Reclaiming Our Unions for Struggle: New Stirrings in the Labor Movement
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Reclaiming Our Unions for Struggle:
New Stirrings in the Labor Movement
Despite the hammer blows that have rained down on the working class and its main organizations -- i.e., the trade unions -- for close to three decades, and despite the complicity of the top union leaders with this ruling-class offensive, union members at all levels, especially the rank and file, are seeking to reclaim their unions for struggle against the bosses and the government.
There is not a mass labor upsurge at this time; workers and their unions are very much on the defensive. There is not, as of yet, an extension of the fightback that we witnessed with the Chicago teachers' strike almost two years ago. But there are repeated and important developments that indicate a willingness to fight back that is swelling beneath the surface and portend major class battles ahead.
* IAM Reform Slate Makes Big Gains:
The elections for the top officers of the International Association of Machinists are taking place in IAM lodges (their name for locals) nationwide throughout the month of April. The IAM Reform Slate website reports that their slate has been winning a majority of the votes in lodges where they did not even have contacts a short while ago.
Their slate has re-energized tens of thousands of Machinists on a labor fightback / anti-concessions platform in the wake of the mammoth betrayal by the top union leadership at Boeing. "Rosie's Machinist" Shannon Ryker received the "Troublemaker of the Year" award at the recent Labor Notes conference. [You can hear her presentation on the video produced by Labor Beat in Chicago; see sidebar article.]
For more information on this IAM Reform Slate, go to:
http://rosiesmachinists751.net
* Teamsters Union In New York Forces Management to Rescind Firings at UPS:
Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) reports that UPS has rescinded the terminations of all 250 drivers fired for reaching out to the public during contract negotiations in Queens, N.Y. All fired workers are members of IBT Local 804, the local of former IBT President Ron Carey, who had organized a successful national strike against UPS (and who, as a result, was forced out of office on trumped-up charges by the government).
When the company refused to come to the table to negotiate a settlement, Local 804 organized a community support campaign. They collected more than 125,000 signatures on support petitions from Teamster members and public supporters. Drivers who had reached out to their customers in person, on camera and in the press were summarily fired.
The grassroots mobilization brought UPS back to the table and ultimately forced the company to rescind the terminations. A press release from IBT Local 804 put it this way: "UPS executives had insisted the firings were a done deal. Local 804 members proved otherwise by staying united, taking their case to the public, and mobilizing support." It was a small, but significant, victory.
* Teachers Organizing the Fightback:
There has been a big increase in the number of rank-and-file caucuses in both the AFT and NEA nationwide. Protest actions of all sorts are taking place as part of the fight against the budget cuts, the growing opposition by teachers to the new performance-evaluation tests, and the overall fight against the privatization of public education. This is occurring in K-12 schools, but also -- as the fight at City College of San Francisco attests -- in higher education, mainly at the Community College level.
From Los Angeles, teacher unionist Joel Jordan reports: "Great news at UTLA! The progressive organizing slate -- Union Power -- swept the officer and Board of Directors elections, with a run-off for president in April. . . . So we're looking at an overwhelming victory in the run-off and the opening of a 'second front' (with Chicago) in the second largest urban district in the U.S.!"
The day before the April 5-6 Labor Notes conference in Chicago, a day-long meeting of dissident teachers' caucuses gathered in Chicago, with delegates from North Carolina, California, Washington state, Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Oregon, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio. The National Network Coordinating Committee of teachers will be holding a larger, open conference of rank-and-file teachers and reform caucuses in Chicago in August.
* Postal Workers' Union Elect Militant Leader:
A militant leader of the North Carolina chapter of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), Mark Dimondstein, recently won the election for union president. Dimondstein ran on a platform to stop the privatization and destruction of the U.S. postal service (which is far advanced at this point) and to build unity with the three other postal workers' unions to beat back and reverse the attacks against the Post Office and the workforce.
The four post office unions, in fact, have just formed the Postal Union Alliance to fight back against the "unprecedented attack" on the Postal Service. The unions will work together to protest privatization, subcontracting, and other actions that have already led to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. The alliance also "vows to form a common front in the fight for genuine postal reform legislation," to fight corporate welfare in USPS service rates, and to work to expand services to include basic banking, notary, check-cashing and other services.
