When Democrats lead the attack

UNTIL RECENTLY, it seemed accurate to describe the difference between the Democratic Party's strategy on labor and austerity and the Republicans' as follows: Both want to drive down the living standards of the working class at the direction of big business. The difference is that the Republicans want to do this by destroying collective bargaining--i.e., a frontal assault on the rights of workers and on the unions. The Democrats, however, want to accomplish the same thing by using collective bargaining.

The cozy relationship of Democratic politicians and labor officials allows the politicians to use the fear of the Republicans to get union negotiators to give up major concessions at the bargaining table. Democratic officials often brag that they could win more concessions from labor than the Republicans with their "good cop" approach--and there is evidence that the Democrats are correct on this.

This strategy also played directly into the interests of the union leaders, as we saw in Wisconsin. Union officials were mostly concerned with preserving their dues base and power. "It's not about the money!" was one of the main slogans in Wisconsin. The Democrats were happy to oblige as long as the labor leaders were willing to give concessions.

So union officials agreed and said to the politicians, "You can cut the members' living standards--just don't undermine our dues base and power." Hence, the Wisconsin union leaders agreeing to cut pensions and health care if collective bargaining was preserved.

This is still a somewhat accurate description of the differences. However, the Democrats' strategy has recently shifted even further to the right. This has been reported in SocialistWorker.org, especially about the Chicago teachers, and was laid out in the June issue of Labor Notes.

The Democrats, in some cases, are now directly attacking at least some collective bargaining rights for certain groups of workers. As the Labor Notes article points out, this will create greater and greater strains between Democratic politicians and labor officials--and more openings for socialists and other militant workers to argue why workers should give no support to politicians of either party.

How far these strains will develop is an open question. Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, and other labor leaders are now at least talking about "running some of our own in state races."

One aspect of this is that the union share of the Democrats' overall political contributions has fallen to half what it was a decade ago--although this may be more because of increasing business contributions than declining labor fundraising). The Democrats now get 72 percent of their campaign contributions from business, even though the AFL-CIO gave $87.5 million in 2008 and SEIU gave around $60 million.

One interesting side note is that one of the Democrats attacking collective bargaining is New Jersey's Senate President Stephen Sweeney--who is also an organizer for the Ironworkers' union! This should make us at least pause to question what the politics of a Labor Party based on the union leadership are likely to be.
Steve Leigh, Seattle