Seiu president: "Why Labor Backs 'Occupy Wall Street"

SEIU President Mary Kay Henry

A comment on a previous blog suggests that the Occupy Wall Street movement might have convinced the Labor leaders to adopt more militant and aggressive tactics in their relationship with the bosses.  I think there is no doubt that the movement will have a positive impact on all workers including Union members and the top leaders of organized Labor.  This is especially the case if more workers, particularly organized Labor’s rank and file become involved.

I have been accused of being a bit negative about the role of the leadership and their intentions.  “Is it not a positive development that Unions are backing the OWS movement?”,  a friend asked me last night in a break in the action as Wales was defeating Ireland in the Rugby World Cup.

My answer to my friend’s question is an emphatic “yes”.  But the “Union” is not one homogeneous bloc. The president of my International Union probably earns around $500,000 a year; that is not your average Union member.  But even this is not the problem.  The dominant and most destructive policy forced upon Labor’s rank and file today by the strategists at the top is the Team Concept. This is the view that workers and bosses have the same interests, are on the same team. The destructive policies that flow from this view involve workers of one company competing with workers of another in order to ensure their bosses win market share from their rivals.  It has been a disaster for workers as globalization has also increased the need for this competition on a world scale.  We have to compete with workers in China or Vietnam or Mexico in order to help US capitalists steal market share from their rivals or drive them from the market entirely.

For those of us who have been active in Unions at the rank and file level for many years, we have seen betrayal after betrayal due to these incorrect policies.  When rank and file members have voted concessionary contracts down in what is really the first attempt to fight back against efforts by the bosses to make us more competitive, they have found themselves in a huge internal struggle against our own leaders at the highest levels whose strategy is to help the employers’ out. Many people, especially young people, who are not in Unions are not aware of the intensity of this assault.  I spoke this week to a former leader of UAW local who was fired along with four others for leading a strike against concessions; they were fired by the corporate employer and their international Union leadership did nothing, in fact are complicit in the firings.  Three of them got their jobs back and two didn’t, a strategy aimed at breaking the unity of this rank and file leadership.

So when we say “the Union is involved” it depends which force inside the Union it is, the leadership and its paid staff, or the rank and file member. In Madison for example, the Labor hierarchy was able to derail that movement.  The way for it to have been successful would have been for the ranks to wrest control from their own leaders.

But let’s look at what the president of the Service Employees International Union says in today’s Wall Street Journal.  Mary Kay Henry, who succeeded Wall Street’s pal, Andy Stern, explains “Why Labor Backs ‘Occupy Wall Street’”  She raises important issues, jobs, housing and the crimes of the bankers.  She talks of the need for jobs above all things and the need to rebuild the social infrastructure of this country.  She explains “while students, seniors and workers didn’t cause our economic collapse, were the ones paying the price.” She also attacks the banks for taking trillions in public money that was supposed to be used to invest in the economy and used that money to “enrich themselves”

Commenting on Henry replacing Andy Stern at the head of SEIU last year (Stern’s salary was about $400,000 a year) The New York Times’ Steven Greenhouse wrote,  “Ms. Henry seems in no rush to distance herself from Mr. Stern’s policies. She subscribes to his ambitious political strategies, even planning to increase his proposed spending on governors’ races to $14 million this year, from $10 million.”  The Democrats will be pleased---it is in to their political campaigns that this money will go. She never once criticizes this party which, along with Republicans and the entire Labor leadership supported the concessions the bosses were asking for in Wisconsin. The exception were the two that affected them the most, the right to a seat at the table without which they’d have no jobs and dues check off where the employer collects the members’ dues money for them.  This is important to the Democratic Party also as it is a source of funds for their election campaigns.

In today’s WSJ piece, it is clear that sister Henry's strategy is business as usual.  She talks of the “horror” Americans felt as we watched “Republican politicians hold our country hostage during the debt crisis”. “The importance of Occupy Wall Street can’t be measured by any set of demands” says Henry adding that it is the “values that unite the protesters” that we must grasp. “The anger has been growing for some time and now that its boiled over there’s no bottling it up” she writes. This is the crux of the issue—it is beginning to “boil over” a little bit. She has to say something, but if it boils over a little too much to the point that it influences the rank and file of organized Labor in the wrong way, Ms Henry and her colleagues atop these structures will join with their allies in the Democratic Party in cooling things down some if they can.

Ms Henry praises the OWS movement and its importance as it shows that “all it takes is a small group of courageous people to light a spark and forever change the arc of history.”  I agree with her. She then goes on to make comparisons with the past describing the great 44 day occupation of the Flint factory in 1936-37 and the civil rights activists and the sit ins in the south. And naturally, there is Tahir Square.

The problem is that there have been such sparks within organized Labor over the years including in Ms Henry’s own Union and the leadership and full time apparatus of which she is a part did their best to douse those sparks before they turned in to a real bonfire; and they were for the most part successful with disastrous results for organized Labor’s’ rank and file and all workers.They have thrown up obstacle after obstacle whenever rank and file workers have moved to throw back the bosses' agenda.

“Nobody can predict what’s next for the Occupy Wall Street movement. And no one institution or person should try to exert their pressure on this inspiring collective of people.”  Any rank and file oppositionist has to laugh at this one.  This has been the public line that’s used whenever the Labor hierarchy abandons and isolates a local Union or collection of workers that attempts to stand up to their employer’s concessionary assaults.  The hierarchy very much pressures and uses it’s position to determine the outcome of workers struggles and publicly joins with the bosses to do so these days.  There are many examples in SEIU, I blogged about a couple of them in my own area here and here; the same with the TWU that represents transit drivers in San Francisco. In the UAW there have been numerous occasions when the hierarchy has crushed opposition or abandoned workers that wanted to “light a spark” in order to reverse years of concessions and defeats. Ms Henry has been present through all of this and, to my knowledge said nothing.

This is the crux of the matter.  The Labor hierarchy will enter this movement in order to influence it and actually influence it in the direction that they want which is business as usual.  They don’t want their members getting any ideas about civil disobedience and democracy and halting economic activity from the folks in the OWS movement. We should welcome Labor to the movement with this in mind.

Ms Henry, was never a rank and file member of the union, but a member of the full-time apparatus, a staff researcher. She worked her way up the Union hierarchy under Andy Stern.  Believe me, in the present climate when the ranks of the trade Unions are not heavily involved in determining the direction of these bodies and there is no well-organized movement from below challenging the leadership’s policies, you don’t get a promotion from above if you are not “safe”.

For Wisconsin to have been successful it was necessary for the ranks of Labor to break from the stifling bureaucratic control of the present leadership and their policies and the same applies to involvement in the OWS movement.  Naturally, the movement as it grows and hopefully it will, will exert pressures on the Labor movement and increase the likelihood of divisions and splits within its leadership. And when leaders, as John L Lewis did in the thirties, take steps forward due to this pressure---move to the left---then we should support that and encourage it.

But we must also judge by actions not words.  Important and encouraging words that could come from the mouths of top Labor officials would be to publicly accept that their policies up to now have been a disaster.   They can announce that business as usual is a thing of the past and mass direct action, strikes, occupations and civil disobedience are the new methods and fighting for what we need and not what bankers and their political representatives say is realistic is their program. They can announce that our movement will no longer support and spend members' money getting Democrats elected in to office and instead join with workers and our communities in building an independent party of and for working people.

Unfortunately, the SEIU president's message has the same old ring to it.