Words and history: the trouble with “Genocide Joe”
By Fred Glass
“History is more or less bunk.” This quaint expression, uttered by Henry Ford in 1921, reveals that words, like history, can mean more than meets the eye. Taken out of context his comment can signify almost anything, like the classic Sam Cooke song lyric, “Don’t know much about history”. Ford’s actual remark came in reference to railroad labor struggles, with the billionaire apparently expressing his displeasure with workers remembering past battles between labor and capital.
It’s my hope that people engaged in the righteous struggle to stop the genocidal Zionist war machine in Gaza, contra Ford, will remember some relevant context and history when they consider the coming presidential election.
I am troubled every time I hear someone referring to Joe Biden as “Genocide Joe.” Ascribing personal responsibility to the president for the carnage in Gaza is not entirely wrong. But it is, in fact, mostly wrong: the personalization takes our eyes off the prize, which is the structure of imperialist oppression, on the one hand, and building the broadest possible movement to fight it, on the other.
“A singular focus on the international scene, shorn of accounting for the dual role of the presidency, means that the legitimate desire to stop the genocide in Palestine—if it leads to sitting out the 2024 election—can quite possibly prevent us from creating the conditions for stopping future events“
The president of the United States is a two-headed beast, as noted in an earlier column. He is the imperialist-in-chief on the international front, regardless of wearing a donkey or elephant pin. As such, his support for the Israeli apartheid regime, planted for three quarters of a century next to the largest oil fields in the world, is reflexive. Joe Biden, the person, is irrelevant to this function of the presidency. Should we pressure him to pull US aid to Israel? Of course. But we’d have to do that no matter who’s in the White House.
United States domestic policy is a different story. For instance, the president appoints judges. We are today living with the consequences of Trump’s Supreme Court appointments in the form of the evisceration of women’s right to control their own bodies, among other tragedies. Trump’s misogynist base was fortunate he occupied the presidency when vacancies arose, and all the rest of us were unfortunate that a Democratic president wasn’t doing the appointing instead.
The president also appoints the heads of powerful federal agencies, like the National Labor Relations Board. In an unprecedented move, on Biden’s first day in office, he fired Trump’s NLRB chair, a viciously anti-union lawyer, and replaced him with pro-labor attorney Jennifer Abruzzo. Without Abruzzo and Biden’s NLRB majority there would have been, for instance, no Starbucks Workers United successes on the scale they have occurred. Under a Trump administration the baristas’ organizing would have been greatly slowed and probably stopped dead through lengthy procedural delays and adverse Board decisions. Who is president matters for the American working class and its ability to act collectively on its own behalf.
A singular focus on the international scene, shorn of accounting for the dual role of the presidency, means that the legitimate desire to stop the genocide in Palestine—if it leads to sitting out the 2024 election—can quite possibly prevent us from creating the conditions for stopping future events like it. Such conditions almost always require a strong, militant progressive movement, with labor playing a big role. Note that this is precisely what has occurred over the past several months, as a powerful anti-war movement has shifted public opinion and the center of gravity within the Democratic Party and organized labor. Note too, that this has transpired within the political space overseen by a Democratic administration.
Compare and contrast with the onset of the second Iraq war in 2003, where a massive but brief anti-war movement crashed and burned against the brick wall of the right-wing Bush administration.
What the performative enunciation of “Genocide Joe” misses, in its virtue signaling, is the practical consequence that will follow a defeat of Joe Biden in November. Throughout the long reign of capitalism as world system it has assumed a number of political forms. It has demonstrated on any number of occasions that it can easily shed a democratic skin and replace it with an authoritarian one. Trump is very clear: this is his plan. When the next Gaza arises—and given American imperialism, it will—the space for a mass movement to oppose it will be tightly constrained and likely violently crushed by the repressive force of a police state under far-right Republican control.
Building socialism is always now
At a recent meeting of my East Bay DSA chapter the comrades narrowly defeated a resolution that sought to make opposition to Trump official DSA policy. Since there is no chance that DSA will be endorsing Trump, the vote foreclosed the possibility of the chapter officially working on behalf of Biden. Two of the people arguing against opposing Trump used the term “Genocide Joe.” One seemed to make the phrase itself his main argument, repeating it several times.
The derogatory “Genocide Joe” enunciation plays in the same sandbox as Trump, who loves elementary schoolyard level nicknames for his opponents. Referring to Biden this way—or anyone else—corrodes reasoned political discourse and tends to end, not engage, rational discussion of the issues.
Part of building a socialist movement is the modeling of socialist human relations, to the extent that that is possible within a capitalist culture. In the late twentieth century we called such modeling “prefigurative politics.” It was a new twist that socialist feminists placed on the concept the Industrial Workers of the World had already promulgated a century ago when it called for “building a new society within the shell of the old”.
Words have meaning, and so does history
Is history predictive? Sometimes. Marx’s idea that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, isn’t the way it always works, although it happened to in the situation he described. Closer might be Mark Twain’s “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”. At the very least we might agree that while history doesn’t necessarily provide a guide to the future, we ignore it at our peril.
It would be in this spirit of informed suggestion, rather than certainty, that we might ask: what do events in 1933, 1968, and 2021 tell us about the coming election and its likely outcomes?
First, in reverse order, January 6, 2021 is an easy one. Trump has repeatedly told us that he won’t accept any outcome except victory. We can expect a more organized insurrection this time around if he loses. He and his lieutenants have had four years to ponder what went wrong, to plan differently, and stoke the resentments and grievances that fueled an attempted coup once before. Although we can’t know how that will turn out—presumably public security forces have also learned from January 6—what Trump will do if he wins is not in question. If he has his way, the democratic experiment called “the United States” will become a memory, and Trump will do his best to distort and extinguish the memory itself.
Second, for someone my age who lived through 1968 as a more or less sentient being, I find it remarkable that some people today think that installing Trump in power, with the accompanying repression of democratic liberties, will awaken the masses and hasten the coming of socialism. Consider the repetition or rhyme: a slice of the anti-war left in 1968, disgusted with Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey’s support of the Viet Nam War, tried hard to believe a Nixon presidency would bring on the revolution. How did that work out?
Marx’s tragedy repeating as farce? Sure, except a Trump presidency will be no joke, and Trump in power a second time will make Nixon in retrospect look like Eugene V. Debs.
History isn’t inevitable until it has already happened. We still have time—although not much—to prevent a fascist America. But we have to make the right choices based on all the factors in play, not just one elevated above all the rest. Hitler’s rise to power depended on the split between the KPD (Communist Party) and SPD (Social Democratic Party). Together the two left parties held more seats and polled more votes than the Nazis; that numerical superiority was short-circuited by the Communists’ suicidal belief that the Social Democrats were as bad or worse than the Nazis. Calling the SPD “social-fascists”, the Communists refused any overtures to work together.
What did this lead to? Six million Jewish dead, which became the ideological justification for the Zionist state; fifty million World War II dead in all; and the German Communists were the first to be rounded up for the concentration camps. Divide and conquer tactics work best when enthusiastically embraced by the divided parties themselves.
“Genocide Joe” is a contemporary linguistic rhyme for “social-fascists”—an insult that divides people who need to be united and obscures the bigger picture with schadenfreude masquerading as politics. It’s tempting, I know. But please don’t. There’s too much at stake.
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Putting Members First: Ron Carey’s Lessons For Labor Movement Reform
By Rand Wilson and Steve Early
Books about union presidents are usually penned by professional writers — either academic historians, labor journalists, or paid flacks. Past accounts of the life and work of labor organization chiefs like John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, Jimmy Hoffa, or Cesar Chavez have run the gamut from hagiographic to constructively critical. Few have had a biographer whose view of their leadership role is rooted in first-hand experience as a blue-collar worker in the same industry and union.
Ken Reiman’s personal connection to the subject matter of Ron Carey and the Teamsters (Monthly Review Press, 2024) resulted from his own career as a UPS driver and activist in the local union that Carey led before becoming president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the 1990s. Reiman’s insights into the workplace culture and organizational politics of IBT Local 804 in Queens, NY, before, during, and after Carey’s presidency provide a rank-and-file perspective on the challenges of institutional change in organized labor over the past fifty years.
“late 2023, newly-elected UAW leaders were conducting a major strike against U.S. automakers, after building a membership-based contract campaign of the sort never employed by the previous leadership during national bargaining.”
Carey’s story, as told by Reiman, contains many important lessons for younger union activists, whether they are Teamsters or involved in other unions. Organized labor today is in a state of very positive ferment. A reform movement in the United Auto Workers, modeled after Teamsters for a Democratic Union, has had similar success winning direct election of top officers and using that system oust old guard officials.
By late 2023, newly-elected UAW leaders were conducting a major strike against U.S. automakers, after building a membership-based contract campaign of the sort never employed by the previous leadership during national bargaining. Earlier in the year, new leadership in the Teamsters, elected in 2022 with TDU backing, engaged many of the union’s 330,000 members at UPS in a national contract fight that drew on the experience of the UPS strike in 1997, led by Ron Carey.
In California in 2023, workers in the state university system staged the largest higher education walk-out ever and union members at Kaiser Permanente conducted the biggest healthcare industry strike in U.S. labor history. Actors and writers participated in an overlapping work stoppage in Hollywood that involved more than 170,000 workers. Meanwhile, thousands of southern California hotel workers also struck for a new contract.
Workers at Starbucks’ have conducted what now appears to be a successful first contract campaign, after engaging in nationally coordinated protest activity and mini-strikes in particular workplaces. The landscape of labor organizing in Amazon warehouses and distribution centers is replete with similar shop-floor skirmishing between labor and management, including worker-led strikes over local issues in many locations with no formal bargaining rights or union recognition.
A similar dynamic mix of union democracy and reform struggles, at the local and national level, and heightened workplace militancy in many different sectors was, of course, the context for Ron Carey’s own late 20th century career as a union dissident, who became the first democratically elected president of what was, not long ago, the nation’s most corrupt and racketeer-dominated union.
PHoto Earl’s second shot
Each phase of Carey’s rise and fall, as recounted in Putting Members First, is worthy of close study by those seeking to follow in his footsteps as a shop-floor militant, an opposition candidate for local union office, and a coalition-builder with other reformers. Finally, and most impressive, was Carey’s role as a national labor leader faced with the daunting challenge of transforming a dysfunctional organization, in the face of employer hostility and the internal resistance of union officials protecting their own perks, political power, and personal fiefdoms.
Below are some of the critical components of union revitalization, as recounted in this biography, that have continuing relevance to present-day reform struggles:
· Ousting local union incumbents.
Like many disgruntled members before and since, Carey first got involved in union politics because officials of Local 804, in the late 1950s, were so unresponsive to worker complaints and concerns. He ran for shop steward, beating a fellow driver who “didn’t want to rock the boat.” Rocking the boat became Carey’s “MO” for the rest of his career. But he understood the limitations of being a “Lone Ranger.” Reiman’s account of how Carey assembled a team of like-minded co-workers to take on the union establishment is a good primer for anyone trying to do that, at the local union level, today.
It took Carey a decade, and several election defeats running for lesser offices, before he became 804 president on a platform of cleaning up the local, enforcing the contract, and improving pensions. As he did 24 years later in the “Marble Palace” in Washington, Carey cut his own salary to show that he was serious about putting union resources to work for the membership.
· Using direct action on the job.
The year Ron Carey became a Teamster steward, Local 804 had twenty wildcat strikes; not long afterwards UPS drivers in NYC struck for six weeks, over the objections of local and national union officials. Throughout his three decades in the local, Carey tapped into, rather than tried to suppress, rank-and-file unrest that took form of job actions, whether legal or not.
When Carey became president in 1968, after campaigning for a year as part of an opposition slate, his first challenge was striking UPS again. This time, 804 members walked out for more than two months to win a first-ever “25-and-out-pension” provision with UPS, effectively using contract rejection votes at mass meetings to win a better final offer from management.
· Challenging bureaucratic control of bargaining.
As Reiman reports, Carey quickly developed a reputation for honesty, transparency, and independence from the corrupt regional and national power structure of the IBT. But, in the Teamsters then, and in many other unions today, islands of militancy have trouble surviving in a sea of business unionism. Putting Members First shows how dissident locals like Carey’s 804 must overcome attempts, by the union hierarchy, to undermine picket-line solidarity among workers bargaining with the same employer, but in different locals or national unions. Carey’s methods of thwarting management’s “divide-and-conquer” schemes, aided and abetted by top union officials, are worthy of emulation.
· Networking with like-minded reformers
In the 1980s, the IBT began negotiating more issues with UPS at the company-wide level – via a tightly controlled national bargaining committee – which reduced the scope and impact of local or regional bargaining. To counter this threat, Carey and Local 804 began to ally with UPS dissidents around the country, including those long active in TDU and equally opposed to a then-provision of the IBT constitution which required a two-thirds vote, rather than a simple majority, to reject any tentative agreement with an employer. Jousting with the International Union over imposition of unpopular UPS contracts—voted down by a majority of those covered by them—helped build the movement for democratizing the Teamsters, by linking bad bargaining outcomes to denial of membership rights.
· Winning and using One Member/One Vote
Most U.S. union members have no direct say about their national union officers and executive board members. The latter are elected by smaller groups of local union delegates at national conventions that tend to be leadership controlled, particularly when incumbents are up for re-election. These delegate bodies are resistant to changing national union constitutions to allow the more democratic method used in APWU, ILWU, the NewsGuild/CWA, and a few others.
The only major breakthroughs in direct voting on top officers have occurred, after corruption scandals and resulting judicial intervention involving the IBT, UAW, and LIUNA. Without a rank-and-file reform movement—of the type which backed Carey during his two Teamster presidential campaigns, or which developed recently in the UAW—it remains hard for opposition candidates to win any union-wide election. The lesson of this book is to be ready for that political opening when and if it occurs, while fighting for “one-member/one vote” in the meantime.
· Tackling internal restructuring
When Carey and other members of his reform slate took over Teamster headquarters in 1992, the “Marble Palace” was not just a monument to past Teamster extravagance. It was full of poorly performing departments, with overpaid and/or incompetent staffers hostile to the goals of the new administration. Foes of reform also controlled all the Teamster joint councils, area conferences, and the boards of the many health and welfare and pension benefit funds. These powerful officials wanted Carey and his team to fall on their faces.
Working with TDU activists around the country and a minority of reform-minded local officers, Carey put 75 troubled locals under trusteeship, cut waste, stepped up Teamster organizing, hired aggressive new staff and empowered members. As Reiman documents, the elimination of the “area conferences” was a major restructuring victory—and a blueprint worth following, as needed, in other unions saddled with unnecessary layers of bureaucracy and staff featherbedding.
