Black Labor fights "Disorder" of Globalization

By Glen ford and Peter Gamble

’Wal-Mart is buying Negro leaders.’ - Rev. Al Sharpton

’We will not be passive bystanders to our own demise.’ - CBTU
President William Lucy

’Economic justice is a part of freedom. We must fight for a
people’s economy.’ - Dr. Julianne Malveaux

Black labor is carefully writing a new page in the book of
African American struggle. Despite the loss of 400,000 Black
union jobs during the first four years of the Bush
administration, and in the face of the U.S. labor movement’s
splitting in two, last year - or, more likely, because of
these cataclysms - Black labor has emerged more militant and
with its internal solidarity intact.

’There has been a split in labor,’ said Robin Williams,
Associate Director for Civil Rights and Community Action for
the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, ’but
there has not been a split in the Coalition of Black Trade
Unionists [CBTU].’ Williams’ own union was among those that
withdrew from the AFL-CIO less than a year ago to form the
rival Change To Win federation. But the 1,700 delegates to
the CBTU’s annual convention in Orlando, Florida, May 24-30,
were united around fundamental issues - Black folk’s issues,
if you will.

When African Americans are once again forced to be the
primary upholders of worker solidarity and labor principles,
when it is African Americans that bear the brunt of corporate
de-industrialization, and when Black labor must fight a
multi-front war for racial, social, and economic justice, and
world peace, then it is logical and righteous that Blacks
appropriate these issues as uniquely their own. As always in
America, the most despised and pilloried must ultimately lead
those whose vision is damaged by relative racial privilege
and delusions of Manifest Destiny.

’We have a responsibility to offer an alternative economic
vision to working families and to those who are economically
dispossessed,’ said CBTU co-founder and President William
Lucy, in his opening convention address. ’We must explore new
concepts to build partnerships among the progressive
religious community, the trade union movement and the
investment community.

’The future of Black workers - and, therefore, the future of
the families, communities, churches, businesses and
organizations that they support - will be unanchored if we
don’t stop the loss of good-paying union jobs to low wage
countries, to automation and to privatization.’

By necessity, Black labor finds itself unable to save African
Americans unless it strives to rescue the nation and humanity
at-large from the depredations of hyper-capital. The banners
flanking the speakers at the Disney Contemporary Hotel’s
convention center expressed the breadth of the project: ’CBTU
at 35: Continuing the Fight for a New Economic Order.’

The struggle for a ’new economic order’ has always been at
the core of African American politics. The abolition of
slavery required a new economic order. Jim Crow was an
economic - as well as social, political and legal - order;
we needed a new one. Those who have always tried to order us
around and kick us down are constantly building their own
self-serving ’orders’ - the current regime being a global
capitalism managed by home-grown racists armed to the teeth,
who harbor a quasi-religious belief that they embody the
essence of civilization.

Many of our fellow Americans - including members of the House
of Labor - view the rich perpetrators of world disorder as
mistaken human beings who can be convinced to act more
responsibly. History has taught Black people a different
lesson: a man whose actions consistently result in killing
you, intends to kill you.

Continuity of Black Struggle

William Lucy first voiced the call for a ’new economic order’
at last year’s CBTU convention, in Phoenix. The venue for the
focus on economic matters would be Gary, Indiana, site of the
1972 National Black Political Convention that ushered in -
for better or worse - an almost exclusive concentration on
electing Blacks to political office, entrepreneurialism, and
individual Black penetration of corporate America.

Shortly thereafter, the roof began to cave in for many of
those African Americans not included in the upward mobility
formula. Students of Hip Hop believe that this urban youth
culture was born of neglect and disdain on the part of the
newly mobile Black classes - a political, economic and
spacial separation that now represents possibly the greatest
obstacle to the exercise of collective Black power.

