A Radical Vision for Today's Labor Movement

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.monthlyreview.org/090216bacon.php

The Importance of Internationalism and Civil Rights
David Bacon

During the Cold War, many of the people with a radical vision of the world were driven out of our labor movement. Today, as unions search for answers about how to begin growing again, and regain the power workers need to defend themselves, the question of social vision has become very important. What is our vision in labor? What are the issues that we confront today that form a more radical vision for our era?

The labor movement worked hard to elect Barack Obama president and win a new Democratic majority in Congress in the hope of new possibilities for labor law reform, universal health care, immigration reform, and an end to the Iraq war. But to win even these reforms, promised by the Obama campaign, unions will have to do more than simply support the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Labor’s ability to move forward depends on finding a new and deeper relationship with its own members, and their willingness to fight for even a limited set of demands. Our history tells us that when workers have been inspired by a vision of real social change the labor movement grows in numbers, bargaining strength, and political power.

At the heart of any radical vision for our era is globalization—the way unions approach the operation of capitalism on an international scale. In the discussion that led to the creation of the Change to Win federation, the Service Employees made a proposal about how unions should conduct their international relationships. It called on unions to find partners in other countries, even to organize those unions, in order to face common employers. AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Richard Trumka said the same thing in New York ten years earlier, when John Sweeney was elected. At the time it represented a big change from the Cold War—that unions would cooperate with anyone willing to fight against our common employers. It rejected by implication the anticommunist ideology that put us on the side of employers and U.S. foreign policy, and shamed us before the world.

This idea is an example of pragmatic solidarity, and a good first step out of that Cold War past. But it is no longer radical enough to confront the new challenges of globalization—the huge displacement and migration of millions of people, the enormous gulf in the standard of living dividing developed from developing countries, and the wars fought to impose this system of global economic inequality. What’s missing is a response from the labor movement to U.S. foreign policy. International solidarity involves more than multinational corporations. Corporate globalization and military intervention are intertwined, and in the labor movement there’s hardly any discussion of their relationship. In the aftermath of 9/11 this led some unions into support for the “war on terror,” and eventually even into support for the Iraq invasion. Unless unions can begin to see military intervention and corporate globalization as part of the same system, many will support the war in Afghanistan, as a new and popular Democratic president calls for increased intervention.

Unions in the rest of the world are not simply asking us whether we will stand with them against General Electric, General Motors, or Mitsubishi. They want to know: What is your stand about aggressive wars, military intervention, and coups d’état? If we have nothing to say about these things, we will not have the trust and credibility we need to build new relationships of solidarity.

U.S. corporations operating in countries like Mexico and El Salvador are, in some ways, opportunistic. They take advantage of an existing economic system, and make it function to produce profits. They exploit the difference in wages from country to country, and require concessions from governments for setting up factories. But what causes the poverty in El Salvador that they exploit to their advantage? What drives a worker into a factory that we, in the United States, call a sweatshop? What role does U.S. policy play in creating that system of poverty?

FULL story at link.

[Chulanowa]

1. K&R; Worldwide solidarity is the future of Labor.

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