NEWS & LETTERS, October - November 2009
AFL-CIO in the crisis
Detroit--Nothing close to suspense occurred during the AFL-CIO Convention Sept. 14-17 in Pittsburgh, even though the labor federation of 57 unions with 11.5 million members elected new leaders, including President Rich Trumka, Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler, and Executive Vice-President Arlene Holt Baker. Trumka, former president of the United Mine Workers union before being tapped by outgoing President John Sweeney in 1995 to be his running mate to lead the AFL-CIO, had served as secretary-treasurer for 14 years.
JOB LOSSES
The AFL-CIO executives lamented the huge loss of membership resulting from automation, outsourcing of jobs to other countries and to low-pay areas in the U.S., the economic collapse, the ceaseless attacks on unions by corporations and the anti-labor policies and practices of the Bush administration.
They emphasized the need for new organizing programs. Trumka declared that a force of 1,000 professional union organizers would be sent next year to organize the unorganized, with special focus on young, low-paid and minority workers, including immigrants. Pablo Alvarado, representing 41 work centers that make up the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, pointed out that every day there are 120,000 day laborers exploited and underpaid by their employers.
INVISIBLE WORKING CLASS
It is interesting that the only speaker to use the expression "working class" was labor secretary Hilda Solis. The others referred to workers as "middle class." A further indication of this is the effort now underway in the AFL-CIO to find another word for workers. Too many people, they say, don't consider themselves workers. Are all the workers in the mills, mines and factories now going to be associates, like at Wal-Mart?
President Obama, like the other speakers, favored the card check provision that has been stripped from the Employee Free Choice Act, but did not forcefully refer to the need to support it. Card check would force employers to recognize a union if a majority of the workers signed a card in favor of a union. Losing it represents a dramatic defeat for the unions that had made card check the centerpiece of their legislative goals.
Almost all the resolutions could be supported by anyone. But then there were resolutions calling for the repeal of Saddam Hussein's anti-labor laws in Iraq; support for ending the Cuban embargo; and support for the return of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya.
Instead of pointing to the need to replace the present economic system that has created economic meltdown and is sending unemployment to record levels, the leadership of the AFL-CIO continues to speak in terms supporting existing "free markets." This comes as no surprise. After all, the AFL-CIO is a labor bureaucracy that long ago demonstrated its capitulation to and cooperation with corporate leaders in opposition to the aspirations of the working class in America.
--Andy Phillips
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