[Peace-discuss] Limits of power?

[David Green]

Thanks Ricky. You fell into my trap of wanting to get you to do the heavy lifting on this issue. 

Ricky Baldwin <baldwinricky at yahoo.com> wrote:          This is an important point, Dave (not that I'm surprised, coming from you) ...

Folks who feel conflicted about worker rights and labor union leaders have every "right" to, because there are intense contradictions there - not to sound orthodox - between union members and union leaders, among unions, between unionized and non-unionized workers, between US and other Western and other countries' workers, etc.  I think we need to talk about it more, within labor - and really anyone who's stuck in this economy.  A publication called "Labor Notes" is a good place for folks to get into or keep up with this struggle within the labor movement and not just the now split AFL-CIO (incl. US Labor Against the War, reform movements like Teamsters for a Democratic Movement, New Directions, etc.)

Part of the problem with power, that I think Bacevich glosses over pretty severely, is that it tends to create little pockets of investment.  They don't just happen.  The US invades Iraq and sets up a government; those people now have a vested interest in maintaining US hegemony.  The British prop up the Raj.  Etc.  Likewise the federal government subsidizes SUVs, which guzzle gas, and other policies contribute to sprawl and the lack of public transportation (appalling most places outside CU), etc., so now, sure, people "want" cheap gas.  In fact, they need it.  Do they "want" US soldiers to "win"?  Well, stick some of their children and friends and children of friends in a secluded outpost in Afghanistan, and well, they don't exactly want them to LOSE, do they?

Similar to this, I have to argue that workers in certain industries may have benefited in some ways or in the short run from the changes you mention, Dave, but I think we know they also lost a lot.  Sure, they made more money, but now they have to pay out more of it for transportation, for example, because the government subsidizes car roads and not railroads.  It's like winning health benefits at one workplace as opposed to national healthcare.  Of course it's better to have it than not - who would give it up who has it, or turn it down who doesn't? - but the tradeoff is, even for unions, it's a constant fight just to maintain it.  Workers in England and Canada earn less wages, sure, but their healthcare is free.  OK, so they have to fight for that, too, but they fight TOGETHER.  We know all this, but the point I'm making is the pattern.

It's more complicated, of course.  Just for example, many union LEADERS may have benefited individually from getting cozy with the bosses and the war machine, and unions did enjoy a peak in membership in the 1950s, but since then unions (led by no less corporate-minded officials) have steadily lost ground in terms of membership, rights and influence*.  Now even they find their (contingent) power curtailed.  

This loss has been disastrous for all US workers, too, due in part to the economics of "bargaining power", related to "pattern bargaining" or "prevailing wage" and related phenomena: higher union density (proportion of union membership) drives wages up for all workers, incl. nonunion.  By the same token, as we all know, as union membership has declined (NOT thru workers making free choices), real wages have spiraled down - and benefits, of course, have plummeted.  At the same time other worker rights, like health and safety on the job, have also eroded due to lack of union influence; even protections against gender and racial discrimination, and treatment of the poorest immigrants, were more vulnerable in part due to loss of progressive unions' influence.  So it isn't as easy as writing off the unions, either.

Even the union workers who supposedly "profited" or "benefited" from  working with capital and the Pentagon, ultimately lost more: their children or grandchildren are trapped in a war without end, an economy racing to the bottom - and even a retirement they can no longer count on.  We know this, but it is often hard for people to realize they've spent their whole lives committing family and community suicide.  Some are, slowly, but there is just enuf privilege left to keep a lot of the blinders in place.  (This is related to my rather unpopular argument re: tho Bush did steal the election, enuf people did vote for him to make it close enuf to steal.  And people must bear some responsibility for being, well, let's say short-sighted.) 

