Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED
11-17-24
The heads the AFL-CIO have some neck on them. In the aftermath of the crushing defeat of their choice for President of the US, the Democrat Kamala Harris, Liz Shuler, the president of this national body to which most US unions are affiliated, said that the Democrats lost the election because the party didn’t listen to low income voters. Another top labor official added that the reason was the party resorted to, “telling people not listening”. The Democrats have an excuse for their actions, it is a party that represents billionaires, the critics in question claim to represent working class people even if they do call us “middle class” to confuse things. It simply exposes their bankruptcy further.
Liz Shuler never offered such criticism as recently as a month ago issuing a press release saying, “From her time as attorney general to U.S. senator to being a partner in the most pro-union administration in our lifetime, Kamala Harris has delivered for working people every step of the way,” Liz Shuler AFL-CIO President, Sept. 30 2024
Speaking to the Building Trades Legislative Council earlier this year, Shuler made it clear that workers are facing only two options in election 2024:
“……they're being offered two paths right, now one is to demonize, turn on their fellow workers to divide ourselves by Race by orientation, by religion, by immigration status; and then there's the other path, the better path, the path where we come together where we take on our real enemies where we bring hope and better lives to tens of millions of people. Those are the two paths.”
If you want to get a taste of why so many union members pay little attention to what top officials are saying, these comments are it, and watch this video of that speech, it’s nauseating, I couldn’t get through it all. When I watched it, it only had 66 views in 6 months, there’s no way the average building trades worker could sit through it, it is not speaking to their needs either.
Shuler is not alone. Only a short while ago, Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, was portrayed as the new radical face of the organized labor movement. Campaigning for the Democratic Party, Nelson praised Kamala Harris, “Trump wants to fire striking workers….”, she said, “…..and Biden and Harris have upheld our right to strike.” She also said, “We see one candidate as the collective bargaining agent in chief and the other as the union buster in chief.”. No thinking worker, if they’re honest with themselves, believes this
This is less than a year after Biden introduced emergency legislation, (with Harris’ support) in the US Congress denying railway workers the right to strike despite the strike being legal. The Democrats and Republicans have no trouble reaching out across the aisle when it’s a choice between workers’ rights and living standards and corporate bosses’ right to profits. Liz Schuler and the rest of the AFL-CIO leadership did nothing as this sacred right for workers was denied overnight.
If the heads of major corporations gave such glowing reports as profits sank they’d be out of work.
Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers President campaigned for Harris and portrayed this election as between the “billionaire and corporate class” and that the Democratic Party was on the opposite side of the class war to the Republicans. He painted Kamala Harris as some sort of working class hero, almost the 21st century’s Mother Jones. One UAW member told me he thought Fain was her campaign manager. It appears that all a politician from a major capitalist party has to do to win the support of the labor hierarchy is walk a picket line holding a sign for a minute or two. They often come down to picket lines for photo ops when there are elections. Believe it or not, the average worker sees this con for what it is.
“The Democratic party is interested in working-class people and what they have to say and they want to be in our coalition”, Fain told union members in Michigan on October 29th. “We’re in a vicious cycle where the billionaire and corporate class take more and more for themselves and rewrite the rules of the game to keep it that way,”
Now the dust has settled, and the Democratic Party is licking its self-inflicted wounds, the heads of organized labor are doing what they always do, blaming their favorite Party when things go awry. They are not only bankrupt ideologically; they are political cowards.
Until the wire, the majority of labor leaders supported the Democratic Party painting a doomsday scenario if Trump got elected. We would have no unions within a short period of time. Totalitarianism and worse, outright fascism was on the doorstep if union members and workers in general didn’t vote for the Democrat. One would think that if they believed that, they would have made some moves to organize their members to defend themselves in the event of a Trump victory. But there’s two main problems with that; one is that it takes work and the other, more important issue, is mobilizing a few million workers, organizing meetings in union halls, workplaces and so forth, would inspire workers as we get a sense of our potential power; it would increase expectations. But, like the Democrats, the labor hierarchy supports capitalism, believes profits are sacrosanct and that the market is the answer to all things. Mobilizing the membership to act in our own defense, rely on our own strength, would threaten that world view and only chaos will follow.
