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Revitalizing the AFL-CIO
When Harry Kelber, the 96 year old relentless labor advocate and editor of The Labor Educator speaks, the leadership of the AFL-CIO should listen. A vigorous champion for the rights of rank-and-file workers vis-à-vis their corporate employers and their labor union leaders, Kelber has recently completed a series of five articles titled “Reasons Why the AFL-CIO Is Broken; Let Us Start a Debate on How to Fix It.”
The reaction: Silence from union leaders, their union publications and at union gatherings.
Kelber, operating out of a tiny New York City office, knows more firsthand about unions, their historical triumphs, their contemporary deficiencies and their potential for tens of millions of working families than almost anyone in the country. Over the decades, no one has written more widely distributed pamphlets that cogently and concisely explain unions, the labor movement and anti-worker restrictive laws like the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, than this honest, sensitive worker campaigner.
At a perilous period for both working and unemployed Americans, facing deep recession, corporate abandonment to China and other repressive regimes, and the Republicans’ virulent assault on livelihoods and labor rights, Kelber believes that AFL-CIO should be on the ramparts. Instead, he sees it as moribund, hunkering down, with control of the power and purse concentrated in the hands of the silent and Sphinx-like Federation officers and the tiny clique of bureaucrats who run the show.
“In the AFL-CIO, the rank-and-file have no voice in electing their officials, because only the candidates of the Old Guard can be on the ballot,” he writes.
Certainly, the AFL-CIO is not reflecting the old adage that when “the going gets tough, the tough get going.” They recoil from any public criticism of Barack Obama, who disregards or/and humiliates them by his actions.
Mr. Obama promised labor in 2008 to press for a $9.50 federal minimum wage by 2011, and the Employee Free Choice Act, especially “card check,” and then forgot about both commitments. He has not spoken out and vigorously fought for an adequate OSHA inspection and enforcement budget to diminish the tens of thousands of workplace related fatalities every year. He’s been too busy managing drones, Kandahar and outlying regions of the quagmire of our undeclared wars.
Nothing Obama does seems to publically rile the AFL-CIO. In February, he crossed Lafayette Square from the White House with great fanfare to visit his pro-Republican opponents at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce yet declined to go around the corner and visit the AFL-CIO headquarters. Where was the public objection from the House of Labor?
He prevents his vice-president from responding to the Wisconsin state federation of Labor’s invitation to address the biggest rally in Madison, Wisconsin protesting labor’s arch enemy, Republican Governor Scott Walker. Biden, a self-styled “union guy”, wanted to go but the political operatives in the White House said NO. Still no public objection from Labor’s leaders.
Kelber describes the lack of a strong, funded national and international strategy to deal with the growing gap between rich and poor and the expanding shipment of both blue and white collar jobs abroad. He laments AFL-CIO’s failure to develop a “working relation with the new global unions that are challenging transnational corporations and winning some agreements.” He also notes that the AFL’s top leaders “have minimal influence at world labor conferences. They rarely attend them, even when they are invited.”
Pushing for higher wages and worker rights in the poorer developing countries, including the adoption of International Labor Organization (ILO) standards has great merit and is also a constructive way to also protect American workers.
Kelber believes it is obvious “that U.S. cooperation with labor unions from other countries with the same employer is the best way to organize giant multinationals, but the AFL-CIO has spent little time, money and resources in building close working relations with unions from abroad.”
What is restraining AFL-CIO’s President Richard Trumka? A former coal miner, then a coal miners’ lawyer, and president of the United Mine Workers, Mr. Trumka has been at the Federation for over a decade. He knows the politics of the AFL-CIO, makes great speeches about callous corporatism around the country, and has a useful website detailing corporate greed.
Unfortunately, words aside, he is not putting real, bold muscle behind the needs of America’s desperate workers.
He can start by shaking up his bureaucracy and put forth an emancipation manifesto of democratic reforms internal to the unions themselves and external to the government and the corporate giants. They all go together.
When I asked Harry Kelber whether there were any unions he admires, he named the fast-growing California Nurses Association (CNA) and the United Electrical Workers.
CNA’s executive director Rose Ann DeMoro is on the AFL-CIO Board and has urged Mr. Trumka to be more aggressive. She has secured his stepped-up support for a Wall Street financial speculation tax that could bring in over $300 billion a year. He may even join her and the nurses in a symbolic picketing of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters next month.
