By Charles Walker
In what is surely a historic step, the nation’s premier labor federation has moved back from its traditional stance of unqualified support for the ruling class’s wars. That doesn’t mean that labor’s top echelon has adopted a policy about imperialistic war that Eugene V. Debs (America’s foremost labor leader to date) could have abided. After all, Debs went to prison because of his unambiguous opposition to American involvement in the First World War. Nevertheless, for the federation, that is the AFL-CIO, to even hint that an American war might not enjoy its full and complete support is, as we say, “historic.”
In a prepared statement issued on February 27during its winter meeting in Hollywood, Florida, the AFL-CIO, representing some 13 million workers, declared that, “The president [Bush] has not fulfilled his responsibility to make a compelling and coherent explanation to the American people and the world about the need for military action against Iraq at this time.” Unfortunately, that’s about as good the federation’s statement gets. The rest of it is pretty bad. For example, the statement also declares its full support for “the efforts to disarm the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein,” ignoring every nation’s right to self-determination, once proclaimed by the United Nations and earlier by the League of Nations.
The federation completely ignores Deb’s position that American workers first and foremost enemy is their own ruling class. Furthermore, the AFL-CIO would have no problem if the projected war, certain to kill countless numbers of Iraq’s mainly underage population, is waged “in concert with a broad international coalition of allies and with the sanction of the United Nations.”
The problem with Bush’s war plans, as the federation sees it, is that the U.S. government has failed to build the same international coalition that it led against Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War. In fact, the labor leaders say, “Many citizens, while supporting the goal of [Iraq’s] disarmament, are not convinced that war now is the only option.” The labor leaders don’t acknowledge that if the recent world-wide marches and rallies are any indication, there’s substantial world-wide opposition to a war against Iraq with or without the backing of the United Nations.
The labor leaders say that “there may be times when we [sic] must stand alone and act unilaterally in defense of our national security,” but fail to note that there are times when the U.S. government acts through others, as it did when Iraq attacked Iran, hoping to defeat the Islamic Iranian government that followed the overthrow of the Iranian monarchy. That point comes to mind, since the federation’s statement rightly criticizes Iraq’s aggression against Iran, but fails to note that the United States was a principal supplier of Iraq’s weaponry, including poison gasses and other weapons of mass destruction.
The labor tops acknowledge that around the world people “are taking to the streets to speak out against a war in Iraq.” And they note that 100 U.S. cities have adopted anti-war resolutions. Strangely, the union leaders fail to mention the anti-war sentiment in their own ranks, as evidenced by the many antiwar resolutions passed by local, regional, state and national union affiliates. In fact, there is now an anti-war organizing center within the labor movement, the U.S. Labor Against War, which reports new anti-war resolutions by labor bodies virtually everyday. Perhaps, the fact that the highest labor body ignores in its statement the mushrooming anti-war outlook in its ranks is the strongest evidence that it is all too aware of that rank-and-file anti-war viewpoint.
The whole point of the labor leaders’ statement is to announce that they have a tactical difference with the administration’s war plans, hoping to gain some credibility with their anti-war ranks. But as the predicted terror rains down on the heads of innocent, defenseless Iraqi’s, their broken bodies are sure to spur greater worldwide revulsion and condemnation of the ruling elite’s war for oil and empire.
Several labor movements say they will strike against the anticipated war. The U.S. labor movement hasn’t reach that point yet. But if history is any guide, when the American workers catch-up with international labor, workers in the citadel of modern imperialism are not likely to rest content with union “leaders” balancing their concern over the ranks’ feelings with their self-assumed concern with being thought “respectable” and “loyal” by the nation’s rulers.
The threat of war is creating a widening gap between organized labor’s ranks and labor’s highest officialdom. That gap partly originated as a result of organized labor’s leaders inability to use labor’s solidarity to defend the living standards of all American workers. Workers will find a way to solve their problems arising from the profit-driven system, with or without the hierarchy that rules over labor today, or so the rise of the U.S. labor’s anti-war movement would seem to suggest.