Admittedly, union members turned out for Harris at a higher rate than the general public, but that is also due to the failure of the labor bureaucracy to broaden their approach and use organized labor’s potential power to draw the wider working class in to its ranks. In the recent Machinists strike at Boeing, a major issue to the members' was the return of the defined benefit pension plan. The leadership should have put this front and centre and also taken it in to the wider labor movement and working class communities as so many of us have lost it. But they fear the support such an approach would garner among the working class in general.
As it stands, with only one in ten US workers in a union, the impact of organized labor’s electoral power is limited, though our ability to stop the US economy from functioning through workplace stoppage is real. Just two recent strikes at Boeing and in the East Coast ports can do that.
While I thought the fascism scare might eke out a win for Harris, the result is not surprising as the US working class, disgusted with the two parties of capital and the status quo it represents, has retreated from electoral politics over the decades, Many have drawn the incorrect conclusion that politicians are all corrupt as is politics in general. Almost 100 million opted out in 2016.
In my view, numerous factors contributed to Trump’s victory in 2024, people being worse off than they were four years ago, misogyny, racism, xenophobia and also a sticking it to the regular crowd stance as well. The Democrats woke agenda doesn’t appeal either and one working class Latino voter pointed out that having Megan Thee Stallion twerking at a rally or having Beyonce on stage didn’t win his vote. There’s a good article here about the Democratic Party’s reliance on celebrity endorsements.
Organized labor spent a lot of money and resources on the Harris campaign. UNITE union claimed to have launched the largest labor-led campaign for Harris knocking on 3.5 million doors and the AFL-CIO spent more than one million on a digital ad campaign in swing states. But we can’t beat capital at its own game, they have more money than us that’s why they’re called capitalists.
The election results prove in a way that material conditions matter. The Democratic Party could not attract the vast majority of workers it needed to defeat Trump because it can’t develop a program that speaks to workers needs; let’s not lose sight of the fact that Harris had more billionaires supporting her than Trump.
Trump, a serial sexual abuser, is an unstable though savvy character. He is appointing a menagerie of freaks in important positions, the lunatics are running the asylum sort of thing. But he is also appointing people who are at odds with each other. This is purposeful as it places him in the center directing operations, the Godfather of the political mafia. The period ahead is going to be some battleground, Trump will not have it all his own way.
In addition, despite the bankruptcy of the trade union bureaucracy, we can’t determine exactly how organized labor will respond to the attacks on the horizon. This is particularly the case with the public sector as Musk, a man like Trump who's had everything handed to him on a platter, aims to cut government spending by at least a third but not on his projects. The Pentagon alone employees some 3 million employees. The public sector is a target as all of the functionaries around Trump are privatizers.
Many local unions are still pretty democratic organs. If you are active in your local union you should be working to build a caucus around a program that meets the needs of the working class, wages, Jobs, environmental protection, housing, health care, education, leisure time etc.
Introducing resolutions like this and explaining why we should support them, and how we can win, forces a debate on the issues that those who support class collaboration want to avoid. Debating and arguing why a resolution should be passed is as important as passing it.
This is how I myself and a few others got my local to end its support for Democratic Party candidates. For a number of years, Afscme Local 444, was known nationally as a prominent local union around the campaign for an independent working class or Labor Party; it held a public meeting in 1989 with Anthony Mazzochi, a prominent official in OCAW who was raising the issue, the main speaker.
I am not in agreement with those that have such a low opinion of the 14 million members in organized labor who argue that the trade union leaders are so entrenched they cannot be removed and our unions cannot be changed. Some leftists even argue that the trade unions are not even workers organizations. This is a mistake and a thoroughly defeatist position in my view.
Don’t mourn, organize as Joe Hill advised us all those years ago.
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