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Organized
labor started off 2010 not with a bang but with a whimper. In
mid-January, top labor officials knuckled under to Obama’s
insistence that they accept taxes on workers’ health plans—only to see
the prospects of the whole health-care “reform” package for which
they’d made this sacrifice of workers’ income go into a tailspin. Soon
after, new statistics revealed an unprecedented decline in unionization
rates, which starkly captures the need for a drastic turnaround in
labor policy and practice.
Scott
Brown, a state legislator who initially agreed to be the Republican
sacrificial lamb in the special election to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s
Massachusetts Senate seat, ended up being elected as the forty-first
Republican Senator—denying Democrats their already shaky super-majority
needed to hold off GOP filibusters against health-care “reform” bills.
Giddy
Republicans proclaimed this a referendum against “government-run health
care.” But the Obama health-care “reform” was
no more “government run” than the Massachusetts state reform established on
a Republican governor’s watch. Yet there’s no doubt that working-class
voters were not pleased with the Obama plan.
The last straw was the tax on benefits insisted upon by the
president—after swearing during the election campaign he would never
agree to such a tax.
Despite
last-minute campaigning by prominent national Democratic and union
leaders, more unionists voted for Brown than his opponent. AFL-CIO
President Richard Trumka claimed this was an
indicator of an apparently previously undetected “working-class
revolt,” and warned the Democrats to get back on the track leading to
jobs, jobs, jobs.
But
for Democrats there is only one track—and it doesn’t lead to jobs.
While one party is always shunted off to a siding, both their trains
are competing to deliver the rest of us to the same destination—the
place described by Canadian labor party (NDP) leader Tommy Douglas as Mouseland, where the Fat Cats rule.
And
the inevitable consequences of being stuck like Casey Jones on this
runaway train were seen once again in labor’s dual capitulation on
health care. Not only did labor officials fail to lift a finger for the
only immediate solution that would benefit the entire
class—single-payer—but in the end it cried “Uncle” when Obama insisted it accept taxes on its members’
“Cadillac” plans. And the bone Obama threw
them in return—that their members could pay the taxes later than the
rest of the working class—will only leave unorganized workers prey to
right-wing rhetoric about labor being a self-centered “special
interest.”
The
so-called “Cadillac” plans are not, in fact, expensive boondoggles full
of needed frills. Under our irrational and wasteful health-care
financing system, they are the kind of plan a typical working-class
family needs to have adequate coverage without ending up bankrupt when
a medical emergency strikes.
But
under the deal with the White House, a 40 percent tax would be imposed
starting in 2013 on the amount by which premiums for employer-sponsored
health coverage exceeds specified thresholds. This arrangement was counterposed to calls by labor to instead raise
revenue for health-care changes through higher income taxes on earnings
above $1 million a year for couples.
The
agreement exempts unionized workers and state and local government
employees from such taxes for five years. This supposedly allows unions
time to negotiate new contracts to gain wage hikes to make up for the
cuts in health benefits that will inevitably follow the new taxes.
Needless to say, bosses will resist any such demands for pay hikes. And
when labor looks for allies against such resistance, it will find many
unorganized workers saying, “Where were you when they imposed the tax
on my health-care
plan?”
Shrinking membership rolls
This
failure of labor tops to fight for the entire class on health-care
issues is symptomatic of unions’ increasing isolation at a time when it
should be gathering around it millions of new workers looking to resist
the fallout from the deepening economic crisis.
Union
density in the private sector now stands at 7.2%, down from 7.6% last
year, and is the lowest since at least 1900. Unions lost 10% of their
members in the private sector last year, the largest decline in more
than 25 years. The broader drop in U.S. employment and a small gain by
public-sector unions helped keep the total share of union membership
flat at 12.3% in 2009. In the early 1980s, unions represented 20% of
workers.
The
U.S. public sector has long had
greater union density than the private. Now, for the first time,
government unionists actually outnumber those in the market economy.
This shocking statistic doesn’t represent growth in public unions.
Layoffs and contracting out by state and local governments and
quasi-public transit agencies are common and growing. And in coming
months they’re going to get far worse, as state budget woes are leading
politicians of both parties to demand massive cuts.
The
larger numbers of unionized workers in public rather than private jobs
registers the collapse of remaining union bastions in construction and
manufacturing. Last year—continuing the massive job loss of
2008—construction employment fell by another 900,000, while 1.3 million
more factory jobs were slashed. As a result, even though aggressive organizing
successes have been achieved by a few unions such as National Nurses
United, during the first year of the Obama
administration overall union membership fell 771,000.
Ironically,
during the very year in which this shocking decline occurred, union officials
had put on the back burner, at the request of the Democratic Party, its
fight for the Employee Free Choice Act, a supposed remedy to low
unionization rates, until health-care “reform” was won.
While
some of the construction work will probably come back, most of the good
paying manufacturing jobs—such as the tens of thousands eliminated
during Obama’s bankruptcy restructuring of GM
and Chrysler—are gone for good. And any regained jobs will come with
much lower wages, benefits, and stability—and more often than not
without union protection.
Where will new jobs &
union members come from?
How
does this fit in to the above-cited refrain of Trumka
calling for Democrats to focus on “jobs, jobs, jobs”? The efforts of
one union located at the intersection of jobs and climate struggles
offers some lessons.
