Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford (at) BlackAgendaReport.com. The complete text of this article can be accessed here at BAR.
"We're tired of living between ‘hard times' and ‘bad times,'" said William Lucy, international secretary-treasurer of AFSCME, addressing the 36th annual convention of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU), late last month. "We cannot cure the system as it is. There is an urgent need for a new economic subscription." The new arrangement requires that "we dismantle the corporate agenda."
But the most painful absence was the army of de-unionized and unemployed workers—disproportionately black—ejected from decent-wage employment by the "corporate agenda ... the U.S. Chamber of Commerce agenda ... the agenda of the National Association of Manufacturers ... the agenda of the rich and wealthy," as Lucy put it.
The devastation pre-dates—but has been exponentially increased under—George Bush. An Economic Policy Institute study showed a nearly 900,000 net jobs loss due to NAFTA trade policies from 1993 to 2002—78 percent of them in manufacturing. An AFL-CIO report registered three million manufacturing jobs lost between 2001 and 2005. And of the union jobs lost in 2004, 55 percent "were held by black workers, even though they represented only 13 percent of total union membership," according the black labor writer Dwight Kirk. "More stunningly," said Kirk, "African American women accounted for 70 percent of the union jobs lost by women in 2004."
"Those of us who are here are the lucky ones," Lucy told the CBTU conventioneers. The CBTU, which "has survived longer than any other black labor organization in American history," spans the entire period of American manufacturing and worker income decline. "When you pair George W. Bush with Deadeye Dick Cheney, the modern-day Machiavelli, you have the scariest White House duo since Nixon-Agnew," said Lucy.
"The nation is less safe and humane than it was five years ago," said Lucy to a crowd comprised of over a thousand labor and community leaders in the own right. "The stock market hit 13,000 two weeks ago—how many of y'all feel richer?" He cites a report that shows "50 percent of American workers live paycheck to paycheck"—a necessary condition for dragooning Americans into a global race to the bottom.
The nine-tenths of blacks that voted against George Bush know he is not "our" president, Lucy noted. "Bush is the most isolated, incompetent president in American history. He turned the Department of Defense into the Department of Evil," said Lucy, to loud applause. These actions are inseparable from the imposition of a "cutthroat economy in ‘which greed is good' and people are told to ‘make it on your own.'"
What black unionists have done in the face of this assault is remarkable.
Black unionists may have emerged even stronger from the Big Labor Split of 2005, when for a time it seemed that both the AFL-CIO and breakaway unions that later formed "Change to Win" were jettisoning commitments to diversity in the trade union movement. No such cleavage occurred within the CBTU, where SEIU (Change to Win), AFSCME (AFL-CIO) and unionists of all affiliations refused to allow labor's "top management" squabbles to intrude on black solidarity.
Solidarity with one another encourages others to seek solidarity with us.
Communications Workers of America (CWA) President Larry Cohen is a founder of Jobs With Justice, and has addressed many CBTU gatherings. An early speaker at the convention, Cohen launched into a push for final passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. The measure, which would make it far easier to unionize workers, passed the U.S. House in March and comes up in the Senate, later this year. But George Bush has already vowed to veto it.
"No other country in the world has the obstacle course for workers trying to get union rights," said Cohen, "except Colombia, where you get murdered."
George Bush is a great fan of the Colombian regime, too.
The U.S. has "gone backward" since 1935, when the National Labor Relations Act was passed, said the CWA leader. "You risk your family's well being just to join a union."
Immigration, the great bugaboo of contemporary U.S. politics, boils down to a simple equation. "Guest worker programs...create two classes of workers," said Linda Chavez-Thompson, executive vice-president of the AFL-CIO. As for the mish-mash McCain-Kennedy bill, "We don't support it. It is a joke." As a Mexican-American, she remembers the old "Bracero" guest workers labor scheme as "an indentured worker program."
Workers can only bargain collectively, when they all have equal rights. The curse of the U.S. labor movement—the most important factor in its failure to become an independent political force in national affairs, unlike labor in other developed countries—was generations of white labor insistence on maintaining a two-tier system of employment, with themselves on top. In the end, the whole labor edifice began crumbling down.
Then, there was politics.
A day later than scheduled, Sen. Barack Obama arrived at the Chicago Regency Hyatt. As a favorite son on several levels, this was his audience. Obama named specific union leaders who, "if it were not for them, I wouldn't be a United States Senator." He harkened back to the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike, which drew Dr. Martin Luther King to his final destination (and where a young Bill Lucy further developed his own vision of freedom movement-labor struggle).
"Your agenda has been my agenda," Obama told the unionists, endorsing the fight to "give employees a free choice." He spoke in general terms about the paltriness of the minimum wage. On health care, the candidate vowed to "save money by cutting bureaucracy ... by making sure that people are not getting fat off the system."
African Americans, he noted, are "twice as likely to be unemployed. African American women make 66 cents on the dollar ... That's un-American, it's got to change." Obama is in favor of job training, and a change in the "trading system with other countries."
Each vague point was punctuated by enthusiastic applause.
The night before, Obama had voted against Democratic leadership's "compromise" Iraq War Funding bill. "The way that we are going to show that we support the troops," he said," is to start bringing some of them home."
Obama had not made a substantive statement of intent on any of the CBTU's treasured and very definitive positions, other than the Employee Free Choice Act. But in a sense, it doesn't matter. Obama is a politician. Movements are meant to make and break politicians, not the other way around.
It's Movement Time.
