The Labor Hierarchy Prepares to Throw Members Money and Resources at The Democrats Preparing the Ground for Further Defeats and Demoralization

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the business oriented Union leaders atop organized Labor in the US are worried about the November elections. They spent millions of dollars of their members' hard earned dues money helping Democrats in to office in the last election cycle and, as usual, the returns are not so hot. EFCA!  What's EFCA?

Their savior this time, Barak Obama, has done what all the other saviors did, helped his friends in the corporate and financial world clean up.  Clinton, a previous savior threw working class women off welfare and betrayed his Labor friends on NAFTA.   "...People who work on Wall Street are good citizens who want their country to change...I want to generate a lot of millionaires.." Clinton told Business Week  in 1992. Clinton followed through, especially for himself and his business partner Hilary.  Another savior the heads of organized Labor turned to was Al Gore who boasted to his friends in Business Week in January 1995, "In one year, we downsized by 100,000 employees. We have locked in place plans to eliminate another 200,000 workers. That's a bold start."

The list of betrayals is a long one.  When I was a delegate to the Alameda Central Labor Council here in the San Francisco Bay Area it was common after the knife was still quivering in the back of the working class, for officials to cuss the Democrats out for another shafting or, more often, blame the Republicans for blocking the Democrats' efforts.  On both counts they're wrong of course.  The capitalist class in this country has one party with two wings to it that play the good cop bad cop role, one gives you a thrashing, the other a cigarette but they're both after the same thing. A political party does not exist in a vacuum, it represents class interests, and the Democrats, as much as the Republicans, represent the interests of the corporations, of the capitalist class that rule society.  There are minor differences no doubt, cutting services to the working class or raising taxes on the working class for instance. And different sections of the bourgeois may at any point in time have more influence or allegiance to one or the other of their two parties.  But the main thing is that they are united on the main point----the working class will pay and the global interests of US capitalism, its right to make profit and for capital to travel the world unfettered will be protected, no matter what the cost in lives and/or the destruction of the natural world.

Either way, even if the Democrats were simply betraying or conning the Labor leaders or if they were genuinely, through the limits of political activity alone, unable to serve our interests, anyone with any sense at all would have abandoned them long ago.  Yet the Labor leaders, despite their members and most US workers abandoning politics so disgusted they are with it, continue to waste workers money and efforts getting them elected. The Union that I belonged to, AFSCME, provided 40,000 volunteers for the Mondale campaign in 1984, these resources are considerable.

The AFL-CIO and the SEIU are planning to spend at least $44 million on the midterm elections. When all the human resources are included the heads of organized labor throw hundreds of millions of dollars at the capitalist politicians every election cycle.  This time they want the Democrats to retain control of both houses of Congress, not that it matters too much.  They had control of both houses of Congress during the Carter years when not one piece of legislation important to Labor was passed and they were in the same position in the first two years of the Clinton presidency.

Richard Trumka, the former mineworkers leader now President of the AFL-CIO sounded quite militant back in 1995 when Gore was boasting about slashing public sector jobs,  “While we are always willing to negotiate as equals, the era of union busting, contract trashing and strike breaking is at an end.  Today, we say that when you pick a fight with any of us, you pick a fight with all of us! And that when you push us, we will push back."

Sounds pretty good but he was running for office in the only contested election for AFL-CIO president in a century. A month or so after, John Sweeney defeated Tom Donahue in the election for president, and Trumka won his seat.  They were all sounding tough for a while, Sweeney talked of blocking bridges before getting elected and shifted to building them once in office---building them not between the leadership of the AFL-CIO  and the members but the leadership of the AFL-CIO and the bosses.

The consequences of their role are significant as they contribute to the general feeling in the US that all politics is bad and that the politicians attack us because they're corrupt or evil people rather than representatives of a class defending the interests of that class. The Labor hierarchy are responsible for the mood of despair and resignation that exists among the working class, the view that nothing will change. Things will change, it's inevitable, but we have suffered significantly and the capitalist class have had their way precisely due to the role the Labor hierarchy continues to play. Any organization that has only one contested election for its top post in a century is an unhealthy one.

There is no doubt that with the tremendous resources at their disposal and Union locals, Central Labor bodies, State Labor Federations throughout the nation not to mention human resources,  the heads of organized Labor could transform the political landscape in the US and break the monopoly big business has in the political arena by providing an alternative political party for workers to join, be active in and vote for.  This would have a major effect on consciousness which is exactly why they resist such a move; as the leaders of a political party they can no longer blame democrats and would  face pressure to "produce the goods", and as firm supporters of capitalism and the free market they are incapable of this.  It will take a great upheaval from below that will convulse organized Labor and force from the bottom up, the building of an alternative to the Democrats.  It is quite likely, given the stifling hold on the apparatus that the bureaucracy has, that such a development will first appear outside of the Unions entirely.

But we can't say the capitalist class or its representatives like Gore or Clinton are  that dishonest; their intentions have been quite clear, right out there for anyone to hear.  Way back in 1974, one of the serious and most respected journals of the US bourgeois warned:

"It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow--the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more...Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares with the selling job that must be done to make people except this reality."  Business Week 10-12-74.

It doesn't  get any plainer than that.