Obama's Election And The Union Movement
By Jack A. Smith
01 May, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Mitt Romney is the Republican Party's strongest contender, but President Barack Obama still has a good chance for reelection in November.
This is largely because the ultra-right and its antics are alienating a sector of voters who otherwise may have tilted toward the Republicans and will bring to the polls those 2008 Obama supporters who may have stayed home because of disenchantment with the White House record.
Recognizing the conservatives and their Tea Party vanguard have gone too far in openly subverting the needs and security of the American people, Obama has decided to veil his center right political record with progressive populist rhetoric for the remainder of the campaign. He even articulates some Occupy themes — a smart if not entirely convincing stance.
Perhaps the main ingredient in any possible Democratic presidential victory is the labor movement. Without it, Obama's chances plummet. AFL-CIO, Change to Win and a few independent unions are supplying Democratic candidates with over $400 million this year. Of equal importance, organized labor wants to field an estimated 400,000 campaign workers as well.
For the first time, union members can now ring doorbells in non-union households, which will allow volunteers to reach unprecedented numbers of people. This is one of the only positive aspects of the conservative Supreme Court's Citizens United decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions.
The corporations and Wall Street will provide the Democrats with more money, but they simply cannot field a fraction of labor's campaign supporters in the streets and on the phones. At the same time the unions not only seek Obama's reelection but several of them have an equal interest in reaching out independently and joining with social movements in the fight against the 1%. Many of the issues brought up by the Occupy forces and others are long time union issues as well, and the labor movement needs allies.
Of course all the Democratic constituencies will have to turn out in full force at the polls as well. In addition to union members this includes African Americans and Latinos, women, younger voters, college graduates, and a not insignificant sector of the 1% campaign funders.
It's ironic that during Obama's first term, with Democrats controlling the House and Senate for two years and then the Senate during the last two, the White House has done little for its main supporters, except those of the power elite. The black community, Obama's most loyal supporters, was completely neglected despite its desperate economic circumstances and high unemployment. Considerable numbers of younger voters, and others as well, of course, were disillusioned by the contradiction between the president's strong election promises of "change" and his weak performance in office.
Many union leaders and members are extremely disappointed by the candidate they worked so hard to elect in 2008. Labor was not only ignored since then; aside from occasional tokens of Democratic support it was actually set back several times during the Obama years.
But when the AFL-CIO General Board voted unanimously to endorse President Obama for re-election March 13, its only reference to the casting aside of workers' interests was one paragraph in a declaration of over-the-top support for the Democrats. It read:
"Although the labor movement has sometimes differed with the president and often pushed his administration to do more — and do it faster — we have never doubted his commitment to a strong future for working families. With our endorsement today, we affirm our faith in the president. We pledge to work with him through the election and his second term to restore fairness, security and shared prosperity."
What followed was a series of statements and documents virtually lauding every decision the president made since taking office in January 2009, singling out three for special mention:
• "He took America from the brink of a second Great Depression by pressing Congress to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which saved or created 3.6 million jobs.
• "He championed comprehensive health insurance reform, which — while far from perfect —set the nation on a path toward the health security that had eluded our country for nearly 100 years.
• "He insisted upon Wall Street reform — passed over the objection of almost every Republican. Now, we can finally begin to reverse decades of financial deregulation that put our entire economy at risk."
Many labor leaders saw through this of course but they are uniting behind Obama to keep the Republicans out of the White House and perhaps make inroads in the right wing-dominated House as well. The destruction of the union movement, after all, is a main objective of the Republican Party.
The unions are much weaker than in past decades. Membership today is down to 11.8%, compared to 35% in 1954. But they remain a huge organization and votes Democratic. The N.Y. Times pointed out recently that in 2008 "white blue-collar men voted for John McCain over Mr. Obama by an 18-point margin, but, in large part because of unions' politicking, white blue-collar men in unions backed Mr. Obama by a 23-point margin."
Despite the enthusiastic statement of support, the labor movement has been complaining for well over a year, often in public. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka repeatedly suggested last year that labor wasn't getting its due and that the unions should seriously consider taking a more independent stance toward the Democrats.
It was expected the key union leaders would silence dissent during the election year, but they have been unable to mask their irritation as the Obama Administration has taken one anti-union step after another in recent weeks and months.
For example, the JOBS bill, passed in mid-April by Congress and signed with enthusiasm by President Obama, doesn't create jobs. The acronym stands for "Jumpstart Our Business Start- Ups Act," and it's a gift to one constituency — the wealthy contributors of Silicon Valley 's tech industry — at the expense of another, the labor movement. The legislation was the creature of Obama's corporate-controlled Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. The bill will greatly benefit big business and Wall St .