UAW
Local 879 in St Paul recently held a press conference urging Ford to
build plug-in electric or hybrid cars at their plant currently
producing Ranger pick-ups—and scheduled for closure by the end of next
year. They are calling for a government subsidy to Ford to keep this
product line.
Nearly
all government jobs plans revolve around subsidies and tax breaks to
private employers as an incentive to hire or keep workers. The track
record of such schemes is not good. In this particular case, Ford is
building its popular hybrid in Mexico, where labor costs are about 20%
of St Paul’s. There’s no way either the workers
or government incentives can compete with that.
Previously,
the local had, in collaboration with environmental and community
groups, campaigned for public ownership of the plant and conversion to
new products. They nearly landed production of new clean buses ordered
by the local transit agency. But the local establishment put the kibosh
on those logical plans, leading to the latest last-ditch effort to keep
Ford.
Local
879’s original strategy was sound. But it’s hard for one isolated group
of workers to implement even the best of ideas in the face of hostility
from the bosses and their politicians. We need a national jobs policy
that replaces trying to bribe employers with nationalizing the key
industries needed for a healthy economy. A whole new public
sector—including finance, energy, transportation, and auto for
starters—could lead the way in putting everyone to work in decent
paying jobs and in rebuilding an economy to tackle the threat of
climate change and other urgent needs.
A
labor movement with such a bold and broad strategy would also find
itself picking up members in existing industries—as well as the new
ones—as newly-inspired workers began fighting to organize.
Coming attack on public
workers
One
place to start gathering the forces for the fight for those new public
jobs is in defense of existing ones. Conservative think-tank pundits
seized on the new data on unionization rates as proof that the time had
come to wipe out unions from the public sector as well.
Fred
Siegel of the conservative Manhattan Institute told The
New York Times: “At the same time the country is being
squeezed, public-sector unions are a rising political force in the
Democratic Party. They depend on extra money for the public sector. In
four big states—New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California—the
public-sector unions have largely been untouched by the economic
downturn. In those states, you have an impeding clash between unions
and the public at large.”
The
attack on public sector workers comes simultaneously with new attacks
on the most popular and needed portion of public services. Both parties
in Congress are preparing to permanently gut Social Security and
Medicare in order to “save” them from their supposedly inevitably
looming bankruptcy.
For
months, the media has been predicting that budget woes from declining
revenues at the state and municipal level must lead to massive jobs and
services cuts. The beginning of such cuts has already led to massive
actions in defense of jobs and services in California and on a smaller scale
elsewhere.
Yet
while unions and students in California prepare for a day of mass
action March 4, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced even more
cuts. His latest budget plan would privatize and deunionize
prisons, curtail seniority protections for teachers, and reduce the
number of sick, disabled and elderly cared for by the state’s In-Home
Supportive Services program (staffed by union workers) while cutting
what their caregivers are paid.
The
dire need for more public services—and the connection to the jobs
crisis—was cruelly highlighted in a recent Washington Postprofile of parents quitting jobs
because child-care costs are more than they get in wages!
Meanwhile,
teachers and health-care workers have been fighting against schemes
like No Child Left Behind that penalize them for what the irrational
systems in their “industries” do to students and patients respectively.
What’s needed instead of victimization of education and health-care
workers for alleged performance problems are many more education
and healthcare workers (with more control over their working
conditions)—as well as more child-care, home-care, and library workers,
etc. And a fight for such jobs would lead to a discussion in labor
about a class-wide approach to real education and health-care reform.
The
productivity of the U.S. economy long ago passed the
point where we could churn out the same amount of goods with a far
shorter workweek. The hours saved could easily go toward immediately
creating tens of millions of new jobs like the ones described above.
And
doing so is now also a matter of life or death for the planet and all
its inhabitants. Shifting work from emission-spewing industries that
make goods toward life-preserving and enhancing services is now
essential for our livelihoods, our health, our sanity, our very
survival.
Need for a political reversal
These
new jobs programs, and the necessary associated restructuring of the
economy, haven’t a snow-ball’s chance in an overheated Earth if the
labor movement remains tied to the Democrats.
While
the working class is not yet in full revolt, anger is building. There
were high expectations that this administration, now celebrating its
first anniversary in power, would move quickly to address job loss,
stagnant wages, foreclosures and evictions, and, yes, the health-care
crisis. Instead, the situation has gotten worse and the “middle class”
that every politician hails is an endangered species. A common expression
has spread to many diverse victims of the
Great Recession: “If we were a bank we’d be fixed by now.”
The
American political system is designed to accommodate
Massachusetts-style revolts by directing voter discontent with those in
power to the column of the only recognized opposition. If you don’t
like the party that pretends to be labor’s friend, you can instead vote
for the traditional party identified with Big Business.
As
the multiple crises we face deepen, growing numbers will become
dissatisfied with this shell game. Our nation’s real rulers try to
prepare for this by offering extra-electoral far-right backup–the Tea
Party, Minutemen, Operation Rescue, and the like. This is a danger we
cannot take lightly.
Our
only mass organizations, our unions, should be embracing a workers’
revolt. It is up to the labor movement to provide a credible
working-class alternative to the twin parties of capital and their
subcontracted right-wing thugs. That means a party of our own to lead
this revolt in the workplace, the streets, and on the ballot.
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