The story is even more complicated, like an onion.  Union membership declined in part because of (not accidental) shifts in the economy - like the notorious export of manufacturing jobs - and because of more direct assaults from an employer class emboldened by massive accumulation during "growth".  But that's not all.  Union leaders - I should say "many" union leaders - became very comfortable in their positions, like the AFL leaders had before the CIO came along, and like others before them right back to medieval guilds.  New members, which is to say new organizing, means more members - which means more opinions and quite possibly more expectations - at least it means more members not tied to the "old guard" leadership in some way, i.e. organizing threatened their power.  More than this, it is easy in a capitalist economy for workers who fight and win gains to see other workers - against whom they may be competing for work - as enemies.  "Scabs."  Strikebreakers.  And
 there is often some truth to that, so there develops a culture of short-sighted but not entirely unrealistic opposition to outsiders: anti-immigrant, racist, sexist, exclusive at its worst.  More subtly, it just translates into a lack of motivation to organize.

There are real reasons unions organize less, of course.  The successes of the 1930s-1960s meant the ranks of organized labor were close to a third of the US workforce - and they had begun to expect gains from their union membership.  Even at today's greatly reduced levels, it's not unusual for union reps to work 50-60 hours a week or more, just trying to hear workers' complaints about their jobs, help them file grievances or EEOC complaints, call OSHA because safety regs aren't followed, or fight the employers' latest attempt to take back what little the unions have gained (like our own UIUC offering workers 1.5 percent even after the State budgeted 3 percent for wages).  From the get-go employers started figuring out ways to fight the new protections in the 1930s (which anyway excluded farm workers and domestic servants - traditional sectors of immigrants and people of color).  By the mid-1970s the bosses were getting more anti-union politicians in office and there was a
 tilt, a steeper hill for unions to climb if they wanted to organize.  Nowadays polls still say most people (especially African Americans and women) would join a union if they could, but most union elections fail.  Even those that succeed are as likely as not to fail to reach a first contract, then dissolve.  Again, the impact even on nonunion workers has been devastating.  And to my knowledge the scope of the problem was off the agenda for organized labor until the 1990s, when insurgents and reformers started forcing incremental changes.  AFL-CIO president John Sweeney was not one of them, but a compromise between, or a dialectical result of, two opposing forces within labor.

I've noticed some very hopeful signs actually since the mid-1990s.  Class is an ugly word in US speak, as Chomsky and others have pointed out, but that isn't the whole story of course: I've been at many many union meetings where union leaders talk about class differently (rallying the working class, etc).  The broad opposition to NAFTA - not joined by liberals or sadly even some anti-racist friends too suspicious of American unions to consider that they could be right on a lot of things - was the crest of a wave, hopefully a taste of things to come again, but nothing is certain.  Amid the flags and "BUy American" tee-shirts I began to hear more and more speeches (from union leaders) at union rallies about how workers are oppressed in Mexico,  Indonesia and other maquiladora areas.  Whereas the UAW had once refused an offer from Mexican workers to turn down UAW members' lost jobs IF the UAW would help them organize (they were with an independent, non-PRI union), the late
 nineties saw the UAW sponsoring organizing across the border among those same workers.  Jobs With Justice and US Labor Against the War, not to mention the student anti-sweatshop movement and Coalition of Immokalee Workers have also made deep inroads into the culture of conservative unionism.  The IWW is even making a comeback, I hear :-)

American unions never achieved the level of social consciousness and organization of, say, Swedish unions, where national bargaining prioritizes the lowest economic rung, not the highest, in part because the unions recognize that if they raise the level of the worst off, they themselves can't drop below that.  And they may never.  But they have been a positive social force in many many ways, along with the evils, the present historical moment exhibiting more than in a long time.  Labor's worth a closer look, I think.  Uncritical support or reckless dismissal of organized labor does no one any good.  None of the positive changes that need to occur will happen by themselves - like Frederick Douglass said - it'll take a fight.  But I've gone on too long.

-Ricky

* That's somewhat oversimplified of course.  Every time workers' organizations of any kind have gained any influence, they have lost it soon, either through brutal suppression or through cooptation.  Piven and Cloward do a good job of documenting how the CIO went south, as well as the civil rights movement, welfare rights movement, etc. - the pattern repeats: agitation and direct disruption lead to gains, while lobbying and working for candidates and otherwise sitting down quietly at the table begins to erode those gains almost immediately.  (Sorry for the obnoxious footnoting.)