Organized Black labor occupied a kind of middle position in
the post-Gary 1972 social configuration. An integral element
of the urbanized Black masses, yet more secure than others in
employment, Black unionists were also privy to the
machinations of both white workers and corporate America. It
was - and is - a unique prism, of critical value in an era
when two distinct currents of Black reality were coming into
being. American apartheid was hardening in its impact on the
urban masses, through a madness of incarceration, deliberate
defunding of public education and cities in general and, with
Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the rise to national power
of the Hard Right. At the same time, a minority of African
Americans were nibbling - and a very few gorging - on the
fruits of no-boundaries capitalism. Larger numbers moved to
precarious suburban - but overwhelmingly Black suburban -
lifestyles.

When the bubble burst as Bill Clinton exited the White House,
everybody’s roof caved in. The Bushite’s - practitioners of
disaster capitalism - unleashed on the nation and world the
disasters of their corrupt dreams. The New Order was clear:
there would be no order at all, but the rule of force and
money. Between 2000 and 2004, Black union membership shrank
from 2.5 to 2.1 million.

By 2005, it was high time to go back somewhere. CBTU chief
Lucy chose Gary, Indiana as the actual and metaphorical
destination.

’Fifteen-hundred people came through’ the high school that
hosted the March 2006 National Black Peoples Unity Convention
in Gary, ’the most important single economic discussion in
the Black community this year,’ said Ron Walters, professor
of political science at the University of Maryland, College
Park, and one of the organizers of both the 1972 and 2006
events. ’I think [Gary 2006] was the first time we focused on
the economic status of our community,the tremendous and
urgent crisis that we face,’ Walters told the CBTU
convention’s Town Hall meeting in Orlando, two months later.

It is evident, however, that at this late date in predatory
capitalist development, when the institutions of government
have been thoroughly corrupted by a racist and amoral class -
abetted by their Black and Brown camp-followers - the
resistance requires tools that were not developed during the
34 years since Gary I.

’We can’t depend on the federal government, they don’t give a
damn,’ said Dr. Walters. ’We need to create centers of public
policy’ to confront the array of rightwing think tanks that
operate against us. "We have the Joint Center for Political
and Economic Studies. Well, that’s not enough.’

’We need liberation-oriented economics to pull all this
together. We need a science of how to win under capitalism.’

Only people power beats money power - an even iffier
proposition when money power also controls state power and
military power. The possibilities that seemed so promising at
the 1972 Gary convention now recede under the onslaught of
capital gone crazy.

’There has been a weakening of the labor compact,’ said Dr.
Julianne Malveaux, noted economist and political commentator.
’People with good jobs and benefits are an endangered
species.’ She was specifically referring to Black people.
That’s not just a shame, it also means that political bases
and resistance resources have been lost - a tsunami of
destruction during George Bush’s first term in office, alone.

What is to be done? Dr. Malveaux, Ron Walter’s co-panelist,
appeared to ponder his ’win under capitalism’ thesis. The
stark realities of official, slash and burn economics call
into question the possibilities of finding a niche in the
capitalistic organism big enough to fit enough Black folks to
justify the effort. ’Economic development and economic
justice are not necessarily the same thing. There is an
aspect of capitalism that has absolutely nothing to do with
justice,’ said Malveaux.

Justice has always been the well-spring of the Black
political imperative. How does one mobilize Black people
power against corporate money power and state power, without
invoking justice? How, without a rage against mass Black
incarceration - the scourge that destroys the Black community
and all its institutions with Nazi-like efficiency?

And in the end, how does one mobilize masses of Black people
when the flow of capital - and white people - back to the
cities shrinks our majorities beyond the tipping point, a
process that is well under way?

’Whites are moving into formerly Black neighborhoods, and
they’re not even scared,’ said Malveaux, to the knowing
laughter of the audience. ’Urban America was always a
political base for us. We need to look at gentrification from
an economic and political perspective.’

The time for looking is limited. Capital transforms
landscapes, especially demographic ones. Beginning around
sixty years ago, the great capital investment in a previously
nonexistent suburbia sculpted the political and racial
contours of the United States. Most people now alive were
shaped by that mighty wave of capital, as were the events
that are celebrated every February as constituting the modern
civil rights movement. Now, we have reached the end of that
cycle. (See all five parts of the BC series, ’Wanted: A Plan
for the Cities to Save Themselves.’)

