| US
Trade Union Movement Split By Jim Barnes (TU Review) The Teamsters is known in Britain because of its involvement in the 50’s and 60’s with organised crime in the US. Jimmy Hoffa the unions president was convicted of fraud in 1964 under the Kennedy administration but had his 13 year sentence commuted by Nixon and was released in the late 60s. He appears to have been murdered during an attempt to regain control of the union in 1975. Currently the union’s president is Jimmy Hoffa Jnr, his son. The union organises roughly speaking in similar areas to the TGWU in Britain. The SEIU is the smaller of the two large unions in the US which cover the same brief as UNISON in Britain and is led by Andy Stern. Unite-Here is the result of a merger between Hotel workers (Here) and textile workers (Unite) predominantly people of colour and predominantly women this union has 450,000 active members and 400,000 pensioners. Also involved are food workers, agricultural workers and a labourers union. There has been a debate simmering for some time in the US movement and it was clear from the behaviour particularly of the SEIU leader, Andy Stern, that he was spoiling for a split. Work had been done to delay the crisis while the US elections were underway but it finally came to a head in August, when the AFL-CIO held its congress. Looking at the arguments put forward by those who disaffiliated it is difficult to grasp how their position would justify a split. The issues they raise would normally be judged as the business of the constituent unions rather than their TUC, and, like the British TUC, the resources available to the AFL-CIO are dwarfed compared to those available to some of its larger affiliates. One of the the principle demands put by the SEIU etc to the AFL-CIO congress was that the AFL-CIO should spend between $25 million and $35 million on recruiting into presumably its constituent unions. This compares with $65 million the SEIU donated to the democratic party in the presidential election. In the British context it would be ridiculous to suggest that the TUC should perform the role suggested for the AFL-CIO by the SEIU etc in the United States. There are differences in the two structures but there are also enough similarities to see that the AFL-CIO would be the wrong body for the tasks suggested.
The theme behind the approach is that unions should recruit aggressively and devote the bulk of their resources to doing so. This sounds fine but in an environment where unions have critically few resources to cope with the tasks they have to address taking funds of this scale out of the running of the union means that other areas of the unions activities would have to be scaled back dramatically. The arguments against the push for these huge resources to be concentrated on recruiting is that the resources should be used to provide a service for existing members, in the form of legal support, representation, education and research. Boiled down to the core the proposals on organisation put forward by Mr Stern etc are really quite reactionary. Mr Stern has been billed as America’s most employer friendly union leader. His union, and the teamsters, contributed some funds last year to a fund for Republican congressmen. The argument used was that since they would be representing the administration the union would have to deal with, they should support measures which would ease the dialogue – their argument not mine. One of the planks of the platform adopted by the coalition of unions who have disaffiliated is to “reassert the American dream”. The methods and original concepts behind concentrating resources on recruiting were developed by John Sweeny the former GS of the SEIU, but who is now the president of the AFL-CIO and is deeply opposed to Mr Stern’s approach. The policy has ‘worked’ in that the SEIU have gained members, but there is a question mark over how much these members have gained from being in a union compared to what they would have gained had a higher proportion fo the unions resources been channeled to supporting them. Also a closer look at the nature of the industries the SEIU and UNITE-HERE organise within and it is areas where there hasn’t bee a strong tradition of union involvement. There will come a point when these unions will have covered the bulk of the areas where unions would be new to the employees, which will mean they are inevitably in a process of diminishing returns. The Teamsters, on the other hand have not made dramatic gains in members over recent years, which suggests the formula has as little relevance for traditional manufacturing areas in the US as it does for the bulk of the union movement in Britain. Underpinning this split however is also a big difference in their approach to politics. There is nothing within the Coalition’s approach which would be a major problem to the current US administration, in fact there is little within the material produced by the unions involved which even refers to the problems associated with the government. Yet the US economy is in crisis. The Republican’s policies are having a devastating effect on the quality of life for ordinary people in the United States. The answer to the lack of a coherent welfare system in the US can not be for the trade union movement to offer this as a service for their members. UNIT-HERE, for instance has 400,000 pensioners in it, which suggests that it sees part of its role as being a support system for people in retirement. It may be that in the US context its inevitable, and important, that unions do provide some welfare function. But to suggest that unions in Britain can pick up members by offering this support, rather than by campaigning for an adequate system organised by the state is a little obscene. To be fair this is not what Bro Stern etc are saying directly – but it certainly smells like it. The split in the US movement in the past was partly as a result of deliberate covert attempts by US government undermine the movement. At a time when the US has one of the most right wing governments in its history it would be naive to assume this wasn’t the case now. |