By Richard Mellor in California
There was an article in Politico, September 22, that detailed the difficulty top union officials were having in trying to get their members to break from Trump and vote for Biden on November 5th. In the article, Rank-and-file union members snub Biden for Trump the authors explained, “To rank-and-file members in some unions, especially the building trades, it doesn’t matter…they’re still firmly in Donald Trump’s camp.”
The article points out that, according to a union poll in six swing states, there is a dead heat between Trump and Biden, with Biden at 48% and Trump with 47%.“We haven’t moved the needle here,” says Mike Knisely, an official with the Ohio State Building and Construction Trades Council. “It doesn’t seem like there’s anybody changing their minds,”, says Don Furko, President of the United Steelworkers Local 1557 in Clairton, Pennsylvania, telling Politico that the, “majority of his membership is backing Trump
A lot of fear-mongering
One official, James Williams, a Vice-President in of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, admits that Trump, “… has a very, very, very solid foundation of our members. Williams makes an attempt at analysis and adds: “They connect with his messaging and a lot of the fear-mongering going all the way back to when he was first elected with, ‘Be afraid of the immigrant. The immigrant’s here to take your job.’ That resonated with our membership. They feel like their way of life and their way of living is under attack and without really understanding the dynamics at play. I mean, the immigrant worker is being abused by employers.”
The heads of organized labour, at the highest levels, are as disconnected from the average dues-paying union member as the Pope of Rome. Does Williams think his members don’t understand that the immigrant worker is abused? Of course, they do.
But it is not an unreal fear that immigrants might take our jobs and may place downward pressure on wages. After the meatpacking bosses smashed the Hormel strike in 1986, with more than a little help from the heads of the UFCW and the AFL-CIO, meatpacking became the most dangerous industry to work in, by 1996 with some 36% of all workers injured, according to a US News and World Report. It was so bad there was an 83% a year turnover rate and companies in Iowa and Nebraska recruited desperate undocumented workers from Mexican villages and “brought them north.”
Disastrous policies of union bosses
What Politico fails to point out, is that it is the disastrous policies of the heads of organized labour, representing 14 million members, that has created this situation. Their narrow pro-market approach and class-collaborationist policies have hastened the decline of wages, benefits and conditions that took decades to win.
Look at the state of the auto worker today. In the years I have been retired from a public sector job, it’s obvious the younger young workforce will not have the benefits or retirement I had.
Strike after strike has been defeated, due to these policies and the relationship the union hierarchy has built with the bosses based on ‘labour peace’. Whenever capitalism goes in to crisis and the bosses cry about profits or terrorize workers and our communities with threats of layoffs or moving abroad in some cases, the officialdom moves to bail them out, at their members’ expense of course.
No lack of sacrifice or solidarity
It has not been the lack of sacrifice, solidarity or heroism on the part of the rank and file worker that has led to these decades of defeats, or the decline in our living standards. Picket lines and strikes have become nothing but 24-hour protests that are not intended in the least to shut down production. It is demoralizing.
The teachers’ and educators’ strikes in 2018-19 broke the mould, and a major reason they were successful was that the established pro-management leadership was weak or non-existent and not able to block them. The approach of these rank-and-file-led strikes was totally different: they included all workers in education andwere not obsessed with obeying the law.
These strikes frightened the established bureaucracy and there has been no attempt by the AFL-CIO or many on the ‘left’ to take the reins of that horse and ride with it. We have article about those strikes on Facts For Working People. Search under teachers, education or Strikes
A hundred million don’t vote
The same in the political arena. The union hierarchy pushes on their members, and the working class as a whole, a political party that workers abandoned long ago. Let’s not lose sight of the fact that almost 100 million never voted in 2016; they are so disgusted with both political parties and the whole process.
Politico: “Pat Eiding, president of the Philadelphia AFL-CIO, said trades leaders need to talk with their members more often about Biden to be effective.” This in itself is insulting. Workers are not stupid. We built unions to improve our material conditions, butwhen dues go up and wages go down, and then conditions deteriorate, then workers lose trust and faith in these organizations. They know Biden is not a union man and is not for the working class. In many ways, voting for Trump was an act of desperation and in some cases just sticking their finger up at the whole phony process.
