I attended a community meeting in San Francisco earlier this week and it was interesting in that the two most influential speakers, a school board member and a Union representative, both presented the small audience with a fait accompli; the cuts were inevitable; damage control is the only answer.
The school board member was very pessimistic and explained how he hated it all, felt very sorry for everyone but that “nothing was going to improve”, that this is not just happening in California but throughout the U.S. Well, that’s nice to hear; we can all wallow in our misery at losing our homes, our schools, our public services.
I managed to speak and gave a little history about public education and why they want to eliminate it and privatize the rest. I explained how this was all connected and how the money was there and the crisis of the system, the bailouts etc. In other words, the big picture. I explained that the assault on the teachers Unions is because they have been the most consistent advocates for public education. There are some four million teachers in the two teachers Unions, the AFT and the NEA, with the NEA being much the larger. This obstacle restrains the capitalist class’ efforts to privatize public education and get their greedy little hands on the public money that funds it.
I made the point though, that the ability of the teachers’ Unions to fight back is hampered by the leadership’s link to the Democratic Party, the party that has run most of America’s biggest cities for the last 50 years or so. Because the entire leadership of organized Labor pins their hopes on Democrats gaining office, and spend hundreds of millions of dollars of their members dues money doing it, any strategy for fighting back against the employer’s assault on us has to be acceptable to the Democrats which mean it is ineffective. The game the Labor leadership plays is repeated time after time. The employers introduce savage cuts, the Union leaders and the Democrats whine about justice and decency and all that, the employers remove some of the cuts and get what they wanted. The Democrats and the heads of organized Labor then announce the defeat as a victory; a victory in hard times.
A Union rep for the teachers spoke after me. He gave a little jab at me by saying that he was going to talk about “practical stuff”. “What can be done right now” he said.
So what was this practical stuff? I was all-ears.
He explained that the Union, the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) had, based on information the employers had given them, given up 8 workdays a year as well as half of some other incentives (I think they were in the form of cash bonuses or something similar) for a total of $7 million in concessions in order to avoid layoffs. But it “hasn’t worked” he said. He basically said that they lied and that the Union acted in good faith giving up its member’s wages and benefits but that the employers were not nice to say the least. Basically, the bosses tricked them we are supposed to believe. The fact that concession after concession offered by Labor leaders to the employers has been met with more aggression was left out of the picture.
He was quite proud of the furlough days it seemed to me because I think the employers had demanded more. Furlough days in California have cost teachers as much as a 20% pay cut. So I put up my hand and I ask him if he was a paid Union representative and he replies that he was.
“How many furlough days are you taking?” I asked him
I could tell that this made him a little uncomfortable. He hesitated for a minute because there is not much likelihood of him taking any as it is not the norm for the full time Union officials that negotiate and champion the concessionary contracts they force on their members to work under those contracts. He did reply that he didn’t know yet or something to that effect.
He got a little frustrated asking me “not to do this”, and continued, saying at one point that he agreed with me, that the cuts in education were part of a generalized offensive basically and that he “agreed” with me.
“If you agree with me; why would the Unions start with a position of concessions?” I asked him.
His answer was classic: “There is no alternative” he said, paraphrasing Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase TINA.
There we have it, “There is no alternative”.
I should add that I don’t know this person and have no personal grudge against him; and he was pleasant enough. But its hard to accept that the Union officials bring these concessions simply because they’re tricked or lied to by the employers. It’s been happening for years. And how can this representative not have an alternative? Has he not read our own history, the history of the working class in this country? Has he not read about the great uprising of 1877, the Flint sit-down strike, the three general strikes of 1934 including one in the city we were speaking in and one in Oakland across the San Francisco Bay? Are they not familiar with the civil rights movement? Perhaps he’s never heard of Rosa Parks who did have an alternative and fought for it under the most brutal conditions.
We belong to an organization with 12 million workers in it and "There is no alternative" to concessions. In California, the docks, communication, transportation and most public services are unionized as well as huge public works projects and “we have no alternative”. The only response we can have to the onslaught we are facing on our living standards is to go backwards----damage control. This might work if we think that the bankers, the employers and their two political parties will be raising our living standards in the near future, but everyone knows this is not so; including the Union hierarchy.
The meeting was quite small despite efforts by some dedicated teachers and a few local activists to get the community there, and a couple of folks were frustrated at this as we all are when the “masses” seem apathetic or unresponsive. But the reason they are not there is not because they don’t care. The main problem is that they see no way out. And here were two individuals with significant social power compared to the average person or Union member and both of them offered only passive resignation to increased attacks on living standards and the increased misery that accompanies them. It’s depressing, it’s bad, I wish it wasn’t happening, but there is no alternative was the message.
Why would someone want to go to a meeting to hear that? They experience it in their daily lives and, anyway, they can read about all the cuts and the inevitability of them in the papers. The Union officials say the same thing about the members; they won’t come to meetings. But why take the precious time out of an increasingly hectic and insecure existence to go to your Union meeting to hear from your leaders that we have to take these and further cuts; we already hear that from the boss. And in this case and others where there are a significant percentage of minorities and immigrants who are often in even more vulnerable situations, they would have to see that there is a powerful organization ready and willing to defend them when they make the decision to fight.
I made the point that if this school board member or the Unions were organizing a real fight back then the meting would have been packed. Instead of individual teachers and activists with their limited resources getting out in to the community alone, the hundreds of million of dollars of their member’s dues money that the Union leadership spends getting democrats elected could be used to mobilize communities instead.
But what’s the point of that when there is no alternative?
George Schultz, the politician and former president of Bechtel, the world’s largest engineering company has some good advice for us. He said that, “Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table.” When the negotiator is more afraid of the power of those whose interests he is claiming to represent, capitulation is a given. Having no alternative to capitalism, the Union leaders are compelled to restrain the power that organized Labor and the working class as a whole has that could transform the situation. It is the Union leader’s worship of the market, their acceptance of a capitalist economic system as the only possible form of social organization that leads them to this point. This mistaken view of the world is what will lead any of us to draw the conclusion that “There is no alternative.”
This situation delays the rise of a movement to fight back but it cannot prevent it. It makes our jobs as activists harder and the suffering of people greater but it cannot stop the working class from ultimately rising to resolve the crisis we face in our lives; the dam will break at some point.
It is always important to openly challenge this ideology when we meet it in the course of our struggles. It comes from the capitalist class, their political representatives and is echoed by the trade Union leadership. By taking up concrete issues and demands, by demanding what we need not what the employers say is realistic, and by using direct action methods to win what we want, will isolate us from the Democrats and their friends atop organized Labor, but to draw workers in to our movement they have to see that there is real material gain from it and that we are prepared to fight and defend our own. We can build a new movement but not without drawing lessons from the past, learning what works and what doesn't.
I took the subway to the meeting and sat by the doors in the compartment. As the train pulled in to Glen park station, a woman stood up and stood by the door preparing to exit the train. She did this as I lifted my arm up on to the partition that separated the exit area from my seat and accidentally elbowed her in the side.
“I’m sorry”, I said to her.
She was in her late forties it looked like and definitely a working class woman. She looked down at me and began to cry.
“It can’t be worse than what happened to me today”, she said.
“Oh, what’s that” I asked.
“I got laid off” she said, in tears as she walked off.
I didn’t have time to tell her about the alternative.
No comments:
Post a Comment