California Offers ILWU and AFL-CIO Leaders Opportunity to Halt Employer's Offensive

California Offers ILWU and AFL-CIO Leaders Opportunity to Halt Employer's Offensive

The impasse over the state budget in the California legislature makes me mad. It makes me mad for a number of reasons. Obviously it makes me mad because there is no light at the end of this tunnel for workers and the poor. This impasse is the result of two groups of politicians squabbling over which section of the working class will bear the brunt of the crisis, the $23.6bn deficit, and the methods of payment; higher taxes or cuts in social services. The politicians of the two capitalist parties are fighting among themselves over how to take our money.

But before they can agree on the method of theft, the violence against workers increases. The failure to pass a budget since July 1 has held up some $2.2bn in government funds normally available to non-profit groups that serve 200,000 disabled people according to Wednesday's San Francisco Chronicle (8-22-02). This has meant that they have had to borrow money but that credit is now drying up. Consequently, workers like Patty Nash, a blind Braille teacher hasn't been paid in weeks. This 54 year old worker has to send her daughter to school without new school clothes or adequate educational supplies because of her lack of money.

Low income elderly, blind or disabled people have not received vital funds that help pay their rent or property taxes and the Golden Gate Regional Center serving 6000 severely disabled children, one of three Bay Area centers equally strapped, has had to borrow $10.5 million to continue helping the disabled kids and will need another $1.5 million to continue helping them through September. Still, this has been a boon for the moneylenders as the center has already had to pay $152,000 in interest to these parasites. During most of July as the pressure was building up on the first victims of the budget battles, the disabled and the poor, the politicians were spending most of the time honoring their colleagues who were being forced to leave the legislative trough due to term limits. This is freedom at its most generous.

While the initial attacks are on the weaker sections of the working class, the poor, youth, the disabled and the unorganized; the rest of us are due. The dock workers (ILWU) up and down the west coast are in contract negotiations with the shipping bosses represented by the Pacific Maritime Association. The government is threatening to make the ILWU negotiate port by port as opposed to coastwide, wants to eliminate jobs (something the Union has already agreed to do in order to avoid a confrontation) and refuses to give the Union jurisdiction over outsourced work. The Bush administration is out to bust the Union, threatening to bring in the National Guard in the event of a strike.

The ILWU is potentially one of the most powerful Unions in the AFL-CIO and controls a considerable portion of U.S. global trade. The employers are aware of this and want to break the ILWU which will lead to increased attacks on all Unionized workers. The ILWU leadership has organized a series of rallies trying to build solidarity among the public and a portworkers solidarity committee has been formed to draw the community in to the ILWU's struggle. But this is made more difficult as the Union's leadership has already given up jobs. What do we go to the low waged youth or the unemployed with? Help us keep our jobs we have none for you? Appealing to people to get involved in such an arduous struggle purely on moral grounds will not be too successful. Mobilizing their members and the community for more well paying jobs as well as for the rich to pay for the budget crisis as opposed to the disabled, the elderly or other working people would be easier I would think.

The leadership of the ILWU and the AFL-CIO in general have a golden opportunity here to force the employers on to the defensive and are refusing to do so. State workers will come under increased attack due to the budget crisis as will all workers. The economic power of the ILWU can be brought to bear on the employers and unionized workers linking up with the disabled, the youth, and the unorganized can begin to turn the concessionary tide.

Workers like Patty Nash, the Braille teacher above would welcome such assistance. As billions are plundered by corporate CEO's and their friends in the White House and state legislatures, the heads of organized labor refuse to mobilize their members and meekly accept the employers' demands and their arguments that the crisis has to be shouldered by workers and the poor. Damage Control is the limit of their resistance and it is impossible to build solidarity this way. "We live month to month" says Nash in the Chronicle report, "It's really disconcerting because there's nothing I can do. I can't imagine how things could get to such a state that it doesn't matter that people aren't getting paid, because it means food and clothes." The reason Patty Nash and millions like her can't imagine why things are like they are and that there is no way out is the heads of potentially the most powerful force in society (the AFL-CIO) refuse to provide one.

One last maddening thing for me is that among the ranks of the AFL-CIO, as staffers for certain "progressive" unions and as leaders in certain locals, there are a large number of people who call themselves socialists or leftists. These people refuse to point to the disastrous role, that the Union bureaucracy plays within the movement itself. In fact they do just the opposite, they obscure it. It is as if a group of us were starving and one individual had a whole barrel of food but we refuse to point that out. The balance of forces are strongly in favor of the working class but the leaders of organized labor refuse to mobilize it.

I attended a meeting of the Portworkers Solidarity Committee at the ILWU hall in San Francisco on August 19th and the idea that the polices of the Union leadership should be openly criticized and challenged was avoided like the plague. This also contributes to the helplessness union members and people like patty Nash feel as the only view of society open to them is that of the employers and the Trade Union officialdom that echo it.

For those of us in the trade union movement who are hoping to contribute to the building of some sort of resistance to global capitalism at home and abroad, a conflict with the trade union leadership over the direction of that movement is inevitable if we are to be successful.

Richard Mellor
Member AFSCME Local 444