· Staying close to the members
To his credit, Carey never felt comfortable in his new inside-the-Beltway world (where a sycophantic culture of political hustling and over-paid “consulting” would, in the end, contribute to his undoing.) He liked hanging out with working Teamsters in Queens, not politicians or other high-ranking union officials in Washington. He was a work horse, not a show horse, a hands-on handler of IBT members’ daily problems, large and small. His organizational accomplishments, as Reiman shows, were always rooted in a strong personal connection with the membership, that many elected and appointed officials seem to lose as they ascend through the ranks of their respective union bureaucracies.
· Taking on employers, with new allies
Carey’s finest hour came in 1997 when the presence of someone at the top of the union who sincerely believed in the power of the rank and file made it possible for 185,000 UPS workers to win the biggest nationwide strike in the last thirty years. The UPS contract campaign employed membership education and mobilization, labor-community coalition building, and outreach to UPS customers and the general public, via the media, that the union had never utilized before.
Two years before, the Teamsters, under Carey, had cast 1.4 million votes in the AFL-CIO’s first contested election in 100 years, thereby helping to secure the victory of a new leadership more helpful in labor-management showdowns like the UPS strike. The IBT joined Jobs with Justice, embraced single payer health care reform, and campaigned against free trade. The union ditched its traditional ties to conservative Republicans, while maintaining some—albeit not enough—distance from Democrats who disappointed or betrayed labor.
· Anticipating a counter-revolution
When union reformers win, they still face pushback from entrenched internal foes. Carey’s crackdown on crooks and leadership perks alienated large sections of the Teamster officialdom. Still-powerful bureaucrats who had split their support between two “Old Guard” candidates in 1991, bankrolled a unified $4 million challenge, fronted by James Hoffa, five years later. The wealthy Detroit labor lawyer masqueraded successfully as a populist critic of a “New Teamster” establishment that was spendthrift, incompetent, and run by “outsiders.”
As Reiman recounts, the Carey campaign fund-raising misconduct in 1996 was a self-inflicted blow to the moral authority and public reputation of his administration. It was the result of corner-cutting and top-down campaigning that was very different from the bottom up approach that propelled Carey to victory five years before. The moral of this story: if you’re going to take on union corruption and corporate America at the same time, don’t let opportunistic “outsiders,” hitch their wagon to your team. Their greed, bad judgement, and lack of any connection to union reform will lead to grifting of a new sort.
While the tragedy of Ron Carey’s criminal prosecution and eventual banning from the union makes for painful reading, Ken Reiman’s book reminds us that the Teamster reform movement survived ‘Donorgate’ in the mid-1990s and upheld his legacy of opposition to Teamster old guard politics and policies. The work of Carey and many like-minded supporters four decades ago raised the bar and set the stage for Teamster reformers to reclaim their national headquarters nearly 25 years later.
One result of that most recent national-level reform slate victory was the 2022-23 UPS contract campaign which drew on the lessons, experiences, and, in many cases, the leadership of 1997 strike veterans. In much media coverage and analysis of last year’s grassroots contract campaign and its results, Carey’s name, memory, and past strike role were often invoked.
To TDU members and the many other Teamsters whose votes made him the first directly elected national union president, Carey remains a heroic, not just tragic, figure. In a union where to this day, many local officers are wary of TDU, the pugnacious ex-Marine and former UPS-driver from Queens was a unique ally in a vibrant reform movement that has now spanned five decades. During that period, we had the privilege of working with Ron in different capacities and seeing him in action behind the scenes and in public, during several critical junctures in the union’s modern history.
We salute Brother Ken Reiman and Monthly Review Press for bringing Ron’s story to a new generation of labor activists faced with the unfinished task of revitalizing and reforming the U.S. labor movement. Reiman’s book will help ensure that Carey’s singular role will be remembered — and rightfully honored — long after his critics and detractors have been forgotten.
(In the late 1970s, Steve Early was an organizer, lawyer, and newspaper editor for the Professional Drivers Council (PROD), a Teamster reform group that became part of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). He assisted Ron Carey’s 1989-91 campaign for the Teamster presidency and, while on loan from the Communications Workers of America, served as a member of Carey’s headquarters transition team in early 1992. A longtime labor activist, Rand Wilson worked at Teamster headquarters in the union’s communications department, under Carey. He helped plan and implement the UPS contract campaign in 1997, and handled publicity for the subsequent two-week strike. In 2022-23, he worked as a TDU organizer aiding membership education and mobilization in support of the IBT’s latest UPS contract campaign.)
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This piece has also run in Jacobin and CounterPunch
“Uncommitted” Is the antiwar movement breaking into mainstream U.S. politics?
By Joe Allen
How the anti-war movement in the US is using the Democratic Primary elections to pressure the Biden administration into withdrawing its support for Israel’s genocide.
Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty airman based in San Antonio, Texas stood outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, February 25th, and announced to the world:
“I’m an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
His last words were, “Free Palestine!” He then doused himself with an accelerant and set himself on fire. He died soon afterwards. Aaron’s self-sacrifice was the second produced by Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza backed by the United States. On December 1, 2023, a woman, whose name has still not been released to the public, set herself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta. She survived, but is in critical condition and remains hospitalized.
Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice drew quick comparisons with Vietnam War era acts of immolation, most notably Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist Monk, who protested the repressive religious policies of the Saigon government in June 1966. Alice Herz and Norman Morrison, who immolated themselves respectively in March and November, 1965, in response to the escalation of U.S bombing and the extensive use of napalm by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson. Morrison immolated himself in the view of then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
Those who knew Aaron Bushnell described him as a kind person who did outreach to the homeless, and had become increasingly influenced by leftwing ideas after growing up in an insular, authoritarian religious community in Massachusetts. Levi Pierpont, who knew Bushnell in basic training, and was later released by the Air Force after he was granted conscience objector status in 2023, wrote:
Aaron is by no means the only United States military member who has felt complicit in the military’s violence, powerless to change anything, and stuck waiting until the end of a four- or six-year contract. There are thousands of military members similarly distraught, having thoughts of taking extreme actions to escape something that feels inescapable.
Marine Corps Veteran and author Lyle Jeremy Rubin took the Nation magazine to argue, “When someone commits an act like this, and leaves us with words like that, I feel obligated to take the person at their word. And the words couldn’t be more instructive. Bushnell doesn’t spell out the precise nature of his complicity. But the mere mention of his branch of service suffices. The US Air Force has played a significant part in the killing spree in Gaza, assisting with intelligence and targeting. It has helped build Israeli airpower for decades now, and shares the same suppliers of aircraft, missiles, and munitions.”
The Lesser Evil?
Two days after Aaron Bushnell’s death, the Michigan presidential primaries were held on February 27. While President Joe Biden won the Democratic primary, the Listen to Michigan campaigners were asking for those opposed to Biden’s pro-Israel policies to vote “uncommitted.” The goal was to get 10,000 uncommitted votes, the margin that Trump won Michigan by in 2016. Ultimately, just over 100,000 voted uncommitted, ten times the goal for campaign organizers, and was helped by the over seventy U.S. cities that have passed ceasefire resolutions.
While some Arab-American Democratic Party officials boosted the campaign, including Abdullah Hammoud, the Mayor of Dearborn, and Michigan State Representative and Majority House leader Abraham Aiyash, it is largely driven by a younger generation of Arab-Americans. “We’re experiencing a revolution,” said Lexis Zeidan, a 31-year-old Palestinian American organizer and spokeswoman for Listen to Michigan told National Public Radio (NPR). “We’re no longer going for the lesser of two evils.”
The prospect of Biden losing Michigan in the November presidential election is openly discussed, and the prospect of Trump returning to power hasn’t, so far, swayed pro-Palestine activists from campaigning against the Biden administration. “I’m going to live under Trump, because I survived under Trump, because he’s my enemy,” Palestinian-American Nihad Awad, co-founder and the national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow. “I cannot live under someone who pretends to be my friend.”
A hairline fracture has appeared in the traditional “lesser evil” approach taken to U.S. elections by the U.S. left in support of the Democratic Party, that has derailed, corrupted, and repressed a broad spectrum of movements of the working class and oppressed for the past century. Marcie Pedraza, a UAW activist in Chicago, whose Local union passed one of the most politically significant resolutions in favor of Gaza, expressed this sentiment circulating around pro-Palestine activism:
“One day, you’re calling for a ceasefire, the next, you endorse a candidate that’s funding the genocide. I don’t want another four years of Trump, but … there has to be another way.”
Campaigns for an “uncommitted” vote spread to “Super Tuesday” primaries on March 5th. Reuters reported.
With almost 90% of the expected votes counted in Minnesota, 19% of Democrats marked their ballots “uncommitted” to show their opposition to Biden’s backing for Israel’s attacks against Hamas in Gaza.
The “uncommitted” vote was also on the Democratic ballot in six other Super Tuesday states — Alabama, Colorado, Iowa, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Tennessee.
Support in those states ranged from 3.9% in Iowa to 12.7% in North Carolina, with more than 85% of the votes counted in each of those states, according to Edison Research.
A handful of unions have called for an “uncommitted” vote by its members, something unheard of in past presidential elections. In Washington state, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) 3000 posted on its website:
“As the largest labor union in Washington State with over 50,000 members, and the largest UFCW local union in the nation, the UFCW 3000’s member-led Executive Board decided on Wednesday February 28th to endorse the effort to have people in the Democratic primary in Washington State vote “uncommitted” on the upcoming ballot.”
But the UFCW 3000’s executive board was careful to frame their call as first and foremost about defeating Trump. “The hope is that this will strengthen the Democratic party’s ultimate nominee to defeat Trump in the General Election in November,” they wrote. Last October, UFCW 3000 and the United Electrical Workers union (UE) issued a petition calling on U.S. trade unions that called for a ceasefire, but fell far short of the Palestinian trade unions movement’s demands.
The Washington Democratic primary took place on March 12th. Almost 50,000 people cast their vote for “uncommitted”, or 7.5% of the vote after a campaign that started at the end of February and spent only $20,000.
For an older generation around the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA), many of whom are from the 1968 generation of radicals, campaigning for an “uncommitted” is a short diversion from how they will vote in November. The New York Times reported that the story of seventy-three year old Lon Herman of Detroit:
On Tuesday, he was volunteering with the Democratic Socialists to help with the “uncommitted” effort in Hamtramck. “We need to make sure the White House knows its policy is unacceptable,” he said. But, he added, he expects he’ll vote for the president again. “If it’s between him and Trump, the Palestine issue would basically be a wash, so I’d have to hold my nose and vote for the Democrat, as I usually do.”
Dearborn
Whether the hairline fracture will heal or widen during the rest of the presidential campaign is still too be seen. But, judging from the response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union (SOTU) speech, many Arab-Americans and Pro-Palestine supporters appeared in Dearborn are unmoved. At an “Abandon Biden” SOTU’s watch party, Farah Khan told CBS News:
“Dropping the aid in Gaza, that’s a photo opp. That’s a desperate cry for awards, that’s a desperate cry for I’m doing good, you know. I’m a humanitarian too, even though, until today, I’m still supplying weapons to kill innocent civilians.”
Another attendee, Anthony Hall said, “All I’ve heard is a lot of what he wants to do. I haven’t really heard any plans. There’s nothing really definite from him. So far, I’m disappointed.” Yet, Dr. Nidal Jbor , of Doctors Against Genocide, noted, “His rhetoric is improving compared to what he was talking about in October to November, so the pressure from the civil society and the United States and all over the world is paying off.”
It’s not surprising that Dearborn is the center of opposition to Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. A city with a majority of residents are from Arab and North African countries, and it has also become a lightning rod for racist hysteria for many years now. Most recently the Wall Street Journal, ran a commentary piece on February 2nd by Steven Stalinsky, a professional Islamophobe and executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital, where he warned:
What’s happening in Dearborn isn’t simply a political problem for Democrats. It’s potentially a national-security issue affecting all Americans. Counterterrorism agencies at all levels should pay close attention.
Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said that Stalinsky’s article is an example of “an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn”. Hammoud posted on X (formerly Twitter):
“Effective immediately — Dearborn police will ramp up its presence across all places of worship and major infrastructure points. This is a direct result of the inflammatory @WSJ opinion piece that has led to an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn.”
Hammoud cautioned Dearborn residents, “Stay vigilant.”
Dearborn has seen this before. While it is best known for being the world headquarters of the Ford Motor Company, Christian Evangelicals have targeted the city repeatedly over the years. For example, in 2011, according to Daniel Devir:
Pastor Terry Jones burned a Koran in Gainesville, Florida, sparking deadly clashes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One year later, he burned a Koran again, and no one paid any attention. That same month he came to Dearborn, Michigan, to protest in front of the Islamic Center of America, the nation’s largest mosque. “Islam has one goal,” Jones told the small crowd, and a much larger group of counter-demonstrators and police, according to the Detroit Free Press. “That is world domination.”
“All-American Muslim” television series, a small effort by the TLC network to portray five Dearborn Muslim families in everyday challenges and circumstances of American life, was canceled after one season, because a hate campaign succeeded in getting major sponsors to end their support.
Dearborn’s Arab community can trace its roots back to the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, but saw a large influx of Arab and Muslim residents following the 1967 war onward. They sought employment, like many other immigrants in the past, in the region’s auto industry, and they also brought their politics with them, including Palestinian nationalism and opposition to Zionism. They were also inspired by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, who supported Palestinian liberation on November 28, 1973.
On November 28, 1973, approximately 2,000 Detroit auto workers, led by Arab Americans, walked off their jobs at Chrysler’s Dodge Main plant, demanding that the leadership of their union, the United Auto Workers (UAW), divest from Israel. The strike, which was organized by the union’s recently formed Arab Workers Caucus, was centered around an event taking place that same day in Detroit: Leonard Woodcock, the president of UAW, was set to receive a humanitarian honor from a Zionist organization, B’nai B’rith International.
The UAW had a long history of politically supporting Israel and financially through the purchase of State Of Israel Bonds. The 1973 Arab workers strike, a long forgotten episode in the struggle against Zionism and U.S. imperialism, has been written about in many places, most recently by historian Jeff Schuhrke writing in Jacobin and available here. No wonder why the worst elements of the mainstream to crackpot far right are obsessed with Dearborn, it has and will continue to be central to the opposition to the Biden administration’s policies towards Palestine.