The ever fundamental Kelber, however, sees a plan B if the AFL-CIO does not change. “Union members should be thinking about creating a new bottoms-up labor federation,” he urges, reminding them that in the nineteen thirties, the Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO) seceded from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and went on “to organize millions of workers in such major corporations as General Motors, General Electric, U.S. Steel, Westinghouse, Hormel and others.”
The new labor federation, he envisions, for today’s times would be controlled by the membership and led by local unions and central labor councils that are impatient with the sluggish leadership of their international union presidents.
Harry Kelber, you epitomize the saying that “the only true aging is the erosion of one’s ideals.”
(Visit Harry’s Kelber’s website www.laboreducator.org for more of his insights.)
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18 Comments so far
Show AllI have been a staunch supporter, and member of, unions mostof my working life. I am currently a member of the IBEW but have been , in my checkered past, a Teamster and an SEIU member.
I am well aware of the glorious history of the union movement here in America, just as I am aware of the split occuring between union leadership and its rank and file. This split has increased as the wages paid union leadership has increased and put union Presidents in the same neighborhood as the CEO's of the corporations for which their members toil.
My current union leadership supports, rather blindly in my opinion, the Democrats and Obama, though all the while they both betray the workers and the erstwhile goals of the unions. Ironically, the rank and file becomes Republicans and Tea Party members....shudder. Almost daily I encounter conversations among the crews that leave me gasping at the egregious errors and even fables these hard working Americans believe wholeheartedly.
I am reminded of a Mose Allison lyric, "your mind is on vacation while your mouth is working overtime".
At least IBEW has continued to gun for their members more than most unions.
If I could get out of the sell-out union that I am in, I would join the IBEW post haste.
See Amy Goodman's May 19 article wherein the Missouri AFL-CIO canned the Operating Engineers Local 148 manager Don Giljum because he (just like ACORN and Shirley Sherrod) was a victim of uber fascist Andrew Breitbart's brownshirt slander show.
I recently heard that the St. Louis Carpenter's Union is negotiating a project labor agreement for the Jewish Hospital project that will incclude overtime ONLY after 60 hours per week.
Yes, IBEW is one of the last really strong union, though my own local, 1245, is considered a "house union" by the other locals. Recently my union has agreed to outside contractors doing more and more of the work, as long as they,too, are members of an IBEW local.
We retain, so far, excellent benefits, a rather embarrassingly good wage and pension plan as well. I am closing in on retirement and those of my buddies who have already done so are averaging around 60K/yr after 40 or more years of service. Maybe this opens the door for GOP criticisms of unions but seven of my colleagues have died in the performance of their jobs in the last five years, and three more severely injured ( one twenty five year old journeyman with a new baby lost both hands and then got fired for violating safety principles).
I agree that unions are becoming as corrupt and as greedy as the corporate heads that they are supposed to counter balance. I am a chapter leader of a local and I am disgusted by the inability of the union to clean house of corruption and when I brought up the matter they gave me the "evil eye". Needless to say my days as a chapter leader are numbered, by my own doing of course. I am still a proponent of labor unions and I remain under the belief that labor unions are necessary for the survival of the worker but union heads need to roll before labor receive full acceptance by the workers world wide.
True that, just as the heads of our govt need to roll also.
Where are the unions and the democrats publicizing the report on Massey mining and the preventable deaths of the miners. If I as a small business owner had caused that death and destruction due to my neglegence I'd be sitting in jail right now. And we can't even get that report publicised. The true problem is the unions expect the dems to protect them when the dems are corporate supporters not union supporters. Hence the unions give up any influence they may have and accept crumbs. Unions and progressives need to withold support from the dems until the dems quit acting like an abusive husband towards them.
Mining is one industry that has eliminated the unions for the most part, here in America. A perusal of the accident statistics for the USA and Canada, a union mining industry yet, shows plainly that accidents in Canada claim far, far fewer lives than do corresponding ones here.
In Canada, unions have forced installation of safe shelters that roll along with the shaft as it is lengthened, shelters which contain medical supplies, food, water and oxygen. Massey fought the acquiring of these with a fervor, as did all the largest mining companies.
"Ironically, the rank and file becomes Republicans and Tea Party members....shudder. Almost daily I encounter conversations among the crews that leave me gasping at the egregious errors and even fables these hard working Americans believe wholeheartedly."
Who's to blame for that?
