What is Labor's Plan?

These are still tough times for working families. Massachusetts unemployment is at 9.1 percent. National unemployment is at 9.8 percent. The real unemployment rate - including a legion of "discouraged workers" who have run out of unemployment benefits, but not found work - is likely double that amount. Meanwhile, corporations and investors (and far too many mainstream economists) are starting to feel their oats again after a rough year and are loudly proclaiming that the economy has "turned the corner." And that dumping billions onto the giant banks and corporations that started the economic crisis "worked." However, that is simply not the case. A more level-headed economist, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, recently pointed out that floating multinationals from the public till while refusing to spend government dollar one on jobs creation and direct support to working families ensures that the American economy will remain damaged for years to come. That information is certainly worrying.

But there's something even more worrying to me. The labor movement - the guardian of America's working families for decades - is proving itself increasingly able to work up a good deal of anger against the symptoms of the ongoing economic crisis. Which is all to the good. Yet it still does not seem prepared to chart an independent and militant political course - separate from the Democratic Party, which shares at least as much blame for the bad economy as the Republican Party does - to mobilize significant numbers of unionized workers together with potentially vast numbers of un-unionized workers to demand a massive public jobs program, direct aid to working families, significantly increased unemployment protections, a fully public national health care system and a host of other needed reforms. To win, in short, the first real victories for working people in decades. Even as labor continues to lose more and more members every year - and more and more political clout in the bargain.

Right now it seems like, for all the sound and fury of events like this week's March and Rally for Jobshere in Boston, labor leadership has no strategic plan beyond holding sporadic symbolic protests, struggling to hold onto existing contracts, continuing traditional sectoral union organizing efforts, and waiting for the Democratic Party to throw some crumbs to working families. Unfortunately, from this corner, it looks like it will have to be a seriously frosty day in hell before even the most minor of palliative reforms will be passed into law. The right-wing is heavily mobilized and in the ascendant. Progressive forces - including, but not restricted to labor - have most of their chips in the tiny basket afforded them by Pres. Barrack Obama and Democratic Party leadership that they put in power. And refuse to mobilize for fear of angering their "allies" in federal government.

We've been down this road before. Eight years of the Clinton administration and workers were far worse off by a number of metrics in 2001 than we were in 1992. The Democrats did little but line the pockets of their corporate allies, and lost control of Congress well before Pres. Bill Clinton's first term was over. Yet any attempt at significant popular mobilization on key economic issues was deflected by progressive leaders - including the then-new leadership of the AFL-CIO headed by John Sweeney starting in 1995 - who endlessly assured their grassroots that reform was just around the corner, and that Clinton would help working families.

Now working people are doing far worse. Richard Trumka is the new head of a (sort of) new AFL-CIO leadership team, but there is another labor federation - Change to Win - led by the Service Employees International Union that hardly sees eye-to-eye with the AFL-CIO. And additional fractures on a number of fronts threaten to splinter such tenuous inter-union solidarity that still remains.

So the question I want to ask on behalf of Open Media Boston to the various leaders of the American labor movement is simple: What is labor's plan to force the government to directly create jobs and expand core public services? I know as well as anyone that to speak of our weakened and fragmented labor movement as a single entity is problematic, but I'm really asking the above question to forward-thinking and politically progressive leaders of key unions and union federations. I'm also asking it to well-placed labor political strategists and researchers. To labor journalists and public relations specialists. To lead labor organizers and campaign coordinators.

What's the plan? And whatever the plan (or more likely, plans ) how is it different from what has gone before, and why should working people believe it's going to help them out of the deep rut we're in?

I'm waiting for an answer. And I don't think I'm alone in that. The future of the American working class hinges on the labor movement's response to this and several related questions in the next few years.

Open Media Boston will be more than happy to afford space in our pages for labor leaders to take their best shot at answering such questions. Although we cannot guarantee that we're always going to agree with the answers we get.

But that's the point of an independent press, isn't it? Even one that exists to defend the rights of working people against the rich and powerful. Discussion and debate. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Only by free and fair airing of various perspectives on key issues of the day are progressives in labor (and throughout society) going to end up further along in our quest for political primacy by developing strategies that stand up to the toughest challenges that conservatives and centrists can throw at us.

So our figurative lines, as always, are open. Let's hear from some labor leaders on this stuff.

Jason Pramas is the Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston. He is a steering committee member of the National Writers Union/United Auto Workers Local 1981 - Boston Chapter, and has signed a union card to join the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 2222.