Labor split feeds anti-union attack

By Milt Neidenberg

Since the split in the AFL-CIO, the top leadership of the two rival union camps have been working overtime to consolidate their bases. Both the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win Coalition have been telling their respective rank and file that they’re for unity. But they are operating in a hostile, divisive manner, ignoring the workers’ and oppressed nationalities’ need for class-wide unity and independent struggle.

After the defection of the Service Em ploy ees International Union and other unions, the AFL-CIO Executive Council ruled at its convention that the disaffiliated unions could not remain in local central labor councils or state federations.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said the AFL-CIO constitution required this ruling. He told convention delegates that the central labor councils and state federations could no longer accept dues—per capita payments—from the defecting unions. Nor, he ruled, could the defecting unions be represented by delegates or officers in the local and state organizations.

The AFL-CIO bureaucracy has now retreated from that position. They have proposed “Solidarity Charters,” to woo Change to Win local unions in the central labor councils and state federations to return to the AFL-CIO.

Since the SEIU and Teamster defections, the United Food and Commercial Workers has also disaffiliated from the AFL-CIO. The AFL-CIO calculates that the loss of these three big unions will cost it close to $28 million—from a budget approximating $120 million—and more than 4 million of its 13 million members.

The Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees/Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees—UNITE HERE—and the Laborers International also boycotted the AFL-CIO convention. Both unions continue to threaten to leave.

The United Farm Workers union has agreed to stay in the AFL-CIO. The Car pen ters union is not affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

It would be a disaster to throw the Change to Win unions out of the local labor councils and the state federations.

Before the AFL-CIO convention ended, the Executive Council appointed a few top leaders to try to mitigate this potential disaster. They set up a committee to review the constitution.

With the board’s approval, Sweeney has now set up “Solidarity Charters.” These would revise the national constitution, permitting the disaffiliated local unions to remain in the AFL-CIO’s central labor councils and state federations.

But the Solidarity Charters create second-class membership filled with bureaucratic hitches.

Hitch number one

According to the AFL-CIO: “If a local union of a disaffiliated union wants to be part of a united local movement in their city and state, they can apply to be part of the central labor council or state federation.

“They would pay a 10 percent solidarity fee to the labor council or state federation to help offset the cost of services and mobilization systems provided by the national AFL-CIO and supported by its affiliated unions.”

The 10 percent charge would be in addition to the dues that each member union paid into the central labor council and state federation before the split.

Hitch number two

Members who sign on to the Solidarity Charters would have to remain in the central labor councils and the state federations until the end of 2006. And they would have to participate fully in local politics. This is an obvious reference to the 2006 congressional election.

This is a high-handed maneuver to get the local unions from the Change to Win Coalition—SEIU, UFCW, Teamsters, and Carpenters—to help finance the capitalist politicians endorsed by the AFL-CIO.

Hitch number three

Members of unions with a Solidarity Charter can’t hold top labor council or state federation office. Individuals already in office can only finish out their terms.

Immediately, Anna Burger, chair of the Change to Win Coalition, denounced the entire proposal to create Solidarity Charters. She called them divisive, saying, “The AFL-CIO has taken a position that uses the rhetoric of unity, but is designed to provide unnecessary divisions.”

She charged that the language contains “fine print poison-pill provisions,” including “discriminatory fees” [and] “a ban on participation in local and state leadership by disaffiliated unions.”

Split whets gov’t appetite

Unfortunately, as the factional rhetoric heats up, leaders of the local and state bodies are in a holding pattern until the hierarchy of both labor factions plan their next step.

The Change to Win Coalition will hold its founding convention in Cincinnati in late September. At a time when Wall Street, Corporate “America” and the government are dumping their global and domestic crises on the backs of the workers and the oppressed, the top-down factionalism couldn’t come at a worse time.

The Change to Win Coalition’s split from the AFL-CIO and Sweeney’s bureaucratic proposal to form Solidarity Charters will only whet the ruling class and its government’s appetites.

As an Aug. 11 Wall Street Journal headline noted, just two weeks after the AFL-CIO split three Republican governors—in Missouri, Indiana and Maryland—opened attacks on public-sector unions.

The Journal reported: “First-term Mis souri Gov. Matt Blunt rescinded collective-bargaining rights for state employees. ... Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a former Bush White House budget director, overturned an executive order that for 15 years provided collective-bargaining rights for that state’s public employees. And Maryland’s Robert Ehrlich, backed by the state Supreme Court, suspended a 2-percent pay increase unions had negotiated for state employees with his predecessor.”

The Journal reveled in “the bitterness between AFSCME and unions that recently quit the AFL-CIO—including the Service Employees International Union which has a significant public employee unit.”

The government joy may yet be short-lived. This mouthpiece for the ruling class hasn’t the foggiest notion of what the rank and file—those who work together to provide public services for millions of workers and poor and maintain the deteriorating infrastructure—are thinking. The workers’ labor power has joined them in unity—Black, white, Latin@, Asian and women.

Still, it is painfully clear that as long as the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win Coalition are at each others’ throats, the potential for unity is submerged. Leaders of both factions are on a destructive, divisive course. They show no vision as to what it will take to revive the labor movement and build unity in the central labor councils and state federations.

Bureaucratic nitpicking over structure and money, which led to the split in the AFL-CIO, will not measure up to what’s needed to respond to the ongoing war against labor.

Among the multinational rank and file of both factions there is a residue of good will. They have worked together over decades in good times and bad. It is in the labor councils and the state federations that most of the support for strikes and other forms of struggle is organized. These bodies could be the structural basis for a multinational rank-and-file fight back.

Public employees are a source of strength and revenue to fight back against the preemptive strike at their unions. About one out of every three of the country’s 5 million state government employees is represented by a union.

AFSCME has more members than any other union in the AFL-CIO, even before the split. United with the numerical strength of SEIU, which has also organized public- sector workers, this powerhouse could meet the war against public employees head-on.

This unity would reinforce the structural level of support built in the labor councils and state federations. It would come from the bottom up, include both public- and private-sector workers, be national in scope and framed in struggle.

It will take a regrouping, a council of lead ers from below, to implement this vis ion of a fight back in the midst of class war.

The capitalist system of exploitation, national oppression and imperialist war will feed the will to resist. Bubbling from below—from the multinational work force, women and oppressed nationalities and united with the anti-war and other movements—there is the energy and will to build this united front. It must burst forth.

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