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| Striking AFSCME workers in Memphis |
“Unless they're (the Democrats) able to break the stranglehold that government-employee unions have on the party on policy, as well as in financial and political support,” says Schoen, “ it will be virtually impossible for Democrats to restore fiscal health to states like New York and California.” (1)
Schoen points out that working class voters are not happy with the Democratic Party and are abandoning it. Working class people have abandoned the political arena in general though given that we have no real electoral choice as the two capitalist parties have what amounts to a monopoly. But there is truth to Schoen’s argument that working class voters are buying the idea that the reason taxes are raised and services are cut, the reason for the attacks, the deficits and crisis in general is the relatively better working conditions and especially the pensions of public sector workers. As we have written before on this blog, without public sector Unions, the percentage of US workers organized is about 7%. And the employers need to bring the public sector closer to this so we are demonized by the big business mass media.
The reason this argument gets any echo among workers at all, especially in the aftermath of the financial system and subsequent bailout by the taxpayers, is that the capitalist class are waging a ferocious ideological war that meets no serious resistance from the heads of organized Labor and the public sector Unions in particular; throw enough mud at someone and some will inevitably stick.
Today’s Wall Street Journal launches another attack on public sector workers reminding us how the taxpayers are held hostage by our incredible power. (2) The author, Fred Siegel gives a brief history of public sector Unionism showing how public sector Unions or strikes were opposed by figures like George Meany, the former head of the AFL-CIO who once boasted he’d never walked a picket line in his life, to FDR who said of public sector Unionism that:
"A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable."
FDR, the astute bourgeois politician who helped save capitalism from itself called the national guard out on strikers we should remember more times than any other president before him. Siegel makes a point of showing that the liberals also opposed public sector strikes at the very least. He a “senior fellow” at the Manhattan institute, a conservative think tank whose co-founder was William Casey, the former head of the CIA, so that’s all we need to know about him.
Siegel attacks those liberals that supported public sector Unionism and used our growing power to get them elected. This undoubtedly worked for a while but we’re in different period now. Siegel and Schoen should not be concerned about public sector Unions taking over the Democratic Party though as the Democratic Party has presided over savage cuts in the wages and benefits of all workers and cuts in public services. The Unions spent $200 million in the last election cycle getting them elected and my former Union, AFSCME, spent $90 million and here in California we have Gerry Brown as governor to show for it who is savaging public services that will especially hurt the poor among us. During the Carter presidency when the Democrats controlled both houses and the presidency, Carter called the National Guard out on the miners and began the process of deregulation continued by Reagan; we don’t get a bang or even a whimper for our buck, but Union leaders might get a political career out of it and can hang around politicians in Washington DC.
In typical fashion Siegel distorts history, or should I say leaves out the role of the working class in history when he has a go at former NY Mayor Robert F Wagner for being one of the first to “seize on“ the potential power of public sector workers. In a hint that the disease runs in the family Siegel reminds us it was Wagner’s father who authored the New Deal’s Wagner Act that “Imposed on private employers the legal duty to bargain collectively with the properly elected Union representatives of their employees.”
There’s nothing extraordinary about codifying such a right in to law but Siegel leaves out a bit of not insignificant history like the three victorious general strikes that occurred a year earlier, 40,000 workers and farmers battling cops on the streets of Minneapolis might just have had some effect on the politicians of the ruling class one might think. They were simply putting on paper rights that were being taken in the streets, facts on the ground as the Israelis call them.
In 1958 there were 15 public employee strikes nationwide but after Jerry Wurf, the main figure in my former Union AFSCME took the helm, local and state governments suffered 254 strikes. AFSCME and the public sector Unions were more progressive than the old AFL craft Unions of the private sector. Martin Luther king was assassinated while in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers, mostly black workers members of AFSCME.
