Labor Needs a Radical Vision

[dcsmart]

By David Bacon

During the Cold War, many people with a radical vision of the world were driven out of our labor movement. Today, as unions search for answers about how to begin growing again and regain the power workers need to defend themselves, the question of social vision has become very important. What is our vision in labor? What are the issues that we confront today that form a more radical vision for our era?

The labor movement worked hard to elect Barack Obama president and a new Democratic majority in Congress, creating new possibilities for gaining labor law reform, universal healthcare, immigration reform and ending the Iraq war. But to win even these reforms, promised by the Obama campaign, unions will have to do more than simply support the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Labor's ability to move forward depends on finding a new and deeper relationship with its own members, and their willingness to fight for even a limited set of demands. Our history tells us that when workers have been inspired by a vision of real social change, the labor movement grows in numbers, bargaining strength and political power.

At the heart of any radical vision for our era is globalization - the way unions approach the operation of capitalism on an international scale. In the discussion that led to creation of the Change to Win federation, the Service Employees made a proposal about how unions should conduct their international relationships. It called on unions to find partners in other countries, even to organize those unions, in order to face common employers. AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka said the same thing in New York ten years earlier, when the Sweeney administration was elected. At the time, it represented a big change from the Cold War - that unions would cooperate with anyone willing to fight against our common employers. It rejected by implication the anticommunist ideology that put us on the side of employers and US foreign policy and shamed us before the world.
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US corporations operating in countries such as Mexico and El Salvador are, in some ways, opportunistic. They take advantage of an existing economic system, and make it function to produce profits. They exploit the difference in wages from country to country, and require concessions from governments for setting up factories. But what causes the poverty in El Salvador that they exploit to their advantage? What drives a worker into a factory that, in the United States, we call a sweatshop? What role does US policy play in creating that system of poverty?
Unions need the kind of discussion in which workers try to answer these questions. Labor education is more than technical training in techniques for grievance handling and collective bargaining. It has to be about politics, in the broadest and most radical sense. When unions don't work with their members to develop a framework to answer these questions, they become ineffective in fighting about the issues of peace and war, globalization and their consequences, such as immigration.
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Today working-class people have to fight just to keep their homes. For the last several decades, many were driven out of cities to lower-cost suburbs, often disproportionately workers of color. Now the families forced into unpayable loans in order to buy houses are losing them to the banks. This certainly calls for a return to the direct action of an earlier era. If we don't mobilize to keep our members in their homes, what good are we? But beyond direct action, unions and central labor councils need to have a concrete program for economic development, housing and jobs. That would start to give us something we lack: a compelling vision and a militant movement in the streets demanding action.
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FULL ARTICLE
http://www.centerforlaborrenewal.org/?P=A&Category_ID=1

[Omaha Steve]

1. Excellent

K&R!