AFL-CIO Leadership is Responsible for Defeats

California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger is on a roll. He wants to make California a business friendly state. “We love it when we take jobs from Las Vegas” says Arnold, “And from Arizona and New Mexico and all those places” he adds. (1) In order to encourage business, Arnold has vetoed bills aimed at raising the state’s minimum wage and has opposed proposition 72 which would require companies with 50 or more employees to provide heath insurance. Schwarzenegger also vetoed three bills last week that would have either increased retirement benefits for city and county workers or reduced the power of independent overseers. “We’re giving him an A-plus”, says Allan Zaremberg, President of the California Chamber of Commerce quoted in Business Week.

Schwarzenegger’s glee at increasing unemployment in Arizona or New Mexico might only be temporary. The next logical step in this war between capitalists over the price of labor would be for Nevada and Arizona’s business community to undercut poor Arnie. They will respond by cutting wages, attacking benefits or both. In this endeavor, they will turn to their politicians in their respective state legislatures. Democrat and Republican alike, recognizing the need for their constituency to compete, will try their very best to outdo Arnold and create a more favorable business climate for their respective states.

The complicity of the two capitalist parties in this process is best exampled by the recent votes in the Indiana state legislature. Democrats and Republicans supported bills shifting the property taxes from giant corporations BP, Cargill and U.S. Steel on to local homeowners in the city of Whiting, just outside Chicago. Homeowners in this overwhelmingly blue collar community in the heart of the rust belt have seen their property taxes increase ten fold or more. Many homeowners will lose their homes and others have been forced to choose between paying the tax and health insurance.

This activity, a natural process in the market economy, has devastating effects on workers lives and our communities. Workers built Unions to protect us from the market, but every major Union official today, from the President of the AFL-CIO on down, sees the Unions that they control as organizations for helping the employers get the best price for labor. In fact, the heads of the major Unions see them as employment agencies with themselves as the CEO’s.

The most pernicious policy forced on their members by the heads of organized labor is the Team Concept, the idea that employers and workers have the same interests. The logical outcome of this ideology is that workers in California should support Schwarzenegger and “their” Californian employers in their struggle for market share with the employers of New Mexico, Nevada or Japan or Mexico for that matter,. The result of this is a downward spiral of wages, benefits and working conditions as workers in different states and different countries, work faster, cheaper, more efficiently (e.g. No cumbersome workplace safety rules).

Any union activist must campaign against this disastrous policy if they are serious about making the Unions fighting organizations once more rather than dues collecting organizations providing finances, precinct walkers and assistance to Democratic candidates for office. Their acceptance of the Team Concept ideology prevents the labor leadership from organizing any serious resistance to these attacks. Rather than relying on the tremendous potential social power of organized labor, the union leadership pleads with more “sensible” representatives of the capitalist class, in the form of the Democrats, to be more reasonable. The AFL-CIO spent some $10 million of our money trying to keep Gray Davis in power in California and one AFL-CIO Union alone, SEIU is spending millions of dollars and donating many organizers to getting John Kerry elected President in November. The clinging to the political coattails of the Democratic Party contributes further to the labor leaders’ impotence socially, and their acceptance of the employers world view, their worship of the market, prohibits them from organizing their members as an independent force industrially or politically for, in their point of view, it can only lead to chaos.

In response to Schwarzenegger’s offensive, Art Pulaski, Executive Secretary Treasurer of the California Labor Federation AFL-CIO says that “He’s kicking the California worker in the guts”, well what’s new? His job is to kick California workers in the guts. Pulaski, or any other top Union official’s alternative to Schwarzenegger was Gray Davis who was no friend of working people and supported the execution of 16 year olds; he kicked us in the guts also. Pulaski heads an organization that represents some 2 million workers but 95% of those workers wouldn’t know what the California State Labor Federation is and certainly wouldn’t have heard of Art Pulaski. When workers do become more aware of the Union and, in particular, Union officials, it is because both are seen as helping the employers achieve their goals rather than the members achieving theirs. Strike after defeated strike, fought with great sacrifice by workers but defeated due to the pro-employer policies of the Union officials, has left a bitter taste in the mouths of many a loyal Union member.

Schwarzenegger was simply expressing a view that all employers and their politicians, and unfortunately top Union officials, agree with. But for us, to be on our employers’ team means we place ourselves in opposition to other workers as we compete with them for who can give up most to make our employers more competitive. We place obstacles to solidarity and unity and the growth of workers’ power and influence both in our ability to shut employers down and win strikes and in the political arena as well. For Union activists, our opposition to the Team Concept will inevitably bring us in to conflict with the Union hierarchy but any attempt to fight for the members will do that. A major struggle within the labor movement is inevitable but we may take further steps backwards before we move forward.

Richard Mellor
Retired member, AFSCME Local 444
Oakland CA

(1) Business Week 10-04-2004