I remember during the 1980’s at AFSCME conventions when the leadership would talk of the “Mean Green Fighting Machine” and AFSCME was the fastest growing Union in the country with annual raises twice my private sector brothers and sisters. I was one of the leaders of a strike at my workplace and was chased around by process servers as public strikes were illegal. They were determined legal during the course of the strike. As Siegel points out, in the 1970’s 1000 members a week, mostly women, were joining AFSCME. The boom that in effect lasted from the recession of 1982 until the present with two brief interruptions delayed the assault on the public sector as the employers waged war on our private sector counterparts.
Siegel also reveals this common class blind spot when he suggests that the right to collective bargaining for public sector workers is not “rooted in deep seated American tradition”. Neither was it for the private sector. But Siegel claims falsely that the existence of public sector Unions was a “privilege” a political decision on the part of certain members of his class. People like Siegel and his class brethren fought unionization with extreme violence and deprivation. They deported us, they shot us, they starved our families. What is “deep rooted in American tradition” is a history of historic struggle by workers and our families against the most ruthless capitalist class in history. The Democrats, the former party of the slave owners and now of the capitalist class is the only party in history to drop nuclear bombs on a civilian population.
Explaining the crass and arrogant nature of the US capitalist class, Engels pointed out that unlike their European counterparts, they did not have to fight an ideological war over two centuries against an existing class system; they never had to defend their ideas. There was no organized ruling class here as such. For them, it was simply a matter of wiping out a couple of million of the existing inhabitants and building some infrastructure. This is a simplified view of things but it expresses it clearly if you ask me, explains the particularly crude and violent character of the US bourgeois.
What we must not forget though is that from day one; from the Native Americans that fought to defend the land and culture to the slave revolts and the revolts in the textile mills of New England and the factories in the 30’s and the fields of California, the struggles of the US working class and all oppressed people’s are what won us what we have today. It is a powerful and rich history of heroism and dedication to the cause of freedom against a ruthless racist ruling class.
The silence of the public sector Union leaders on this offensive of capital is deafening. At best, they will agree to file a lawsuit. They cannot counter the ideology of capitalism and the market because they support it. There is nothing they fear more than a worker’s victory because for them, any movement of the working class threatens the relationship they have built with the employers based on Labor peace, it can only lead to chaos; capitalism must survive, and along with it their comfortable lifestyles; it is the only way.
As rank and file members, and indeed all workers, we have a responsibility too. We have sat by and watched as our brothers and sisters in the private sector have had wages and benefits taken away that took decades and heroic struggles to win. We have allowed and are still allowing the Union leadership to waste our hard earned dues money getting the politicians of the bankers elected in the hope they will throw us some crumbs, will be a little nicer. We are in a struggle against the bosses but in Unions we are faced also with a much more difficult struggle, that against the concessionary policies of the top leadership. The bosses will not let up and are intent on putting the US working class on rations.
Siegel writes that it is the public pension crisis that is bankrupting the country. We have a different point of view. The looting of society’s resources by him and his Wall Street colleagues is bankrupting the country. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the building of bases all over the world and paying off dictators all over the world so the US can loot the wealth of their populations is bankrupting the country and making the world unsafe for ordinary Americans; we cannot travel to half the countries we used to be able to because of their actions taken in our name; it is them that put American lives in danger and its us that have to stop it.
We public sector workers are 36% organized. I am retired, I retried at 54. I was in some type of construction all my life and my body has paid for that. I can live on my retirement and believe that society should provide all retired workers with enough to live on and we should able to retire at 45 or 50 like the wealthy do if we want to. I am not ashamed of receiving enough to live on and will join the fight for all workers to not only earn a decent living and live a decent life but to retire in security also.
We must learn a lesson from the private sector, lets not be driven to 7% before we finally get off our asses. Even with a diminished private sector we still represent huge and important sectors of the economy and any serious actions by us will be welcomed and would encourage the millions of others who can barely survive to take action.
We can learn a lot from the Tunisians.
(1) The Union Threat to the Democrats' Future
(2) How Public Sector Unions Took Taxpayers Hostage
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