Two Roads Forward for Labor: The AFL-CIO’s New Agenda

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from Dissent magazine:



Two Roads Forward for Labor: The AFL-CIO’s New Agenda
By Nelson Lichtenstein - Winter 2014


[font size="1"]Raise Up Milwaukee, an independent offshoot of Fight for 15, July 2013 (WisconsinJobsNow / Flickr)[/font]

An early defeat and a year-old victory have put energy and urgency into the effort by American trade unionists to launch what AFL–CIO president Richard Trumka has declared a “new strategic initiative.” The 2010 defeat in Barack Obama’s first term of the Employee Free Choice Act, the “card check” membership sign-up law, derailed labor hopes for a new era of organization and membership growth, especially among the tens of millions of low-wage workers who are employed in the retail, hotel, health care, and warehouse industries.

But then came the re-election of Obama. Despite high unemployment, a weak economy, and a noticeable lack of enthusiasm on the part of some of his partisans, including many in the trade union movement, the president pulled off a victory that, by way of contrast, seemed far more like a vindication of social policy liberalism than had been put forward in Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign. Under such circumstances, it seems quite plausible to argue that a progressive, liberal majority exists in the United States, manifest today both in metropolitan America and at the presidential level of politics, but quite plausibly ascendant during the next decade in both houses of Congress and in non-southern statehouses.

Under such conditions there are two roads that lead toward a genuine revival of the American trade union movement. And when I say “revival” I mean not just a larger set of unions with more members, but rather a labor bloc, social and demographic, that is on the offensive, setting the economic and social agenda on multiple fronts so that employers and politicians find that concessions to or solidarity with the unions seem the most practical and common-sense policy, if only because they will ensure their own prosperity and survival.

The first road would look something like what transpired on May 1, 2006, when during the massive “Day Without Immigrants” demonstrations millions of Latinos and supporters shut down scores of food-processing plants, restaurants, vineyards, and transport hubs in what was, in effect, a general strike. In its early hopeful stages, the Arab Spring looked something like this, and had Occupy been a dozen times larger it might have resembled a de facto sit-in that paralyzed urban financial hubs. We’ve had such mass upheavals in the more distant American past: in the industrial cities of the Midwest during the height of the 1936 and 1937 sit-down strikes; and in the era of hospital, teacher, and sanitation worker militancy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/two-roads-forward-for-labor-the-afl-cios-new-agenda

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