We must go back even further than Gary 1972, to a fundamental
reassessment of Black people’s resources: primarily, our
solidarity, the single legacy of slavery and Jim Crow - the
’oneness’ that was once enforced, but is now taken for
granted - that is worth nurturing and preserving. Only people
power beats money power. As Bill Lucy explained to the
Orlando convention, we are rapidly running out of everything
but ourselves.

Excerpts from William Lucy’s Speech

’In no city can anyone ever suggest that a leader of the CBTU
ever sold out their community or their organization - we do
not sell out. It’s as simple as that.

’For the past six years we have had the most devastating
government for working people. Six years of government, of
the rich, by the rich and for the rich. Six years of
government cloaked in deceit and deception, supported by lies
and alibis.’

Workers

’The failed policies of this administration are visible in
every segment of our lives. Jobs, education, healthcare,
economic development, pensions and retirement security,
Social Security, prescription drugs, trade or immigration.

’Unemployment is up and wages have been stagnant since 2001,
forcing desperate working parents to get a second, and
sometimes a third job or max out their credit cards just to
make ends meet. The average household now carries eight
thousand dollars in credit card debt.

’Worker benefits continue to disappear. Only 46 percent of
America’s workers now have a pension, with the numbers
dropping each year as corporations line the pockets of
corporate management at the expense of workers. Adelphi,
Delta, United Airlines symbolize the greed and arrogance that
permeates corporate America.’

War

’The future of children and grandchildren is being strangled
by Bush’s war in Iraq and his tax cuts for the rich elite,
which have driven our national debt to $8.3 trillion. That’s
$28,000 for every man, woman and child in this nation.’

Corruption

’This administration and their corrupt allies in Congress
have looted the federal treasury, treating it like their
personal ATM machine and ripping off the taxpayers.

’From refueling aircraft at the Pentagon to body armor, from
war material to hot dogs in the cafeteria, they have found a
way to steal from the American taxpayer. Their level of
corruption is only exceeded by their level of incompetence
and dishonesty.’

Katrina Racism

’And no place was Bush’s incompetence, racism and hypocrisy
more visible than with the federal government’s response to
the hurricane disaster in Mississippi and New Orleans.

’The whole world, and especially the people from the gulf
region, will never forget the incredible incompetence,
indifference and cronyism shown by this administration in the
aftermath of one of the greatest natural disasters of our
time.

’We must end this madness.’

Black Condition, Not Black Problem

’Today, one out of every two American children who happen to
be Black lives in poverty, compared to one out of every seven
white children.

’Today, more than 800,000 young men who happen to be Black
are locked into a criminal justice system that punishes white
offenders less frequently and less severely.

’Today, the average Black family earns 60 percent that of the
average white family.’

Rethink Everything

Going back to Gary means rethinking the whole deal, since
1972 - maybe since Emancipation. However, the Black union
leaders gathered in Orlando in May, most of them middle aged
repositories of wisdom for their families and neighbors as
well as their fellow unionists, were hungry for more mundane
and immediate advice: How do we survive the Great Theft and
Disorder?

’What’s the difference between income and wealth,’ asked
Chaka A.K. Uzondu, facilitator of a workshop titled,
’Closing the Racial Wealth Gap.’ About 40 unionists filled
the meeting room. ’People tend to focus only on income but
the disparity in resources is much more dramatic in wealth
than in income.’

In fact, although Black income is less than two-thirds that
of whites, white household wealth is eight times that of
Black families. ’Inequality is growing enormously,’ said
Uzondu.

Wealth gets a family through hard times, or pays for a
college education. Income can be cut off in a moment. Thus,
the precariousness of Black life, even among higher income
African Americans.

Kenny Diggs and Petie Tally, young union activists, handled
the nitty-gritty ’All Politics is Local’ workshop. The
question before the room was simple: ’What actions can we
take to create change?’