March on the DNC
Meanwhile, despite the hostility of the Democratic Party establish, the “Uncommitted” vote activists continued to push ahead. In Illinois, the March 19th primary revealed at that over fourteen percent of Chicago’s Democratic voters refused to vote for President Joe Biden. Illinois’ highly restrictive primary doesn’t offer an “uncommitted” option. “Uncommitted National is so proud of organizers in Chicago for mobilizing support for our anti-war movement,” says Layla Elabed, chair of the Uncommitted National campaign told In These Times. “Even without an uncommitted or equivalent option on the ballot, Chicago organizers were able to strongly refute Biden’s unrestricted funding of genocide in Gaza.”
Cook County, including Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, has one of the largest Palestinian populations in the country. The WLS, local ABC news affiliate, reported last December, “Today, the Chicagoland area is home to more Palestinians than anywhere else in America, with over 18,000 living in Cook County. The second largest population is in Wayne County, Michigan, which covers the Detroit metro area and has four times less than Cook County.” Not surprisingly, it has also been the seen of mass demonstrations in support of Palestine since Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
While the antiwar movement has certainly had an impact on mainstream politics, so far, it hasn’t had the effect of shaking up the mainstream political parties. There are no antiwar challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination, and unlikely given the short time left in the primary season. The few candidates running on third party platforms, such as Cornell West, face many hurdles due the U.S. electoral system’s hostility to third parties.
Right now, pro-Palestine activists are beginning to shift their eyes to the upcoming Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago in August. Along with abortion rights activists, pro-Palestine activists are battling a worried DNC and Chicago’s “Progressive” Mayor Brandon Johnson to secure permits as close to the United Center, where the convention is to be held. Chicago passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in January, after the city council passed a resolution supporting Israel in October.
Convention planners are clearly worried of potential protests that could disrupt the convention proceedings on the outside and on the inside from a handful of dissidents. “What makes this difficult is there’s going to be a lot of people who legitimately should be there, like credentialed, relatively high-up people who will have access to sort of exclusive areas of the convention,” said one person to WBEZ radio, who previously worked on several Democratic campaigns. “They might protest, but it’s not like you can just keep out, like, a vice chair of [a state] Democratic Party.”
A nationwide mobilization at the DNC would send a global message of solidarity to Palestine. See you in Chicago.
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Checkout Joe Allen’s Medium postings for more of his writing
Dan Osborn Challenges Nebraska’s Political Establishment with a Blue-Collar Agenda
By Steve Early
This piece is running with the kind permission of Barn Raiser
Recent studies of lawmakers in the United States have found that less than 2% of those serving on Capitol Hill held blue-collar jobs before they were elected. That percentage drops even further among the nearly 7,300 state legislators across all 50 states, according to researchers at Duke University and Loyola University Chicago, who found that only 81 of those legislators were previously employed in working-class jobs. Dan Osborn, a 48-year-old building trades worker, is a rare example of a candidate working to increase those numbers.
Osborn is running a labor-backed independent bid for U.S. Senate this year in Nebraska. His opponent, Sen. Deb Fischer, the 73-year-old Republican incumbent first elected in 2012, pledged to serve only two terms, but is now seeking a third. Fischer has built a $2.7 million re-election war chest with support from defense contractors, Senate Republican colleagues and AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee).
Osborn, a married father of three children, first rose to prominence in his home state four years ago as president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union Local 50G, after he led a successful 11-week strike by 500 union members at an Omaha Kellogg cereal factory. Before working in that plant for 18 years, Osborn had dropped out of college and followed in his father’s footsteps by joining the Navy. He has also served in two Nebraska National Guard units and is now employed as a steamfitter for a contractor that maintains the heating system at Boys Town, an iconic institution located in Omaha.
At his campaign kick-off last fall, Osborn denounced “the monopolistic corporations… that actually run this country” and pledged to “bring together workers, farmers, ranchers and small business owners across Nebraska around bread-and-butter issues that appeal across party lines.” So far, he has raised nearly $400,000 among mostly small donors. Osborn and his volunteers have collected the 4,000 signatures needed to get him on the ballot this November (they’re still collecting signatures to have a safe buffer). His labor endorsements include the International Union of Elevator Constructors Local 28, Plumbers Local 16, Sprinkler Fitters Local 699, Steamfitters Local 664, the Office and Professional Employees International Union and Osborn’s former BCTGM Local 50G.
Osborn’s unusual effort in a Republican dominated state has drawn national publicity. In December, The Intercept reported on a poll conducted by Change Research, which found Osborn leading Fischer by a margin of 2 points (some have questioned the poll’s methodology). A January profile of Osborn in the New York Times framed his “long shot bid” as one test of whether “the rising power of an energized union movement can translate to high elective office during an election year when working class voters will decide the next president and the direction of the country.”
In his interview with Barn Raiser, Osborn talks about why he decided to run, how his platform is different from other candidates for public office and what kind of voters he is trying to reach on the campaign trail.
You’re running for the U.S. Senate from Nebraska. You’ve served in the military, you’ve been active in the labor movement. What part of your biography most motivated you to run for office at this time?
We’re all a product of our past, the good, the bad and the ugly. So, I suppose the short answer would be all of it. But, in particular, the labor movement. The strike at Kellogg’s really opened my eyes to the fact that I could help make a difference in people’s lives. I saw politicians, on both sides of the aisle, come out and support the strikers.
Our U.S. Senate is a country club. It’s full of millionaires, business execs and lawyers. Working-class people just aren’t represented. I think it’s time to change that. It should be “we the people” representing us, not just the country club politicians.
I imagine that one obstacle for any candidate from a blue-collar background is getting time off to build and run your campaign. If you’re not a lawyer running a big business or have family wealth, how do you take time off from a job like yours to, to run for office?
I think that’s part of the reason why people like me don’t do it, because it takes a tremendous amount of time and energy. To date, I have not taken any time off from work. I can try to sneak in a lunch meeting here or there, but most of my business is conducted during the week, after I get off from my (at minimum) eight-hour shift, and all weekend long.
I understood the sacrifice that I was going to have to make to do this, but at the end of the day, I still feel like it has to be done. And it has to be done now. This year. Like, I can’t continue to wait, or hope somebody else will run in the next cycle.
And I feel that way because I think the majority of people are feeling that way. There’s an invisible, intangible type of gut feeling that this is one of the most important elections of all time. I imagine that every candidate who has ever run for office would call their own race the most important. But I do feel that, because I think it’s provable and tangible, given the fact that so many people are registering as independents—it’s the fastest growing demographic for registered voters in Nebraska. There’s 270,000 in Nebraska, and nearly 440,000 in Iowa. That’s because we’re seeing the divide that has been created in the polarization of politics, which makes every single issue about getting reelected and not about doing the right thing or getting things done.
People are fed up, they’re frustrated, they’re pissed off—whatever terminology you want to use. And I’m one of them.
So, part of what influenced your decision to avoid a party label and to run as an independent was to tap into that growing electorate demographic?
I’m an independent, and I’ve been an independent since 2016. I was a Democrat before, but I feel like both parties have stopped listening to working people and have stopped working for them. They’re all more aligned with corporate interests, especially my opponent, Deb Fischer. She takes a tremendous amount of money from the railroad industry, from pharmaceutical companies, and she votes accordingly. If people don’t already know that, then they need to be informed of it. This is why I say that Washington is broken, and we need to roll up our sleeves and fix it.
One of the things about your campaign, which was profiled recently by Jonathan Weisman in the New York Times, was your focus on labor issues. You’re somebody that’s supporting paid leave time, minimum wage increases, strengthening rail safety and you’re talking about the right to organize for people misclassified as “independent contractors.” The Times described that agenda as appealing “narrowly to blue-collar wallets.” It doesn’t sound like a narrow range of issues to me. What kind of response have you been getting about your platform?
The response is tremendous. It resonates with people because it’s about issues that we all deal with on a daily basis, not the wedge-type issues that divide us. These issues can unite us. That’s what I want to focus on, not creating more division.
One of the things that the Times didn’t mention is that my platform calls for lowering taxation of overtime wages. In my field we try to work overtime in order to get ahead in life. But without overtime wages, a lot of people are only able to tread water financially. But with guaranteed overtime pay, if you’re willing to sacrifice the time—and, you know, we are only awarded so many minutes in this life—and choose to use that time to help your company, you should get paid accordingly. But it throws you into a higher tax bracket the more overtime you work. And that’s something I want to fight. If you’re willing to sacrifice for your family, you shouldn’t be punished for it.
Another unusual issue on your agenda is the right-to-repair. What does it mean and why are you raising this as an issue?
I’ve always worked in an industrial setting, but doing a lot of things that you could compare to farming jobs. One of them is wrenching on equipment.
I’ve been to many farms and have seen the tractors and equipment that farmers use. They are some of the most handy people on the planet. But when the farm equipment manufacturers take away their ability to repair their own equipment, that’s going to cut into their bottom line big-time. And it’s spilling over into other sectors as well. Subaru has fought the right-to-repair law in Massachusetts, and other companies aren’t far behind. They want to take away your ability away to repair your own car.
Last summer my car broke down on the side of the road. My alternator went out. Luckily, my wife was able to take me to work. On my way back from work, I stopped at an AutoZone with a buddy of mine who has a truck full of tools, and we replaced the alternator on the side of the road. I was able to purchase a refurbished alternator for $150. If I would have bought the original manufacturer’s version, it would have been closer to $350. So, that takes money out of people’s pockets if you take away their ability to repair their own vehicle. You probably remember when you could take the back of your cellphone off and replace your own battery. You can’t do that anymore! Now you gotta take it to the Apple Store where you have to wait in line for two hours, and hopefully you have enough money to cover it.
John Deere was one of the original farm equipment manufacturers to require farmers to get their equipment fixed at a licensed dealership.
I wanted to stress the importance of the issue for those who might think it’s not that big of a deal. Okay, so I would have had to pay $200 more dollars for an alternator. But what if I had to pay $500 more because I had to take it into a dealership to buy one? That’s just an added cost onto an already inflated economy. And it’s nickel-and-diming everybody. It all adds up.
You’ve been critical of some meatpacking industry practices, which you believe favor the interests of Big Ag over small farmers and ranchers. What got you interested in this issue? Was it growing up in Nebraska and knowing people who try to survive as farmers?
The small family farmers that I talk to, their issues fall right in line with small businesses in both rural and urban areas. But rural areas in particular have had a tough time competing with the Walmarts and Amazons of the world. You could drive through Main Street anywhere in the USA—not just in Nebraska—and you’re likely to see a Dollar General on one end and Walmart at the other, and all the mom-and-pop stores are closed.
And many people that work at Walmart, McDonald’s or Dollar General have to be on Medicaid because they just don’t get paid enough. That’s problematic. These huge corporations are using taxpayer’s money through the federal government to subsidize their health care, while they don’t pay their employees a livable wage.
That’s the nicest way I can put it. I was going to say something worse. So, yeah, it’s frustrating to see. And the small family farms are getting choked out, because they’re forced to settle for however much they can sell their cattle to the large meat producers or they are forced into only buying Monsanto seeds—all these are practices that only benefit the huge corporate farms.
George Norris was one of the great progressive populists who came from the Nebraska tradition of running as an independent. Does that help anybody running as an independent like you today, or is someone like him not remembered much today?
As I understand it, populism ebbs and flows throughout history, predominantly since the Industrial Revolution. The reason for this is because the people with the money are always fighting to get more of it, and to have more power and control. And they do so by buying congressmen and senators. And then the people start to realize that the government isn’t working for them, and they start to elect more populist candidates that feel their pain and struggles.
But the caveat is that the people with the money never give up fighting. They are relentless. That’s why this election is so important because what we’re seeing is a class struggle, if you will.
We live in the richest nation in the world, and we want to be able to live in relative comfort. We want to be homeowners and car owners. Like myself, I’m not trying to get money so I can buy a Corvette. I just want to live in relative peace and harmony and happiness in the richest country in the world. That’s the basis of the American dream. That’s what the American people deserve. And when 1% of the population owns 90% of the wealth, that’s problematic.
Are there particular reforms that if you were elected you would support in terms of limiting the influence of big money in politics?
Term limits, of course. Career politicians can certainly be dangerous, but I get both sides of that issue, especially if you get somebody who’s genuine and willing to do the right thing and not sell their soul to the corporations. But there’s always a flip side of that coin, which is why I’m supporting term limits. Two terms in the Senate is 12 years. If you can’t do what you set out to do in 12 years, then maybe you should step aside and let somebody else come in and try to make some changes.
I’ve been getting a lot of flack from the Times article about calling both Joe Biden and Donald Trump too old. To set the record straight, here’s where I messed up: I also called them incompetent. And saying somebody is too old and incompetent in the same sentence is not right, you know, it makes it sound like you’re being ageist, which I’m not. But I do feel that if you are running for one of the most important jobs on the planet, you can be too old for it.
If you don’t have the big independent expenditure committees, if you’re not taking PAC money, if you’re trying to raise money like you do with email blasts and other things—that’s a lot of work. Are you getting a good response from small donors?
I spend a few hours on the phone every day. I get people hanging up on me, but I’ve also had some amazing conversations with people all over Nebraska. But we live in a digital age, and we’re reaching a lot of people digitally. We just surpassed $400,000, which is nowhere near dollar-for-dollar to compete with Deb Fischer in this race. But we have to spend enough money to get our message out, and then be able to defend ourselves.
What is your relationship with the Democrats? Will they keep their ballot line open in your race?
I don’t believe they’re actively searching to run anybody against me. I think they see the path to victory. The interesting part about this campaign is that we’re building a coalition. I also have libertarians and Republicans. I want everybody’s endorsement. My whole team is just full of a hodgepodge of people who believe that there needs to be a change in our political system.
Are there any issues or referendum questions likely to make it onto the ballot this fall that you want your campaign to draw attention to?
The right to an abortion is one of them. I believe in a woman’s decision on whether or not to have an abortion is between her and her doctor, it’s not the federal government’s place to dictate those things to people. Deb Fischer believes in a complete abortion ban. I strongly disagree with that position.
Fischer has also signed on to the national right to work. That’s damaging to labor. Whether you’re in a union or not, if you’re in an industry where there are unions, they bring up your wages as well.
I’m also against voucher programs for private schools, which was introduced in the state legislature this year. Basically, the bill allows rich people to get tax credits and funding for their kids to go to private schools, while taking funding away from the public schools. It’s a clear case of the rich getting richer.
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In Response to Ben Fong’s review of “Labor Power and Strategy”
By Jeffery Hermanson
In December of 2023 Ben Fong published a review of Labor Power and Strategy (PM PRess) in the online journal Catalyst. The review provoked a lot of discussion and continuing interest in the interview with John Womack on the topic of working class power. Jeff Hermanson, a long time organizer in many industries from the garment district of NYC to the Biz in Hollywood wrote a response to Fong based on his rich experience. The Forum is happy to publish his response to Ben Fong.
