Stand and Fight with the Unions, or Lose Everything

The most amazing thing about this administration is that the right, liberal, pro-Democratic thing do is almost always also the thing that will win the most votes in the next election.

As with the (still too small) economic stimulus, health care reform, Wall Street reform, cap-n-trade and immigration reform, so with the Employee Free Choice Act.

President Obama's recess appointment of a labor-friendly member to the National Labor Relations Board, there is hope - faint but real - for rolling back the last 30 years of repug union-busting.

If you think unions are some Depression-era anachronism with no relevance in today's every-man-for-himself market, you might want to check out the illegal lockout of workers at a Nevada boron mine. Boron, as I didn't know until I read this piece, is a mineral essential to just about every industrial application you can think of. Not something we can get along without for long.

From The Nation:

The future of a small town in the Mojave is thus entangled in geoeconomic competitions far larger and more important than the borate market itself. So what chance do 560 miners and their families have in a fight with Godzilla?

The record of the past twenty years is not encouraging. With some heroic exceptions--the 1989-90 Pittston coal strike in Virginia, the 1990s Frontier Casinos strike in Las Vegas and a few others--international unions have seldom been willing to support a local fight to the last bullet or bitter dime.

But ILWU has a unique street credibility. The pit bull of CIO-generation unions, it bit into the heels of the West Coast stevedoring industry in 1934 and never let go. Industrial unions are supposed to be dying, but the ILWU, despite its modest size, punches hard enough to keep the powerful Pacific Maritime Association sulking in its corner, while ensuring that the docks remain safe and well paid.

As the only union that survived McCarthyism with its left-wing leadership (under Harry Bridges) intact, the ILWU is also legendary for putting muscle behind the slogan of "working-class solidarity." Since the 1960s it has conducted scores of job actions and walkouts in support of striking Australian dockers, California farmworkers and South African freedom fighters. Indeed, in May 2008 the union shut down the West Coast for a day to protest the war in Iraq.

In anticipation of the Boron lockout, ILWU had persuaded members of an international coalition of mining and maritime unions--many of whom have done battle with Rio Tinto--to hold their periodic conference in the nearby desert city of Palmdale. On February 16 the delegates, along with rank and file from other ILWU locals, arrive in Boron for a march to the mine followed by a big Local 30 barbecue.

The overture to the protest is the earthshaking full-throttle roar of shovelhead and twin-cam Harley-Davidson engines. The stevedore-bikers of Local 13 (LA Harbor) emerge out of the desert haze like Marlon Brando's leather-clad horde in The Wild One (or, better, the Comanches in Blood Meridian).

Someone, awe-struck, whispers, "Glad these guys are on our side." Later I count twenty-six Harley black beauties corralled in a reverential semicircle on the street side of the union hall. (The unfortunate owners of rice-burners and pasta rockets have had to remove their imported Japanese and Italian bikes to a discreet distance.)

Carloads of out-of-town ILWU members arrive, then two buses carrying dozens of US and foreign labor leaders. The crowd applauds, people shake hands, someone turns up the volume on "Born in the USA" and the marchers begin to assemble, about 600-strong, behind a banner that spans the entire width of the road: An Injury to One Is an Injury to All.

It's an easy one-mile walk in pleasant weather to the front gate. Local 30 brings a dozen American and Marine Corps flags to the front, and begins to chant, "We Wanna Work, We Wanna Work." The sheriffs are relaxed, but the Gettier security guards up the road nervously shift their feet. As usual, their faces are inscrutable behind dark glasses, but you can almost smell their guilty sweat.

Imagine a picnic jointly organized by the IWW, the American Legion and the Hells Angels. One of the first speakers is Oupa Komane from the South African miners' union. He has a magnificent voice: "Comrades, I bring you revolutionary greetings from the miners of South Africa!" I look around to see how the "comrades" waving American flags react. Komane gets warm applause.

A battle-hardened copper miner from Utah (where Rio Tinto owns the great Kennecott pit at Bingham Canyon) says, "I can't tell you what I think of this company--not in front of women and children." An Australian warns, "They will kill your town. That's what they did to us." A Canadian talks about more dead mill towns in Quebec, while a New Zealander tells a story about Rio Tinto's sinister role in defeating climate-change legislation in his country.

The fiery head of the Turkish borate workers, whose state-owned industry (Eti Mine Works) was founded by Atatürk, father of the Turkish Republic, brings greetings from the Borons of Anatolia: Kirka, Emet, Kestelek and Bandirma. He scoffs at Rio Tinto's claim that his miners' lower hourly wages (almost $10 in a cheap country, versus an average of $26 in Boron) necessitates the trashing of union rights in California.

Finally, Ken Riley, president of the largely black International Longshoremen's Association Local 1422 in Charleston, South Carolina, and a leader of one of the most courageous fights in modern US labor history [see JoAnn Wypijewski, "Audacity on Trial," August 6/13, 2001], summarizes the case for optimism: "You pick on the ILWU, you pick on the world. When our own international deserted us, they were there. Now we're here."

Later, I take Ken aside and confess my doubts. He shakes his head. "I understand what you're saying, but you're wrong," he says. "This isn't political theater. The first month of a struggle is decisive, and the ILWU is doing a terrific job marketing Boron's importance to the rest of the labor movement. Internationally, our unions understand that we have to organize the logistics chain, from producers to transport to distributor to retailer. This is a new model of power for the labor movement, like industrial unionism in the 1930s, but adapted to the reality of globalization."

"But Boron?" I ask.

"Hey, something new is being born here. It has to be."

Read the whole infuriating, inspiring thing.

Then consider this by Mike Elk in Truthout:

Currently, there is only one place in America where illegal immigrants and Glenn Beck followers sit down together on a regular basis and fight for their collective self interests - the halls of organized labor. Unions unite people behind shared self-interest and a common social purpose: making their jobs better - something we all desire. Through working together, they gain trust of one another and are less likely to be victims of conservative scare tactics.

The statistics don't lie. Obama won by 23 points among white, noncollege graduates who belong to a union, even as he lost by 18 points among all white, noncollege voters.

Working-class whites aren't just more likely to vote for progressives when organized labor is strong, so are people of color, women and young people. As the landslide loss of corporate, anti-workers' rights Democrat Creigh Deeds in Virginia shows, working whites will vote for Republicans for cultural reasons when a Democrat fails to stand up for them. However, people of color, women and young people don't have a cultural punching bag in "liberal elites," so when Democrats disappoint, they simply don't vote.

Thus, keeping people from joining unions and thereby upsetting the conservative ruling class that thrives on cultural resentment is the number one goal of conservatives. The biggest barrier for making strong unions is the fact that 30,000 workers are fired from their job every year for trying to join a union. In the United States, an employer has to post a piece of paper saying they fired a worker for trying to a join. As my father, a union organizer, always said, "If the penalty for robbing a bank was you had to post a piece of paper saying you robbed a bank, we'd all be bank robbers!"

Killing the Employee Free Choice Act is the number one priority of the Chamber of Commerce for this reason. It's more urgent for them to squash than climate change and health care reform put together. They know that increased unionization threatens their whole balance of power.

It is time that we realize that the Employee Free Choice Act is this important. The Employee Free Choice Act is not just a union issue. Without a revitalized labor movement, we get bogged down in the cultural wars of TV, and any progressive change we make is unsustainable. We need to create organs of social dialogue.

We also need to create 10 million new jobs right away, plus another 3 million a year for the foreseeable future. There is one entity, and one entity only, in this country devoted wholly and unreservedly to creating and preserving well-paid, secure jobs with good benefits, the kind of jobs of which world-leading nations are made:

Unions.