Montana public sector workers join AFL-CIO. But what does that mean?

Wisconsin events terrified the AFL-CIO leadership

The AFL-CIO blog reports today that the Montana Public Employees Association (MPEA) is affiliating to the national body after being an independent association for the past 65 years. “We realize that by affiliating with the national and Montana AFL-CIO we become a stronger voice for our members and for all workers in the state of Montana.” Says Quint Nyman, the executive director of the MPEA.

The state AFL-CIO president, Jim McGarvey concurs, “When workers stand together on the job, in our communities, and at the voting booth we can do great things,” he says. The AFL-CIO welcomes the affiliation naturally announcing that it comes at a time when “support for the rights of public employees is stronger than ever.”

“Over the past few weeks we have seen unprecedented strength and solidarity growing within the labor movement—which makes this news so exciting.” adds AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.
But this unprecedented support and solidarity has not been mobilized and organized in to a struggle to reverse the attacks on wages, benefits and working conditions that have savaged workers’ lives and our communities over the past 50 years.

The strategists atop the AFL-CIO choose their public words very carefully for fear that they will raise the expectations of their own members and the working class population as a whole; no Egypt’s or Tunisia’s here please. This is why the issue of public employees’ rights is all that is on the table. The right to bargain is an important right, but what we demand at that table and what we do to win those demands is what matters. We never built trade Unions sitting in chair across from the boss.  As George Schultz, one of the more astute of our foes said, “Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table.”

Unfortunately, the AFL-CIO hierarchy brings no power to the table. In the case of the recent upsurge in public employee activity they don’t even bring demands to the table except those that affect their jobs, the right to talk to the boss at all and dues check off where the bosses collect their members dues from them and send a check to the Union. For the paid Union staffers or selected shop stewards to collect dues would bring them in to too close a contact with the members which is something the hierarchy fears like the plague.

Too many times the AFL-CIO heads have cried wolf and threatened the employers with talk of shutting them down and bringing the power of the members to bear on them only to capitulate in the end. When they actually do call strikes, they are designed to lose; they are not designed to stop production or scabs form entering and are in actuality nothing more than 24-hour protests. Two weeks of that and workers get pretty demoralized.

The members have little say in how they are run and often have little idea of what’s happening at the table. Individual locals are left isolated to fight national and more often, global corporations alone and workers are stranded on ineffective picket lines for months on end losing their homes and livelihoods. There is no real attempt to generalize these struggles and link up with communities, the youth and non-Union workers. The bosses have heard it all before; they're not afraid of the Labor hierarchy.

I'm afraid you are, sister

The Labor leadership has no alternative to capitalism and their strategy is defined by what will help capitalism survive, their demands must fit in to this framework; workers must sacrifice. They support the Team Concept on the job and the Team Concept in the political sphere through support for the Democratic Party. The “stronger voice” they are referring to relates only to the ballot box; getting a Democrat elected. In the struggle in Wisconsin, both the Union leadership and their allies in the Democratic Party support giving to the employers all the economic concessions they want.

Concessions are not an issue for the heads of organized Labor, being part of the team that develops them is.

The position of organized Labor’s hierarchy is that we cannot win; there is no alternative so we have to bail the system out and their policies flow from this worldview. The danger when workers move in to struggle or when militant opposition caucuses arise within organized Labor is that workers challenge this view naturally. The struggle for a better life or even to keep what we have comes up against the limits of the market that cannot provide these things. This is why the Labor leadership is terrified of a victory, and crushes or derails movements that threaten the employers interests, it would undermine, as we have said before, the argument they have been putting forward that we can’t win and that the market is god.

Leadership is the reason we have been driven so far back. What they say and do has an important effect on consciousness and any activity that might flow from it. I was at the rally in San Francisco that was called by the Labor Council in support of Wisconsin and for “Middle class jobs” and “The American Dream”. That makes me want to throw up but I’ll leave my comments on that for a later date. There were a couple thousand people there and within a couple of minutes of me arriving an AFSCME Business Agent that I know got to the podium to rouse the masses.

But out came the Labor bureaucracy’s line, “This is not about money” she emphasizes and stressed a similar point more than once for fear that the audience might start thinking about the savaging they’ll get when and if  Union officials like her get to the table. “Why isn’t it?” I shouted back. “Of course its about money, and if not it should be. It’s about jobs and work conditions and health care and housing.” I couldn’t be heard except for a few people around me but it was the same old stuff, don’t raise expectations, don’t get people thinking about the economic and social consequences of the attacks on public sector workers and services, the need for more of each, jobs, services, health care, education etc. and making the rich pay. This official, like the entire leadership of the AFL-CIO whose views she is expressing, supports eliminating all these, or cutting back on them anyway.

It was too depressing for me so I went to the Libyan gathering at the anti-Gaddafi rally which was inspiring to say the least. I felt at home there and even spoke at it.

When workers see a leadership that is actually leading, putting forward a real fighting program and a strategy for winning it, then there is much more of a willingness to become involved in developing it themselves and acting on it; to go on the offensive against the boss. But the heads of organized Labor do not counter the ideology and propaganda of the bosses that we have to hear every day. All we ever hear from them is what we can’t do and how we can’t win and that we have to tighten our belts and share the sacrifice. In California the Democratic governor’s budget is about to savage workers and the poor further and Labor officials have referred to it as fair and balanced.

So when workers enter the AFL-CIO family we have to recognize that if we are to make it worthwhile we have to participate in the building of rank and file opposition caucuses that go on the offensive; that raise demands that are also organizing tools by rejecting the false view put forward by the present leadership that we have to take concessions or can’t win. We can then link these with similar community organizations and groups of unorganized workers and open the door to a powerful offensive of our own.