File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9711, message 361


Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 10:39:55 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: M-I: WSJ on labor's "opportunity"


I've had my criticisms of John Sweeney and the rest of the new team at the
AFL-CIO, but the following Wall Street Journal op-ed makes it pretty clear
what the ruling class wants to see: a return of the old cold-warriors. The
print version of this article is decorated with a WSJ dot drawing of Lane
Kirkland, but the right-wing dream for succeeding Sweeney is the appalling
Sandra Feldman. Read it and weep.

Doug

----

 [The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition]
 [Section Navigation]                       November 19, 1997

Labor's Crisis--
And Its Opportunity

By JONATHAN MAHLER

Ron Carey's fall from power this week--a federal
overseer barred him from seeking re-election as
Teamsters union president--isn't just a victory against
union corruption. It may also be an opportunity for
organized labor to throw off its reflexively leftist
politics and steer a more centrist course.

To understand the true significance of these
developments, we must go back to the early 1970s. In
December 1972, author James Ring Adams wrote on this
page of a "Battle Royale Among the Socialists." Mr.
Adams was referring to the ideological fault lines that
were fracturing the intellectual-labor coalition in the
wake of Sen. George McGovern's rise to power in the
Democratic Party.

Mr. McGovern was a neoisolationist with
elitist, antilabor tendencies; and the
convention that nominated him had refused to seat the
president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, the
anticommunist leader of the Democratic trade union
movement. In the years that followed, the McGovernites
held sway within the Democratic Party--but were kept at
bay within the labor movement under the leadership of
Meany's successor, Lane Kirkland, and his
secretary/treasurer, Thomas Donahue. Mr. Kirkland made
the AFL-CIO a major force in the battle against
international communism, playing a crucial role in
supporting Poland's Solidarity movement.

Ideological Struggle

But labor veered left in 1995, when Mr. Sweeney defeated
Mr. Donahue in the race to succeed Mr. Kirkland as
AFL-CIO president. And behind all the talk about money
laundering and corruption inside the House of Labor
lurks the next stage in an ideological struggle that has
been running for more than a generation.

Its trajectory was set when the writer Michael
Harrington created the Democratic Socialists of America
in 1972. In a lather over the Socialist Party's lukewarm
"statement of preference" for Sen. McGovern, Harrington
seceded from the party, opening a rift that has never
been mended. On the other side of the divide stand the
more moderate Social Democrats-USA. Many of its members
participated in the Reagan revolution and were partisans
in the AFL-CIO's fight against communism in Poland.

Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats: As
anachronistic as these names sound to the American ear,
the two groups' ideological differences explain a lot
about the current situation inside the labor movement.
Mr. Sweeney's rise has given Harrington's heirs a new
prominence within the labor movement. Four erstwhile
members of Students for a Democratic Society have
emerged at the center of the Teamsters scandal,
including, most notably, the onetime campus radical
Michael Ansara, who has pleaded guilty to raising
campaign funds illegally for Mr. Carey. Mr. Sweeney
himself belongs to the Democratic Socialists. (The group
made headlines just last month when it was reported that
a member of its governing political committee, Kurt
Stand, had been spying for the East German secret police
for 20 years.)

The new AFL-CIO chief has taken an indiscriminate
approach to coalition building. He held hands with the
New Age Rabbi Michael Lerner at Mr. Lerner's
touchy-feely "Summit on Ethics and Meaning" last year,
and he has cozied up to left-wing MIT linguist Noam
Chomsky. More broadly, Mr. Sweeney's AFL-CIO has
emphasized partisan politics over organizing, dumping
millions of dollars into electoral contests in which the
Republican candidate was deemed vulnerable.

None of this sits well with the Social Democrats, who
fell out of power in 1995. "They've got nothing to offer
that wasn't done before--and done better before," says
Donald Slaiman, president of the Social Democrats and an
official at the AFL-CIO under Mr. Kirkland. Mr. Slaiman
would like to see Big Labor become once again a vibrant,
independent force, the engine behind gradual social
change as opposed to a vehicle for class warfare.
Internationally, of course, the Social Democrats favor
interventionism in support of democracy.

They may yet get their wish. The scandal engulfing Mr.
Carey just might pave the way for the return to power of
the labor movement's Cold War brain trust. Mr. Sweeney's
fate is closely linked to that of Mr. Carey; not only
did Mr. Carey swing his union behind the AFL-CIO
president, but investigators are looking into charges
that the AFL-CIO responded in kind by helping to steer
cash into Mr. Carey's campaign coffers.

Without Mr. Carey, there's no reason to believe that the
Teamsters will stick by Mr. Sweeney--especially because
Mr. Hoffa will have his own score to settle with the
AFL-CIO's president. Some even speculate that the
Teamsters will be kicked out of the federation. In any
case, it's likely that Mr. Sweeney's base of power will
be substantially eroded. "If Carey doesn't survive, it
is going to be a very tense few years in the AFL-CIO,"
predicted one labor expert, sociologist Stanley
Aronowitz of the City University of New York's Graduate
Center.

Here's where the Social Democrats come in. It's rumored
in labor circles that if the Teamsters are indeed
expelled from the federation (or leave voluntarily), the
unions that were defeated in the 1995 election may unite
behind the president of the American Federation of
Teachers, Sandra Feldman. Ms. Feldman, the protégé of
the late Albert Shanker, says she is 100% behind Mr.
Sweeney; at a recent executive council meeting, however,
she pressed the AFL-CIO chief about the Teamsters
debacle. What's more, the AFT is currently in the
process of merging with the National Education
Association, a deal that could put her at the helm of
the largest trade union in the free world.

Bread-and-Butter

In the event that the Teamsters stay in the federation,
there is also the possibility of an alliance between
traditional Social Democratic forces like the AFT and
the so-called bread-and-butter unions, like the
Teamsters, which are primarily concerned with wages,
pensions and benefits. There is a precedent for such an
alliance: George Meany, the plumber who commanded the
labor movement during the waning years of the Cold War,
was closely aligned with the intellectual Albert
Shanker.

Mr. Adams concluded his 1972 Journal article by quoting
a prominent Social Democrat, Penn Kemble, as saying that
the "New Politics" doesn't just want a place in the
liberal coalition of the Democratic Party; it wants to
take over the Democratic Party--even if that meant
throwing out the labor movement. A generation later, a
struggle is erupting over whether the labor movement
should forge an alliance with the wing of the Democratic
Party that turned its back on the worker a
quarter-century ago.

--------------------------------------------------------

Mr. Mahler is managing editor of the Forward newspaper.

 Copyright =A9 1997 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights
                       Reserved.




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