After May Day
This week’s editorial would have been released on May 1st, but I decided to hold it up for a couple of days; so I could think over how to approach my subject, which - appropriately enough - is May Day and the American labor movement. I’ve written about May Day for Open Media Boston three times before this, and generally tried to take a positive approach to the day’s various purposes over the centuries and to the efforts of the organizers of the annual Boston area May Day celebrations - with a special focus on May Day as International Workers’ Day, the global labor holiday’s American origins, Cold War era efforts to suppress it in this country, and its resurgence in cities across the US thanks largely to immigrant activists - many of whom grew up celebrating it in their home countries. And each of those three years, I felt pretty sanguine about the prospects for labor and allied social movements. Even if the local May Day actions were fairly small. Drawing a few hundred participants most years with the exception of the immigrant upheaval around May Day in 2006. But this year, it was difficult for me to write happy talk on that day. The American labor movement is now not just in a holding pattern on the road to a revival of its fortunes. The American labor movement is on the verge of being completely destroyed. From predictable attacks from corporations and their bought-off politicians. But also from a lack of imagination on the part of its own leadership.
I mean, of course, I am fully aware of the situation facing organized labor globally. Giant corporations and banks rule the roost worldwide. Their influence is everywhere. Their control of the mass media and political sphere is near total.
Therefore, what we’re seeing now in the US as elsewhere is the attempt of our capitalist ruling class - in both its right and left wing variants (i.e., the Democrats and the Republicans) to consolidate its control over the political and economic spheres, and impose labor discipline of the last remaining sector of workers that are organized collectively to oppose them. The American labor movement.
Meaning that the owners of our productive processes and their pet politicians want to wipe out unions once and for all, force most of American working people back to 19th century labor conditions and consign the rest to permanent structural unemployment. All while wiping out the remaining bulwarks of the social safety net built by the labor movement between the 1930s and 1960s. In this fashion, the rich and powerful will be able to maximize their profits and minimize their costs. With tremendously negative costs for millions of people. Most of whom continue - quixotically - to consider themselves “middle class.”
So that’s the background. And that means that American labor leaders have the deck of politics totally stacked against them from the word go. I want to be clear that I understand that.
However, none of that excuses the strategic and tactical mistakes being made by the leaders of our unions and allied social movements. Like immigrant movements (which is a discussion I will save for a future editorial).
Look, for example, at the Wisconsin debacle that many commentators have marked as the beginning of the latest wave of assaults on labor by corporate interests. A right-wing governor, Scott Walker, and a largely right-wing state legislature passed a law that stripped that state’s public sector labor unions of their right to collective bargaining on all issues other than wages. Meaning that those unions will soon essentially lose their ability to be unions. The labor movement called a series of large rallies that captured the popular imagination in that state and brought national and international attention to the situation there.
There was an opportunity to reverse the legislation and make Wisconsin workers the standard bearers of a newly revived labor movement. But the labor movement failed to maintain solidarity. Leaders of the state AFL-CIO and major national public sector unions like the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees refused to back calls for a general strike and major boycotts of industries that back the right-wing governor. Worse still, even as the large protests were gearing up, they attempted to negotiate with Walker by basically giving him everything he asked for except for their collective bargaining rights. Cuts in wages and benefits of all kinds. And wage freezes.
Far from being removed from office by popular mandate or even mildly chastened, Walker has just signed a new law that prohibits local governments from passing ordinances guaranteeing workers paid sick and family leave.
So that’s bad. And the news for labor is going downhill from there. Several other states have passed or are in the process of passing similar legislation. Some of which like Ohio are traditionally labor bastions. And at least one of which - Massachusetts - is completely controlled by ostensibly pro-labor Democrats.
Which brings us to our fair Commonwealth.
The Massachusetts House of Representatives voted last month to strip public sector unions from the right to collectively bargain over health care benefits. The Senate has as yet to vote - but the very idea that 111 out of 160 state representatives would vote in favor of such a bill would have been inconceivable just a few years ago.
Even if the bill is stopped in the Senate or by Gov. Deval Patrick, how did it get to the point where - as the Boston Globe recently reported - nine Massachusetts labor leaders could go to visit House Speaker DeLeo to demand that he quash the bill before the vote … and that “blue collar Democrat” gave them a mere 90 seconds face time after making them wait for 45 minutes?
Sure, Mass. labor responded to the vote with letters threatening to unseat many Bay State Democrats in the next election, but legislators shrugged off the threat.
And they were right to do so. Because they know perfectly well that Mass. labor leaders won’t follow through on that latest threat. They have made such threats many times before, but by next election time, those same leaders will be stampeding every progressive they can find to vote for every Democrat that’s running for office because “if we don’t we’ll be in trouble.”
