One big question for the US labor movement was answered by the midterm elections last year. Rebuilding the labor movement has to combine fresh and innovative organizing approaches with political action. Coming out of the defeat of the ultra-right Republicans in the Congressional elections in 2006, the labor movement is energized and on the move. Most everyone – from the Democratic Party and their candidates to the Republican Party – recognize the role the unions played.
The importance of labor’s contribution to the defeat of the Bushies in Congress was immediately apparent in the “First 100 Hours campaign” of the new Congress. Raising the minimum wage was front and center. In addition labor’s most important political objective, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), was rapidly introduced and passed through the House Education and Labor Committee and will probably have been passed in the House by the time you read this. The bill is co-sponsored by 233 members of Congress including many who are newly elected. [Ed. This issue went to press in late February. EFCA passed in the House on March 1 and is currently pending in the Senate.] The bill would take corporations and employers out of the business of union elections and allow workers, on their own, to organize a union by a majority signing union cards in a workplace.
Nothing shows the new energy and unity coming out of the elections like labor’s work on the EFCA. Both the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win (CtW) unions are fully mobilized for its passage and working together. There are using national and regional conferences, rallies, phone banking, the Internet, hearings, workplace meetings
Subject to Debate
There is a real important lesson in this turn of events for labor as it tackles the big challenges ahead. When John Sweeney was first elected president of the AFL-CIO in 1995, his election was the tip of a powerful reform movement in labor that was alarmed at the drop in union membership and the trade union’s decline in economic and political power. Almost immediately, as the federation began the process of rebuilding, a powerful debate broke out.
On one side were those who believed that lack of will and resources were the main problems holding back organizing and weakening labor. On the other side were those who thought that the problem had more to do with the hostile right-wing environment created by big business starting with the Reagan/Bush years and Patco. And there were many others who correctly said that rebuilding the labor movement would require both a new commitment to organizing and greater and more independent political action.
With many variations on a theme these differences blossomed and eventually resulted in the split in labor. But the labor movement today is shaking off that past. The unity in action around EFCA is a big step towards healing the breach and reuniting labor. The EFCA combines the need to organize with independent political action in an inseparable whole.
Labor’s EFCA Strategy
The unions pushed hard to get the EFCA introduced early and then passed in the new House of Representatives as part of a bigger strategy around the bill. Everyone understands very well that major opposition will develop in the Senate and that, even if it were to pass, Bush would immediately veto the bill. But the emerging strategy is to now turn support for workers’ right to organize and the EFCA into a major presidential campaign issue for the 2008 elections. Likewise labor intends to make the bill an issue in targeted 2008 congressional elections, where vulnerable Republicans face difficult re-election bids, especially in the Senate. Then, the thinking goes, with new victories in the House and Senate and a pro-labor Democrat in the White House, the Employee Free Choice Act can become the law of the land.
We can see the strategy in action and working already. Senator Barack Obama, John Edwards and Congressman Dennis Kucinich have all come out for the EFCA as part of their presidential campaigns. Hillary Clinton was a co-sponsor in the last session of Congress. But getting candidates to endorse and mention workers’ right to organize is not enough. Rather, linking the fight for the EFCA to ongoing struggles will be key. In the first hearings, held when the bill was reintroduced into the new Congress, one of the first to testify was Keith Ludlum who is deeply involved in efforts to organize the 5,500 pork processing workers at Smithfield Foods in Tar Heel, North Carolina. Ludlum was illegally fired during a 1994 organizing drive by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. With the EFCA those workers in Tar Heel would have been union a long time ago.
Other unions have set up meetings with members of Congress to hear similar first-person stories about company abuse and illegal activities to defeat union organizing. Many in labor also want Congress to hold hearings on EFCA around the country as a way of showcasing business and government attacks on the right to organize. They believe that live testimony will put added pressure on Congress to act to defend basic labor rights. Organized labor’s fight for this legislation needs to be seen as the cutting edge, the framework, for meeting labor’s many challenges.
The Challenges Ahead
There are many challenges facing labor today. Plant closings, job loss, and capitalist globalization are taking a vicious toll on US workers, destroying living standards and even whole communities. Wages and working conditions are under assault. Bush and others are leading the charge to do away with employer-based health care while at the same time doing nothing to provide for universal health care. The war in Iraq is killing thousands of people, both US and Iraqi. Many of the US dead and wounded are union members or from union families and all are overwhelmingly working class. Plus the war wastes billions of dollars that could be far better used for meeting people’s needs and providing jobs. Corporate and government abuse and scapegoating of immigrant workers is increasing. Corporate racism and discrimination against women are on the rise in the workplace.
Clearly one important answer to these and many other problems facing unions and working people is a much bigger labor movement. Some 60 million US workers say they would join a union if they could. Sixty million new union members would do a lot more than give workers a fighting chance. It would be a big step forward for democracy in general, for all people. Organization is the best way the working class and working people have of standing up to corporate power and wealth. Think what 60 million more union members would mean in the 2008 elections. That kind of surge in union power and influence could go a long way in slowing down and even reversing the ultra-right Republican political realignment and domination of the past 20 years.
Those kinds of numbers could begin the long process of reversing the terrible economic assault on all workers and working people. This is the kind of voice and potential organized force that could reverse the tax cuts to the rich and redirect money and priorities to vital human needs like housing, education, jobs, ending poverty and raising living standards. This is the kind of power that could guarantee passage of the Medicare for All Act to provide for universal, affordable health care for all in the US. More union contracts that raise wages and protect jobs and working conditions would put upward pressure on living standards for all workers.
In the early 1970’s the labor movement was much bigger than it is today. Yet even divided as it was on the Vietnam War, the Labor for Peace movement was decisive in ending that war. Today a much larger majority of a smaller labor movement is against the Iraq war. Today for the first time in its history the AFL-CIO has broken with US foreign policy and demanded that the troops come home. Large sections of labor have officially endorsed and participated in peace actions. Not since World War I has the mainstream of labor been so active against a war. Think what a labor movement, grown by 60 million members, could do to stop the war in Iraq and prevent a war in Iran.
Sixty million new members would bring millions of new African American, Latino, Asian and other victims of racial and national discrimination into the labor movement. It would bring millions of immigrant workers, women and youth. It would be a very positive change in social composition for organized labor and would tremendously strengthen it over all. Imagine the resulting growth of labor forms like the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, Coalition of Labor Union Women, and Pride At Work. This kind of growth and change in labor would strengthen and cement more strongly the core constituencies of the critical forces in society needed to build a mass all-people’s front against the ultra-right, transnational capital and capitalist globalization .
Not Just a Dream, a Necessity
This is not an argument that the EFCA is a magic bullet that will solve all of labor’s problems. Rather it is an argument that the need to build the labor movement is critical to progress for us all. It is an argument that we need to link passage of the EFCA to all of labor’s immediate struggles and beyond. It argues that passage of this law is vital and in the interests of all progressive and people’s movements. The labor movement will continue to develop innovative and creative organizing strategies that can win. Just look at the Smithfield campaign, SEIU’s great victory for janitors in Houston, or UE’s work in North Carolina and the steelworkers’ Tyson and Goodyear campaigns. The AFL-CIO’s alliance with the “workers’ centers” movement is another great example.
Did you know that every 23 minutes, a worker is fired or retaliated against for their support of a union in their workplace? This fact not only speaks to the viciousness of the corporate attack on unions, but it also speaks to the movement of workers down below. Thousands of workers, even in today’s harsh anti-union climate and unfair labor law, are fighting for their rights at work. The fight for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act gives us all a handle to help them, ourselves and the whole progressive movement.