Five groups organized themselves to answer the question as it
related to different issues areas: affordable, quality health
care, jobs, immigration, retirement security, education. A
cluster comes back with its assessment on how local and
national policies interact in education:

’Georgia has a big problem with discrimination. The schools
are broken down. There’s no transportation system to get to a
better school.

’Collective bargaining could help, so Congress could do a lot
to get collective bargaining for teachers. Teachers are paid
very poorly in Georgia.

’Illinois has the same problems as New York and Georgia - and
more.’

Outlawing Taxes

At another workshop, facilitators Foster Stringer and Ann
Mitchell explained the gory details of the legislative
atrocity TABOR, the so-called ’Taxpayer Bill of Rights.’
TABOR is the ultimate poison pill - the Hard Right’s stealth
weapon to ’starve the beast’ of taxation and, thereby, what’s
left of the social safety net. Pushed by the troglodyte
National Conference of State Legislatures and a host of
rightwing think tanks, the state constitutional amendment
’restricts revenue or expenditure growth to the sum of
inflation plus population change; and it requires voter
approval to override the revenue or spending limits,’
according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Mr. Stringer, of the American Federation of Teachers, shows a
map of where TABOR is moving across the nation.

’If TABOR had existed when Bill Clinton was president, that
surplus by law could not exist,’ he said. ’If TABOR becomes
part of the state constitution, you’re locked in.’

An informed organizer’s obligation is to ’educate our union
members as to what that is all about. How are we going to fix
Louisiana and Mississippi and Florida if we can’t raise the
money. It will have to be taken from other areas.’

’The general public honestly believe that TABOR will not
affect basic services: health care, education,
transportation, the environment. You as union members have
the credibility to make this case.’

Toxic Katrina Politics

The term ’environmental racism’ was unknown to the delegates
in Gary, 1972. However, in the full flower of ’disaster
capitalism’ - as Clark-Atlanta Prof. Robert Bullard, of the
Environmental Justice Resource Center, dubs it - Black
unionists have jumped in with all four feet. The CBTU
affiliate CARAT (Community Action and Response Against Toxics
teams) is active in the dumping grounds that we call Black
communities all across the nation.

When Katrina hit, the Black CARATs were there. Beverly
Wright, a New Orleans home owner and community activist, told
a packed room of unionists how CARAT saved her house and
block - at least for the time being.

As Ms. Wright explained it, 179 volunteers helped
rehabilitate her block. They included unionized steel
workers, Hampton University students, and ten young prisoners
from New Orleans in bright orange jumpsuits. Bush’s boys were
either absent or actively sabotaging the rescue.

’FEMA was supposed to pick up the dirt. They did so for two
days and never returned. We were left with big mounds of
dirt,’ said Wright.

Then a hostile state agency jumped in. The Louisiana
Department of Environmental Quality disputed residents’
claims that flood sediment was contaminated. A bureaucrat
’went on TV,’ said Ms. Wright, to show he would eat the dirt.
’We said, if he eats dirt for ten years, then we’ll believe
him.’

Nobody in government lent an effective hand. ’The mayor had
no plan for us. The government had no plan to repopulate our
neighborhoods. They were trying to destroy our project by
leaving dirt in the streets.’

’They are trying to turn New Orleans East into green space.
But our whole block is returning except for one 80 year old
lady.’

Wright reports that 27 houses on the block were rehabilitated
by volunteers in 12 intensive work days. ’Twenty-five other
neighborhoods want to do the same thing. Twenty-eight
neighborhood associations all meet once a week. All of them
want to come back.’ In New Orleans, we witness the classic,
lawless war of capital against people. In words and actions
writ large and infinitely racist, capital cannot help but
telegraph its intentions. ’Developers are looking at this
property and salivating. I have a lakefront property,’ said
Ms. Wright, who hopes to remain in her city through CARAT’s
’Safe Way Back Home’ initiative.

The next day, at another CARAT workshop (the organization
holds an overlapping annual conference with CBTU), Black
unionists grouped by state for an exercise in ’Community Risk
Mapping.’ The task was to create a hypothetical list of
hazards and short- and long-term risks to communities, and a
plan of action.