Working class party needed
It is the union hierarchy that is responsible for the apathy in the electoral arena, by refusing to build an alternative working-class political party and failing to protect workers’ wages, conditions and our living standards in general.
As for the immigrant threat, Trump and the right wing wouldn’t be able to use it so successfully if it were a fantasy, it wouldn’t “resonate” so easily. The trade union leadership has no answer to it, and no answer as to why our brothers and sisters, workers from Mexico and Central America, come north. They never explain what causes it and what the answer is from a worker’s perspective.
All the quote above says, is that the members “feel” this way or that and then basically criticizes the members from a moral standpoint, because they are too ignorant to recognize that immigrant workers are abused. This from officials whose jobs are in no way threated by immigrant labour and are often lifetime positions.
Immigrant Freedom Ride
Look at the so-called AFL-CIO-supported ”Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride,” in 2003. In conjunction with various immigrant and civil rights groups, the plan was to fill 18 buses with 800 immigrants and travel across the USA, stopping in some 100 communities in 42 states, to have rallies and speeches with local politicians about the plight of immigrant workers and the importance of immigrant rights. It would end in Washington DC and encourage other to join the caravan.
The project was supposed to cost around $1 million, and AFL-CIO staffers were visiting union halls around the country looking for some financial support. We had heard our union local was getting a visit. As we walked in, we saw these two guys that looked like lawyers, and approached them as such, even though we knew they were from the AFL-CIO. We had never in decades of activity ever seen someone from the AFL-CIO, so we figured they were after money.
They gave a presentation and made a point of linking this so-called “Freedom Ride” with the Freedom Rides of the Black Revolt and the Civil Rights Movement. This was a disgraceful attempt to portray the leadership of the AFL-CIO, that has refused to lead a real fightback against the capitalist offensive, as following in the footsteps of Martin Luther King and the heroes of the Black Revolt.
A couple of us spoke against donating money for this farce that would divide and weaken workers, including immigrant workers, and we explained why. Our opposition had nothing to do with being anti-immigrant, undocumented or otherwise. We explained that after years of cooperating with the employers in driving down union wages, benefits and conditions, taking busloads of immigrants through communities savaged by these policies under the banner of defending “immigrant rights” alone and not linking this to local and domestic concerns , like jobs losses, wages and so on, would be a disaster.
Communities suffered job losses
Many of these communities had suffered job losses, as industry moved to places like Mexico and Asia in search of cheaper labour. In a letter we wrote to the AFL-CIO after we sent them packingu we wrote: “……we are very sceptical of what this “Freedom Ride” is really all about. The original Freedom Rides were part of a mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of young people and others to fight against a vicious racism in the South. They openly defied the law, and they had no real support from the Democrats or Republicans. We must say that the present “Freedom Ride” does not do justice to that name or the heritage of that struggle.”
This all occurred after the passage of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, when Bill Clinton, Robert Reich (apparently a raving leftist now), and others, opened up the Mexican market to US agri-business, hurting both US and Mexican workers.
By some accounts, NAFTA drove 15 to 20 million Mexican subsistence farmers off the land, separating them from their means of subsistence and forcing many to risk the dangerous journey north to feed their families. For US workers, many jobs were lost as US capitalism sought more lucrative and cheaper labour across the border.
Rallies for immigrant’s rights, in communities where good union jobs were sent abroad, might not be the most popular rallying cry one would think. We believed as it was organized it would strengthen anti-immigrant sentiment and the right-wing anti-union forces like this response.
Attacks on ‘undocumented’ workers
The bosses will always seek the cheapest labour in search of profits. When I was still at work and there were attacks on the undocumented workers here in California, I wrote about why immigrant workers are not our enemies and what approach workers and organized labour should take, and distributed it at work. It was a while ago, and I would probably redo it somewhat, but it’s basically how I see things. You can find that article at this link.
The letter we had our local union (Afscme 444) send to the AFL-CIO, explaining our decision not to support the so-called “freedom Rides” can also be read in total at this link.
I do not condone a vote for Trump. But the reason for many union members voting for him, becoming apathetic, opting out of the union or electoral politics, or being drawn to right wing and at times ant-union views, falls squarely on the shoulders of the labour officialdom atop the AFL-CIO.
The leadership of organized labour has almost no credibility.
From the US socialist website Facts For Working People. The original can be found here.
October 7, 2020