Trumka, one of the two labor members of the 24-person blue ribbon 1% panel, thundered: "We are disappointed — and angry — that despite warnings from current and former financial markets regulators, law professors, institutional investors and consumer advocates, 73 senators voted for the cynically named 'JOBS Act'.... This is a vote against investors in the real economy and for Wall Street speculators. When the next bubble bursts, Americans will know who to blame."
And then there's the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA), which was engineered in April by President Obama in Colombia and will go into effect May 15. Obama characterized what has been called a "little NAFTA" as a "win-win" for both countries and an expression of support for the besieged Colombian labor movement. More union organizers have been murdered in Colombia than anywhere else in the world. Two dozen were killed last year alone.
United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard denounced the agreement, charging that it allows the Colombian government to continue "its shameful distinction as the most dangerous country in the world to be a trade unionist.” He suggested Obama's guarantee about enhanced safety for Colombian union organizers was mistaken. Trumka called the compact "deeply disappointing and troubling."
Leaders of the Colombian labor movement joined Trumka in this statement: "The underlying trade agreement perpetuates a destructive economic model that expands the rights and privileges of big business and multinational corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, and the environment. The agreement uses a model that has historically benefited a small minority of business interests, while leaving workers, families, and communities behind."
This is just the latest. In February Congress and Obama approved a bill funding the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) over union objections. The legislation also weakened bargaining rights for workers in the aviation and rail industries by increasing from 35% to 50% the number of worker signatures required to allow an election for union recognition. It wasn't even necessary to pass the measure at all. FAA reauthorization has been extended for the last four years by temporary funding, and could have been continued until the labor restrictions were excised. Labor howled again, to no avail as usual.
In fact Obama has reneged on nearly all his 2008 campaign promises to the unions, such as his pledge to fight for the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that would have removed onerous limitations on labor organizing going back many decades. Trade unions have been fighting unsuccessfully for relief the whole time.
The White House also didn't act on labor's call for the administration to create 25 million full-time jobs. Obama ignored a promise to hike the federal minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011. He didn't, as he vowed, renegotiate NAFTA. He strengthened the Patriot Act after insisting in 2008 that he would get rid of it. He didn't fight for safety and health standards for workers. The White House supports cutbacks in postal services that are strongly opposed by labor.
The list of Democratic dismissals of labor's priorities — to placate the right wing and satisfy Wall St. , corporate and wealthy backers — contains many more examples. And as far as the AFL-CIO's three favorite Obama moves are concerned — jobs, health insurance and Wall St. reform — they stand as their own refutation. Each of these "victories" was worked out and compromised beforehand in negotiations with insurance companies, corporations and the financial industry.
This is only part of the story. Several key unions are beginning to engage independently with various movements for social change, mainly on economic issues. Labor is hardly united on this matter, but it's a development worth watching.
In an open letter to Trumka in late March, independent consumer advocate Ralph Nader said he was aware of "your group's public stands in favor of" progressive legislation, "but as you well know, there is a very marked difference between being on-the-record, as the AFL-CIO is, and being on-the-daily ramparts pushing these issues, as your organization is not."
Nader was right in terms of the AFL-CIO endorsement of the president, which simply didn't accord with its own known disposition, but efforts are being made by some unions to mount the "ramparts" of public witness in recent times and they are not just intended to collect more votes for Obama in November.
This is an important point. There are two aspects to the question of the large labor-liberal coalition that lately has bedecked itself in the slogans of the Occupy movement. According to the Global Justice Ecology Project April 24: "Over the past several weeks, a broad coalition of progressive organizations — including National People's Action, Color Of Change, the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), MoveOn.org, the New Bottom Line, environmental groups like Greenpeace and 350.org, and major unions such as SEIU and the United Auto Workers — has undertaken a far-reaching effort to train tens of thousands of people in nonviolent direct action. They have called the campaign the 99% Spring."
This effort is not an Occupy project, and a number of Occupy supporters (such as the key magazine Adbusters) and some activist groups are suggesting that the coalition is merely an effort to co-opt the anti-1% forces to support Obama, but that's only partly correct.
It's true that Obama is using the 99% slogan to draw a sharper distinction between himself and shape-shifting Romney, who is expected to occasionally gravitate to the center right during the remaining campaign while not completely disavowing his opportunist waving of the Don't-Tread-On-Me Tea Party banner during the primaries. It's also true that some groups in 99% Spring are in it strictly to support the Democrats and are in fact front groups.
