I was at a meeting the other night at the nurses Union. They had a link up to a Union official from Wisconsin. Most of the attendees were lefties and left officials/staffers in the Unions; hardly any nurses. A young staffer from HERE brought a worker from the Castlewood campaign where the workers have been locked out and on picket lines for a year. There were all the rahs and cheers in support. But this method is a proven failure. There was a similar ineffective picket which is actually an appeal to boycott, at a fancy hotel in Lafayette CA where workers and others tried to persuade rich people not to go in and "do the right thing".
It was a failure and Castlewood will be a failure. Workers can't be on ineffective picket lines for years; they're not paid Union staffers/officials, they lose money in strikes and stuff. The staffer asked us to come down and others said we should go down as the Union leadership continues a policy that has repeatedly failed and demoralizes workers in the process. The same with the hotel strike/lockout in San Francisco a few years ago or the grocery strike in southern California. The reason workers are not active in their Unions is that the leadership doesn't want them there; they will place demands on them that threatens their view of the world, that the bosses have to be helped, capitalism has to be saved and this threatens the relationship they've built up with the employers over the years based on Labor peace.
When they need them to let off some steam they bus people here and their but keep the members at bay and uninvolved. Why go to a Union meeting to hear that you have to take concessions and if you openly oppose that they bring the weight of the apparatus and its army of staffers against you? But not one of the socialist or left speakers said a word about this at this meeting or, for the benefit of the hotel worker, explained that the leadership has to take a different and more aggressive approach. And when the official from Wisconsin said that he had the "chutspa" was the word he used I think, to say to the leadership at an AFL-CIO executive board meeting didn't they see they were being attacked, no one clarified this not so much for him, he's the head of a Labor Council and in the present objective situation you can't be the head of a Labor council, and certainly not a state Labor federation unless you are "safe" no threat to the accepted policies. Without a movement from below I would say it would be near impossible to be on a central Labor Council executive board if you were openly challenging the leaderships disastrous polices among the ranks. But it should have been clarified for the one or two fresh rank and file members that might have wandered in.
Firstly, the members of the AFL-CIO executive board up till now, have not been under attack; members have. They are now with the possibility of losing their "seat at the table" and, along with their Democratic Party friends, facing a cash crunch as the end of dues checkoff, which is good for the rank and file but bad for the hierarchy and the Democrats, makes it harder to get the money in.
There were cheers as the HERE strategy was announced which certainly misleads the worker that such a strategy is the right one and will lead to further demoralization ahead. A top official of the SF Labor council was there and really said nothing substantial at all, this is a Labor council that supports concessions as they all do and whose leadership has attacked rank and file workers publicly that voted against them. Those of us on the left might consider why it is we have not been very successful sinking deep roots in to the rank and file of the Unions and the working class as a whole. We can blame the worker all we like but an internal audit might be in order. If you're not seen as significantly different from the present leadership and willing to challenge them openly and build caucuses around an alternative program and tactics, why would the average rank and file member get involved?
The Union bureaucracy often uses well-meaning young people as staffers. The danger in using the shop stewards and rank and file workers is they have a potential base in the local that they can use to challenge this bureaucracy. They are not stupid, they don't draw rank and filers in that oppose their concessionary policies in a serious way. With a young person brought in from the outside, they open their mouths and their gone. Here's a link with a message to young people thinking about working for Unions:
http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=278 t
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