Don't allow the Labor leadership to turn a possible victory in to defeat in Wisconsin. Build a united working class movement----no to the Democrats

Ohio workers protest anti-union legislation

In any struggle it pays to know who are enemies and who are friends. But it is also important to understand what motivates some of those who are on the same side, or appear to be on the same side. In the movement that has sprung up in Wisconsin in response to the frontal attacks on trade Union and workers’ rights, there are three major players that are opposed to Republican governor, Scott walker’s attempts to eliminate collective bargaining rights as well as wages, benefits and working conditions of public sector workers. There is the trade Union bureaucracy at the helm of the organized Labor movement, the rank and file of the movement and the working class as a whole, and the other capitalist party, the Democrats.

There are significant differences between these three forces. The trade Union leadership and their friends in the Democratic Party are opposed to the weakening of collective bargaining rights which includes limiting contracts to one year and requiring annual employee votes to retain unions.

The bill would repeal all bargaining rights for home health care workers, University of Wisconsin System faculty and academic staff, and employees of University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics. It will eliminate dues check off where employers collect dues money for the Union from the paychecks. (In many ways this would be a good thing as it would mean full time staff stewards on the job would have to interact more with the members to collect finances)

For the trade Union bureaucracy, it means losing a seat at the table. The employers will have limited or severely curtailed, the legal rights of Unions to negotiate over wages, hours and working conditions. There is no doubt that this is a frontal assault on trade Union rights.

The Democrats on the other hand are against such a blatant attack on Union rights because the AFL-CIO leadership and their counterparts in the Change To Win coalition that split from the AFL-CIO a few years ago provide this party with millions of dollars of their members dues money during election campaigns; $400 million to elect President Obama. When assistance in kind is included, phone banking, mailings, precinct walking etc. the Union contributions to the Democratic Party over the years amounts to billions of dollars and it has done nothing to stop the decline in our living standards brought about by attacks from Democrats and Republicans alike.

The Union leaders provide money and foot soldiers for the Democrats. My former Union, AFSCME, provided 40,000 volunteers for Walter Mondale in 1984. The resources are clearly there for us to run independent labor/working class candidates for state, local and national elections.

Don't let the Dems derail an independent workers' movement

“Stripping away workers’ rights is something we cannot as Democrats allow to happen” Wisconsin Democratic Senate Minority leader Mark Miller said as he skipped the state. The Democrats skipping across the border to Illinois from Wisconsin in order to block the vote on Walker’s bill is merely a superficial attempt to portray themselves as workers’ friends, as the guardians of workers’ rights. They do not want to lose Union money and Union Labor the leadership provides them at election time.

Workers gathered in Columbus Ohio to protest similar legislation that will eliminate most collective bargaining rights for the 400,000 public employees in the state. President Obama was there Tuesday to meet with small business owners but his spokesperson declined to comment on the situation in Wisconsin or Ohio according to the Wall Street Journal. This is our friend?

The trade Union leadership and the Democrats have no problem with workers paying more to bail out the system and to recuperate from a meltdown that the capitalist class has caused. That is not an issue with them. We have quoted numerous Labor officials who are pleading with the bosses to negotiate cuts with them. They have stated many times that finances are not an issue and both groups are only too willing to cut wages, eliminate benefits and increase workers pension contributions; they simply don’t want to lose the right to talk about it.

For the public sector workers, all workers and youth and the recipients of public services, money, services and working conditions do matter. The idea that we have to take cuts, that services have to be slashed, is nonsense.

As a blog pointed out the other day: “The U.S. has the most unequal distribution (of wealth) among industrial nations (the OECD nations), and among all nations in the world we rank at #73 in inequality behind such nations as Morocco, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Russia, Egypt and Romania. The U.S. also has the highest childhood poverty rate among all developed nations. France has about the same child poverty rate as the U.S. before government interventions. France reduces childhood poverty to 7%, we reduce it to 20%.”

We’ve bailed out the bankers and Wall Street to the tune of trillions of dollars. Not only have we funded the numerous dictators falling in the Middle East right now, they are spending trillions of dollars on building bases all over the world and on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Democrats and Republicans have no disagreement on the basics that workers and the middle class must pay for their crisis. They simply differ on the level of cuts. Because the heads of organized Labor also make this argument, that we have to sacrifice, that we have to give back what took a hundred years or so to win, this idea takes hold in the minds of many workers. The propaganda that public sector workers are the cause of the deficits, tax increases and cuts that other workers have been facing also gets an echo because the Labor leaders fail to counter it with an offensive of our own, instead, making moral arguments that we “deserve” what we get because we are hard dedicated workers etc. What does that say about the workers that lost their paychecks and benefits?

Where our money is, but we've have to fight for it.

There is no shortage of money so there is no need to go backwards. A recent study by the Government Accountability Office said, “72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005.” While “More than half of foreign companies and about 42 percent of U.S. companies paid no U.S. income taxes for two or more years in that period” the report said.

Yet we have this absurd situation where 65,000 workers are in the streets of a mid-sized state Capital and their leaders are saying its all so that they can sit down with the boss and negotiate our wages, benefits and working conditions away and accept cuts in pay. They are even raising the threat of a general strike so they can go and hand over our living standards to the boss. This is the time to go on the offensive. We must demand increased public services through a massive national infrastructure plan. More jobs, pay and a retirement we can live on for all; a shorter workweek, health care, free education at all levels; a $15 an hour minimum wage, a moratorium on foreclosures etc. We can introduce legislation to tax the rich and the corporations as Oregon has done. We must build and expand this movement and draw other workers and youth in to it in the struggle against the capitalists of both parties and through such a campaign, run political candidates on a fight to win platform independent of the two Wall Street parties.

This is the alternative to a future of never ending concessions and defeats.