Dimondstein was a keynote speaker at the Labor Notes Conference. [His speech is included in the Labor Beat report; see below.]
* Growing $15 an Hour Movement:
Spurred by the electoral victory of Kshama Sawant and the successful organizing drive for a $15 minimum wage ordinance in Seattle, scores of labor-community coalitions have been building similar movements in cities across the country. In San Francisco, a resolution adopted by the S.F. Labor Council was followed-up by a decision to form a coalition, led by SEIU Local 1021 and Jobs with Justice, among others, to place a $15 an hour minimum wage initiative on the November 2014 ballot. "This is about lifting up everybody in the community, not just low-wage workers," said Shaw San Liu, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Progressive Workers Alliance, which is spearheading this campaign.
As a result of this mounting pressure from below, the national AFL-CIO has even come out for a $15 federal minimum wage -- at a time when Obama is pushing for a increase in the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour (a proposal that is being fought tooth and nail by the Republicans). Many young labor and community activists are mobilizing in support of this campaign.
* Growing Labor for Single Payer movement:
Outraged by the attacks on the unions' health plans, more and more national unions are speaking out against the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) and urging support for single payer. This issue surfaced in an explosive manner at the AFL-CIO convention in September 2013. But business has not returned to usual in the house of labor on the healthcare front. Some unions, such as UNITE-HERE, are actively educating the labor movement about the serious shortcomings of ACA. This is likely to be one of the main breaking points -- if not the main breaking point -- between labor and the Democrats (and one of the main leverage points for launching a Labor Party) in the period ahead.
In many states, such as California, the labor movement is joining with community organizations to form coalitions with the goal of placing a single-payer initiative on the ballot in 2017. Under the provisions of the ACA, states can opt out, or modify, their ACA legislation in 2017 as they see fit -- and this could include opting out of the private-insurance-dominated ACA system to establish a single-payer system. The Campaign for a Healthy California (CHC), led by the California Nurses Association/NNU, is educating labor and community about the major problems with ACA and building a base to launch a successful campaign to defeat what will surely be a billion-dollar effort by the insurance companies to stop any single-payer ballot initiative in 2017.
For more on the UNITE HERE campaign, go to:
http://www.unitehere.org/detail.php?ID=3775
For more information on how states can move toward single payer in 2017, to go the PNHP blog.
* Moral Mondays Movement Spreads Across U.S. South:
A recent article written by Tom Bias and distributed by the Labor Fightback Network noted that the "Moral Mondays" protests that shook North Carolina's capital through all of 2013 -- led by labor and community organizations -- have now spread to Georgia and South Carolina. UE Local 150 leader Saladin Muhamad called this a "budding mass movement" as he reported on the close to 100,000 people from throughout the South who turned out for a "Moral Mondays" protest in Raleigh on February 8.
The protests have targeted the attacks by the Supreme Court and many Southern governors on the voting rights of Black people, the decisions by state legislatures not to participate in Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, the assault on public employees and their collective-bargaining rights, the "New Jim Crow" legislation across the South and the growing prison-industrial complex, the mounting attacks on pensions and unemployment benefits, the lack of housing, the attacks and deportations of immigrant workers, the loss of funding for civil rights enforcement agencies, and more.
It is no surprise, therefore, that all the top leaders of the North Carolina Public Service Union, UE Local 50, were jailed and still face serious charges -- along with more than 900 other labor and community activists. Reclaiming the traditions of the early Civil Rights Movement, these activists are putting their bodies on the line -- and they are inspiring workers and youth in the rest of the country in the process.
For more information on this movement, go to:
http://southernworker.org/
* Huge Turnout for Labor Notes (LN) Conference:
The bi-annual LN conferences have always been a gathering place to do networking for serious labor activists and officials committed, as their slogan goes, "to putting the movement back in the labor movement." But this year's LN conference -- reflecting the rumblings occurring within the labor movement -- was different. For one thing, it was the largest ever -- 2,000 union activists, with a much larger percentage of youth, Black and Latino activists. A big contingent came from the Southern Workers Assembly in North Carolina. And some national unions attended the conference. This was the case of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), whose 400 delegates attending a prior union meeting in Chicago all came to the LN conference. -- A.B.
