May 10, 2009

1. How important do you think the passage of EFCA will be to revitalize the trade union movement in the US?

First off, the EFCA is in serious trouble in Congress.  Employers have been inundating Congress with lobbying, letters, phone calls, and whatever else they can do to defeat, including extraordinarily dishonest media advertising,   Labor, meanwhile, is engaging in its usual lobbying, thinking that this, along with massive campaign contributions to the Democrats, will win the day.

Labor support groups are circulating petitions in many states, and this may help.  But an aroused rank-and-file, writing letters to newspapers, organizing in workplaces, meeting en masse, in DC and their localities with their representatives and senators, massively demonstrating in the streets and in front of businesses, especially those who probably have used government bailout money to fight the EFCA, and so forth, is nowhere to be seen.

If EFCA is passed, it will help unions gain members, and this will be good.  However, if the union doesn’t conduct a rank-and-file-based organizing campaign to get the cards signed, then in the long run, it won’t matter much.  If the unions don’t educate their new members, in a radical way, it won’t do much good.  Plus, if the bargaining breaks down, the EFCA provides for an arbitrator to set the terms of the first collective bargaining agreement.  This could be a good thing, since the first contract is now so hard to win, given the pathetic weakness of the labor law in the United States.  But, what bout the second contract?  In the need, labor needs a lot more than the EFCA, as I try to show in the book.

2. Your book repeatedly talks about the need for unions to preserve their political independence (especially from the Democrats) but isn’t it true that in recent years, especially since 2000, unions have gotten much closer to the Democrats?  Haven’t the union experiences with the Labor Party and the Nader campaign in 2000 convinced many that there is no alternative to working with the Democrats?

Yes unions have gotten close to the Democrats.  Pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into election campaigns.  But as Dr. Phil says on his U.S. television show, “How’s that been going for you?”  As Kim Moody shows in his book, U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition, there is an inverse correlation between spending money in elections and the number of organizing campaigns unions conduct.  Sure. Unions get some crumbs from the table. Ok if you’re a beggar but pretty sad if you are a labor movement.

Working with Democrats is not the same as being subservient to them, to the point that you have no independent principles.  When the president of the United Steel Workers says that workers here don’t have to take to the streets like their counterparts in Europe because here they have union lobbyists in Washington, well what more needs to be said about the bankruptcy of the thinking of most of the labor movement?

3. One of the differences between the first and second editions of your book is the actual experience of the AFL-CIO under the leadership of the Sweeney team.  Given the high hopes many had in the ‘New Voices’ leadership in the mid-1990s, what do you think went wrong?

Well, Sweeney came out of the same “pragmatic,” overly bureaucratic, old (literally), white, overpaid, fearful of the rank-and-file leadership his team replaced.  So while they did some good things, as I say in the book, they were incapable of breaking the old mold.  Lots of talk, lots of new committees, not much real action.  Hope springs eternal, and most of us were thinking that anything was better than the old guard.  But I have said for many years that once the left was thrown to the wolves by the unions during the Cold War, the die was cast.

4. You don’t seem convinced that the Change to Win split produced any positive results.  Do you expect the CTW unions to merge back into the AFL-CIO before your third edition comes out?

The facts speak for themselves.  What has CTW done to build a new labor movement?  Nothing substantial comes to mind.  The SEIU has done some awful things as it has built its membership.  Turmoil abounds in CTW today, as is well-known.  I think that most of the unions will reach an accord with the AFL-CIO, but even if they do, what will have changed?

5. One of the biggest changes that’s happened to the trade union movement (and not only the trade union movement) in the last decade has been the growth of the Internet.  But you don’t mention this in your book.  Why not?

I do have lots of internet resources listed at the end of the book.  I probably should have included something on the uses of the internet for labor.  So. I admit to an oversight.  However, the internet is just a tool, not the savior some seem to believe it is.  Much has been made of the internet in the Obama election.  But what has this done to make for an aroused public?  What did it do to push labor’ agenda forward?  The financial elite are still in charge.   And will the internet organize workers?  I don’t see how.  Face-to-face contacts are always necessary.