Ben Fong has written an interesting review of the recent book Labor Power and Strategy. I thought his response to Womack was better than any of the ten respondents in the book with the exception of Gene Bruskin’s discussion of the Smithfield pork processing organizing experience. But I also think the approach of Brother Fong underestimates the remaining power of workplace organizing, as demonstrated by two recent struggles, that of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, and that of the UAW.
Womack writes, “You have to wound capital to make it yield anything. And you wound it painfully, grabbing its attention, when you take direct material action to stop its production, cut its profit.”
In the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, we see how a well-organized and well-led small (11,000 members), independent and democratic union in a position of structural power (the WGA) can use that power to “wound capital” in a significant way, especially when supported by organized workers in the broader industry. Writers are the initiators of the process of production, so their strike takes time to take effect, as their finished scripts wind through the production pipeline. In this case, as in the previous 2007-8 strike, the writers undertook location picketing (productions in process). Based on the experience of the 2007-8 strike, the writers began location picketing earlier in the strike (in 2007-8 there was initially some member resistance to “picketing our own productions”); and the picketing was much more effective this time because of the solidarity support of the IATSE (cinematographers and other crew) and the Teamsters, who refused to cross picket lines. Then, ten weeks into the writers’ strike, the actors also struck, completely shutting down Hollywood film and TV.
It is highly likely that there would have been no actors’ strike if the writers had not struck first. The writers demonstrated the new degree of solidarity in the industry (in 2007-8 the IATSE opposed the writers’ strike and their members crossed the picket lines) and the ability to shut down production, even productions that had finished scripts. The writers also defined the issues – compensation for streaming, protections for the use of AI – and demonstrated the degree of public support for the writers’ positions, on issues which were shared by the actors. Again, the structural power of the writers – their role as the suppliers of an essential element of the production process – was key to mobilizing the solidarity support of the other unions, and that solidarity support then gave a morale boost to the writers and helped maintain their commitment to fight to the end. “Pencils down” was shown to be an effective strategy.
In the UAW strike, the innovative “Stand Up Strike” picked strategic plants and distribution centers as their targets, while workers in other plants continued working. This preserved the strike fund, avoided putting pressure on all UAW members in the Big Three at once, and hit profit centers of the employers. The assembly plants chosen were not just the most profitable plants, they also stood at the head of long and complex supply chains, and their shutdown had immediate negative effects on the component and parts suppliers. Layoffs immediately began at parts suppliers, not only in the US but also in Mexico. Some of the first supply chain producers to be hit were the seat manufacturers, which were in a just in time (JIT) relationship with the assemblers. They had to stop right away, because there was no place to store bulky seats, and hundreds of workers were laid off from seat plants on the Mexico-US border. Industry analysts reported concerns that a long strike would damage supply chain firms, and could provoke bankruptcy of some, disrupting the ability of the Big Three to resume production when the strike ended.
Both of these examples demonstrate the vulnerability of complex production networks to targeted strikes by small groups of workers in strategic structural positions in those production networks. Defining the critical “strategic structural positions” is a key task of union leaders, and requires serious research and analysis. Often this research requires the participation of workers involved in the production process themselves.
I had an exchange with John Womack Jr. about a strike I coordinated in the 1980’s for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in the NYC garment district. We were striking a non-union blouse manufacturer who was using around 10 to 15 Korean-owned sewing shops that employed Latino workers, mostly Mexicans and Dominicans. We had salted several of the shops with former strikers whose shops had gone out of business rather than sign a union contract. In one of the most important shops, we struck but could only pull out a minority of workers, among whom were four button-hole machine operators. I came out of the dress industry, so in this strike I learned that in a blouse shop, the button-hole machine operators were the most important (and most highly paid) workers, because operating this machine required a high degree of skill, and if the button-holes were not precisely placed, the blouse would not hang correctly. Therefore we agreed to pay the full salary of the four button-hole machine operators, while the other strikers went to look for work in the other shops in the production network, to “bore from within.”
Another part of the importance of this particular shop was that the employer was an officer of the Korean Apparel Manufacturers Association, of which all 400 Korean-owned garment factories in NYC were members. So KAMA decided to help this owner out by asking other owners to come to the shop and help move cut fabric across the picket line. This effort resulted in the KAMA members discovering the anger and fighting spirit of the Latino workers, as they were unable to cross a very militant picket line. After this incident, the KAMA president, who owned another of the most important shops of this network, approached the union through a Korean organizer that worked with me, and asked how the Korean garment manufacturers could resolve this dispute. We told them that if they stopped working for the blouse company, we would have no reason to target them; and they agreed to stop working on the blouse company’s goods until the strike was over. This was a turning point in the strike, which we eventually won.
Thus there are several factors that need to be looked at to determine whether a particular group of workers is situated in a “strategic structural position.” First is the technical question, i.e. are their skills and function essential for the production process, are they not easily replaced? Second is the economic question, i.e. what role does their particular unit play in the profitability or economic viability of the enterprise or industry sector? What impact does stopping their unit have on other employers in the production network? Third is the social question, i.e. what impact does their action have on other groups of workers in other parts of the production system?
The third point might be considered to be part of the “associational power” equation; but in my opinion, I believe Womack’s view, which I share, is that the social impact of action by a group of workers is largely dependent on the perception by other groups of the structural power the first group can wield. In a garment production system, the cutters are widely considered to have more structural power than the sewers, since they are fewer in number, and if they stop work the sewers will have no cut fabric to sew. Therefore a strike by the cutters often convinces the sewers to join in the strike, as the expectation of victory is enhanced. This is analogous to the situation in the entertainment industry, where a strike by the writers, who are few in number but who produce the scripts that are necessary to start the production process by actors, directors and crews, encourages other industry workers to take action.
In complex distribution systems, like Amazon, Walmart, Target, Kroger’s, US Foods, etc., the questions presented are similar but as in every inquiry can only be answered by concrete analysis of concrete conditions.
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Hoffa, Racism, and the Teamsters: The 1945 Detroit Mayor’s Race
By Joe Allen
As many people know by now, I’ve been looking into the historical relationship between the Teamsters and the State of Israel for a few months. Several online outlets including Counterpunch and the Stansbury Forum posted my original article The Teamster Connection: Apartheid Israel and the IBT. My interest in the subject was sparked by growing calls by many U.S. based unions for a ceasefire in Gaza. So far, neither the leadership of the Teamsters or any of its local affiliates or the longstanding reform group Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) have called for a cease fire, and have, in fact, opposed such resolutions.
One important stage in the evolution of the Teamster’s relationship with Israel was a testimonial dinner thrown for Jimmy Hoffa in April 1956. It was a major attempt to clean up Hoffa’s odious public image. The proceeds of the dinner were donated to the building of a children’s home in Israel. He was not yet the nationally known and notorious figure that he became following his appearance before the Senate Rackets Committee hearing in 1957. But, his thuggery and relationship with gangsters, however, were well-known in the labor movement, and, especially, in Detroit, his home base.
Curious, I decided to dive deeper into Hoffa’s lesser known but important resume building activities: his role in defeating UAW-CIO leader Richard Frankensteen’s run for mayor of Detroit in 1945. The 1945 Detroit mayor’s race is a real education in the deglamorization of Jimmy Hoffa, especially on the question of fighting racism. While Detroit witnessed much rank and file opposition to the UAW’s no-strike pledge, it also saw hate strikes against black workers and racist rioting over housing. With the war over, Detroit’s 1945 municipal elections saw any parameters of “wartime unity” erased.
According to an article in The Public Opinion Quarterly, written soon after the election, captured the brawl in its introduction:
Faced with the threat of a liberal candidacy of the UAW-CI’s Frankensteen, conservative forces in Detroit resorted to anti-Negro, anti-Semitic, and anti-“Communist” propaganda to elected their candidate, Jeffries, in one of the “most vicious, nasty campaign” in recent municipal history.
The Teamsters supported the incumbent Mayor Edward Jeffries, who ran a race-baiting campaign to defeat Frankensteen. The UAW and the Teamsters were bitter and contentious rivals in Detroit as well throughout Michigan and the Midwest. The Teamsters were prepared to use the most unsavory methods and make alliances with the most reactionary forces to defeat the UAW-CIO But, it’s not just a story of Teamster sabotage but also Frankensteen’s self-defeating strategy, especially, his failure to squarely fight racism in Detroit.
The Teamsters Role
According to Teamster historian Thaddeus Russell, the Detroit Teamsters in 1945,
“maintained their policy of opposing any candidate backed by the CIO. In the 1945 mayoral election, the CIO put its full weight behind an effort to elect UAW vice president Richard Frankensteen. As the national [CIO] PAC (Political Action Committee) and state and local CIO bodies pumped more than $200,000 into the Frankensteen campaign, the Teamsters did not hesitate to endorse the incumbent Jeffries.”
A publicly circulated letter by the Detroit Teamsters signed by Hoffa, Bert Brennan, and Joint Council President Sam Hurst endorsed Jeffries.
The Teamsters and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) were thrown into a panic after Frankensteen won the largest share of votes in an eight person non-partisan primary in August 1945. Frankensteen was projected by the UAW-CIO as a “labor candidate” since the non-partisan nature didn’t require a party affiliation, even though he had a long history of involvement in Democratic Party politics. For example, as recently as 1944, he was a delegate to the Democratic Party convention.
Again, according to Russell,
“When Frankensteen scored an impressive victory in the primary, the concerted effort of the CIO behind his candidacy caused the Wayne County Federation of Labor [WCFL] to abandon its longtime opposition to Jefferies and finally agree with the Teamsters on the threat of the CIO’s entry into politics.”
For Russell, “The WCFL’s opposition to Frankensteen along with the vigorous Teamster campaigning and Jeffries’ race-baiting proved to be a winning combination among Detroit’s white working class, who reelected the incumbent by a margin of 56,000 votes.” Vigorous campaigning, indeed. Dan Tobin, the Teamsters national president at the time, wrote in the December 1945 issue of The International Teamster magazine in December 1945, “Frankensteen was defeated by only 56,000 votes. The Teamsters supported his opponent, Mr. Jeffries, not because they were in love with Mr. Jeffries but because we could not afford to support Frankensteen.”
Apparently, the Teamsters had enough affection for Jeffries and his sordid campaign by rewarding him with a major mobilization of Teamster members, family, and friends to the polls. Tobin boasted:
“The membership of the all of the local unions of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in Detroit is close to 25,000. Each man was expected and almost commanded to bring one other vote to the polls besides his own. That would be his wife, his sister, his brother or some friend. That would make a total of 50,000 votes, which undoubtedly were delivered against Frankensteen. Some of the other American Federation of Labor not as large in membership as the Teamsters did the same.”
A Knight in Dull Armor
Even if Tobin’s vote count is off by a few thousand votes, the Teamsters role in the re-election of such a racist demagogue as Edward Jeffries is horrendous. But, there is more to the story, including Frankensteen’s hapless campaign. Dubbed “A Knight in Dull Armor” by Time magazine, Frankensteen proved continually unable to defend himself from a hailstorm of attacks and stupidly distancing himself from his trade union background, despite a much larger turn out of voter than the last time the UAW-CIO put forward a labor slate in 1937. Over 500,000 voters turned out in 1945, significantly larger than the 400,000 in 1937.
Writing as Martin Harvey in Labor Action newspaper, Martin Glaberman focused on several critical failings of the Frankensteen campaign. First, according to Glaberman was:
“During the whole campaign the initiative was in the hands of the reactionary Jeffries. It was he who determined the issues and set the tone of the campaign. Outstanding in the issues presented by Jeffries was the race question. Jeffries organized a widespread undercover anti-Negro campaign which surpassed his vicious use of the question in the last municipal election. The central idea was white supremacy in the City Hall and the maintenance of the “purity” of the all-white neighborhoods.”
Jeffries campaigners and supporters among white homeowner associations also, according to Harvey/Glaberman:
“distributed leaflets in Negro neighborhoods charging Frankensteen and the UAW with being anti-Negro. In the same way they initiated a whispering campaign charging that Frankensteen was Jewish, yet distributed newspapers in the Jewish neighborhoods charging Frankensteen with being a friend of Father Coughlin and an anti-Semite. Even the regular daily press gave support to this campaign by featuring prominently news items on the extent of Frankensteen’s Negro support and charging repeatedly that Frankensteen represented only a minority of the population.
“The second major issue,” according to Glaberman , “in Jeffries’ campaign which was constantly combined with the first was the “red scare” and the charge that the CIO wanted to take over the city. On both of these issues Frankensteen devoted his time to denying the charges. He did not represent the Negroes, he said, but all the people. He was not a red and the CIO did not want to take over the city. He offered no program for the Negroes to put an end to the discrimination and segregation to which they are subjected and he offered no program to labor or the people as a whole on the many vital problems which exist, foremost among them being jobs and security.
Frankensteen was reduced to “only positive statements were devoted to presenting himself as more efficient, as more concerned with improved bus service and cleaner alleys.” Glaberman summarized Frankensteen defeat:
“Without an aggressive program, for labor and the people, without calling on the middle class to support labor in this program, it was impossible for Frankensteen to answer the viciously reactionary charges of Jeffries. If his denials are valid, that is, if he does not represent labor but “all the people,” then why should anyone support him rather than Jeffries, who claims the same thing? If his denials are not true, that is, if he does represent labor, then why should the middle class, the storekeepers, the professionals, etc., support Frankensteen when they see no difference between “labor’s” program and Jeffries’ program?”
The 1945 Detroit municipal elections have fallen down the memory hole for the U.S. Left. It deserves a more extensive research and writing.
Richard Frankensteen
Profile: Detroit News profile, 1997.
Backed by UAW President Homer Martin, Frankensteen won the vice-presidency of the international union in 1937. But in 1939 Martin was ousted as president by R.J. Thomas, and Frankensteen lost as well.
During World War II he was appointed to the National War Labor Board and the National War Production Board by President Franklin Roosevelt. He was appointed by Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) President Philip Murray in 1941 as national director of efforts to organize workers in the expanding aviation industry during the war years. He retained the post when the UAW was given jurisdiction over the industry in 1942.
The power struggle turned ugly at the UAW’s convention in 1943 in Buffalo when Reuther delegates attacked Frankensteen and George F. Addes, secretary-treasurer of the UAW, for their support of piecework and incentive pay in auto plants. The Reuther faction circulated a campaign ditty to the tune of an old ballad, “Reuben and Rachel,” that suggested Frankensteen and Addes were taking orders from Joseph Stalin.
The verse went:
“Who are the boys who take their orders
Straight from the office of Joe Sta-leen?
