Socialist Forum. The consensus seemed to be: not much. From there the workshop attendees, mostly longtime union activists and organizers, really wanted to talk about what a besieged labor movement must do now, split or no split.
The dire straits facing American workers are certainly enough to fill a day of grim statistics, mostly familiar by now, and what to do about it all could fill several weeks. With time short, the keynote speaker Adolph Reed Jr. quickly set the tone of the day: “We‘re screwed and we‘ve lost, thanks for having me.” With humor and realism, Reed and others at the conference reconstructed a historical context for recent events with an eye to next steps.
Lessons of history
When the American Federation of Labor split in 1935, noted Terry Davis of the United Electrical Workers and Jobs with Justice, it was over “a huge principle”. Dominated by skilled trade unions built on a strategy of limiting their membership, the AFL at that time refused to sanction union organizing drives in the exploding population of unskilled industrial workers. The Congress of Industrial Organizations formed with that specific purpose in mind. Both groups grew by leaps and bounds, the conservative AFL actually organizing more new members than the rival CIO.
Davis and others at the weekend workshop repeatedly contrasted that principled schism in 1935 with the current “structural”, “bureaucratic” “non-event” that many critics have charged really boils down to a spat over few million dollars between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. There was also another split, Tobie Higbie of the ILR faculty pointed out, in 1949 when the CIO frog-marched several unions and many thousands of workers out the door. The outcast unionists had refused to cut loose the many Communists who had helped build the US labor movement to its historical high point, representing around a third of the workforce.
The point, that there are splits and then there are splits, and that US workers starved for change shouldn’t get too excited about this one, was not lost on the group. The 1935 split, Reed said in his opening, occurred in the context of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, the New Deal and the Wagner Act that declared unionization a legal right and collective bargaining the official policy of the US government -- at least for some workers -- that same year. The lay of the land has obviously changed since then.
Decades of job exports, hostile legal revisions, outsourcing and vicious corporate attacks on unions have whittled membership down to an all-time low. More and more workers in the US are joining the agricultural and other workers left out of the New Deal, marginalized, in a trend that an article in the latest issue of “Dollars & Sense” identifies as “the spread of unregulated work”. In contrast to the 1935 split, which took place on the basis on an upward swing in labor organizing, said Sean O’Torain of the Chicago-based Labor’s Militant Voice, the current split occurs in the context of a collapse.
This contrast suggests a path, insisted many of the speakers, to independent labor politics, to community unionism, to direct action and broad coalition-building. Time to get real, they said. The era of collective bargaining that has all but come to an end, Reed explained, was not really a truce as labor has usually viewed it, but more like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty that briefly delayed the Nazi invasion of Poland. “One side was arming, while the other was not.”
Deeper, broader, in their faces
What American workers need, according to Reed, is a broader working class movement, one that exceeds the limitations of the organizations that have become familiar in the last seven decades. “Unions,” he said, “are the anchor, not the basis of that movement.” Speaking of the catastrophe on the Gulf Coast for example, he says, as a nation “we have lost the capacity to imagine that government can be used as a tool to make people’s lives better.”
The post-war era, Reed said, has been characterized by compromises, which have only delayed the inevitable conflicts. Now the compromises are “coming home to roost” on the Gulf Coast, in the collapse of organized labor and so on. After the Great Depression, he says, the government in effect “paid off enough constituents to keep things moving along” for awhile. The government has now abandoned this Keynesian approach, but it was deeply flawed from the start.
“Whenever you create a class of beneficiaries,” Reed said, “you also create the opposite.” To the extent that policy privileges a segment of the working class, he said, to that same extent there is always a reserve army of the underprivileged that can be used to undermine any gains.
In the meantime, Reed says, labor unions and other groups have become dangerously comfortable in a kind of mouse-wheel of relatively ineffective activities. In order to protest, he says, labor activists and others now routinely promise not to disrupt anything, stay in designated areas where nobody will see them, turn out the paid staff and then go back to the office.
Meanwhile a radically different approach may be making a limited comeback, O’Torain said. At least that’s his plan. The basis of the 1935 split, he reminded his audience, was not politicians’ largesse but a growing tendency to direct action including four major strikes that established nationwide networks and scared the daylights out of elite thinkers -- as well as the leaders of the AFL. The CIO, said O’Torain, was an attempt to regain control of a labor movement getting ahead of its organizers.
“I’m not advocating violence,” O’Torain said, but nonviolent disruption. In support of Indiana workers on strike, he said, his group had picketed at bosses’ homes, leafleted their churches and even followed them when to the gas station where they fill up. For the locked-out boilermakers in Meredosia, a small group discussion on the subject suggested, this method might entail organizing mass defiance of a restraining order there that limits picketers to six. “When they see that they are facing the whole town, it becomes a different matter,” O’Torain explained.
The wrap-up
There is never enough time at any decent activist conference to discuss the topics that come up. “Beyond the Split” was no exception. Conference organizers even had to skip a planned question and answer session in order to make up for time lost in presentations. It was too bad, and somewhat ironic given the prominence of themes related to encouraging more active participation. But nobody claimed the conference itself would substitute for the activities discussed.
Several small group discussions like the one on direct action did develop a number of themes at the end of the day, ranging from strike support to interactive website design. Many of these suggestions seemed to echo Gene Vanderport’s memorial at the opening to longtime labor activist and educator Stan Weir: “The labor movement begins with the rank and file, ends with the rank and file, and everything else is just extra.”
One group debated starting a local chapter of the community-labor coalition Jobs with Justice, which in other cities has spearheaded living wage campaigns, strike support and other collaborative efforts. There is of course already a Living Wage Coalition here with some victories under its belt, but this could serve as a germ for a broader coalition.
In the end, attendees seemed to think the day was well spent, indicating that they might like to spend another such day. There is certainly more to discuss, and more concrete plans will require at the very least a smaller follow-up meeting or two. Unregulated work, for one thing, never really came up except in informal discussions after the conclusion. Perhaps that’s an agenda item for the next workshop. |
This work is in the public domain |
