THE VOICE OF LABOR?

THE VOICE OF LABOR?

COMMENTARY

ORGANIZE WAL-MART, ORGANIZE THE SOUTH-THE FIGHT FOR THE UNIONS IS IN THE FACTORIES NOT IN THE CONGRESS

FORGET REPUBLICANS, DEMOCRATS AND GREENS! BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR SOCIALISM!

In the normal course of current socialist propaganda tasks left-wing militants today do not find themselves spending much time commenting on particular pronouncements of the labor bureaucracy. Our task is to win militants to a fighting working class program and to a great extent the labor bureaucracy is used as a generic foil, no more. When things heat up in the class struggle that will obviously be a different story and we will be directly contesting the authority of that stratum of the labor movement. Nevertheless every once in a while it is good to see exactly what they are thinking and what ‘strategy’ they have for the labor movement. Recently John Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO, authored an Op/Ed article in which he very clearly showed why labor is in such dire straits in America.

The basic point of his article-Freedom to Unionize- was the not very profound idea that the blood-thirsty capitalists who run today’s businesses are out to nip any union organizing efforts in the bud, through fear, intimidation and dismissal. Who would have though? Left out of that equation is the miserable record of organized labor, his bailiwick, in fighting that decline. But such is politics. What is important here is not the enumeration of the sins of the past but a solution to the problem.

Mr. Sweeny does not propose to organize Wal-Mart that would go a long way to reversing the decline in union membership. He does not advocate organizing the South that is a magnet for runaway shops that stay in this country. He does not call for an international labor campaign to unionize those 'off shore' runaways. He most certainly does not call for an end to organized labor’s long term love affair and financial support of the bourgeois parties, particularly the Democrats. No in the face of the devastation of the organized labor movement and the ravishing of real working class standards of living over the past thirty years he proposes that labor support Massachusetts Democratic Senator Kennedy’s Employee’s Free Choice Act. This proposal would create another capitalist bureaucratic agency that would ‘insure’ labor’s right to form unions and be free of employer harassment. Would that it were so simple.

Every labor militant knows, or should know, that we use every agency available, even governmental agencies, in order to pursue the class struggle against the capitalists. What we most emphatically do not do is call for more governmental labor-controlling agencies like this unlikely scheme. That is not our program for militant struggle and has not been so since back in the 1930’s in the heyday of such agencies as the National Labor Relations Board, etc. However, that is not Mr. Sweeney’s main sin. In no place, not even as a passing nod, does Mr. Sweeney even pay lip service to the idea of organized labor struggling in the factories and workplaces for its demands. In that sense Mr. Sweeney is the true modern day voice of the labor bureaucracy. What every labor militant should say is Brother Sweeney move on over. ORGANIZE WAL-MART! ORGANIZE THE SOUTH! BREAK WITH DEMOCRATS - BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!