NOtesonline

• Barry Rubin Lunch
  
• Debate Builds in Labor
  
• "Anti-Americanism"
  
• Trokskyites Under the Bed!
  
• D'Emilio Book Award Finalist
  

REMINDER:
SD-USA will host a lunch for

BARRY RUBIN
Director, Global Research for International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel,
and author of a new biography of Yassir Arafat

"Why is the Arab Israeli Conflict so Unsolvable?"

Friday, November 14, 12:15 pm
1319 18th Street, NW, 2nd Floor

For a reservation call 202-467-0028 or e-mail: info@socialdemocrats.org

Debate Builds in Labor

Trade unions provide an institutional foundation for a large part of America's civic and economic life, but to learn about an important debate now taking shape in labor you'll need to Google around in some obscure backwaters of the Internet. It's a debate about the character of the labor movement itself -- not just about the election-year manuvering that's in today's headlines.

One place to start: Ranknfile.net. Click on this and what you'll see is a scanned fax of a 13-page document prepared for the so-called Gang of Five, a group of presidents of major international unions who are trying to develop new strategies for the movement. They call themselves “The New Unity Partnership” – NUP. (To get the document in a more readable form, click where it says “Click here for text file.” You may get a prompt box saying “enter network password,” but if you then click “cancel” on the box you should get through.) The matters raised in this paper are sure to strike outsiders as arcane, but they could have considerable significance. (The indifference of the national media to all this is a subject in itself.)

This NUP document appears to be a set of talking points developed for discussions among Andrew Stern of the SEIU, John Wilhelm of Hotel and Restaurant, Bruce Raynor of UNITE, Terence O'Sullivan of the Laborers International and Doug McCarron of the Carpenters. Business Week, the only mainstream publication to cover this development, reports that some among them even talk of the possibility of leaving the AFL-CIO if their approach is not adopted.

The ideas under consideration by the NUP group would change the AFL- CIO from a voluntary alliance of independent unions to something considerably more centralized. A core leadership group would review union charters to decide how well affiliates are performing. Provisions of the AFL-CIO Constitution that restrain affiliates from competing with one another in organizing and from raiding one another's existing membership could be altered. Certain unions would be given monopoly franchises to organize specified sectors of the labor market, e.g., construction, retail, health care, etc. Local labor councils might have their officers appointed by the Federation, rather being elected locally. Membership services that have been a focus for many unions and the AFL-CIO Federation itself would be slashed back, and the resources shifted to organizing.

All this makes for an interesting discussion. On one hand, the restructuring of our economy will inevitably require some kind of restructuring of the labor movement, and there can be no arguing with the fact that labor has to bring in new members. But there are also some good questions to be asked. Surprisingly, debate about these issues so far has been almost entirely within the labor left, not between the left and those who might be considered trade union traditionalists.

Harold Meyerson had an informative and generally sympathetic piece on the Gang of Five in the American Prospect in which he remarks that Stern, Wilhelm and Raynor have “come out of the '60s left and brought its values to the labor movement.” But he goes on to cite the CWA Vice President Larry Cohen's worry that union organizing carried on by “movement” activists from outside the workplace may not sink deep roots.

Readers who enjoy free-swinging polemics can go to Counterpunch for an exchange between SEIU Vice-President Tom Woodruff and Joann Wypijewski that gives a flavor of the debate. Woodruff contends that “Unions must act like one movement, not 65 overlapping and competing organizations that happen to be part of a common trade association called the AFL-CIO.” Wypijewski counters that it will be hard to “convince most of the rest of organized labor to give up their unions or transfer some of their members to the appropriate sectoral union.”

Veteran labor and left commentator Harry Kelber sees the NUP as a power grab by Carpenters President Doug McCarron, who, he believes, will sell out to the Bush Administration or employer interests if that proves convenient. “The New Partnership is not a reform movement to improve the lives of ordinary union members, who are hardly mentioned in the document,” he writes. “Its real purpose is to take over the AFL-CIO and mold it in McCarron's image, when the labor federation holds its convention in 2005.” (One of the discovered NUP FAX pages noted above actually suggests a meeting between NUP leaders and Karl Rove.)

Still more on the controversy this has stirred on the left can be found in the October issue of “Labor Notes.”

Other questions about the NUP plan are sure to be raised in due course by more mainstream critics. Would sectoral unionism eliminate the professional and occupational identity that unions provide for more up-market workers? Could the organizing model become a messianic quest to build “The Movement” that belittles mundane needs that many workers join unions to get help with? Who will decide how labor market sectors will be apportioned out, and which unions will get the franchises to work in them? Should judgments about a union's effectiveness be taken out of the hands of its members?

In his interview with Business Week Andrew Stern proposed that debate about these issues be postponed until 2005, when the Presidential elections are over and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney's term is up. But it's difficult to organize a group and also to suggest that debate about its purposes be put off. Soon after Stern's interview appeared John Sweeney announced his intention of running again in 2005, and warned against divisive debates in the labor movement. ("Sweeney to Seek New 4-Year Term as Head of A.F.L.-C.I.O, New York Times, Steven Greenhouse, September 17, may be purchased at www.nyt.com).

Differences within labor are already manifest in the contest for the Democratic Presidential nomination. An AFL-CIO endorsement of labor stalwart Richard Gephardt was short-circuited last week when Stern and AFSCME President Gerald McEntee turned toward Howard Dean. A coalition has been established outside the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education to support Gephardt –- the Alliance for Economic Justice -– and there is talk among some of its backers about continuing cooperation after the election.

Leaders of the embattled labor movement often carry on their internal dialogue behind closed doors, out of understandable fear of being hurt by “washing our laundry in public.” But these days such discretion is usually futile, and can even appear devious. Open debate about labor's future course might prove a good thing for unions and the public.