  
  ----- Original Message ----
From: David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com>
To: Peace Discuss <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2008 5:18:19 AM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Limits of power?

  One group that has profited has been labor union leaders, those who formed the AFL-CIO in the 1950s and supported U.S. hegemony through Vietnam and beyond, marketing the idea to workers that they were now a "middle class." These leaders became part of the corporate establishment. This history needs to be better understood (including by me). At least workers need to begin to come to grips with the contradiction involved in their being defined as a middle class, as if the interests of labor unionists could be extracted from those of working people at large. This will, unfortunately, re-open the can of worms regarding whether workers chose to move to Levittown (writ large), or were somehow forced or tricked into doing so. Certainly, for example, auto, oil, and rubber companies were responsible in cities like Los Angeles and elsewhere for dismantling public transportation and building freeways instead. And workers in those industries benefitted, in the small and material
 meaning of that word. But in the long run, they did not "profit," for workers cannot profit, only owners.
   
  DG

"C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:
  The Limits of Power
Andrew Bacevich interviewed by Bill Moyers, PBS, August 15, 2008

Andrew Bacevich: Our foreign policy is not something simply concocted by people 
in Washington D.C. and imposed on us. Our foreign policy is something that is 
concocted in Washington D.C., but it reflects the perceptions of our political 
elite about what we want, we the people want. And what we want, by and large - I 
mean, one could point to many individual exceptions - but, what we want, by and 
large is, we want this continuing flow of very cheap consumer goods.

We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they may 
happen to be, in order to be able to drive wherever we want to be able to drive. 
And we want to be able to do these things without having to think about whether 
or not the book¢s balanced at the end of the month, or the end of the fiscal 
year. And therefore, we want this unending line of credit...

============

This, I'm tempted to say (but shouldn't) is bacevich-ackwards. In the light of 
the majority opposition to Bush's war and the recent revelations about the 
fraudulence that produced support for it, it would in fact be more accurate to 
say, "Our foreign policy is ... concocted by people in Washington D.C. and 
imposed on us."

The notion that "it reflects the perceptions of our political elite about what 
we want" is true only in an attenuated sense -- and on the face of it, it's 
absurd. Can we picture the "people in Washington" asking themselves what "we the 
people want" as the first step in forming foreign policy?!

In fact, the interests of the small US ruling elite and those of the large 
majority of Americans are not only different, they're actively opposed. It 
takes people with the rhetorical skill of a Barack Obama to cover that fact. 
(That is the primary purpose of his book "The Audacity of Hope.")

In its domination of the world economy since the Second World War, the US elite 
has had only one really dangerous enemy, and it wasn't the USSR, China, or 
"terrorism." It was the US working class (which contains more and less 
privileged strata) -- the majority of Americans who have to sell what makes them 
human (their work of head and hands) to the owners of capital, in order to eat 
regularly.

To pacify that enemy, some concessions had to be made in the generation 
following WWII, and (as one indication) inequality of income (measured by the 
Gini index) actually declined in the US in that period. But that was a payoff, 
a bribe, and -- once working-class institutions were largely destroyed -- it was 
reversed: in the next generation (roughly the last quarter of the 20th century) 
the US elite got its own [sic] back. As Linda Webber points out in tonight's 
"AWARE on the Air," the wealthiest 1% of Americans received 22% of the national 
income in 2006, the highest percentage since 1929.

Inequality in America has increased since ca. 1975 -- real wages have not risen 
for most Americans since then -- until now that Gini index is back where it was 
in 1929. (It didn't work out well then.)

This situation does not call for Puritan reflections on an "unending line of 
credit." It calls for an accurate account of how policy is formed in the US and 
an analysis of the institutions that form it. A good question to begin with is 
cui bono -- who actually profits? --CGE



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