No one else but the gruesome twosome,
George F. Addes and Frankensteen.
Who are the boys who fight for piecework,
To make the worker a machine?
No one else but the gruesome twosome,
George F. Addes and Frankensteen.”
Other verses, some unprintable, added spice to the doggerel.
In the end, the convention endorsed a Reuther resolution opposing piecework and incentive pay and Reuther defeated Frankensteen in a race for first vice-president. Addes narrowly kept his office.
At the 1943 UAW convention in Buffalo, Frankensteen was elected first vice-president of the UAW.
Frankensteen was a Wallace supporter at the 1944 Democratic convention.
From Tom Sugrue, The Origin of the Urban crisis, page 80:
“Several Detroit politicians used the housing issue to their advantage in the reelection bids later that year [1945], incumbent Mayor Edward Jeffries, in a campaign laden with racial innuendo, attacked UAW-backed mayoral candidate Richard Frankensteen, flooding Northwest and Northeast Side neighborhoods with literature warning of his opponent’s support for public housing and ties to black organizations.”
“Jeffries and his supporters combined anti-black and anticommunist sentiments into a potent political brew. Frankensteen, warned Jeffries and his supporters, was a “red” who would encourage “racial invasions” of white neighborhoods. Unlike Franksteen, Jeffries would uphold community interests. “Mayor Jeffries is Against Mixed Housing,” proclaimed a boldly printed campaign poster. It quoted Jeffries: “I have tried to safeguard your neighborhoods in the character in which you, their residents, have developed them.” The Home Gazette, a Northwest Side newspaper, editorialized that “There is no question where Edward J. Jeffries’ administration stands on mixed housing.” It praised the Detroit Housing Commission for “declaring that a majority of the people of the city of Detroit do not want the racial character of their neighborhoods changed, and for reiterating “its previous stand against attempts of Community-inspired Negroes to penetrate white residential sections.”
Black observers of the election and union supporters of Frankentseen were appalled by the blatant racial claims of Jeffries’s campaign, and at attempted to use economic populist and anti-Nazi rhetoric to deflate Jeffries’s charges. Henry Lee Moon, writing in the NAACP’s monthly, Crisis, accused Jeffries of appealing “to our more refined fascists, the big money interests, the precarious middle class whose sole inalienable possession is a white skin.” Jeffries’s racial appeals were remarkably successful. They bolstered his flagging campaign, and gave him a comfortable margin in November against UAW-backed candidate in a solidly union city. On the local level, the link between black and red was a clever for attracting white Democrats, suspicious of liberalism and its capacity for egalitarian political and social rhetoric.
Public housing is “Negro housing.”
Lichtenstein, page 235:
“Most significantly, the fault lines that had long divided autoworkers according to race, ethnicity, skill, and politics were now deeply buried within a larger commitment to the union and its cause. These divisions had not disappeared, of course: Richard Frankensteen’s unexpected defeat in November’s [1945] mayoral election had demonstrated the capacity of those forces backing Mayor Edward Jeffries to use racist and anti-Semitic innuendo and outright slander to pry Polish and Italian voters from the CIO, even in solidly working-class neighborhoods.”
Halpern, UAW Politics, 42-43:
“In the municipal elections, Frankensteen won 44 percent of the total ballot, somewhat more than the labor slate won in 1937. He took 61 percent in Polish working-class neighborhoods and 75 percent in Italian precincts. But the relative decline in their loyalty proved the margin of defeat for the CIO, which had never won more than half of the votes of those who lived in Irish or southern white sectors of the city.”
Time magazine, October 29, 1945
POLITICAL NOTES: Knight in Dull Armor
Monday, Oct. 29, 1945
When hulking Richard Truman Frankensteen was nominated for mayor of Detroit, many a U.S. left-winger got excited. Frankensteen was a founder and vice president of the vast United Automobile Workers, C.I.O. He had bled at the hands of Ford “service men” at the famed Battle of the Underpass in 1937. He also seemed to have some political sex appeal: he was a college man (University of Dayton ’32), a ready speaker, young (38) and did not mind admitting that he wrote operettas, collected dolls as a hobby. If U.S. labor was to produce, not merely influence poli. ticians. perhaps Frankensteen would lead the way.
But last week, as Detroit’s final election drew near, Dick Frankensteen looked less like a trail blazer than a man just feeling his way around in a lot of trees. He had spoken as few ringing words about labor as possible. The reason: even his enemies in the union wanted him to be mayor (and thus out of union officialdom) so there was little point in it. Instead, to woo the public, he harangued audiences about Detroit’s dirty alleys, its street-railway fares, tried hard to be everyman’s friend.
Target Elusive. None of this was very exciting. As every city boss knows, candidates should make great promises, roar for reform or sail into their opponents, particularly incumbent opponents. Frankensteen found that attacking his opponent, Mayor Edward J. Jeffries, was disconcertingly like shadow boxing. In six years as mayor, Jeffries had done little, had made few bad mistakes.
But the mayor found 206-pound Dick Frankensteen a target hard to miss. He charged that U.A.W.’s man was suppported by Communists and rabble-rousers, would run the city for a little group of labor chieftains. Smear pamphlets appeared on Detroit’s streets. Hecklers asked Frankensteen embarrassing questions about housing for Negroes, his plans for non-union city employes.
Losing ground, Frankensteen made dramatic attempts to settle the crucial Kelsey-Hayes strike. He failed to produce any dramatic results. Meanwhile the muddled state of Detroit’s labor affairs did nothing to improve his standing in the public eye. Last week Detroit politicos guessed his chances were no better than 50-50 (though he had drawn 82,936 primary votes to Jeffries’ 68,754), that he would win only if Detroit had a strong, last-minute impulse to throw out his opponent.
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You can read more from Joe Allen on Medium
Trump Courts the Teamsters
By Peter Olney
Trump and the mainstream media have been playing up his courting of the Teamsters. But will the powerful union really endorse him? Don’t bet on it.
Sean O’Brien has been driving the Teamsters in a new direction since he led a coalition campaign that included Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) to topple the union’s old guard in 2021.
Last year, O’Brien and TDU teamed up in a grassroots contract campaign at UPS that eliminated two-tier for delivery drivers, ended forced six-day work weeks, increased part-time wages from $15.50 to $23 an hour, and forced UPS to create thousands of more full-time jobs for part-time workers.
Under his leadership, the Teamsters have brought back the strike weapon, used it to win strong contracts, and organize the unorganized – including at DHL, Sysco, and US Foods.
O’Brien hit the stump with Senator Bernie Sanders and Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, to denounce white-collar crime syndicates like Amazon. He’s spoken at the TDU Convention and Labor Notes, the biennial conference of the grassroots, troublemaking wing of the labor movement.
So more than a few progressives were left scratching their heads when Trump hosted O’Brien in Mar-a-Lago January 4. Alarm grew when Trump met with Teamster leaders and members at IBT headquarters three weeks later.
Now, headlines are breaking that the union contributed $45,000 to the Republican National Committee. What the hell is going on?
Engaging with Members and the Issues
It’s understandable why Trump is courting the Teamsters. Fake populist, fake friend of the working stiff, is the would-be dictator’s whole brand. Trump landing the endorsement of the 1.2 million Teamsters would be a major coup, and a disaster for Biden who needs labor’s support to win in the Midwest and other swing states.
Could it really be that the Teamsters, who have not backed a Republican for President since mobbed-up leaders endorsed Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the 1980s, are capitulating to MAGA?
Don’t bet on it. But the Teamsters face the harsh reality that approximately half of their members support Trump. And they are not alone among unions in facing this problem. The union I worked for, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), faces a similar challenge of doing politics with a membership where Trump support is surprisingly strong in many locals.
Under the headline, “Biden stakes his reputation on blue-collar workers, turns out they’re Trump voters”, a Bloomberg report using small-donor data documents that, “Mechanics and truck drivers give to Trump, while professors and scientists support Biden.”
This fact is a crisis not just for Biden, but for the entire labor movement. It defies an easy response if the goal is to engage and move more union members away from Trump in a highly polarized and toxic political environment.
Trump and other right-wing populists have been exceptionally effective at using wedge issues to win over white working class voters. Union voters are more likely to vote against Trump than their nonunion counterparts, but union leaders have largely struggled to persuade their members to break with Trump.
In the Teamsters, many members resented the rubber-stamp endorsement of Democratic presidential candidates by former Teamster President James Hoffa, O’Brien’s predecessor and the son of Jimmy Hoffa.
O’Brien is trying something different. The Teamsters are meeting with all presidential candidates. They even sat down with Cornel West, Marianne Williamson, and Robert Kennedy, Jr. Rank-and-file members have been part of each roundtable and Q&A.
Next month, members and Teamster leaders are scheduled to host President Biden.
The IBT donated $45,000 to both the Republican and Democratic convention funds and pledges to have members “on the ground and active in both Conventions.”
In the meantime, members will be polled about their views on union issues like organizing rights, the NLRB, and right to work as well as on more general issues – their responses will be compared with the candidates’ stances.
A more open process could leave some Trump supporters and undecideds in the union’s ranks more open to listening to the Teamsters Union’s statements and endorsements.
Will it work? Who knows?
The Fallout
“Trump’s visit to the IBT was a circus,” one attendee told me. “He didn’t answer a single question or address a single concern. Everything was just a rant about immigration. It was disgusting.”
In the short term, there have been real downsides. Trump, the master pitchman, has effectively played up his Teamster appearances for publicity, leaving some union allies and members bewildered and alienated.
Many Teamsters want no part of Trump and resent their union being part of anything that could further validate or legitimize him.
“Trump’s visit to the IBT was a circus,” one attendee told me. “He didn’t answer a single question or address a single concern. Everything was just a rant about immigration. It was disgusting.”
While the media has played up Trump’s courtship of the Teamsters, Trump himself hardly sounds confident.
Asked at the press conference at the IBT what odds he would put on getting the Teamsters endorsement, Trump stammered, “Well, I don’t know, they never do that, they never give it but I felt, I felt, yeah, we have a good shot, I think.”
Later Trump added: “I don’t know if the top people are going to support me, but within the union I have tremendous support.”
Sadly, Trump’s not entirely wrong about his support in the members and that fact goes a long way toward explaining not just the Teamsters endorsement process but the challenge confronting many union leaders.
Can the Teamsters Help Defeat Trump?
Engineering Biden endorsements is not front of mind for many on the left. In Michigan, progressive and Arab-Americans called for a people to vote “no preference” in the Democratic primary to protest Biden’s capitulation to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.
No one in their right mind wants a Trump victory in November. If and when the Teamsters endorse Biden, it will surprise no one. But what will it take for it to make a meaningful contribution to defeating Trump?
First, the Teamsters endorsement needs to persuade at least some Biden skeptics or soft-Trump supporters in their ranks.
Even more importantly, the union will have to put real money and boots on the ground to work in critical swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada.
The Teamsters intervened heavily in the Georgia senate race to help elect Raphael Warnock and Jon Osoff to give Democrats the Senate majority in 2021. That new Senate majority passed the Butch Lewis Act. Named for a Teamster and TDU leader, the act saved the pensions of over 400,000 Teamsters and millions of other workers and their families.
Today, the principal sponsor of the pension relief bill, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, will need the support of at least some Trump supporters to win reelection in Ohio, a state that will likely go for Trump in November. The Teamsters will be stumping for Brown. Already an ad aimed at working class voters features Teamster retiree leader Mike Walden crediting Brown for saving truck drivers’ pensions.
Last summer, Democrats were bewildered and furious at Shawn Fain for critical remarks aimed at Biden that they said risked boosting Trump among UAW members. Those concerns are now long-forgotten in the wake of the UAW’s Biden endorsement. Now, it’s the Teamsters turn in the headlines.
Trump has milked his appearances with the Teamsters for photo ops and publicity. That’s unfortunate and unseemly. But don’t miss the signal for the noise.
At the IBT three weeks later, O’Brien followed Trump at the podium and told reporters:
“There’s no question that the Biden administration has been great for unions.”
“Whatever candidate supports our issues is going to get our endorsement,” O’Brien added..
The challenge for the Teamsters and the whole labor movement is to make such endorsements, and the GOTV programs that follow, effective in actually defeating Trump.
…
This piece originally ran in Portside
New Book Shows: The AFL-CIO can be Reformed, Locally and from the Bottom-Up!
By Steve Early
For the past 65 years, the main locus of union democracy and reform struggles in the U.S. has been local unions, which hold leadership elections every three years and are closest to the membership. Thousands of rank-and-file workers have campaigned for more militant unionism by running for and winning local office.
Some have had the backing of national networks of like-minded dissidents, including Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a TDU-inspired reform caucus within the United Auto Workers. And, in recent years, TDU and UAWD supporters even ousted national headquarters officials in Washington and Detroit, with the result being more effective contract campaigning and/or strike activity at major employers in the trucking and auto industries.
Very few modern-day reformers have mounted similar challenges to the status quo in city or state labor federations chartered by the national AFL-CIO. Representing workers from different AFL-CIO affiliates, these central labor councils (CLCs) may be just as bureaucratic or dysfunctional as the individual unions that belong to them. But, structurally, most are too far removed from workplace struggles to generate many electoral challenges to incumbent AFL-CIO officials, at the local, regional, or state level.
As a result, there have been few contested elections, like in the Teamsters and UAW, with opposing slates offering alternative programs for union revival. In AFL-CIO leadership votes, officers and executive board members are chosen by convention or council delegates, the same method used by most national unions. The rank-and-file has little or no say about who runs AFL-CIO bodies.
A Rare Labor Insurgency
One notable exception is the Vermont Labor Council, which represents 20,000 public and private sector workers. In the Green Mountain State, due its small scale, most state AFL-CIO convention delegates are working members or retirees, not full-time officials. Since 2019, they have cast ballots in several hotly contested elections which resulted in a mandate for change.
Most recently, last September, they elected an all-female leadership team to three top officer positions and made Katie Maurice the youngest state AFL-CIO president in the country and the only one who belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Maurice took over last fall from David Van Deusen, a fellow member of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). In a new book from PM Press called Insurgent Labor, Van Deusen describes how a group of local union officers and staff members created a reform faction called “Vermont AFL-CIO United!” five years ago. These rank-and-file activists were frustrated by their labor council’s lack of militancy and creativity, plus its inability to aid new organizing, contract campaigns, or strikes.
Fourteen United candidates got elected in 2019—taking all the top officer jobs, forming a majority on the executive board, and winning a national AF-CIO-ordered re-run of the original election. Their goal was to revitalize a moribund organization through membership education, mobilization, and direct action. They favored greater internal democracy and transparency, independent political action and more labor support for social and environmental justice.