Whether it's Nader's conclusion here that the problem with the AFL-CIO is one of a lack of "boldness" or whether it's Taibbi's conclusion that the problem is a matter of unwillingness on the part of leaders and workers--what these arguments and others like them do is maintain focus only on efforts within the current system. As if an alternative simply did--or could not--exist.
Those who make these kinds of arguments do so becuase they are enbedded in the current system.
What Nader's and other arguments like it do is create a vacuum--"it reinforces the hold of the big business Democrats over workers, it confuses and paralyzes them politically, and makes inevitable the advance of the ultra-right and ever deeper attacks on social conditions, living standards and democratic rights."
-The Liberals' lament: "Why won't Obama fight?"
Thank you Ralph. On target as always. It's clear that the unions themselves are part of the problem, and I can see why fewer and fewer people want to be in them. Got too top heavy. Like the rest of the country. Is it so hard for people to get together and create a union with by laws that put the power in the hands of the members? It sounds like most of the unions are being run by fascists.
Even the CNA and IBEW leaders are making around $300,000 a year, with hundreds of top staffer making between $100,000-$200,000 a year. I was really disappointed to read that. The United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) caps its union official’s salaries at $56,000 a year and appears to be a truly democratic union. Shouldn't the members get to decide how much of their wages should go to their leaders? And how many, who have been watching the leadership agree to wages being slashed, would vote to pay these leaders such astronomic figures? Sounds like a madhouse.
I had been saying that corrupt unions are better than no unions, but like the two arms of the Kleptocratic Party, looks like we need a big broom. Or a big flood, and start all over. Corruption is a cancer, it just gets bigger until it kills.
Labor needs it's own elected and appointed officials to stand against the Corpocracy
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
I remember when Bill Clinton campaigned against "free trade" and then, once elected, flipped & sent Hillary around the country to speak to the unions about how they shouldn't worry about NAFTA because it would create many more good jobs here in the U.S. than it would lose to Mexico. AND THE UNIONS' "LEADERSHIP"--AND FAR TOO MANY OF THEIR RANK & FILE--GRUMBLED A BIT THEN SIMMERED DOWN, KNUCKLED UNDER, AND LET ONE DLC DIMOCRAP AFTER ANOTHER CLING TO THEIR TEATS EVER SINCE.
The "fight" the unions led against NAFTA and Clinton's support for it was so weak, self-divided and conquered from the git-go that it was dead on its feet by the time Congress passed the WTO final trade agreement. By the late '90s Clinton had ordered his Secretary of Labor to STOP KEEPING STATISTICS ON THE JOB LOSSES FROM NAFTA because by 1997 we had lost so many thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs to Mexico and were gaining so few jobs of any kind in return that it was becoming a political embarrassment. The union leadership knew Clinton had hushed up these job loss statistics and I never heard them say SQUAT about it. Did you?
How do I know that the union "fight" against NAFTA and Clinton's support of NAFTA was the quintessential example of American union defeatism? Because the (once) big unions continued to make major political campaign donations to, and to conduct door-to-door campaigning for, Bill Clinton's re-election and Barrack Obama's election and the election of most of the neo-liberal pro-"free trade" leaders of the Dim Party in Congress from 1994 to this day.
By the time Obama revealed his true corporatist far-right, anti-union, anti-working-class, anti-middle-class colors in early-to-mid-2009, the unions should have done what the International Association of Firefighters recently did and shut-down donations to federal election campaigns for BOTH Republicans and Democrats.
They should have united a broad, multi-union movement to dump their servile, self-destructive co-dependency on the failed Dimcrap Party to back a new national progressive populist political movement that reached out to the Progressive and Black Caucuses to encourage them to leave the Party to help form the nucleus of that new movement and/or Third Party. This is an urgently needed change from failed, neo-liberal coddling, strategies and tactics that the unions are STILL ignoring even at this late date.
Union membership in the U.S. was still 20% when Reagan entered office. Now it's down to 7.9% and dropping.
The U.S. unions are DYING because their co-opted leaders refuse to organize in broader and deeper solidarity against every aspect of economic neo-liberalism, of which the egregiously failed Dimocrap Party is but one major political component.
