U of M MAPL 5111 - LABOR NEEDS A RADICAL VISION

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LABOR NEEDS A RADICAL VISION By David Bacon New Years Day, 2005 For forty years, AFL-CIO leaders George Meany and Lane Kirkland saw unorganized workers as a threat when they saw them at all. They drove leftwing activists out of unions, and threw the message of solidarity on the scrapheap. Labor's dinosaurs treated unions as a business, representing members in exchange for dues, while ignoring the needs of workers as a whole. A decade ago new leaders were thrust into office in the AFL-CIO - a product of the crisis of falling union density, weakened political power, and a generation of angry labor activists demanding a change in direction. Those ten years have yielded important gains for unions. Big efforts were made to organize – strawberry workers in Watsonville, asbestos workers in New York and New Jersey, poultry and meatpacking workers in the south, and healthcare workers throughout the country. Yet in only one year was the pace of organizing fast enough to keep union density from falling. Other gains were made in winning more progressive policies on immigration, and in some areas, relations with workers in other countries. Yet here also, progress has not been fast enough. Corporations and the government policies that serve them have presented new dangers even greater than those faced a decade ago. The set of proposals made by SEIU, and now by other unions from CWA to the Teamsters, are a positive response to this crisis. They've started a debate labor desperately needs. And they all put the issue of stopping the slide in members and power - the problem of organizing - in center stage where it belongs. Organizing large numbers of workers will not just help unions. Wages rise under the pressure of union drives, especially among non-union workers. Stronger unions will force politicians to recognize universal healthcare, secure jobs, and free education after high school, not as pie-in-the-sky dreams, but as the legitimate demands of millions of people. But the AFL-CIO has a huge job. Raising the percentage of organized workers in the U.S. from just 10 to 11 percent would mean organizing over a million people. Only a social movement can organize people on this scale. In addition to examining structural reforms that can make unions more effective and concentrate their power, the labor movement needs a program which can inspire people to organize on their own, one which is unafraid to put forward radical demands, and rejects the constant argument that any proposal that can't get through Congress next year is not worth fighting for. As much as people need a raise, the promise of one is not enough to inspire them to face the certain dangers they know too well await them. Working families need the promise of a better world. Over and over, for more than a century, workers have shown that they will struggle for the future of their children and their communities, even when their own future seems in doubt. But only a new, radical social vision can inspire the wave of commitment, idealism and activity necessary to rebuild the labor movement.Organizing a union is a right, but it only exists on paper. Violating a worker's right to organize should be punished with the same severity used to protect property rights. Fire a worker for joining a union - go to jail. Today, instead, workers get fired in a third of all organizing drives. Companies close and abandon whole communities, and threaten to do so even more often. Strikebreaking and union busting have become acceptable corporate behavior. There are no effective penalties for companies that violate labor rights, and most workers know this. In addition, there are new weapons, like modern-day company unions, in the anti-union arsenal. Chronic unemployment, and social policies like welfare reform, pit workers against each other in vicious competition, undermining the unity they need to organize. Millions of workers are desperate because they have lost jobs, or are in danger of losing them. Employers move factories, and downsize their workforce to boost stock prices. The government cuts social benefits while driving welfare recipients into a job market already glutted with millions of people who can't find work. Without speaking directly to workers' desperation and fear of unemployment, unions will never convince millions to organize, and risk the jobs they still have. Government and corporations may treat a job as a privilege, and a vanishing one at that, but unions must defend a job as a right. And to protect that right, workers need laws which prohibit capital flight, and which give them a large amount of control over corporate investment. In the meantime, organizing unemployed people should be as important as organizing in the workplace. Since grinding poverty in much of the world is an incentive for moving production, defending the standard of living of workers around the world is as necessary as defending our own. The logic of inclusion in a global labor movement must apply as much to a worker in Bangladesh as it does to the non-union worker down the street. While the percentage of organized workers has declined every year for the past decade, unions have made important progress in finding alternative strategic ideas to the old business unionism of Meany and Kirkland. If these ideas are developed and extended, they provide an important base for making unions stronger and embedding them more deeply in working-class communities. The two proposals at the end of SEIU's ten points begin to address these strategic ideas, but they fall short of providing a new direction. They are the proposals on diversity, or civil rights, and on building a global labor movement. Labor's change in immigration policy was a watershed development, which put unions on the side of immigrants, rather than against them. The change provided the basis for an alliance between labor and immigrant communities based on mutual interest, and asked union members, and workers in general, to fight for a society based on inclusion, rather than exclusion. But this policy was usually implemented to win support for union organizing campaigns, and only rarely to defend immigrant communities as they were attacked in the post-911 hysteria. When 40,000 airport screeners lost their jobs


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