Pittsburgh G-20: Union bosses join 'Partnership'

July 7, 10:49 AMPittsburgh Grassroots ExaminerMike Boda

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"Don't bite the war that feeds you"
-1960s AFL-CIO button

While it would be nice to believe that trade unions (and college campuses) in the US are the hotbeds of radicalism that their right-wing detractors and their left-wing supporters allege, a cursory glance at US labor history does not quite bear out that assumption. The conservative, pragmatic American Federation of Labor (AFL) has been shaky at best, since its inception (lobbied for the Chinese Exclusion Act), and eventually, the more radical Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) systematically did its best to quash its revolutionary tendencies, in accordance with the Taft-Hartley Act and merged with the AFL in 1955, which helped to ensure its survival through the cold war.

The recent announcement that the Allegheny County Labor Council of the AFL-CIO, the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers (USW), and the Pittsburgh Building and Construction Trades Council have signed on as part of the Pittsburgh G-20 Partnership, was likely motivated by the same survival instinct that helped them weather the McCarthy era. Such a partnership is merely an extension of the trade-union aristocracy's role as another layer of management or an external mediator between the people who work and those who control production, rather than the workers themselves seizing and controlling production, as advocated by proponents of revolutionary industrial unionism, also known as syndicalism. Were this 1909 instead of 2009, this would come as shock, but today, the only immediate, negative consequence they face for their participation is the grumblings of a handful of anarchists and activists, which the union leadership has spent 50+ years distancing themselves from.

This not meant to be a blanket condemnation of local unions, their members or even of union bureaucrats, many of whom are decent, well-intentioned folks, but the leadership of this social construct itself. While the 'piecard' unions have undoubtedly improved some the material conditions of their members and workers in the US, generally, their leadership's cozy relationships with politicians and corporate entities remain an obstacle to long-term, meaningful change.

The upper echelons of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy vocally supported the US war against the people of Southeast Asia and its members in the construction trades were the famed "hardhats" who beat up on the student anti-war demonstrators, as law enforcement and private security agencies had previously done to them. An important part of success in a hierarchy is finding someone below you to stand on to elevate your position.

With the cooperation and support of US intelligence agencies and multinational corporations, the AFL-CIO formed the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) to ensure that organized labor, especially in the developing world of the mid 20th century, was compliant and supportive of US business interests, and AIFLD played a key role in the September 11, 1973 coup in Chile. Their elation was short-lived, as Augusto Pinochet, the military dictator that they had supported, quickly banned all labor unions. This partnership between State, Capital, and Labor still exists, re-christened in 1997 as the American Center for Labor Solidarity or the Solidarity Center and in the 21st century it has already assisted with US interventions in both Haiti and Venezuela.

Aside from union leaders not wanting to complicate their symbiotic relationship with business leaders, such organizations are unfortunately subject to bizarre laws that make all but the most timid of tactics illegal, and therefore subject to racketeering laws and lawsuits.  Big labor, as it stands, needs all the help it can get from the Democratic politicians whom they support financially., especially for the moribund Employee Free Choice Act commonly referred to as "card check" and being invited to Barack Obama's party, as opposed to crashing it, not that the Democrats have delivered for them in a long time.