If Big Labor Would But Fight, Millions Would Join Them on the Ramparts

Friday, March 30, 2012 by Common Dreams
An open letter to Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO
by Ralph Nader


Dear Mr. Trumka,

You have come to your leadership position of our country’s labor federation of unions with 13 million members the hard way. Starting by working in the coal mines, then becoming a lawyer, heading the United Mine Workers, then becoming the Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO before assuming your present position in 2009, who can pull rank on you in the formal labor movement?Yet, the AFL-CIO’s public leadership in three major areas has been far less effective than one would expect. I am referring to your less than assertive response to President Obama: 1) turning his back on raising the federal minimum wage; 2) failing to advance his card check promise to you in 2008; and 3) dropping the ball on backing long-overdue safety and health responsibilities of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

I say this with the awareness of your group’s public stands in favor of these three crucial matters to working families. But as you well know, there is a very marked difference between being on-the-record, as the AFL-CIO is, and being on-the-daily ramparts pushing these issues, as your organization is not.

Even just making a statement, however, took a back seat in your March 13, 2012 endorsement of Barack Obama for a second term as president. In what ways has Mr. Obama “moved aggressively,” as you declared, “to protect workers rights, pay, health and safety on the job?”

He has neither championed nor pressed Congress, when the Democrats were in control in 2009-2010, to give you card check which you have long-said was needed to reverse the serious decline and expand the ranks of organized labor by millions of workers (you told me this in 2004).

Second, Mr. Obama appointed an excellent head of OSHA and then betrayed OSHA – an agency that has estimated 58,000 workplace-related American deaths a year from disease and trauma! That is over 1000 people a week, every week, on the average.

Dr. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor and the head of OSHA, cannot get White House approval for issuing long-overdue standards or strengthening weak and outdated standards such as the woefully inadequate silica rule, to save American lives not threatened by terrorists, but by corporate negligence or worse. Why have you not exposed this reality in public? Has Mr. Obama, whom you have socialized with at White House viewings of the Super Bowl, ever invited you to come across Lafayette Square to discuss this serious ongoing, preventable tragedy?

Had he taken worker concerns seriously, he might have asked you why the AFL-CIO for many years, has retained at its large national headquarters so few full-time advocates on occupational health and safety? And you in turn might have asked him why his politicos are blocking Dr. Michaels and why he is content in having only $550 million for OSHA’s annual budget while the U.S. spent $675 million in 2011 paying corporate contractors to guard the overbuilt U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. Are these the Obama “values” you extolled in your endorsement statement?

More dismaying is your touting Mr. Obama for aggressively protecting workers’ pay. By pushing for more NAFTA type “pull-down” trade agreements through Congress, and not moving to revise NAFTA as he promised in his 2008 presidential campaigns, he is undermining both workers’ pay and jobs. By totally abandoning his pledge made to over 30 million workers in 2008 that he would press for a $9.50/hour federal minimum wage by 2011, he left them defenseless with more debt and fewer necessities of life.

The AFL-CIO wants at the least to catch up to 1968 with an inflation-adjusted $10/hour minimum wage law. Where is the visible muscular campaign for such legislation? Keeping up with inflation for the federal minimum wage is historically supported by 70 percent of the people. That includes many Republicans and even Rick Santorum and, until his latest flip-flop, Mitt Romney. A $10 minimum wage, after years of windfall price increases and executive compensation windfalls at labor’s expense, would annually pump tens of billions of dollars into greater consumer demand by low-income families in this recessionary economy.

What is the AFL-CIO waiting for? Hundreds of non-profit organizations will follow your lead. Talk is not enough. Resources and muscular lobbying are required along with far more relevant and tough public advertisements than your members are seeing and paying for on TV these days. Enough, already, of the general feel-good mood spots on TV.

The AFL-CIO is in a deep, defensive rut when in these tough times it should be in an aroused, innovative state of high alert and aggressive action. Workers in the 1930s’ Depression were in worse shape than workers today, yet organized labor was more militant.

As someone who in earlier days had been a dig-in-your-heels labor negotiator in fights with management, what did you receive for millions of American workers in your early, blanket endorsement of Mr. Obama? No wonder he can get away with giving the trade union movement and unorganized workers the back of his hand. You have unnecessarily allowed him to believe that you have nowhere to go. This is another way of saying that the Republicans, by being worse than the bad Democrats, are holding the American labor movement hostage to the corporatist Democratic Party.