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LINK TO HIGHLIGHTS OF Labor Notes Conference 2014, Produced by Labor Beat (Chicago)
On YouTube at:
http://youtu.be/sEPHe-mFi04
Speech excerpts from the Friday evening and Saturday morning plenaries of the April 4-6, 2014 Labor Notes Conference in Chicago. And before the speeches begin, a quick visit with the folks at the lit tables that provide much of the political ambience surrounding this biennial event.
Speeches by: Karen Lewis, President of Chicago Teachers Union, who delivers the welcome; Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes Editor; Stephan Chan, Union of Hong Kong Dock Workers, who led a 40-day strike in 2013; Tim Sylvester, President of IBT Local 804, UPS New York; Jessica Davis, Workers Organizing Committee/Chicago; Mark Dimondstein, newly elected President of American Postal Workers; Kimberly Bowsky, Chicago Teachers Union.
Mark Dimondstein, APWU President, dwelled on the attacks on the public sector unions, "along with this [privatization] drive of public services, from education, public transportation, public utilities, public hospitals, and public postal services. . . . Privatization represents the looting of what belongs to the people. Privatization represents a transfer of wealth from decently paid union workers to the bosses and owners who thrive off of non-union, non-living wage jobs."
Dimondstein capsulized the basic strategy of the privatizers: "But since the people trust the Post Office, frontal privatization is not such an easy thing. First you have to degrade it, undermine it, not have enough people working the windows, have the lines long, close early, deliver mail late into the night, and people are going to be forced to look elsewhere. I compared it in our campaign to a lot of what's happened to public education in this country. Before you can destroy it, and move in for the kill, you have to undermine it and degrade it."
President Dimondstein also noted at several points in his speech that both the Republican and Democratic Parties have been leading the privatization attacks.
[The political ramifications of such political observations were addressed later at the Conference at a featured session on Labor and Independent Politics. We videotaped that meeting and will delve into that footage in some future Labor Beat show.] Length - 26:39
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Mass Mobilizations Spread to
Demand End to Deportations
ALL OUT FOR MAY 1st!
The failure by the Democrats and Republicans to reach a deal on "immigration reform" left an opening for labor and community activists who had not swallowed the "poison pill" of Comprehensive Immigration Reform to initiate a campaign to demand that Obama stop the deportations (more than 2 million under his watch to date), expand DACA (deferred action), and stop the firings of undocumented immigrants.
Soon the campaign was endorsed by local unions and central labor councils -- and then by entire city councils (Los Angeles, San Francisco, and later many cities across California and the country). Labor activist David Bacon, in an aptly titled article titled, "How Change Happens," described this as "a growing insurgency . . . in direct response to the fact that the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has implemented the harshest parts of Congress' immigration reform proposals, even while Congress has been paralyzed and unable to pass them."
Bacon summarized some of the recent activities of this movement:
"In early March, hundreds of people inside the Tacoma Detention Center launched a hunger strike against its private operator, Geo Corporation, demanding better conditions and a moratorium on deportations. A week later the strike spread to another Geo facility in Texas.
"This is only the most dramatic action of a wave of activity around the country, in which community and labor activists, and now deportees themselves, have refused to quietly endure increased immigration enforcement. . . . These activists refuse to wait for Congress to enact its immigration reform proposals, and in fact many reject them as fatally compromised. Instead, they're organizing actions on the ground to win rights and equality:
" - In Tucson, San Francisco, Phoenix, Chicago and other cities people sat down in front of ICE buses and vans, and chained themselves to vehicles, to block deportations. . . .
" - Supervisors in Los Angeles and San Francisco passed resolutions demanding a moratorium on the huge wave of deportations -- 2 million people in 5 years. The San Francisco resolution also demanded an end to the tens of thousands of immigration-related firings.
" - In Burlington, Washington, immigrant indigenous farm workers from Oaxaca went on strike repeatedly last year for labor rights, better pay, and to stop a grower from using the H2A guest worker program to replace them."
Bacon concluded his article as follows:
"Figuring out the alternative isn't really the hard part. It's building a movement strong enough to force Congress and the administration to enact it. But this is possible, as our own history tells us. Historian Howard Zinn warned: 'When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them.'
"Zinn believed people have the power to win radical demands. 'If there is going to be change, real change,' he said, 'it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves. That's how change happens." -- Editors