But some unions, which certainly wants a Democratic win, also seeks to promote labor's agenda independently among the masses of people, not least by associating itself with movements demanding a better deal for the 99%.
Union leaders know this isn't the latter 1930s or the first three decades after World War 2, when the Democrats often went to bat for the working class/lower middle class. This is 2012, after several decades when productivity jumped 70%, wages stagnated at 10% increase and the rich more than doubled their income. Today the Democrats are no longer center/center left. Wall Street has both parties in its pocket.
Actually, many of the Occupy slogans are quite similar to what labor has been fighting about for years, such as denouncing Wall St., the corporations, CEO pay, the end of the "American Dream," and particularly the rampant growth of economic inequality and the rich-poor gap.
The AFL-CIO organized several marches to Wall St. in New York in the years leading up to last October's Occupy march and occupation of Zuccotti Park near the financial center. Labor hardly received any publicity because the commercial mass media is anti-union. The media, however, thrives on new social disruptions that include matters of permanent encampment, forced removal, several incidents of serious police brutality, and the fact that millions of people are adopting relatively radical slogans throughout the country.
Some big labor organizations, such as the giant Service Employees International Union, the Transport Workers Union and others supported Occupy Wall Street protesters from the beginning and joined in their big demonstrations because of a similarity of grievances. Finally, as a perhaps belated response to the economic crisis, a lot of labor's old slogans have now percolated into social movement discourse.
The unions didn't invent the 99% watchword but it was an easy fit for a major people's movement representing millions of workers that's being aced out of the political system by the power elite. The AFL-CIO now refers to the labor movement as " America 's original working class social network."
Not all unions by a long shot are yet involved with social movements, and all too frequently social movements seem indifferent to union problems or view organized labor as just one more "interest group." Some unions, indeed, have become antagonistic to certain causes such as the environmental movement. The Laborers International Union, for example, was highly critical of the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline because it "takes away jobs." The actual number of jobs involved is not that large, but it's important to a union with high percentage of unemployed workers.
This is not a new problem and a possible step toward resolution is fairly obvious. Social change movements must make genuine efforts to demonstrate concrete solidarity with the trade unions. The job issue is real in terms of the environment and other labor issues. What's needed is a united campaign by the social/political movements and the trade unions to oblige the power structure to take forceful steps to put people to work, including the creation of "green" jobs and infrastructure repair. Social change movements should also provide active support for labor's campaign to eliminate barriers to organizing workers.
Frankly – though this is a long shot – at some point labor should consider taking a portion of the multi-millions its spends on financing Democratic candidates and lobbying Congress and use part of it to build a mass coalition of unions and various social change organizations willing to fight the power. It's obvious the unions aren't getting an adequate return for their monumental investments in the system. It would take several million bucks and a few years, but a huge nationwide activist movement making radical economic and social demands on the government and political system could pay off in a big way.
This is an unusual election year. As all peace and justice organizers know, presidential election years are virtually a washout for all activism except that of an electoral nature. The enormous anti-Iraq war movement was totally sidelined in 2004 as its Democratic base focused on supporting pro-war John Kerry. It happened in 2008 as well, and the peace movement nearly collapsed when Obama took power. Now there are numerous dissident actions taking place around the country in an election year. Occupy still gets considerable attention but other types of activism are in the streets and meeting halls as well.
Today's activism is a far cry from the dramatic growth of the political left and the union movement during the Great Depression — particularly in the formidable strike activity that characterized the period — but at least it has started after a relatively quiet couple of years following the onset of the Great Recession.
The May Day action and other manifestations are signs that economic and other activism will continue to grow. Another reason is that the government acknowledges that 14.6% of workers remain unemployed, partially employed or "discouraged and not working (a probable underestimate) — and this situation is expected to last for several years.
The American labor movement is under the gun and beginning to move in a good direction, too slowly for some, to fast for others. The big union federation only broke with decades of top leadership "business unionism" in 1995 that kept the movement distant and suspicious of progressive social forces. This is changing, though many unions are still foot-dragging.
Real solidarity between the movements and the unions will enhance positive change. The more the unions involve themselves in social struggles for equality, people's rights and labor rights, in the face of a political system in thrall to the 1%, there's a good chance it can become stronger. And a bigger and more viable union movement can lead the way to substantial progressive social change. Time will tell.
The author is editor of the Activist Newsletter and is former editor of the (U.S.) Guardian Newsweekly. He may be reached at [email protected] or http://activistnewsletter.blogspot.com/
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