The union's "arguments" against CAFTA and Obama's drive for new "free trade" treaties with Columbia and South Korea were so craven and spineless they were PATHETIC. They petulantly insist on minor tweaks to make these treaties "tolerable" when they should be openly opposing the entire "free trade" regime. They should be pushing hard to repeal the WTO final trade agreement that enabled the WTO's secret, corporate-staffed, trade dispute tribunals (to restore State and federal sovereignty for publicly accountable, elected representatives of the people to negotiate trade treaties and their provisions as they did for over 200 years until NAFTA).
They should be demanding globally enforceable and enforced labor rights and environmental protections (an impossibility that will force the dissolving of the corrupt "free trade" regime) and a slow, industrial & agricultural sector-by-sector moratorium/phase-out of the "free trade" regime so that affected countries (including the U.S.) can begin to rebuild their own domestic manufacturing base (and better paying jobs) and family farms.
What Mr. Nader, and 99% of the contemporary left will not publicly acknowledge is that the backbone behind labor in the 1930s was the Communist Party, and to a lesser degree, the Socialist Workers Party and other socialist/communist groups. The failure of socialism and communism to present itself as a viable alternative to working people (and having played out as a complete disaster in the old Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, etc) is fresh in everyone's minds. The reason the CP et al embarked on their crusade to organize workers was precisely because reform from above was never an option.
The IWW noticed this in 1905, who, ironically enough, was disrupted by the CP in the 1920s and subsequently written out of history post-1921 by so-called labor historians; they represented the form of workplace democracy that was most indigenous to the American expereince of, ironically enough, a fresh immigrant labor force, and were contunually haranged by the left to "join" some Party apparatus or another. These same Party people who advocated for labor rights later on did so as a means to an end-- State power, where democracy would be dissolved. Human rights and Marx-Leninism are incompatable. We know where this road leads. The American worker isn't playing that game, yet the left will not self reflect, perhaps go as far to reevaluate their limited Hegelian Dialectic in which they are stuck. A labor movement without democracy in the workplace is a corpse. The AFL/CIO is that corpse.
Now, there are no viable advocates to rebuild the labor movement from the bottom up, in a democratic fashion. The modern IWW is mired in an identity crisis between Marxism and Anarchism, activist group for social issues or labor union. The descendents of the Marxist left look more like struggling roadkill then organizations willing to take the question seriously--they focus on getting Party members into union office where they can advance an agenda through procedureal manipulation (or through harassing other union officers) rather then as the voice of the people they purport to represent. They are as bad as the Democrats, except the Democrats are at least effective in pursuing self interest. As for the rest-- corporatized activism (non-profits) will not build a labor movement. And tired rhetoric will not inspire anyone to act.
Where is the inspiration on the left? It is as dead as the communism that at least provided hope, albiet misplaced.
Thank you for the analysis and the memory (good to see someone still has one). During the '30s there was genuine fear our country could move in a totally different direction, and that fear made progress possible. At best, what we have left on the left is nostalgia.
As a long-time teachers' union activist in Los Angeles, I commend Mr. Kelber and Mr. Nader for their efforts. The comments also have highlighted a number of important points. However, I don't think the solution to the problems identified is a restructuring of the AFL-CIO or a new "bottom-up" labor federation. I think we need an inside/outside strategy, in labor as well as the Democratic Party, to put forward militant, no-compromise positions and then challenge the leadership to get on board or get out of the way. The building blocks already exist: Labor Party advocates, single-payer health advocates, US Labor Against the War(s), some national unions and some central labor councils, caucuses like TDU, magazines like Labor Notes, websites like Talking Union. What we need is coordination. The sixty-four dollar question, of course, is how to make that happen.
I have been an active union supporter my entire life. Although I am not currently a member of a union, my husband and I traveled to Wisconsin in order to support the workers there.
The energy and spirit of the protest there was inspirational. But you could sense that the force of the movement was being carefully guided into the disabling, destructive dem-party meat grinder, chewed up and spit out as another harmless phenomenon.
Organized labor today is virtually irrelevant. It is a relic of the past, a 'time gone by,' when the average working person understood "which side they were on."
Truth seems to be that the leadership of organized labor today, as the leadership of the dem-party is on the side of their own self-interest. They are corrupt and a barrier to the progress of working class interests. They lead us astray.
Todays most exploited workers are at nursing homes, big box retail stores, groceries, restaurants and fast food chains. For the most part, they are unorganized.
The only hope I see in the near future for workers is to organize these sectors into NEW, worker-controlled unions that know which side they are on and are willing to fight for their interests.
Sorry Ralph, but you misspelled the name, it's Chumpka, not Trumpka!