By Richard Mellor in California
Richard Trumka, head of the US trade union federation, the AFL/CIO, died last week. In answer to the effusive praise for Trumka from the mainstream media, this blog was Richard Mellor’s response:
Well, I started on a short piece about Richard Trumka and his death last Thursday and just decided not to bother. However, I’ve changed my mind after reading some of the glowing praises from sections of the US ruling class that has devastated living standards and workers’ rights on the job for decades. I just have to say something.
It is statements like this one from “Worker” Joe Biden that set me off:
“Perhaps the most important trait I valued in Rich is that he was never afraid to speak truth to power, even if the power was held by people he helped elect – myself included.”
What workers’ leader would want praise from a long -time architect of US capitalism’s war on workers at home and abroad like Joe Biden, the Senator from Dupont, as he was known by many? And if Trumka wanted to speak “truth to power” (a meaningless term these days) as far as a powerful Democratic Party politician is concerned, he should have told him he was using his influence and authority within organised labour to finance and organize our own political alternative to this party of capital we know as the graveyard of all social movements.
‘our own presidential candidates…’
“Organized labour will run our own independent candidates”. He could have started with that, but it would not have been popular with his friends in the Democratic Party. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez even made the point that only in the US would she be in the same political party as Joe Biden.
Robert Reiter Jr, the attorney, lobbyist and president of the Chicago Federation of Labour, described the former union lawyer Trumka as a “blue collar guy”. I remember the president of my national union, Afscme, leading us on a picket line at the closing of our bi-annual national convention, donning his baseball cap, showing how he was just a “blue collar guy” at heart. The baseball cap is a temporary piece of clothing for him.
Chuck Schumer, the ardent Zionist and career politician who claimed Israel’s illegal settlements have nothing to do with the conflict there, called Trumka a “fierce warrior” for workers’ rights. “Just yesterday he was lending his support to the striking miners in Alabama,” he said last week. “Lending his support”? What does that mean? Usually, it’s getting photographed by the media on a picket line for an hour or two. [See article on US miners’ strike, still going on, here]. We know it doesn’t mean using the collective power of 14 million members to force the bosses to concede.
Under pressure from building trade unions
Trumka never lent his support to the Standing Rock struggle that the Sioux and their allies fought for months over the installation of the Dakota Access pipeline. Instead, under pressure from the leaders of the building trade unions, he, and the AFL-CIO, supported the pipeline as “it is providing over 4,500 high-quality, family supporting jobs.” This is the standard myopic position from the building trades leaders when it comes to the environment, Nature or jobs. Trumka should have supported the Sioux and the environment. There’s no need for job losses in the building trades, our roads, railways, and infrastructure in general needs plenty of work.
The leaders of other, particularly public and service sector unions didn’t agree, but among the AFL-CIO hierarchy openly campaigning against policy with the purpose of changing it is taboo.
The labour hierarchy uses terms that they pick up from Democratic Party politicians and the business world. Terms like “grow the union” as opposed to the business, although they see the union as a business. Like the politicians that claim at election time that they will “fight” for this that and the world. Like Bernie Sanders, they ask the question but provide no real answers, “Is it fair” that Jeff Bezos earns (…fill the gap) and a worker has to work three jobs to pay the rent? “No, it isn’t fair, vote for me”.
Trade union leaders have only one weapon – get Democrats elected
It is how you fight that is the most important issue and Trumka and the entire trade union leadership at the highest levels have only one weapon: get their Democratic Party allies into office. Trumka loved Barack Obama. And why wouldn’t Obama and Biden not love him?
The AFL-CIO provides foot soldiers as precinct walkers and for phone banking at election time, and in 2008 spent $53 million getting Obama elected. They’ve spent billions over the years. To his credit, when he supported Obama for president, Trumka said that there are some white union members who, “just can’t get past this idea that there’s something wrong with voting for a black man.”.
That is true without a doubt, but it is also more complicated than that. He leaves out that as far as electoral politics goes, over the decades, workers have learned that on the fundamental issues: housing, health care, jobs wages etc, they have seen nothing but declining living standards. Even during the tech boom of the 1990s when profits hit a 40-year high, the lowest wage earner won market driven increases as labour was tight.
Trade union leaders like Trumka refused even to take advantage of an opportunity like that, for fear of offending their Democratic Party friends and the effect victories and wage gains would have had on their own members. The leadership atop the AFL-CIO is masterful at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The trade union hierarchy are important to capitalism
When wages go down as union dues go up, then why pay them? Workers never built unions or voted as an exercise in civics. Pushing the Democratic Party on the US workers is trying to get them to vote for a party they abandoned a long time ago.
Trumka and the trade union hierarchy are important to capitalism, as it is their job to hold back the workers’ movement, suppress any movement within the ranks of organized labour that and threatens capital and the relationship Trumka and co have built with it, based on labour peace and cooperation.
To rely on the collective power of workers, both organized and unorganized, our ability to shut down production, to hurt the bosses where they feel it most, in profits, this would be a dangerous road for them to take. Power attracts and victories inspire, and as top union officials are more secure in their positions than the CEOs of private corporations (though not quite so well paid) they want the status quo; if only the bosses would just be a little less aggressive. For them, the capitalist, free market form of social organization is sacrosanct, there is no other way. When the system goes into crisis, they defend it.
At 25 years old, Trumka got a job as an attorney for the United Mine Workers of America working out of Washington DC (you can make good connections in DC which is why many of the national unions have their offices there) and held that position for five years. He became the president of the UMWA in 1982 when the bosses were waging a ferocious offensive against organized labour.
AFL/CIO ‘reformers’ swept to power to make changes
In October 1995, John Sweeney ousted former AFL-CIO President, Lane Kirkland, when the AFL-CIO had the first contested election for president in a century. Sweeney, then President of SEIU, Richard Trumka of the UMWA and Linda Chavez-Thompson of AFSCME were swept to power on a program of reform claiming that labour could not continue to fight, “…only defensive battles.” and promising to make the AFL-CIO the “….fulcrum of a vibrant movement, not simply a federation of constituent organizations.”
The reformers made it clear, “…we cannot wait for change in the political climate to provide us with the opportunities to grow. We must first organize despite the law if we are ever to organize with the law.”
I wrote back then that this was fighting talk from the progressives. John Sweeney even talked of blocking bridges to win labour’s demands, but quickly went from blocking bridges to building them. Building them not between the leadership of the Federation and its members, but between the leadership of the Federation and the employers.
The Sweeney-Trumka team made a huge and eventually successful effort to get nurses and hospital staff represented by the SEIU, and other smaller unions to join in a labour management partnership within the Kaiser medical group; there were too many strikes and disputes. At the time, this left the California Nurses Association (CNA) that was still outside the AFL-CIO and represented most Registered Nurses, out on a limb because if the CNA struck, it would be all that harder for the other unions, now in a partnership with the boss and all that entails, to support them. They were on a new team now.
Trumka went on to head the AFL-CIO after Sweeney’s retirement in 2009, until his death last Thursday. But let us not kid ourselves, Richard Trumka was just a continuation of the same policies and practices that have contributed to the decline and influence of organised labour in the US and the declining living standards that are a result of it.
From the US socialist website, Facts for Working People. The original can be found here.
