Can Labor Get Out of This Mess?

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.truthout.org/081109R

Tuesday 11 August 2009

by: David Bacon, t r u t h o u t | Perspective


Lucy Wong is a member of UNITE HERE, the national union for hotel workers. (Photo: David Bacon)

For anyone who loves the labor movement, it's not unreasonable today to ask whether we've lost our way. California's huge health care local is in trusteeship, its leading organizing drive in a shambles. SEIU's international is at war with its own members, and now with UNITE HERE, whose merger of garment and hotel workers is unraveling.

In 1995, following the upsurge that elected John Sweeney president of the AFL-CIO, the service and hotel workers seemed two of the unions best able to organize new members. Their high-profile campaigns, like Justice for Janitors and Hotel Workers Rising, were held out as models. Today they're in jeopardy.

This conflict has endangered our high hopes for labor law reform, and beyond that for an economic recovery with real jobs programs, fair trade instead of free trade, universal health care, and immigration reform that gives workers rights instead of raids. The ability of unions to grow in size and political power is on the line.

Today only 12 percent of workers belong to unions, and less in the private sector - the lowest level of organization since the years before the great longshore strike of 1934. And falling numbers aren't the whole story. Some labor leaders now say that only huge deals at the top, far from the control of rank and file workers, can bring in new members on the scale we need. To make those deals attractive to employers, they argue, unions have to be willing to make deep concessions in wages and rights, and in our political demands on everything from single-payer health care to immigration reform.

We need some better ideas about how unions should organize - to rethink even what a union actually is.

Part of our difficulty is that our labor movement, and workers themselves, think about their interests in relatively narrow terms. By comparison with workers in South Africa, El Salvador, or even Mexico and Canada, we are very conservative, and reluctant to see the root of our problems in the system itself, or to talk openly about the need to change it drastically. It is more important than ever that workers see their class interest, but what is that interest? How should we defend it?

Our labor movement has resources and wealth that are enormous by comparison with most unions around the world. But what good is it if we don't at least use it effectively to defend ourselves, or if it even becomes a brake on our willingness to take risks like those French workers who lock their bosses in their offices, or Mexican workers who, facing the declaration of their strike in Cananea as illegal, have defied and fought it for the last two years?

FULL story at link.