SOL SANDERS: THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT?
Follow the money No. 121 Decline and fall of the American labor movement?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/staff/sol-sanders/
Longer ago than I care to remember, I discussed “the decline of the American labor movement” with an old friend, a high AFL/CIO official, veteran of many a bitter “organizing campaign”, at its palatial 16th Street Washington headquarters. [Transparency alert: My Mom, a 17-year-old Romanian Jewish solitary immigrant was an “ILG” shop steward in her shirtwaist sweatshop circa 1918 after losing seamstress friends in the 1911 Triangle Fire.]
In our rambling interchange, my pal hypothecated huge 1930 gains for “organized labor” resulted from three causes: government sponsorship [FDR’sWagner Act and National Labor Relations Board], Socialists and Communists. He meant ideologically dedicated men and women willing to try to persuade blue collar [mostly in that era] workingmen in an “employers’ market” to band together to win wage and better working concessions. [Ironically, Pres. Barack Obama just awarded the Medal of Freedomto Dolores Clara Fernandez Huerta, co-founder of a Mexican-American agricultural workers’ union whose roots were in Socialists’ failed efforts at organizing Negro Southern sharecroppers.] Their role was far from easy – or safe. For example, the Reuther brothers, who inherited their German-born father’s social democratic and trade unionist philosophy, were beaten, almost killed, by Ford’s hired “goons” before United Auto Workers certification..
That conversation was not so far from the NLRB recently trying to force Boeing to halt South Carolina plant expansion “to protect” Washington state unionized workers – but likely pushing even more subassembly overseas. Nor were Wisconsin events last week so distant. Pseudo-analysis spun by mainstream media elevating notoriously inaccurate “exit polling” to analytical status has come up with theories if little evidence. The spinners grabbed onto the straw voters going for Gov. Walker were resentful of a recall not based on indictable malfeasance. One common sense observer pointed out most Walker supporters, tired of election after election, voted, walked to their cars, and went home. So exit pollsters talked to “activists”. The pollsters claim even Walker supporters voiced pro-Obama sentiments for next November. Then why a “presidential size” turnout? That prognostication well may be as wrong as their early exit polling predicting a close vote.
More important, Wisconsin events must be seen in the state’s long history of radicalism. Has everyone forgotten the Prairie Populists, the Farmer Labor Party, the LaFollettes, or that the state was scene of the bitterest isolation-intervention debates before Pearl Harbor? Wisconsin was, after all, the first state to recognize government unions. Given the fading of authentic social science research these days, replaced by self-admitted advocacy journalism, we may never know what has led to Wisconsin union membership drastically falling away. Surely it has something to do with disgust over last year’s “occupation” [and minor destruction] of the state capitol and the spectacle of runaway senators refusal to adhere to democracy’s chief fundamental, voting.
No, the import of these events is dramatization of a growing propensity of Americans to turn their back on trade unions. It is not an accident, as the Communists were wont to say [do they really still exist!], the largest AFL/CIO unions are “public sector” bureaucrats, often with better wages and perks than equivalent entrepreneurial jobs. Nor, for that matter, is it coincidental local governing bodies from San Diego to northern Virginia and Maryland are removing clauses requiring “union labor” in contract bidding.
After all, National Democratic Party Chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schutlz predicted Wisconsin’s recall vote would be a “dry run” for Pres. Obama next fall. As former Pres. Bill Clinton and other capitalist-friendly Democrats chip away at the Obama strategy of class warfare by defending Mitt Romney’s business career, Campaign Manager David Axelrod is left only with Mr. Obama’s chicquerai – his “cool” approach to domestic and international issues, his bevy of Hollywood glitterati, and his [and their] hoped for continued appeal to youthful voters [and viewers]. Mr. Obama’s “no-show” in Wisconsin spoke volumes about the growing rift with the government bureaucrat-dominated AFL/CIO.
It could well be, as the saying goes, in the long run of history Wisconsin’s principal outcome will be disintegration of government unions. Coupled with a growing number of state right-to-work laws guaranteeing secret union balloting, the defeat of federal “card check” to reinforce “closed shops”, and the continued migration from the Rust Belt to those states, we could be hearing the death rattle from Middle America of “organized labor”.
sws-06-08-12
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