Election 2005

Flying under the rader of the minor concern of who becomes our next president is the election that really matters, the race to succeed John Sweeney as head of the AFL-CIO in 2005 (okay, just kidding about 2004, but what happens next July may be the most important decision for the labor movement, and hence, the future of American work, since the merger of the AFL and CIO). At stake is the vision laid out by the leaders of America's most dynamic unions, the SEIU and UNITE HERE versus that of the more old-line industrial and craft unions. The finger pointing and dirty politics has already begun, as the folks at CounterPunch leaked a memo that supposedly details the plans of the seven union New Unity Partnership (SEIU, UNITE HERE, Laborers, and 4 others) for world domination through alignment with Karl Rove and the Republican Party. If this memo is true, which I doubt, then the folks at UNITE HERE and the SEIU are nothing more than corporatist lackey's in disguise. The fact remains though, that labor is at a crossroads, and the only two unions really doing anything to expand its power are the service workers and textile, hotel and restaurant employees. Commentators have decried the possibility of the AFL-CIO splitting, a distinct possibility no matter who wins next July, but would this be such a bad thing? The most dynamic points in American labor history did not come after the merger or during the AFL's monopoly over national labor politics in the early part of the century, but rather when the Knights of Labor and CIO provided more radical, egalitarian and innovative organizing techniques than the conservative AFL. Something needs to be done to organize the millions of poorly paid and grossly mistreated service workers who now make up the vast majority of the American workiing class. The SEIU and UNITE HERE, while by no means perfect, have been the only national unions of any power that have recognized the changing nature of world capitalism and not been held hostage to a producerist mentality that fetishizes the production of physical commodities. They should certainly not recieve anyone's blind vote, but come next July, the candidate who has a program to meet the facts of deindustrialization, the internal dispersal of industry and the nature of capital production in the 21st century should at least get a fair hearing from those whose future most depends on an invigorated and democratic American labor movement.