The AFL-CIO is in a deep, defensive rut when in these tough times it should be in an aroused, innovative state of high alert and aggressive action. Workers in the 1930s’ Depression were in worse shape than workers today, yet organized labor was more militant.

People inside and outside the AFL-CIO know the problems. They are: complacent bureaucratic rigidity, fractious relations between member unions over how supine they need to be to Obama and the Democrats (with their costly wars), the lack of union democracy and competitive elections both within member unions and at the AFL-CIO plus, except for a few unions like the California Nurses Association, a distinct lack of sustained fervor and money for organizing drives.

You know all this only too well. Yet, as a 14th Century Chinese philosopher once said, “to know and not to do is not to know.” Unless you shake the AFL-CIO up and reorder its priorities against the corporate state, expect another four years of an Obamabush Administration.

Sincerely,
Ralph Nader

Trumka: Primarying Lincoln Was 'Priceless', Dems Will Realize Their Timidity

Sam Stein, HuffPost Reporting - 10- 5-10 10:51 AM

Hoping to shape the narrative around the expected loss of Democratic congressional seats in the fall election, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka argued on Tuesday that the lesson learned from the past two years will be that Democrats were too timid with their legislative ambitions.

"Those battle-worn Democrats will understand that they faced tough races not because they did too much but because they did too little," said Trumka.

Speaking to a small group of political reporters from the union federation's offices overlooking the White House, Trumka argued that the president, up until recently, lacked a clear argument for his economic agenda. That, combined with pared-down reform on a host of policy fronts, has left the party in a precarious state -- though one that, Trumka argued, is not as bad as the pundits are predicting. Democrats, he predicted, will hold on to both chambers of Congress.

The union leader was particularly pointed when making the case that Democrats are primarily responsible for their own precarious political states, even if the AFL-CIO helped put them there. He expressed no regrets for a failed attempt to knock off Senator Blanche Lincoln in a Democratic primary, calling the effort (which cost the union millions of dollars) "priceless" and arguing that purging members on matters of principle was, in turn, a principled thing to do.

"We will do it again," said Trumka. "You will see us doing more primary races in the future. Not less. More. And some of them will be successful and some of them won't. But people understand we are willing to fight for working people, And by the way that generated a whole lot of enthusiasm in the state. We now have more volunteers in that state then we have ever had before... She gave us no votes. She didn't help working people. It doesn't matter whether it is a Democrat or Republican working against you, the result is the same. "

Echoing the type of arguments often heard within progressive circles, Trumka also argued that the health care law that has become toxic for some Democrats would have been more of a boon for the party if it included a government-run insurance option.

"It would have made it more effective," he said. "It would have made it more able to control costs. I think if it would have been in there, there would have been a lot more enthusiasm for it. But it isn't. So the question becomes, the decision between the old system and the new bill, without the public option, which one is an improvement? Which one gets us close to where we want to be? There is no question that the bill that was passed gets us closer than the old system..."

Taken together, Trumka appeared to be laying the groundwork for the post-election argument bound to surface if Democrats lose a substantial number of seats. While the White House has put the onus for electoral success on whether or not "base" voters end up coming out to vote, labor seems to be making the inverse case. Voters, Trumka argued, are there to be motivated. But the elected officials within the party failed to provide them with compelling reasons to show up.

"What I hear on the ground is, people didn't say you went too far on health care," he said. "They say 'You didn't do enough. You should have had a public option. You should have had this; you should have had that. You didn't go too far on job creation, you should have created more jobs.' No one has said to me, 'You know, Rich, you guys went too far in regulating Wall Street.' Most people want to tar and feather them for what they have done."

Memo to Labor Movement: Follow UE’s Lead and Fight Corporate Outsourcing

by Roger Bybee
Wednesday, September 29, 2010 by In These Times

This Saturday's “One Nation” rally in Washington, D.C.—organized initially by the AFL-CIO and NAACP—has been badly needed to outline a bold program to re-generate hope and activism among people worn down by today’s terrible economy.

