Unions must act like unions

State employees in New York and Connecticut, as in so many other states, are being told they have to make painful concessions in order to prevent mass layoffs. But it’s not just the politicians who are telling them this. It’s their own union leaders.

How many times have workers in the private sector been told by their bosses that there was no money for health care, for raises, for pensions? But the workers knew that was a lie, and they fought for better contracts. Sometimes they had to walk the picket line for days, weeks or even months. But if they held out, they had a chance of winning many of their demands. That’s how millions of workers in unions were able to move out of poverty.

Unions in the public sector are often more restricted by reactionary laws barring strikes, but they are still supposed to fight for the workers, not do the work of the bosses and their politicians. When the states or cities say, “Jump,” public workers don’t want their unions to answer, “How high?”

In Connecticut a month ago, a rotten, giveback contract negotiated by union leaders was rejected by workers in the state employees’ unions. They told their unions to fight for something better. Gov. Dannel Malloy, a Democrat, then increased the pressure, saying the state had to immediately institute huge cuts in economic development programs, highway rest stops, bus subsidies and bridge inspections and close courthouses, welfare offices and motor vehicle branches. Layoff notices were sent out to 6,500 workers.

This declaration of war against the workers should have been answered with a plan of struggle to force the politicians to back down. Instead, the union leaders decided to change the rules on how many votes it takes to ratify a giveback contract.

In order to protect the gains made in previous contracts, these rules had required an 80 percent acceptance vote. Only 57 percent had voted in June to accept the giveback contract, even after enormous pressure on the members to do so from the governor and the Democrat-controlled General Assembly. Now the union leaders have decided to make ratification possible with a simple majority.

Will this make the governor reverse the layoffs? Or will it only whet the appetites of those who are trying to set back the workers’ standard of living and destroy their unions?

Now the two largest unions of New York state employees — the Civil Service Employees Association and the Public Employees Federation — are following suit, trying to convince their members to accept a three-year wage freeze, unpaid furloughs and benefit cuts, supposedly as protection against layoffs.

There wouldn’t be any unions in this country if that had been the mindset in the last big capitalist crisis of the 1930s. The bosses and their politicians always say there’s no money for the workers — until the workers’ struggle forces them to cough it up.

Workers who don’t have a union need to fight to get one. And workers with unions need to fight to make their unions fight!