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| They look different but think the same |
Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO
2021
In the 1980’s I had a meeting with a union staffer for the national union who was some sort of a leftist. He was a black guy from the US South and an educated man by all accounts. We sat and talked about the state of affairs at the time. He was a decent guy and we talked about the lack of diversity atop organized labor. He talked of the “old white men” that dominated the labor movement and were in leading positions in the state AFL-CIO body. He was concerned about this lack of diversity. What he meant was people who looked like him.
I made the point that it would be one thing if they were militant and fighting for major gains as well as leading the struggles against racism, sexism and discrimination in general. In that case, that they were white would not be such an issue; in fact, most of them wouldn’t be white if that were the case. The problem is that they don’t fight at all; just the opposite. I stressed that any healthy democratic organizations, a union, a church, community groups, would have a leadership that represented the membership they served and that elected them; this would happen organically.
I hate this term diversity. It is part of the identity politics
arsenal. It trumps politics and ideas when all they mean is appearance.. Both
Republican and Democratic Parties, in response to pressure from marginalized groups
(we used to call them specially oppressed minorities) are including more
minorities in their ranks. California governor GavinNewsom recently made a pledge to appoint a black woman if Senator Feinstein retires from the Senate before her term ends in 2024. *
What a con game this is. This is what the obsession with identity politics gets us. Does anyone actually believe he will appoint a black woman who is a socialist? One who fights for workers at all? Never mind that, just a regular black woman who actually fights and campaigns for real jobs, rebuilding communities and cutting the offensive budget in order to make such a campaign actually mean something; a militant black shop steward from the shop floor, perhaps? Of course not, we've witnessed what the Democratic Party machine has done to isolate the "squad" that group of "uppity women" who are rocking the Democratic Party. Like his colleague Biden, Newsom will select one who thinks like he does. A person that seeks advancement within the system and will defend the system including the murderous US foreign policy. One that defends the so-called free market and capitalism. Kamala Harris is exactly that. I have had experience with Kamala Harris, I watched her in action. She put a lot of young black men in the prison system.
The AFL-CIO hierarchy claims they have "made history" with the present leadership pictured above. There is nothing historical about it other than the appearance of the people. On the issue, what they stand for and believe in there is no change. They are participating in the great diversity con.
The trade union leadership responds to the pressure from the black working class, people of color and women etc, in the same way the Democrats and Republicans do. When I was still active in the labor movement, the AFL-CIO leadership, in response to pressure from the huge percentage of workers of color that have entered the organized labor movement, and in order to undermine it, made an effort to alter the extreme whiteness of the federation’s leadership. Jack Otero was the first elected Latino Vice-President of the National AFL-CIO, (sorry my politically correct friends, I am not a fan of Latinx. None of my working class Latino friends use it, I’ll reconsider it if they do). “Otero was a founder and later served as National President of the AFL-CIO's Labor Council for Latin American Advancement.” https://www.dclabor.org/home/archives/11-2016/11
Alongside Otero, the recently elected AFL-CIO president John Sweeney who defeated Donahue when the moribund Lane Kirkland retired, was influential in creating the position of Executive Secretary of the AFL-CIO that was filled by Linda Chavez Thompson who had been the recording secretary for the laborers’ union (This union has a huge Mexican American/Latino membership and women were an increasing percentage of union members; they’re not stupid these labor bureaucrats). I remember being at an International Afscme convention, and women at that time were more than 50% of Afscme’s membership, and people were elated as two non-Europeans (whites) occupied such high positions in the organized labor movement.
Both Chavez Thompson and Otero ended up working in the Clinton Administration. There you go. At Democratic Party conventions, as much as one third of the delegates are from union backgrounds, staffers, officers and others looking for a political career. Union conventions are run very much like the Democratic Conventions.
It is important we get women, people of color and other underrepresented people in to union and political office. But my experience in the union has been that if someone is a fighter, a defender of our interests and a campaigner to improve them, workers swill support for that person.
White workers have to accept that discrimination has denied so many people of a rightful place in society and we have to speak out loud and be clear about that. But the obsession with identity politics, promoted by the white liberals and their class colleagues of color harms the interests of all workers no matter what our ethnic background, religious affiliation, skin tone, sexual orientation or any of the numerous other diversions aimed at undermining class solidarity are.
Oh, and the guy I was discussing with that I mention at the beginning of this commentary? What his main issues was that he wasn't one of them.
The picture above is a a propaganda ploy.
*An earlier version of this story incorrectly had Feinstein as Attorney General
1 comment:
Right you are, Richard. My local, the UFT, is a perfect example. We are a majority female union. From the 1990s to 2016, most of the time, our president was a woman, first Sandra Feldman and then Randi Weingarten. Weingarten, who is now president of the AFT, was particularly bad. She began her career with our union as a staff lawyer who had never been a teacher. When Feldman, who was her mentor and ill with cancer, chose Weingarten as her successor, in order to meet the UFT Constitutional requirement a candidate be a union member, Weingarten was chauffeured daily to Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, where she taught one class, an Advanced Placement History class, for one year. That is her sole teaching experience and enough to meet the Constitutional requirement.
When Feldman retired during her term, the UFT Executive Board, controlled by the Unity ruling caucus, elected Weingarten her successor, which gave Weingarten the advantage of incumbency at the next membership citywide election. Weingarten, a double "minority" since she is also a lesbian, was arguably the worst of the rogue’s gallery of presidents UFT has suffered. In the 2004-5 contract, she gave up the right to grieve disciplinary letters, and allowed a longer work day, et al. The fact that she was a woman like most members made absolutely no difference in her willingness to bargain concessions instead of organizing a fight. She was squarely in the post-1975 Unity ideology, and a lawyer, not a teacher on top of it. Her gender was totally irrelevant.
A UFT Retiree
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