But, inside and outside Vermont, that progressive agenda proved to be surprisingly controversial. Rather than welcoming and applauding the election results, the national AFL-CIO —then headed by the late Richard Trumka—threatened to remove the reformers from office and put their council under the control of appointed staff members from Washington.
As Van Deusen recounts in his book, this trusteeship was averted and union activists in Vermont have continued to make their state labor council a model for the rest of the nation. Last Fall, a second United! slate again won a majority of the seats on the labor council executive board. Van Deusen’s successor, 31-year old Katie Maurice hailed the results as an “affirmation of our desire to continue to focus on rank-and-file organizing within the state of Vermont over political lobbying.”
New organizing, plus a major affiliation with the long independent Vermont State Employees Association, has nearly doubled the state fed’s dues-paying membership since 2019 (although the VSEA did not support the United! candidates last fall and instead backed the building trades slate that lost).
A Record of Accomplishment
What else have Vermonters accomplished in the last four years– in addition to fending off a hostile take-over from Inside-the-Beltway? As Van Deusen reports in Insurgent Labor, state labor council meetings were opened up to all union members, not just elected delegates, and began to attract their largest turnouts ever.
The reformers worked with building trades unions to pass so-called “responsible contractor ordinances” that require prevailing wages on major public construction projects in multiple Vermont cities and towns.
Vermont became the first state labor federation in the region involved in the “Renew New England Alliance.” This six-state “Green New Deal” coalition is campaigning for the creation of thousands of good union jobs—for workers building affordable housing, installing rooftop solar panels, cleaning up pollution, and slashing the carbon emissions responsible for climate change.
The new leadership’s savvy use of social media, radio shows, and local TV appearances enabled organized labor to reach a bigger non-labor audience—and build stronger relationships with community allies. Within the broader Vermont labor movement, Van Deusen aided rank-and-filers in non-AFL-CIO unions during their fight against a public employee pension cut favored by Republican governor Phil Scott and leaders of the Democrat-controlled state legislature. Labor council organizers used Vermont’s annual May Day rally in Montpelier to build support for the state’s immigrant workers, who are mainly Latinos employed on dairy farms.
The new and improved state AFL-CIO has given Vermont Democrats a much-needed dope slap by endorsing more third-party candidates for state and local office. As Maurice explains, “since 2019, we have strengthened our ties with the Vermont Progressive Party, which has not only focused on workers’ rights but also championed broader social justice causes, in a political landscape often dominated by powerful corporate interests. “
According to Maurice, “The VPP’s role as a party for the working class is not just about rhetoric; it’s about tangible actions. It’s about supporting legislation like the VT PRO Act that would protect the right to organize, about standing up against union-busting tactics, and ensuring that union members have a seat at the policy-making table in Montpelier.”
Misconduct or Model Behavior?
Before his death in August, 2021, Rich Trumka had an opportunity to support an exemplary CLC initiative, calling attention to the still looming threat of fascism in the U.S. In anticipation of then-President Trump’s likely rejection of the 2020 election results, Vermont labor council delegates issued a bold call for “a general strike of all working people in our state” if there was a right-wing coup aimed at keeping Trump in office.
AFL-CIO headquarters tried to block any discussion of such a contingency plan in response to a possible constitutional crisis (of the sort which did occur, shortly thereafter, on January 6, 2021). After Vermont labor leaders debated the subject anyway, Trumka ordered an official probe of their alleged non-compliance with national AFL-CIO rules applying to local affiliates.
In response, then state fed president Van Deusen urged AFL-CIO headquarters to investigate “how the example we are setting in the Green Mountain State could serve as a model for what a more engaged, more member-driven, more democratic, more anti-racist, more pro-immigrant and more organizing centered labor movement…could actually look like in other parts of the country.”
As readers of Insurgent Labor will discover, this tug-of-war had a happy ending, temporarily. Vermont labor reformers got a “final warning” from Trumka shortly before his death, but none were removed and replaced by appointees from Washington, D.C. Under Trumka’s successor, Liz Shuler, an organizing subsidy was resumed and relations with the national AFL-CIO took a welcome turn for the better–until late January.
In a Jan. 22 letter, President Shuler informed the council’s new officers and e-board that she was investigating last Fall’s “election process” based on a “protest appeal” filed by an affiliated union. She also directed them to “refrain from any discussion of the investigation…with the general public or entities and individuals not affiliated with the Labor Council.”
This attempted gag order is directed at United! supporters who have, in past internal disputes, tried to enlist allies on the AFL-CIO national executive board or keep labor media outlets informed about interference from Washington. Their impressive record of internal democracy and worker engagement should be a source of inspiration for trade unionists elsewhere, not further headquarters harassment and meddling.
Yet this new controversy does help amplify Insurgent Labor’s bottom line message: the ability to make real change rests in the hands of grassroots activists. To meet the challenges facing Vermont workers, Van Deusen and his reform caucus built on the best of organized labor, at the local and state level. They didn’t wait for top-down solutions or instructions from the national AFL-CIO, which has, consistently, been no friend of bottom up change in Vermont.
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This article originally appeared in Capitol Hill Citizen. For ordering info, see: https://www.capitolhillcitizen.com/order-an-issue/
Strategy, the Movement and Power: Debating Labour and Community Organizing
By Kurt Stand
Two recent books, Labor Power and Strategy and Power Concedes Nothing, speak to the urgency of our times – the sense of danger, the sense of possibility, the need to grasp the moment. The fact that these are each collective efforts with multiple authors providing perspectives based on different realms of engagement is a reminder that only by drawing broadly from all streams of activism will we be able to defeat the fascist danger which threatens us all, be able to overcome the fragmentation and destruction which capitalism in its neoliberal phase is imposing on working people, on society at large. Yet the two books reflect strikingly different frameworks as the following quotes make clear.
The overarching perspective informing the essays in Labor Power and Strategy is put forward in an introduction by Glenn Perušek, faculty member at the Building Trades Academy at Michigan State University and former director of the Center for Strategic Research at the national AFL-CIO:
“The labor left sees building workers’ power as starting with existing organizations – mobilizing union members in contract and organizing campaigns. This activism needs to blend into broader solidarities – with other unionists, other workers, and other popular interests. Organizing the unorganized must be a top priority. Building active, member-controlled and member-mobilizing unions, integrally connected with their communities, striving for good-paying jobs for all amounts to movement unionism. … Building strong, active unions also requires a comprehensive research and planning process. … Finally, some conception of aspirational goals – politics in the broadest and most positive sense – must infuse labor. A revitalized labor movement needs to be part of an overall multiform movement for social justice.”1
The discussion which follows focuses on how to bring about that revitalization and realize in practice the potential power workers hold. The contrasting emphasis of Power Concedes Nothing is expressed by Alicia Garza, principal at Black Futures Lab and co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, in her essay concluding the volume:
“For the last two decades, the US left has been forced to reckon with race in a new way; none more salient than the push to address and engage with the impacts of racial capitalism and state-sanctioned violence. … Marginalized communities largely led this push and moved the US left to a reckoning that is transforming the left itself. With respect to electoral organizing, segments of the US left are pushing beyond a strategy of nonengagement to using electoral organizing as defense, with an eye on long-term power-building. While still certainly uneven, the engagement of leftists of color in the fight to claim the country’s politics is a significant development, one that must become more than a trend. It must become a lifestyle. In order to build and seize power and transform how power operates, we must take electoral engagement even further to incorporate electoral strategies that shape our larger fights and help us win.”2
Although the core anti-capitalist, racial and social justice outlook informing both books overlap, the divergence between them is palpable. Perhaps having the two books “talk to each other,” we can uncover paths to a convergence.
Strategic Power at the Workplace
Labor Power is built around an extensive interview with John Womack Jr. (a retired professor of Latin American History and Economics at Harvard) conducted by Peter Olney (former director of organizing for the International Labor and Warehouse Union) in which the work’s key point is made: Workers need to understand the structure of business in order to locate management’s vulnerabilities and then attack those in order to win a particular strike or organizing campaign. Being strategic in this sense – and not being sidetracked by non-strategic struggles notwithstanding the moral importance and social meaning these might have – is of particular importance because the weakening of organized labor in the United States (and globally) the past four decades has led to the concentration of capital in ever fewer hands, growth of massive inequality, and a loss of popular democratic power. The current upsurge of union organizing and strikes raises the possibility of overcoming that weakness, but, Womack posits, militancy without direction will be unable to shift power relationships.
Weakness and decline did not occur because of happenstance. Capital reshaped industrial production through sets of policies imposed under the rubric of neoliberalism, in part to overcome limitations imposed on management “freedom” that union organizing had previously established by way of a post-World War II “social contract.” The success of that restructuring was due to a long-term strategic approach largely absent from organized labor. Globalization combined with “just-in-time production” has meant that production is scattered in multiple smaller units – quite unlike the enormous factories of the past where manufacturing was integrated at central locations and large inventories were maintained to weather downturns and strikes. That means shutting down any one site may not have the impact such an action might have had during the time of the rise of industrial unionism. On the other hand, production is far more dependent than in the past on regional, national, international supply chain links – and it is at the point of those links where worker power can be best exercised to leverage far-reaching change. As Womack explains:
“Let us set aside labor’s political, legal, and other kinds of struggles. These all take their own kinds of strategic analysis, planning, and action. If we focus here on campaigns of struggle along supply chains, I think there is only one kind of study for them, to find the industrially and technically strategic weaknesses in the chains.”3
The logic here applies whether the conflict is restricted to a contract dispute or a demand for recognition, or whether the conflict takes place as part of a wider confrontation over working-class rights. And while this directly highlights the importance of workers in transport industries, a granular analysis can show how workers in tech or services, manufacturing or agriculture, can similarly find points of vulnerability at the heart of capital’s power. Organizing at Amazon, for example, rather than being aimed at every site where the company does business, is better focused on warehouse hubs that can disrupt a whole distribution chain. Finding the particular “choke point” is not only a political question, it’s also a technical question; Womack argues that the ability to do strategic research is vital to labor organization. Yet that is one side of the equation – workers equally need to cultivate a spirit of resistance and defiance, that is essential to any strategy to exercise power. Womack explains:
“Those teachers [striking in West Virginia] confirmed to me yet again that over the last forty-odd years pro-labor liberals have gone wrong in constant appeals to indignation or pity for workers, appeals for feelings to help victims. What works with working people is courage in action, the brave display of power. Once they see somebody acting forcefully in justice, they’re more likely to follow. You see solidarity;”4 adding, “ … their public display of independent power and their public proof of the merits of their cause are the main lessons for labor in general now.”5
The strength of this understanding is that it redirects labor thinking to being concrete rather than relying on sentiment or unfocused militancy. Management’s view of “labor problems” relies on a realistic assessment of what is needed to maximize profits (i.e. how to maximize control over the workforce) within prevailing conditions; labor can do no less by way of response if it is to regain the initiative. Key to doing so means recentering unionism back at the point of production, contrary to the drift over past decades in which comprehensive campaigns focusing on consumers, students, stockholders, the media, the general public) have taken center stage. Important as these are, they tend to remove leadership away from the involved workers and instead give greater importance to those organizing in peripheral spheres, with strikers or organizing workers playing a secondary role. For Womack, the center of any challenge to existing power has to come from people who are impacted, to those workers defending their rights. That is where the intersection between strategic knowledge and strategic action can lie.
There is a danger, however, in the way Womack poses the issue of organizing and power, for by focusing on those sections of the labor force who hold power based on their location in the production process, there is a failure to fully appreciate the necessity to engage all workers irrespective of whether or not they are at a choke point. Moreover, a conception of organizing that over-relies on expert research can underestimate the initiatives working people take on their own – as, for example, treating “hot shops” where workers show a readiness and willingness to organize as a distraction if it isn’t “strategic” as if strategy could be developed that ignores or overrides decisions working people make on their own behalf. Finally, management isn’t passive; the very factors that can enhance labor power can also make capital more determined to undermine the basis of that strength.
This is a critique a number of the commentators in Labor Power make; as a collective enterprise, the book provides a look at class struggle from differing perspectives. A particularly cogent example can be found in a response by Katy Fox-Hodess (lecturer in Work, Employment, People and Organizations at the University of Sheffield) in which she examines the power of dockworkers – as strategic a workforce as one can find in world of globalized production chains. Citing examples from Portugal and Chile, she notes that whenever victory was attained, it was dependent on alliances with “non-strategic” workers be they students, be they the unemployed. Fox-Hodess writes:
“ … Power flows in multiple directions across multiple dimensions – economic, social, and political – in conflicts between capital and labor. The more strategic the industry, the more likely it is that the capitalist state will intervene. As a result, labor movement revitalization will require understanding not only how to find and take advantages of vulnerabilities in the technical division of labor but also how to find and take advantage of economic, social, and political vulnerabilities within the capitalist totality. This will by necessity require a clear understanding of the forms of power each group of workers may offer and a clear understanding that success will come through articulating and combining powers across multiple dimensions, suggesting the need to rethink hierarchies that privilege the technical over the social and political.”6
Strategic Power in the Electoral Arena
The subtitle of Power Concedes Nothing – “How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections” – serves notice that virtually all (if not all) the essays maintain a clear focus on the danger of authoritarian reaction and the need to build a multi-racial alliance that contests for political office around maintenance and extension of democratic rights. Each of the book’s contributors see the necessity of making the defeat of the Trump (and Trump-inspired) fascist danger a priority through electoral activity and the complementary necessity of building power through mobilizing heretofore excluded communities. Unity built within and between communities subjected to systemic oppression is thus at the core of any strategy to build wider unity around democratic rights and social justice within our country as a whole. Union struggles are part of the picture but there is little about workplace mobilization, labor-management conflict or internal union divides – nor, for that matter is social justice organizing unconnected to the electoral arena given much attention. Rather, the priority is consistently on how to win elections and gain strength in government sufficient to implement public policy changes that attack poverty and inequity.
Doing so, the authors of the book contest the view that voter mobilization is not foundational for systemic change (a possible implication of Womack’s conception of organizing). Addressing that outlook directly, National Domestic Workers Alliance Executive Director Ai-jen Poo and National Research Director Linda Burnham in an essay on the “get out the vote” mobilization of domestic workers during the 2020 elections, contest misconceptions that minimize the radicalizing impact election campaigns can have:
“There is debate within the social justice left about whether electoral organizing is ‘transformative’ or not. The logic of on-going issue-based and constituency-based organizing is very different from that of electoral organizing … When done well, it engenders a transformation in consciousness from apathy to concern about particular grievances to an understanding of the dynamics of broader social and economic inequities…
“… [On the other hand] to get millions to flip the switch from non-voting to voting – isn’t that transformative? The domestic worker movement mobilized thousands of canvassers and phone bankers in active defense of democracy – isn’t that transformative? … Their work centered the political power of women of color in a system designed to minimize and negate that power. The rhythm and metrics and subjective feel of the work are different from grassroots organizing. But that too can be transformative.”7
What gives salience to this connection is that existing political and legal institutions (let alone ideological and cultural narratives) have undermined the ability of popular movements to move beyond resistance toward implementation of alternatives that people can see and feel in daily life. Focusing on governing office provides a means to overcome limitations that inhibit the ability to shift public policy toward economic and racial justice, a means to create alternative structures of power in the moment when challenges of environmental destruction, violence, poverty, inequality and declining quality of life are everywhere apparent.
