Labor's priorities
Glenn, David
AKIND OF euphoria surrounded this summer's UAW picket lines in Flint, Michigan. Nearly everyone who drove past the lines honked a horn or pumped a fist in solidarity; hardly an hour went by...
...Although it was nice to see that the electorate preferred the Democrats' (mushy) commitments to education, abortion rights, and the environment to the Republican Contract with America, the entire process did nothing to breathe life into our democracy...
...But even in this unhappy context, surely unions could use the electoral arena more effectively, as a means of forcing their issues onto the public agenda (as they briefly did with the minimum wage in 1996) and as a means of strengthening coalitions with other progressive social movements...
...But only a glimpse...
...In this atmosphere it was irresistible to make hopeful speculations: What if every strike enjoyed community support this broad and this deep...
...The GM strikes turned all of Michigan's attention toward fundamental questions about the social contract...
...In other words, the AFL-CIO had no choice but to play some role in the Democrats' dismal machinery of 1996: the vacuous, glossy television ads...
...In New York this fall, a coalition of unions will try to win ballot status for the Working Families Party, which would use the state's fusion system to cross-endorse laborfriendly Democrats...
...the election-season cavein on welfare reform...
...Drive by a bar, and you'd see a pro-union sign outside ("UAW and Red Wings: You're Number One...
...Meanwhile, back in Flint: a week after the GM strikes were settled, the state of Michigan held its primary...
...Every so often would come some powerful reminder of the real world of 1998...
...the corporate-sponsored Democratic Convention...
...DAVID GLENN is associate editor of Dissent...
...The die maker's point leads us far away, at least for the moment, from lofty speculations about Flint's social movements and their potentially radical energies...
...Let's take it as a given that for the foreseeable future, unions will need to make a lot of cheerless, defensive, lesser-evil endorsements...
...In the Democratic gubernatorial race, Larry Owen—a don't-rock-theboat candidate endorsed by the UAW and the state party establishment—was defeated by the cryptopopulist Geoffrey Fieger, who is best known as Jack Kevorkian's attorney...
...hardly an hour went by without a restaurant van pulling up with a donated meal, and handshakes all around...
...With Bob Dole in office, the UAW and the Teamsters would have had much more difficulty in defending their members' contracts—and that in turn would have hampered unions' efforts to organize new members, the lack of which is threatening the labor movement's very survival...
...We can look, for example, to the work of Progressive Milwaukee, an initiative of the New Party and the Milwaukee Central Labor Council...
...A President Dole would have looked at this scene and, invoking his powers under the TaftHartley Act, declared an "economic emergency" and forced the strikers back into the plants...
...Were Owen's tepid, failed campaign and Fieger's unhinged, successful one really our only options...
...DISSENT / Fall 199S • 7 COMMENTS & OPINIONS...
...It's not yet clear, however, whether the Working Families Party has roots in any social movements outside of labor...
...Walk past a church, and you'd see leaflets for a pro-union rally organized by the Christian Autoworkers Association ("We Already Have the Victory...
...Can labor's electoral work carry more hope in 2000 and 2002...
...And the congressional elections are likely to be smothered by Monica Lewinsky's blue cocktail dress...
...Fieger's bluntness is refreshing, but he's hardly a consistent progressive, and his campaign is accountable to no constituency or social movement...
...The GM strikes idled nearly two hundred thousand workers and measurably reduced the country's Gross Domestic Product for the summer quarter...
...The Flint of this summer provided a small glimpse of such a world: a functioning republic, with engaged citizens who refuse to bow to the will of the propertied...
...What if every town devoted this much energy to debating income inequality and workplace democracy...
...the alleged pipeline of funds from a supreme oppressor of labor, the Chinese People's Liberation Army...
...This point is undeniable...
...Instead, it summons this banal thought: Gee . . . it's a good thing the labor movement poured so much energy into re-electing Bill Clinton...
...There has been almost no talk of labor's core issues—income inequality and freedom of association, much less of any broader liberal reform agenda...
...This project has brought labor, churches, and progressive neighborhood groups together to elect several candidates in nonpartisan races for city council and school board seats—and used these positions to enact several livingwage laws...
...So far the 1998 campaign season has been even more disheartening...
...So for purely defensive reasons, if no other, it was crucial to secure a second term for the man who finds a new way to disappoint us every week...
...One evening, for example, a striking die maker from the GM metal-stamping center, gesturing at the TV news crews, solidarity banners, and honking cars said to me: "You know, none of this would be possible if Bob Dole were president...
...Labor is investing heavily in uninspiring, culturally conservative gubernatorial candidates in Illinois and California...
...It's not a proposition that makes the heart surge with the fer6 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 vor of reform, but it's a true one...
...The left's failure to force those questions into the state's campaigns was just the latest of our long chain of missed opportunities...
...Dole would almost certainly have squashed the Teamsters' 1997 UPS strike on similar grounds...
...Flint, it seemed, was where all of America's missing class consciousness had gone...
Vol. 45 • September 1998 • No. 4
