AFSCME President "Battling for the American Dream"

Can we really depend on these two?

Gerald McEntee and Lee Saunders, President and Secretary Treasurer of my former Union, AFSCME, have a joint message for us in the spring issue of the International Union’s magazine, AFSCME Works.  “Today we are fighting to preserve the destruction of the middle class—the everyday people who live and work on Main Street,” they write.They also tell us that we are in a battle for the American Dream.  What's that?  If it's a three car garage, a boat, a 2500 sq foot house I don't want it and the planet can't afford it. That's an American and global nightmare.  A secure job, education, health care, an end to the incarceration of millions of people they have abandoned; that might be the start of a decent dream.

Here we go again. Right off the bat I am a bit confused. If the “middle class” lives on Main Street, where do workers like me live? And who lives in what we used to call slums back home and what we call over here, the ghetto.

They use the term “middle class” repeatedly throughout this issue which is about the events around the attacks on collective bargaining rights. It seems the working class is being abandoned even though McEntee/Saunders say in their introduction that AFSCME joins coalitions that fight for “those who have low incomes.” Perhaps these people are workers. But surely that can’t be because they also say that the present attacks are threatening the livelihoods of public service “workers” and I don’t think we are counted as the “low waged” by most people, including ourselves. Mind you, we have lost ground too, and when we include service workers, like those that cook or clean,  then "low waged" is more appropriate, even in the public sector. But with benefits you are generally better off than your private sector brothers and sisters.  I never considered myself “low waged” and it appears now, I am the extreme opposite, one of these overpaid, greedy public sector, er, workers. I have a pension I can live on.

Oh, my. I am so confused.

Maybe the next article by Clyde Weiss can help me. Let’s have a look. Oh no! I am worse off. Weiss says that we must win this fight that was initially a “battle to preserve collective bargaining rights” in Wisconsin but has become a “nationwide fight to save America’s working middle class ” (My added emphasis). Oh, man, it gets worse. "Working middle class" What's that? What am I? Am I working class, working middle class, middle class, low waged, the working poor, the aristocracy of Labor? A retired bum, Jesus, life in the US is so complicated.

I’ll have to leave that issue as I guess I am not smart enough to understand the complexities of class society. Let’s see what else they’re saying, these heads of a workers organization with 1.3 million members?

Ok, they want “good jobs” say McEntee and Saunders, they must be talking about us because they already have good jobs.  They write about growing up in Union households sitting around the dinner table talking about it. They’re proud of their ancestry their er, (working class) roots. This is a bit of a stretch isn’t it? I think it’s been a long time since Gerald McEntee had any working class roots, His father was an AFSCME official for one thing and being in the management of a conservative trade Union apparatus is a bit different than being a “rubbish collector” which is how McEntee describes him. McEntee has been in his position as president for 30 years and earned around $360,000 a year when I was active in that union. He earns close to $500,000 today. Marty Beil, executive director of AFSCME Council 24 in Wisconsin earns around 162,000 a year, or did in 2008, the latest figures I found. And at rallies in Wisconsin and around the country, including one here in San Francisco that I attended, AFCSME and other full time officials made a point of telling those present that “this is not about money”. They’re right, for them it’s not.

It is evident that the main issue from the heads of AFSCME and the AFL-CIO developed in the boardrooms of these organizations which are headquartered near their other friends in Washington, is the right to a seat at the table. Their strategy for fighting the attack on this right has nothing to do with a concern that it might weaken their ability to negotiate higher wages, more leisure time and a better life for their members and the working middle, low waged, working classes.

The Clyde Weiss article makes it clear that the battle that is being fought is one to recall Republicans and elect Democrats in their place. The Democrats are much more astute you see. They recognize that Gerald McEntee, Lee Saunders, and all the top officials in the Labor movement support lowering wages, curbing rights and reducing benefits that workers have won over the years, they are practical people; capitalism is in trouble and they want to help. Weiss even makes the point that not all billionaires are bad people, “Extremist billionaires like David and Charles Koch…..fill the campaign war chests of those who do their bidding.” he writes.

And who might the non-extremist billionaires be? I might ask----- the pussycats who are our supporters.

Weis does offer the AFSCME solution that is the only inspiring point that keeps me reading. AFSCME’s “solutions” will “build the middle class, not tear it down” There’s those poor workers, left out again. Here’s the inspiring part though, “..we can end costly privatization of public services, close corporate tax loopholes and raise revenue when necessary to protect public services.”

He lays out his strategy for victory and warns us we can’t win unless we “tell our neighbors and friends how our jobs improve our communities, why collective bargaining (that most people don’t have) ensures that workers are treated with respect on the job “ (which no worker has and those without bargaining rights have less of it) and here’s the big one that will attract those millions of unemployed, especially the youth, we should tell our friends, “….having a seat at the table builds strength for the middle class.”

By the end of the day I felt pretty depressed reading the same stuff we’ve heard over and over again through the years, years that have seen living standards continue to decline and the percentage of workers in Unions sink to tragic lows, from 35% of the population to 12%. The last bastion of Unionism, the public sector is now faced with what the auto workers before us went through; without the public sector only about 7% of US workers would be organized. The garbage I read in the Union publications has nothing that could inspire any Union member and certainly not those outside of organized Labor, the couple of million in prison, young workers, students or those specially oppressed sections of the working class, women, people of color, the disabled, etc. The publications successfully accomplish what they’re supposed to------they bore you to death.

But wait, Jeez. How did I miss this? I’m such a blockhead, too smart for my own good in not recognizing that our leaders are our leaders for a reason, they have some sneaky hidden strategy up their sleeve and I see it couched here, hinted at enough for me to see the big picture. I’m back on track now, ready to fight. I take back every criticism I made of brother McEntee’s strategy so judgmental was I that I missed the hidden message, and here’s what I missed silly me: wait, I have to compose myself so filled am I with joy and emotion, sniff, sniff:

“We are proud to have so many fellow Americans--including President Obama---standing with us,”