Most of the essays and interviews that comprise Power Concedes Nothing provide a close-eyed view of how the authors engaged various communities to put such an electoral orientation into practice. Initiatives such as these do not take place in isolation, rather, they share an overarching conception of systemic change. Maurice Mitchell, National Director of the Working Families Party, expressed the underlying aim of left engagement in mainstream politics in an article reviewing the course of the 2020 presidential primaries and general election:
“Neither of the progressive candidates won the Democratic presidential primary, but we were clear-eyed going into the general election. Joe Biden became the standard-bearer and pick to take on Trump, and progressives knew we had to push the Democratic nominee as far to the left as possible. Donald Trump was an existential threat, a global leader of the far right, and we had to defeat him at all costs. The campaigns run by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were instrumental in injecting progressive ideas into mainstream discourse. Canceling student debt, a wealth tax, and health care for all were no longer fringe ideas. Even candidates closer to the center were talking about the need for transformative changes. Our picks were not victorious, but our policies were front and center.”
Mitchell, then quotes from an interview he gave to the Nation in 2021,
“Making Donald Trump a one-term president is our moral mandate and a necessary step to building the world we want to see. Our plan is to beat Trump while organizing a multiracial movement powerful enough to turn our demands into policy. Electing Joe Biden is a door, not a destination.”8
Yet a door that doesn’t open may lead some to draw different conclusions. The impetus for left engagement in mainstream politics flowed from the way mass movements that drew millions into the streets – be it anti-war protests in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2002, the “Day Without Immigrants” boycott of work, school, shopping on May Day in 2006, the Womens March to protest Trump’s inauguration in 2017, the on-going demonstrations, rallies and street actions following the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 – were unable, on any significant level, to win legislation that met the demands of those mobilizations. When powerful movements of resistance are unable to create vehicles for positive actions, then space opens up for reaction to take the offensive. It is a recognition of that need to build tangible change out of mass action, not as an end in itself, but as a step toward further change, that inspires the contributors to Power Concedes Nothing.
This danger exists when it comes to electoral engagement too; political success can and often is turned around – recall how victory soon thereafter turned to defeat (as in Virginia), how a narrow loss by Democrats allowed reaction to tighten its grips on power (as in Florida), or, going back a minute, Republican congressional and state-wide gains two years after Obama was elected President in 2008. If electoral mobilization isn’t connected to local membership organizations, gains made can be fleeting – the exercise of power needs to be rooted in on-going engagement if communities are able to find chokepoints equivalent to those sought in labor struggles. Mondale Robinson of the Black Male Voter Project, in one of the several roundtable conversations included in Power Concedes Nothing, noted how talk of reparations gained traction during the 2020 presidential campaign, without sufficient means to turn words of promise into tangible, meaningful policies:
“ … I think what frightens me is what happens to the Black people that came out because of the energy you are talking about – those possibilities of what could happen with an administration that’s willing to hear this conversation about reparations – but then nothing is delivered. … for those of us who knock on Black people’s doors, they’re going to say, we’re still dealing with this, they didn’t do this …”9
Overcoming Obstacles
No form of action, no campaign, no organizing drive can guarantee victory, and no gain – be it electing a progressive to office or winning a union contract – can guarantee that what was won might not be hollowed out. Campaigns don’t take place in a vacuum; existing power is always looking for ways to reassert its dominance.
Robinson makes the critical point: “If you are organizing the communities, please be of the community …” adding “… we need to figure out how we provide services beyond a ballot for Black people, if we want them to vote for our candidates and issues.”10
Organizations, networks, activists need to come from or be deeply rooted amongst people being mobilized so that decisions to orient in one direction or the other, decisions as to how to address immediate material needs, are community decisions where the people impacted take ownership of the process, including evaluation and reevaluation of the tactics and strategic orientation.
It is only when organizing is genuinely rooted that the political clarity of Mitchell’s assertion that Biden’s election was “a door not a destination,” can be made real and continue over the inevitable flow of successes and setbacks. The 15-year UFCW unionizing drive (1994 – 2009) of 5,000 workers at the Smithfield Meatpacking plant in North Carolina exemplifies what that can look like and provides a bridge leading to an intersection of the themes in each of these books. Gene Bruskin, a long-time union activist who served as UFCW campaign director from 2006-2008, recalls a perfect example of a choke point writing in Labor Power about the moment when workers struck the livestock department: “trucks were lining up and thousands of pigs were either squealing frantically in the trucks or stuck outside the gates heading toward the plant, with no workers to tend them. Once hogs get out of a truck, it’s difficult to get them back in.”11 Ninety workers had shut down the entire plant and “within six months they signed a union contract with raises, safety and line-speed clauses, a good grievance procedure, and, most important, respect and dignity.”12
Yet as Bruskin adds, prior to that was a walkout of Latino immigrant workers to protest deportations – an action they organized on their own initiative through their own networks. So too, African American workers petitioned Smithfield to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday. Although the union drive began largely in response to abysmal working conditions, those galvanizing demands arose from community opposition to discrimination broader than the workplace. UFCW utilized the NLRB (without which the worker who organized the job action at the livestock department would not have regained his job) and OSHA (providing the legal basis for the safety complaint), and sympathetic elected politicians, wherever possible. Maintaining consistent pressure from multiple places without ever losing sight of the need to constantly build and rebuild support amongst Smithfield’s workers, is the reason why the numerous setbacks during the campaign never translated into the demoralization of defeat. And it was why that choke point action was able to prove decisive whereas previous disruptions in production never got past simply being disruptive.
Successful organizing to gain elective office can follow an analogous path as happened over the course of a decade in Arizona beginning in 2010 with a campaign initiated by LUCHA (Living United for Change Arizona) to overturn a “show me your papers law”13 which sought to install fear throughout the state’s Spanish-speaking population. Following that came successful organizing for public school funding, state-wide paid sick leave/living wage increases, and to defeat Sherriff Joe Arpaio (a national hero to the racist right for his brutal treatment of prisoners). This went hand in hand with massive voter registration, rebuilding a Democratic Party infrastructure that Democratic leadership had left to atrophy, and election victories for municipal, county and state office. This led to Trump’s defeat in the 2020 elections in a state that has been a bastion of right-wing power since the days of Barry Goldwater.
César Fierros Mendoza (LUCHA’s communications manager) explained the linkages that made this possible:
“It is incumbent that we engage in the electoral process to oust politicians who stand against us and elect those who stand with us, but elections cannot be the only tactic we engage in. Often our people are disheartened by what feels like wasted energy spent on elections for people who will ultimately betray us, but that is only because we usually fail to make explicit the larger strategy that elections are a small part of. At the end of the day, we’re trying to build political power to reshape our communities into places where we can thrive, and electoral power is essential to that project.”14
Long-term strategy and engagement in the moment need flow one into the other – when social change and immediate needs become divided, organizing (be it electoral or workplace) becomes divorced from popular participation. When pre-conceived ideas are imposed, politics becomes sterile. Any particular approach or direction needs to be constantly tested, reevaluated and altered both by deeper insight in the changing nature of the environment and the initiatives, attitudes, perspectives of the wider community (be those outlooks ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’).
Failure to do so has consequence in labor organizing – a prime example was the United Farm Workers ill-fated strawberry campaign in the mid-1990s which was based on intensive research on the industry without equivalent engagement with the workforce. That is a cul-de-sac those engaged in political campaigns based on programs divorced from people often become trapped. A prime example took place at DSA’s convention in 2019, when delegates passed a “Bernie or Bust” resolution mandating that Sanders was the only candidate the organization would support in the 2020 presidential election. David Duhalde (DSA’s former youth director and current vice chair of Democratic Socialists of America Fund) notes in an essay in Power Concedes Nothing, that the decision “hurt DSA’s ability to work with other mass organizations during the general election, and paralyzed the organization around the general presidential election as the COVID-19 pandemic, surging mobilizations against police violence, and growing right-wing violence changed the landscape in unforeseen ways.”15
This is contrary to the responsiveness to immediate circumstances that led to DSA’s massive growth in 2016, contrary to the kind of organizing others were doing that prevented Trump’s bid to hold onto office in 2020. Or, as Duhalde concludes, “Socialists should avoid solutions and blanket decisions that are devoid of an analysis of the particular conditions and scenarios at play.”16 Sanders himself recognized this, endorsing Biden after the primaries had run their course, based on the same logic as Mitchell articulated – his presidency would be a “door not a destination.”
Organizationally, DSA has moved away from such blanket statements, but a strong undercurrent continues to advocate artificial straightjackets for elected socialists, uphold narrow criteria for supporting candidates or evaluating them after elections. What makes the perspective of those who pretend that they could and should control elected officials so problematic is that it echoes the anti-democratic ethos that calls all politics and politicians corrupt. That leads all too many to seek solutions outside the social sphere, to abstain from voting, it leads others to turn to the authoritarianism of Trump and his ilk, it leaves corporate power unscathed. Forgotten is a simple truth: political leaders are kept honest by organizations and movements strong enough to support them.
Bringing it All Together
The United Auto Workers strike, embodying much of the approach Womack put forth,17 exemplifies the importance of linkages. The victorious strike was built upon the expression of power through mutual support by walking out simultaneously at General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis; it was built upon a strategic use of power by striking selectively at each. The UAW also built solidarity within and outside the union by seeing the development of electric vehicles as a potential source of union jobs rather than as a competition between two sets of workers – similarly, the union rejected attempts by Trump and other MAGA Republicans to pose US and Chinese workers in opposition to each other by keeping the focus on corporate greed. Flowing from this, the union displayed genuine political independence, denouncing Trump yet holding off on endorsing Biden until he addressed specific needs of the workforce.
Another example of strategic solidarity was the successful strike undertaken by multiple unions working in tandem by health care workers at Kaiser Permanente. The strike was selective and episodic, mobilizing members that impacted the corporation’s bottom line, while minimizing disruption to patients – so the company could not pose workers against the community as frequently happened during management’s anti-labor offensive in the 1980s and 90s. Moreover, the unions involved were able to connect their grievances due to nursing shortages, their demands around pay, hours and staffing into a community issue of public health and patient need. Coordinated actions by unionists combined with public outreach forced Kaiser Permanente to accept the unions’ basic demands.
A third, more challenging example of a strategic approach to building working class unity against corporate power is seen in the rank-and-file movements within railroad worker unions which was able to gain a critical demand for paid sick leave that had appeared lost when the unions, under pressure from corporations and the Biden Administration, initially agreed to inadequate contracts. But two rank-and-file movements (one a multi-union movement, the other located within the largest rail union) developed a strategy working in cooperation with progressive caucus members of Congress, were able to win through pressure what had been lost at the bargaining table. Railroad accidents, in particular the disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, reinforced the connection workers were making: demands for increased staffing are also a demand for community safety.
As with the UAW and the Coalition of Unions at Kaiser Permanente, the rail workers won because of combining solidarity with a strategy rooted in understand where the corporations were vulnerable.18 But many outsiders failed to see that victory for what it was, failing in a sense to understand how political action and worker organizing can combine from the standpoint of organizing, when the organizing takes place from a position of relative weakness. More to the point, it is rooted in failing to understand the mutual dependence of workplace action and political mobilization in the wider public sphere. And this is crucial, for whatever gains are made in the current upsurge of labor action will prove ephemeral unless accompanied by a direct connection to political organizing rooted in mass mobilization and electoral action. The same holds true in reverse, elected officials and mass movements of protest will be unable to consolidate and move beyond protest without the structural power of organized labor acting to overcome the structural power of capital in defining and limiting social and economic rights.
After all union solidarity doesn’t automatically translate into solidarity around public education, affordable housing, criminal justice reform, universal health care, abortion rights (let alone opposition to war or support for environmental justice); that requires a fuller understanding of class. As Bill Fletcher (racial justice, labor and international activist, scholar and author) puts it in Labor Power, “Race and gender are not identity questions. They speak to a specific set of contradictions and forms of oppression that are central to actually existing capitalism.”19 Stresses that inhere in our social structures and within the capitalist system obscure that understanding.
This is where the need to create – both within labor and within political and social justice organizations, structures that are truly controlled and strategically directed by members, by impacted communities. A crucial component of that lies in education – not in the form of trainings or lectures (important as these can be in some contexts), but rather through participatory education, an underutilized form of organizing that expands mutual support by personalizing linkages that grow out of the experience and knowledge of those being engaged.
Melissa Shetler, from the Climate Jobs National Resource Center and Cornell’s Labor Leading on Climate Initiative, puts it in one of the most incisive essays from Labor Power:
“If we want an activated membership, we must practice a participatory democracy, and a participatory pedagogy, that will engage them. To develop leaders, or even better recognize and support already existing ones, we must engage workers in collective action in which they are valued, heard, and able to leverage their power. While identifying strategic choke points can indeed be effective, what was strategic today may not be strategic tomorrow. Without a broad analysis, organizers can spend all their time building power around a position that, in a swiftly evolving global economy, suddenly no longer exists. But if we build broader power, learn to be adaptive, and practice participatory democracy, we can construct new ways of being within the old structures that may ultimately generate momentum,” concluding, “successful pedagogy – and successful labor organizing – is community building.”20
Community building in this sense means forging a new sense of community as a political project that grounds multiracial democratic politics within the anti-corporate class politics of labor action; making multiracial politics a “lifestyle,” as Garza put it, bringing together social justice and economic justice organizing as distinct yet also intertwined spheres of engagement.21 Building union power also involves autonomous action to expand democratic rights; fighting to expand democratic rights means not only fighting the racist, fascist right, but fighting corporate power that structurally inhibits the exercise of popular power anywhere in society.
Such linkages need to be institutionalized, in a form that brings the insights – and the organizing upon which those insights have been developed – together in practice. With a final turn toward Power Concedes Nothing, we conclude with a passage by Maria Poblet, executive director of Grassroots Power Project, charting how those connections can be made.
