The “Change To Win” coalition offers the same basic course as the Sweeney leadership of the AFL-CIO. They promote collaboration with the employers on the false premise that bosses and workers have common interests to save “our” companies, instead of mobilizing the ranks to defend the interests of working people. Seeking to maintain their high living atop the union movement, labor officials on both sides advocate ever-bigger unions mergers, which only weaken the industrial character and potential power of the unions.

The rate of unionized workers in the United States—12.5 percent—is the lowest since the 1920s. In the 1930s, a working-class upsurge gave rise to a powerful industrial union movement that organized millions. By the end of that decade, however, as the U.S. rulers escalated their antilabor offensive and imperialist war preparations, this momentum was blocked by growing bureaucratic control of the new unions.

During the post-war capitalist economic expansion, the labor bureaucracy further institutionalized its class collaboration. In exchange for gradual improvements for relatively better-off workers, they tied the fortunes of labor to the bosses’ profitability. They turned their backs on the needs of the union ranks, the unorganized, and the oppressed at home and abroad. They let the government hamstring the unions in red tape. The labor officials have poured millions of dollars into electing one or another of the candidates of the employers’ parties—the Democrats and Republicans—in an impotent effort to gain some political clout.

When capitalism entered a long-term economic decline in the 1970s, the bosses unleashed an escalating antilabor offensive. The union bureaucracy has been prostrate and unable to confront the assault. The weakening of the unions is to a large degree the payoff for these decades of class collaboration. For example, instead of fighting for a comprehensive social security program that includes government-guaranteed, lifetime health care for all, union officials negotiated “fringe” benefits industry by industry or company by company, tied to the fortunes of this or that boss. As a result, millions today have no health insurance or face losing medical and pension benefits as the bosses gut union contracts and the Democrats and Republicans step up attacks on Social Security and Medicare.

While the unions keep weakening, however, resistance by working people to the bosses’ “productivity” offensive continues—from organizing struggles by meat packers in the Midwest to striking janitors in Southern California to the union-organizing battle by Western coal miners. It is in these struggles, including efforts to win solidarity and extend it to other working people, that the seeds of labor’s future lie. That’s where the eyes—and the activity—of class-conscious workers should be.
 
 
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AFL-CIO faction fight may split labor federation  
 
 
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