But what will labor folks be asked to do once they get back to their hometowns after the rally? With the AFL-CIO finally applying some “street heat” in the nation’s capital, will labor’s leaders also recognize the need for ongoing mass protests at the local level?

Understandably, the AFL-CIO will be assigning highest priority in the next month to firing up other union members and their families to vote for Democratic candidates and prevent Republicans from gaining control of the House on November 2. A GOP takeover the House would blot out any and all hope of more forceful steps to heal the economy. This effort makes sense—if labor doesn’t stop there. Specifically, there is a badly-missing and vital component to the AFL-CIO strategy: forcefully and visibly taking on the forces that are destroying jobs and foreclosing working families’ homes en masse.

That’s why battles like the United Electrical workers Local 204 is waging against the Haskon plant closing in Taunton, Mass., is so crucial. Haskon’s parent company, Esterline Technologies, is moving to shut down a profitable plant and relocating the jobs to lower-wage facilities in Tijuana, Mexico (where wages in border-area plants are about 10% of manufacturing jobs in the United States) and Brea, Calif.

Struggles like the Taunton battle offer working people an alternative to the pervasive mindset of utter hopelessness and powerlessness. Workers finally get an outlet for the suffering, humiliation and insecurity that they have suffered since the recession turned their lives inside out. The Great Recession, occurring in a context of easy and rapid capital mobility unimaginable during the Great Depression, has magnified Corporate America’s power to threaten them with job loss unless they capitulate to more and more concessions.

But there is still enough political space to effectively resist these threats. If labor—and the Democrats—fully get behind such local battles, they could potentially develop massive pressure on a number of corporations. For example, Haskon’s owner, Esterline Technologies, is particularly vulnerable as a corporation heavily reliant on contracts from the U.S. government and is engaging in a highly unpopular type of maneuver in shifting US jobs to Mexico. Fully 78% of Americans—presumably including a large number of conservatives and Tea Partiers—oppose such relocation of US jobs.

In the case of Haskon, the plant targeted for closing has been a consistent money-maker for Esterline Technologies, based in Bellevue, Wash. The company has been a major defense contractor and the beneficiary of at least $66.9 million in taxpayer dollars from 2000 to 2009. This stream of tax dollars was very helpful in pumping up Esterline’s net earnings to $119.8 million last year. The federal contracts also helped Esterline CEO Robert W. Cremin to cream off $6,731,506 in total compensation in 2009. CFO magazine recently reported, “the company's defense contracts assure it a solid base of revenue for years to come."

Yet Esterline—the beneficiary of so much taxpayer-provided revenue, is moving rapidly to shut down Haskon, which has been producing sophisticated silicone gaskets and door-seals for all the major airplane manufacturers and the federal government for the past 80 years. Esterline will thereby add 100 more people to the ranks of the jobless in Taunton, a city of 56,000 where the unemployment rate is already at 9.9%

At the bargaining table, UE has explored buying the still-viable plant’s equipment from Esterline in the hope of either finding a new owner or operating the plant themselves under worker ownership. Esterline could thus help to keep the Taunton jobs alive.

Instead, the corporation has tried to exact an outrageous bargain from the workers in negotiating a severance agreement, reports UE Northeast Regional President Peter Knowlton. Esterline is insisting that the union’s right to purchase the equipment be contingent on accepting a severance deal that would penalize the most senior workers, severely degrade the quality of workers’ health insurance, deny laid-off workers the right to health insurance required by state statute, and impose other onerous provisions.

Nonetheless, the corporate website shamelessly pronounces, “Esterline Defense Technologies is a dedicated team that operates in an environment of truth, trust and teamwork through open communication and respect.”

Congressman Barney Frank is one of the few Democrats who has plunged deeply into the workers’ cause, and will be among those taking part in a Sept. 28 vigil aimed at saving the Haskon plant and 100 jobs. (Union sympathizers are perplexed by the lack of response to this campaign from Sen. John Kerry, who spent the first part of his 2004 campaign denouncing “Benedict Arnold CEOs”).

The struggle to save jobs at Haskon is precisely the kind of fight in which labor needs to invest enormous resources. Clearly, putting all of labor’s eggs in the Democratic basket is one investment that has not paid off.