“To win governing power, state-power-building groups need the capacities to design, drive the demand for, legislate, enact, and defend agendas for progressive reforms that serve the needs of low-income, working-class, and historically marginalized communities. In doing so, these power-building groups will not only help hold electeds accountable through their terms in office, but fundamentally reshape the structure of the government itself, creating the conditions for more authentic and multiracial democracy… “… pathways to gaining governing power may be circuitous, with setbacks and side steps as well as opportunities to make forward leaps, along the way.
We will continue to oppose bad government policies, and to fight the advance of authoritarianism and white nationalism. We show up, mobilize our bases, and defend our communities. At the same time, we want to see ourselves as, and start acting like, we can run things, we can co-govern, and beyond this, we can ultimately reshape governance, in our communities, in our states, and in our nation.
“With the goal of governing power as our compass, we use each arena of contestation as an opportunity to shift power, change the political climate, and take steps that get us closer to transforming governance. Electoral engagement is one of many arenas where we make these shifts, over time. This is the essence of what it means to build power in the states, through better aligned, coordinated work. This is what we are talking about when we talk about governing power.”22
…
This piece originally ran in Socialist Project
Endnotes
- “Situating Womack,” by Glenn Perušek in John Womack Jr., Labor Power and Strategy, edited by Peter Olney and Glenn Perusek, PM Press, Oakland, 2023, pp 8-9.
- “Building and Transforming Power: Lessons from the 2020 Elections,” by Alicia Garza, Power Concedes Nothing, edited by Linda Burnham, Max Elbaum, Maria Poblet, editors, OR Books, New York/London, 2022, p 394.
- “The Foundry Interviews,” John Womack Jr. with Peter Olney in Womack Jr., op. cit., p 33.
- Ibid p 54.
- Ibid p 55.
- “No Magic Bullet: Technically Alone Strategic Power is Not Enough” by Katy Fox-Hodess, Ibid p 87. See also Jack Metzgar, “Associational Power, Too,” especially pp 95-96.
- “Domestic Workers Enter the Electoral Arena” by Linda Burnham and Ai-jen Poo, Burnham, Elbaum, Poblet, op. cit., pp 254-255.
- “Protest, Politics, and (Electoral) Power” by Maurice Mitchell, ibid. p 319.
- “Black Voters in 2020: A Roundtable Discussion,” with Sendolo Diaminah, Arisha Hatch, Thenjiwe McHarris and Mondale Robinson, moderated by Karl Kumodzi, Ibid. pp 147 – 148.
- Ibid, p 150. Bill Fletcher, in his contribution to Labor Power, uses Spartacus’ slave rebellion as a metaphor: “While he and his uprising failed, he placed himself within the people who were in motion,” and thus his near success, thus his legacy. Womack Jr, op. cit. p 75.
- “Thirty-Two Thousand Hogs and Not a Drop to Drink, by Gene Bruskin, Ibid. p, 126. See also Hog Wild by Lynn Waltz, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2018 for a fuller description of the Smithfield campaign, especially pp 183 – 201.
- Bruskin, Ibid. p 127.
- The law referred to is SB 1070. See “LUCHA’s 10-Year Road Map to Victory,” by César Fierros Mendoza, in Burnham, Elbaum, Poblet, op cit. 49.
- Ibid. p 60.
- “Democratic Socialists and Presidential elections,” by David Duhalde, Ibid, p. 297. See also Duhalde’s “U.S. Elected Socialists Just Held their Largest Gathering in Nearly Forty Years,” In These Times.
- Ibid, p. 303.
- See Womack’s analysis of the strike “The UAW Strike, as of October 9, 2023,” in Stansbury Forum.
- See “Despite Controversy, Rail Workers are Winning Paid Sick Leave” by Paul Garver and Eli Gerzon, Working Mass, June 29, 2023. For an extended look at the power and limitation of rank-and-file upsurges in the absence of political space (and a strong organized left) see New York Longshoremen: Class and Power on the Docks by William J. Mello, University Press of Florida, Gainsville, 2010, especially pp 197 – 202.
- “Should Spartacus Have Organized the Roman Citizenry Rather Than the Slaves,” by Bill Fletcher Jr., in Womack Jr. op. cit. p 74.
- “Abandon the Banking Method!” by Melissa Shetler, in Womack Jr. op cit, p 117, p 118. For an example of that kind of leadership see Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America by Keisha N. Blain, Beacon Press, Boston, 2021, especially the description of her role at the 1964 Democratic National Convention and immediately thereafter in 1964, pp 53 – 57.
- Desmond Serrette notes that “We must develop a more sustained pro-democracy infrastructure that doesn’t depend on stridently racist and extremist opponents to make the case for a well-resourced, accessible election system” in “To Deepen Democracy Give Workers More Say,” Convergence Magazine, May 12, 2023.
- “States of Solidarity: How State Alignment Builds Multiracial Working-Class Power,” by Maria Poblet, Burnham, Elbaum, Poblet, op. cit. p 127.
Former Pro Athlete Explains His Support For a Ceasefire in Gaza
By Dave Zirin
This piece originally ran in The Real News Network
Former NBA player Tariq Abdul-Wahad says athletes have a responsibility to speak out in solidarity with Palestinians.
The sports world has largely been silent in the face of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Yet former NBA player Tariq Abdul-Wahad is standing up and speaking out in support of a ceasefire and the rights of Palestinian people. Tariq Abdul-Wahad joins Dave Zirin to discuss his support for Palestine and the responsibilities of his fellow athletes in this moment.
Post-Production: Taylor Hebden
Transcript
Dave Zirin: Welcome to Edge of Sports TV, brought to you by The Real News Network. I’m Dave Zirin. We are going to speak to former NBA player Tariq Abdul-Wahad, who has done what few in the US sports community have done, and that’s come out publicly for a ceasefire in Palestine and to free the people of Gaza. Let’s go to him right now.
All right, so Tariq, just from the start, how did you come to publicly support a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza?
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: Well, Dave, this is a no-brainer. I mean, historically, for me it’s a little bit different. Being from France. Growing up, France has always taken a stance to protect the Palestinian people. So we always understood this relationship between the state of Israel and the Palestinians as an occupation situation. Do you understand?
In Europe, we don’t see it… It’s closer to us. So we grew up with it, understanding that Palestinians lost the war, but there were still many injustices still going on.
So my relationship with this conflict is not… The lens with which I’m looking at it is way more European than it is American. We understand what the situation is. Israel, in this case, is an occupying force.
So we understand that wars are going to happen in the world, but there are still laws and rules. And when you start to carpet bomb children and women, I don’t care who Hamas is, I don’t care where they are, what’s wrong is wrong.
Dave Zirin: Now, did you come to these ideas by growing up in France, by growing up in Europe, or was this a political awakening for you later in life?
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: Well, it’s a combination of things. I graduated from San Jose State University.
Dave Zirin: Yes!
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: And athletes at San Jose State, thanks to Dr. Edwards, have always been, to some extent, politically active. So it’s the tradition. When Tommy Smith every year comes back to the campus and talks to the student athletes, you don’t miss those speeches. You make sure you attend.
And so it’s really a combination of the area where I lived, where I went to school, being an athlete, and being politically active was almost the norm. It’s not an exception. It’s what you are expected to do.
Dave Zirin: Dr. Harry Edwards, of course, a former guest on this show, as was Dr. John Carlos. It’s amazing to hear that historical continuity because people forget that in ’68 they had an internationalist outlook. They were against apartheid and occupation all over the world. It wasn’t just for the United States that they raised their fist. Actually, it’s very heartening to hear you standing in that internationalist tradition.
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: Well, the Speed City. Yes. That’s the name of the track team back then.
Dave Zirin: Speed City.
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: Yeah, Speed City. Yeah. That’s what they used to call San Jose. Speed City, because these guys, not only were they fast on the track, but they were also very fast with their brains. These are trailblazers. These people are our leaders, technically. Every athlete in America should read Dr. Edward’s book, should read the history of Tommy Smith and John Carlos. We should know this. This is part of American sports heritage as much as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, all these people played a role.
Dave Zirin: You played in the league for years. You know NBA players. You’re standing for a ceasefire. Can you see other players signing on to such a statement? The horrors are just every day, but we also know that athletes can be fearful or live with some tunnel vision. But do you think we have the chance to break through and get some brave fellow superstars to sign on to something that calls for a ceasefire?
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: I sure hope so. I mean, I sure hope so. This is not, listen, this is a no-brainer. This one is obvious. I don’t know what to tell you, Dave. I have children. I have three kids. We’re bordering on insanity at this point. Because first of all, it’s very hard to function as a regular human being on your day-to-day when you know that America is basically funding this madness.
And then you also have to put the things in true perspective, whether you’re an athlete or not, sports are not important in such situations. So if you’re an athlete and you play sports and people listen to what you have to say, the least you can do as a part of the human race is to say something. Is to say something.
So yeah, I hope and pray that athletes across the board, not just basketball players, not just athletes in the NBA, but athletes across the board, anybody who has a platform should use it to say something.
Dave Zirin: And the number one block to them saying something right now, the number one block for there not being a thousand Tariq Abdul-Wahads standing up to make a statement right now, what do you think that block is? Money?
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: Dineros. It’s money. They’re afraid. They’re probably afraid that it’s going to hurt their bottom line.
Dave Zirin: We can’t live that way though. There’s too much crisis right now.
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: Well, yeah, you and I, we understand that, but that’s why we still have to be active. We still have to reach out. We have to teach them.
A lot of them too, though, they don’t really understand what’s going on. They don’t understand the scope and the gravity of the situation, even though I’m sure a lot of them do. But sometimes it takes organizing in the background. It takes courage. It takes a few to step out and then a few more to join. And then if there’s more of a coalition and there’s a group of athletes who can come out and stand, they will definitely stand stronger.
Dave Zirin: Right. I totally agree with you about that. Without organization, fear will flourish, but organization is a great hedge against fear because people feel a sense of their own power.
What’s it been like for you since you spoke out? You’ve been very active on social media. Actually it’s harrowing to go to your page because you’re very, very astute about listing the various horrors that have been taking place. What has that been like for you?
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: Well, my page was starting to get some momentum and then I got shadow-banned, I think. So that’s the first thing. So they’re going to limit your reach.
But for me, it’s nothing. I’m no one. I’m just another voice. I don’t think I’m more important than the next man or than the next lady or the next child. Just gotta say what you see.
I’m a retired player, so obviously I don’t feel the same pressure as someone who is playing. I don’t have these economic pressures. But I honestly believe, from the bottom of my heart, that I am on the right side of history on this one. It’s clear.
Dave Zirin: Right. Have you heard from people in France… Because it’s been interesting, like you said, in France, there is a culture of standing for Palestinian liberation, but there’s also been a crackdown in France on protesters, on people trying to speak out.
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: Absolutely, they have. But remember the French president — I’m not supporting him in any way, but I’m just saying. He called for a ceasefire weeks ago. So even he realized that this was too much.
But France now wields very little power. So France is not the country it used to be. It lost a lot of its influence in Western Africa. It lost a lot of its influence to Russia and China. So it’s not the voice that it used to be on the international stage.
And locally, they are fighting against Muslims and minorities. France is not… Even though Macron called for a ceasefire before any American politician even pronounced the word, France is still, at its core, also a racist country. Let’s not get it twisted.
Dave Zirin: What do you say to, say, your kids or to somebody you’re mentoring who says to you, I’ve been told that the United States is the land of the free, the home of the brave, a place where justice reigns, and yet we’re underwriting this brutal total war on a civilian population. How do we square those two ideas?
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: Well, that’s the question that this country has been asking itself since its inception. Yes, it’s cool. It’s the land of the free. You and I are free to talk about it. We’re free to discuss it. We are free to debate it.
But the strength of freedom is not in the opportunities we have to voice our opinion. It has to go further than this, and this is why the political system in this country is becoming flawed. I don’t know if you’ve noticed. It’s becoming more and more… What’s the word I’m looking for in English?
Dave Zirin: I think it’s broken.
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: It’s become more and more obtuse. The choices are less. And so it is a free country, in a sense, but we cannot forget that, in this country, money rules. Money rules and influence rules.
What’s happening right now, it’s actually going to be very interesting, because a lot of people who did not participate as much as they should have in the political process in this country are now going to be very active.
And I’m going to give you a very simple example. There are a few states that are going to be swing states in this election, in the presidential coming up, in which many Muslim Americans and Arab Americans live. And I guarantee you that Joe Biden is not going to get these votes. I know this for a fact. These votes are gone. So either he can replace the votes or these votes are going to be his undoing. Do you understand what I’m saying?
Dave Zirin: Yes.
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: Pennsylvania and Michigan, we’re talking about differences less than 10,000 votes, 20,000 votes in some cases.
Dave Zirin: Look, you’ve been so generous with your time. I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you just two more questions if I could.
First, I want to give you the chance to put a message out there for all the athletes who want to say something, who want to speak out, but are fearful for a whole host of reasons. What do you have to say to them?
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: Grab your courage. You are extraordinary people. These athletes, you guys and ladies are extraordinary. You are the 0.1%. And if you think that this is wrong, you should speak out, whether you’re going to pay the price or not.
I’m going to be honest. This is one of those where you might have to sacrifice something, but something must be said. And as exceptional as you are, you only — And I’m talking to these athletes — As exceptional as you are, you are only as exceptional as your moral fiber.
Dave Zirin: And I’d be remiss if I didn’t let you go without pointing out to our audience, in case they’re not big international basketball fans, that you were an absolute pioneer in coming here from France and succeeding as you did. France is on the leading edge of the world right now when it comes to basketball. And I’m in DC where we watch Bilal Coulibaly.
I ask you, how has France made this leap to becoming this kind of basketball powerhouse? And do you ever feel this sense of pride that you laid this groundwork for the basketball culture in the country?
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: It’s cool because you are part of something special, obviously. But it’s also a reminder of history. Let’s not get it twisted.
The reason why France has top-notch athletes is because these athletes come from African countries, or their parents immigrated, their grandparents immigrated, and they were born in France. The younger guys who were born in France and raised in France and whatnot. But without the African and Caribbean diaspora, French sport would be run-of-the-mill. The reason why it’s exceptional is because of its relationship with Africa and its relationship with the Caribbean.
Dave Zirin: I was going to say, so no colonialism, no basketball success is one of the things you’re saying?
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: It’s a weird statement, but it’s very accurate as well.
Dave Zirin: Like so many things in our upside down era, weird but true.
Tariq Abdul-Wahad, it’s been such a gift to be able to speak to you. Thank you so much for joining us on Edge of Sports TV.
Tariq Abdul-Wahad: No problem, Dave. Have a good one. Stay safe out there.
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