Tom Paine: "We're tired of living between ‘hard times' and ‘bad times,'"

[Omaha Steve]

The Heart Of The Labor Movement
Glen Ford
June 07, 2007

Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford (at) BlackAgendaReport.com. The complete text of this article can be accessed here at BAR.

"We're tired of living between ‘hard times' and ‘bad times,'" said William Lucy, international secretary-treasurer of AFSCME, addressing the 36th annual convention of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU), late last month. "We cannot cure the system as it is. There is an urgent need for a new economic subscription." The new arrangement requires that "we dismantle the corporate agenda."

But the most painful absence was the army of de-unionized and unemployed workers—disproportionately black—ejected from decent-wage employment by the "corporate agenda ... the U.S. Chamber of Commerce agenda ... the agenda of the National Association of Manufacturers ... the agenda of the rich and wealthy," as Lucy put it.

The devastation pre-dates—but has been exponentially increased under—George Bush. An Economic Policy Institute study showed a nearly 900,000 net jobs loss due to NAFTA trade policies from 1993 to 2002—78 percent of them in manufacturing. An AFL-CIO report registered three million manufacturing jobs lost between 2001 and 2005. And of the union jobs lost in 2004, 55 percent "were held by black workers, even though they represented only 13 percent of total union membership," according the black labor writer Dwight Kirk. "More stunningly," said Kirk, "African American women accounted for 70 percent of the union jobs lost by women in 2004."

"Those of us who are here are the lucky ones," Lucy told the CBTU conventioneers. The CBTU, which "has survived longer than any other black labor organization in American history," spans the entire period of American manufacturing and worker income decline. "When you pair George W. Bush with Deadeye Dick Cheney, the modern-day Machiavelli, you have the scariest White House duo since Nixon-Agnew," said Lucy.

"The nation is less safe and humane than it was five years ago," said Lucy to a crowd comprised of over a thousand labor and community leaders in the own right. "The stock market hit 13,000 two weeks ago—how many of y'all feel richer?" He cites a report that shows "50 percent of American workers live paycheck to paycheck"—a necessary condition for dragooning Americans into a global race to the bottom.

FULL story at link.