Well that kind of logic is what got the American labor movement in the deep hole it’s in today.
I mean legislators have eyes, as do I. In a public rally in the run up to the vote on the Mass. collective bargaining bill, the best the state’s labor movement could muster was 500 person rally in the middle of the Rose Kennedy Greenway. Sure, the rally was called as a general attack on the anti-worker stance of financial giants like State Street Bank and Goldman Sachs, and their role in causing the Great Recession that we now all suffer through. But even in that regard it was a very weak showing and was acknowledged as such in the local media.
And while the local labor movement pulled out a couple of thousand workers to a rally in solidarity with Wisconsin workers a couple of months back - even that is not a very impressive number when unions alone have tens of thousands of members in the Bay State. Add progressives in general and that number at least doubles, if properly mobilized.
But the proper mobilization never gets called. The unions never call their entire membership out into the streets and keep them there because labor leaders - in Massachusetts as elsewhere in the US do not yet seem to apprehend that they are in a death spiral.
Most American labor leaders are used to the way it used to be not so long ago. When they were “players.” When politicians came to court them and did at least some of what they demanded on behalf of their membership. When they could pick up the phone and get a powerful politician on the other end of the line and
That era if it wasn’t already painfully obvious, is over. And in some respects that’s a good thing. Labor leaders in all too many unions are far too removed from the concerns of their members. And how could they not be. Aside from the few remaining left-wing unions like the United Electrical Workers, union staffers and especially union leaders make very good wages. It’s the rare labor leader that doesn’t make over $100,000 a year. Top leaders make double, triple or quadruple that amount plus perks and benefits that are very close to what their counterparts in the top echelons of many corporations make.
Sure no labor leader makes anything like the CEOs of the largest corporations, but they definitely make what the average corporate executive makes. And some of them double (or triple or quadruple) dip - getting paid for more than one job or post. Both inside labor and in government.
Well-paid labor leaders are members of the upper middle class or the professional managerial class or whatever you want to call people in the upper 5 or 10 percent of wage earners. They live in the suburbs in nice homes in nice neighborhoods, they drive nice cars, they wear nice clothes, they have nice vacations, and so on and so forth.
And ok, all but the corrupt among them - and there are definitely some corrupt labor leaders - work hard. Sixty even eighty hour work weeks are not uncommon for the average union local or labor council president, or regional or national labor leader. So they earn their money.
But they are comfortable in ways that their members are not. Especially now.
And most of them have never been in a real fight. They are very used to what I’d call political theater. They’ll hold the occasional rally or sickout and threaten job actions or even strikes. They’ll bring a few hundred workers to lobby the State House once or twice a year on key bills. [And sometimes, it’s not even the unions themselves that turn people out, but allied labor-community organizations that arose a couple of decades back to try to put some fire back into labor struggles. With decidedly mixed results since such organizations are far from universally loved among the top ranks of labor.]
Yet these are not, by and large, the labor leaders of the 1880s or the 1930s. When they get screwed by the largely Democratic politicians they put into office. Over and over and over and over again. Year after year after year after year. They make noise, but they never punish.
They never discipline politicians and the rich that control them. They never violate the many anti-labor laws that make the old militant strategies illegal. They never say "public sector workers aren't supposed to strike, but we're going to strike anyway" or "unions aren't supposed to be allowed to hold secondary boycotts, but we're going to do that anyway" or "unions aren't supposed to occupy city halls and the State House and make the state ungovernable until we get our rights back and expand them to include unionized private sector workers, but we're going to do THAT anyway."
They never, in short, fight like their members lives depended on it.
Well all I can say is … we’re at that point in history again. Where workers livelihoods and indeed their very lives will depend on whether the few remaining working-class organizations that we call unions remember how to fight again.
And until they do, May Day and Labor Day and any other holidays that working people celebrate are going to remain quaint echos of a long gone past. Attended by small numbers of people in out of the way corners of a few dozen cities like Boston. Unnoticed by all but a few sympathetic publications like Open Media Boston.
Because right now, workers don’t have a damned thing to celebrate. And getting about 200 people to turn out for the Boston May Day rally on the Greenway and about 600 for a more immigrant themed rally in Chelsea - both without significant support from major labor unions - is important, but just another indication that American labor movement has a long way to go before it lives up to its promise once again.
And there’s a real possibility that the American labor movement will just crash and burn in the years to come, and that it might be decades before it rises again.
And that would be a real pity. I am always hopeful about such things, although it may not always seem so in my writings. But there are limits to hope. Especially when the signs and portents do not auger well for some kind of Egyptian style uprising here in the US.
So I’d like viewers to mull this stuff over, and send in some comments if you want to discuss and debate.
That’s it for now.
