Jane McAlvey on the GM Strike. Democrats Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda.

Did the UAW Have a Leading Body?  I couldn't find a mention of them in the article.

Is there an election going on?

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

Editor, Facts For Working People

I just read Jane McAlvey’s October 23^rd article in The Nation where she chastises the Democratic Party for using workers as props appearing on picket lines for photo ops and such. She then gives us numerous examples of what this party she supports should be doing.

Well I have some news for Ms McAlvey, the Democrats have been doing this for a long time and most workers are fully aware of it and are not fooled by it. Every national convention I attended or conferences of higher union bodies like the state AFL-CIO conventions, always had Democratic Party big wigs in attendance. It’s clear to any casual observer that the trade union hierarchy and the Democratic Party leadership are joined at the hip.

One of the reasons 100 million people didn’t vote in the last election is that millions of workers have drawn the conclusion that our living standards, protections on the job and general material conditions have deteriorated under Democratic and Republican parties alike and the “lesser of two evils” approach is a bankrupt strategy. The trade union hierarchy (along with Ms McAlvey) continues to force upon organized labor’s rank and file a political party they abandoned long ago.

In an earlier commentary, I pointed out that Ms McAlvey is a former SEIU staffer, labor strategist and a Harvard graduate with a Phd., she was brought in to the labor movement by the AFL-CIO hierarchy as far as I can see around the 1996 elections and the advent of SEIU’s John Sweeney. Sweeney, for a moment or two, talked of blocking bridges in the mold of Martin Luther King but soon went from blocking them to building them, not in order to reach out to his members and the wider working class, but as a gesture of solidarity with the bosses and the capitalist class in general.

While some university graduates, even Phd’s have placed the skills they have acquired through higher education at the service of the union rank and file and have become an integral part of the rank and file themselves, others have joined the lower ranks of the trade union hierarchy and its full time apparatus. Having a Phd. or graduating from a famous capitalist institution like Harvard is a plus. The labor hierarchy uses the skills acquired in these institutions to their advantage as they keep the 14 million members of organized labor from getting out of hand and threatening the relationship they have built with the bosses based on class collaboration and labor peace.

During the recent GM strike I spoke to a few UAW rank and file members I have  known for years trying to get a feel for how they saw things. I spoke to a Chrysler shop steward who told me that the general mood was that the UAW leadership  “Sold us out years ago”. This is not an unusual response when you ask the average union dues payer how things are progressing. The discontent within the ranks of organized labor and anger at the present leadership is widespread. It has a real material base. Defeat after defeat, workers being left on picket lines for weeks on end with little to show for it, leads union members to this conclusion. Unfortunately, the average dues payer often blames corruption, character flaws, greed in the abstract, taking bribes from the boss as the reason for the leadership’s betrayals. While there is truth to all of this, the main problem is that the trade union leadership acts the way it does because it has not alternative to capitalism. Consequently, when capitalism goes in to crisis they move to bail it out and that means at their members’ expense.

After three weeks on strike, Terry Dittes, the Chief UAW negotiator at GM sent a letter to his members on October 6^th 2019 that said, GM were refusing to “provide enough job security in the next four year contract.”  In that letter he went on to chide GM for the lack of “professional courtesy” and for not explaining why the company didn’t respond in the way Dittes believed it should and that, The law and basic decency require no less.”. Where is this man’s head at?  Why would GM act any differently?

There is no such thing as job security in a capitalist economic system. After years of cooperation and handing over the members’ living standards without a fight, the bosses have drawn the conclusion that they don’t need the labor hierarchy anymore. They are not afraid of the trade union leadership at all. And the law means nothing to them when it comes to profits.

Is there an election somewhere?

 Ms McAlvey writes of the GM strike being a great opportunity for the Democratic Party. The Party could have, “….called an emergency summit on how plants threatened with being shut down during Trump’s administration can be kept open….”

The Democratic Party, “….could have called on the environmental movement and its donors to help line up the financing needed to convert the GM plants slated to close into electric auto plants.”, she writes, though she  does explain that electric car production doesn’t do much for the rest of the working class as it would mean many fewer jobs, by some accounts three million worldwide from what I read. But, “….fewer is better than none…” she says.

“Nancy Pelosi could have passed legislation in the House demanding a bailout by Trump” MS McAlvey writes. She must have missed the bit where Nancy Pelosi explained to a rather impressionable young DSA member, “I have to say, we’re capitalists, that’s just the way it is.”.

Ms McAlvey’s piece for The Nation yet another cover for the disastrous role the trade union officialdom plays as she fosters the illusion that the Democratic Party will change course and become an avid, radical defender of the working class; “The sooner Democrats shift from making workers props in their campaign to making them central actors in rebuilding our infrastructure, retooled for climate and human justice, the sooner we can end the nightmare that is America today.” She never mentions the trade union leadership at all. This is not an accident but a matter of policy for people who have entered the labor movement through the good graces of the officialdom.

The Democratic Party is the only political party in history to have dropped nuclear weapons on urban populations. It is a capitalist party funded by Wall Street and the very same billionaires that fund the Republican Party with a few exceptions. The last elections revealed how the two parties operate as staunch Republicans, not of the religious fanatic branch, crossed over to support the hated Hillary Clinton faced with the odious degenerate, racist and sexual Predator Trump.

Ms McAlvey, is described as a “Senior policy fellow at the University of California at Berkeley’s Labor Center.”. I’m not really sure what that means though I assume she writes or suggests policy that the union hierarchy applies in its every day managing of the apparatus. She also writes books on organizing and the labor movement. I do know that on the board of the UC Berkeley Labor Center are numerous top labor officials in California including heads and former heads of the State Federation of Labor AFL-CIO Central Labor Council officials and others. The Center also receives some funding from unions. This is why Ms McAlevey doesn’t mention the trade union leadership and its role in the GM strike; she’s not stupid. I have to repeat what I wrote previously about this subject and what constitutes a “rank and file” activist a title applied to almost anyone these days. “Working as part of the union bureaucracy, selected to do such work by the union bureaucracy, is not working on the shop floor. In fact it is a prerequisite to being selected for a job in the union bureaucracy, by the union bureaucracy, not to have led movements on the shop floor, not to have built a fighting movement in the workplace or among the union rank and file.”

In my view, Ms McAlevey is not qualified to give the millions of workers that fight the bosses in the workplace every minute of every day, advice on how to fight. She is not alone. There are many labor experts in our union movement that have spent none or very little time on the shop floor before being brought in to the ranks of leadership by the hierarchy.

Without having built a base in the workplace, of being rooted in the rank and file in your union local and openly opposing and campaigning against the concessionary policies of the present leadership, in particular the Team Concept from which flows the collaboration and betrayals; it is impossible to make serious change. In all honesty, how can anyone talk about the GM or any other strike and never mention the force that led it and that determines strategy and policies?  Only someone who is dependent on the leadership for their employment and advancement.

Here are a couple of the pieces I have written about this subject. The readers can also check out the labels on the right of this blog, particularly the DSA, and Labor Notes labels.

A Fighting Union Leadership Will be Built by Rank and File Activists

14 million Union Members: Why Their Leadership Won't Fight

On the recent UAW/GM strike
GM Strike: The Auto Workers Are Up Against Global Capitalism
Day Seven of the UAW/GM Strike. Spread it.

If UAW members ratify the contract, what does GM get?

UAW leadership Reveals Tentative Agreement. UAW Members should Vote No