But the reality is that the Unions and Union workers were the ones responsible for the size of the turnout and Move On was just hitching a free ride and then instantly forgetting who got them to their destination. But then that is kind of how liberal Democrats behave. Take our "friend" in the White House for instance. He received FOUR HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS in 2008 from organized labor. A lot of that based on his promise to fight for EFCA (DOA). Since the beginning of the struggle in Wisconsin he has said about a total of 40 words of tepid support. Workers are already feeling pretty tepid about him, too.
March 1, 2011
MOVE ON.ORG HITCHING A FREE RIDE
Labor's huge outpouring on Saturday certainly showed that those who proclaim the death of the Union Movement are definitely premature. But there were no Mea Culpas to be found. And on Monday there were no lead stories about the national resurgence of the Union rank and file. I checked in on MSNBC Daytime to see if they were running some stories and featuring Union leaders or rank and file talking about seeing all their members united - public sector and private sector together. Nope! Just Move On Executive Director, Justen Ruben and not as much as a shout out to Unions for mobilizing members nationwide. And then I saw the congratulatory e-mail from the local Move On Chapter and it did not say anything about the work of the Unions in mobilizing their members who came to Salem from Portland, Corvallis and Eugene. In fact it didn't even name all the Unions who were represented.
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Well put. moveon.org is about as opportunist as an organization can get. The national Dems and even a lot of the high ups in the labor aristocracy want to use token phrases about "hard working Americans" and "teachers, nurses, firefighters" and the like, but what is needed now is what we are seeing in Madison - class consciousness. May it lead to a class warfare that is no longer one sided.
I wish more of the focus would turn from middle class nurses and teachers and on to folks like my mother-in-law, who works for the state of WI for $14 an hour. The increase in pension and health insurance is the same for her as it will be for a nurse or teacher, which represents a much higher percentage of her income. At her facility there are a number of state employees who make less than $10 an hour - well under a living wage in Madison. But no one is telling there story, no one is talking about what a couple hundred more bucks a month for health care means to them.
I'm glad that Move.On sponsored the rally and took the initiative and that some unions cooperated in doing turnout. This was primarily a Move.On event, not a union event.
We should ask why this is so and why unions have yet to mobilize against neoliberalism and for public services en masse. Really, a "working families" platform that prioritizes rationalized public services is not the same thing at all as a class-conscious attack on neo-liberalism. And the teachers who are at the forefront, bearing the brunt of the neoliberal attack on government, have yet to fight back in a determined way in most places. How do we explain that?
From the AFT/UFT opposing community control of schools in the late '60s to the present day we see a line that more or less marks defeat as well as a refusal to build a fightback with real allies in the community. So I think it's a good thing that Move.On and unions cooperate: we need to change that history. The left needs to strengthen, not criticize, unity when and where it exists. And we need to deepen that unity by bringing in every key force. One weakness of the rally was the relative absence of young people and people of color, for instance.
I'm okay with the unions having spent money on Obama, at least as he presented himself as a candidate. Imagine where we would be with McCain/Palin in the White House or what a union-hating President would or could do regarding the fightback in Wisconsin.
We need to understand the balance of forces now. We can't fight and win by ourselves at this point. We need to think in terms of united fronts. To do otherwise is to misunderstand the present political moment and not grasp the dialectic. Give me an example of where we're winning by ourselves and without a united front of forces.
I agree that we're relying too much on "professional" workers, but we need to see this in terms of gender and class: what is going on in Wisconsin and elsewhere is fundamentally both an attack on women workers and on their unions. The bigger danger, I think, is that we may be reinventing forms of craft unionism by an over-reliance upon the normally conservative and usually male-dominated uniformed sector unions.
I think there is an analogy here between those who say the revolution in Egypt was created by Facebook. FB was a tool for communication. So Moveon has an e-mail system which was a tool. But I attended because of the outreach by SEIU as I would suggest the other Unions did. Even the Egyptian FB CEO didn't claim he was the reason for the revolution in Egypt. My problem with Moveon was its blackout on the reason for the turnout. Union members..and Unions.
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