Laverne Mayfield, director of community outreach for the
International Chemical Workers Union, related to BC a real-
world hazard CARAT confronted in Cincinnati:

’We found that styrene was being stored in a railroad tank
car at a plant near a poor and working class neighborhood.
The inhibitor agent [that stabilizes styrene] had run out. If
there had been a fire, the fire department would not be able
to put water on it, because water causes styrene to explode.
Meanwhile, people are getting sick. The chemical plant should
pay for cleanup of this poor community.’

Black Women Are Everywhere

When the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists was born in 1972,
35 to 40 percent of the delegates were women - the most
striking characteristic that sets Black organizations apart
from white ones. Approximately the same ratio - maybe more -
obtains today. The CBTU’s National Women’s Conference is
extraordinarily popular - and basic to the bone. These
sisters take care to deal with the fundamentals.

’We’ve got to adjust to change if we are going to retire
comfortably,and not wind up going to work at age 70 or 80 to
survive,’ said Anita Patterson, chair of the Women’s
Conference.

The women of CBTU have gotten the message: hard times are
upon us, and we must change our habits and practices. ’Our
money doesn’t stay in our community very long, does it?’ said
author T’Angela Floyd, rhetorically.

Loan officer Ladonna Smith declared, ’Our credit is our
character’ and, ’Bad money management is putting some of us,
not all of us, in bondage.’

Certified financial planner Kimberly Stewart dissected the
Bush partial privatization Social Security scheme, which is
based on the Chilean model imposed by former military
dictator Augusto Pinochet. ’The actual results from Chile
show that more than 80 percent of those who [invested their
retirement money in the private sector] have less to retire
on than those who left it in the government plan.’

People must ask, ’Is the investment going to get me through
this week, or get me through this life.’

Financial planner Augustus ’Gus’ Olalere, provided an
overview:

’Companies are continuing to divest from pension funds, and
putting the money elsewhere. The laws have no teeth, no
substance. We must hold our elected officials accountable.’

Olalere urged consumers to insist on ’defined benefit’
retirement plans that detail the actual benefits retirees
will get, rather than ’defined contribution’ plans that say
only what the corporation will contribute. ’A recent study
showed that more than 80 percent of people with some form of
retirement plan actually don’t have enough money for
retirement.’

The lesson: Black women are getting into survival mode.
That’s an ominous sign, but we’re glad somebody senses the
danger.

The Men of Words

We have left the ’men of words’ for near last, because they
are widely visible, whereas the people who organize on the
ground often do so in relative obscurity.

Operation Push chief Rev. Jesse Jackson was fresh from what
he believed to be a great Black victory in New Orleans, where
Mayor Ray Nagin won reelection. Nagin had marched with
Jackson and thousands of others in April in New Orleans.
Therefore, the former Republican and consistently rightwing
politician’s victory should be seen ’in terms of redemption,
revival,’ said Jackson. The reality is much more complicated.

In times of crisis, the last thing we need is simplistic
formulations. (See Sanyika, ’Nagin’s Re-Election As Mayor of
New Orleans,’ in this issue.) The perception and reality of
Nagin’s victory are quite different things.

But the Reverend’s take on immigration was keyed to Black
unionist’s clear knowledge of the world. ’Today our economy
needs guest workers to undermine organized workers,’ said the
Baptist preacher.

’Immigrants took our jobs? Saying that is like the dentist
pulling the wrong tooth.’

’Did immigrants take your jobs in Detroit?’ [’No!’]

’Did immigrants make tennis shoes in Indonesia?’ [’No!’]

’Did immigrants take your steel jobs out of Pittsburgh?’
[’No!’]

’How can people who can’t vote and have to hide by day take
your jobs? It is easier to fight a desperate worker than to
fight the Power.’

Jackson called for a $100 billion budget to reinvest in our
cities. Knowing that would not occur as an initiative of
congressional Democratic leadership, no matter what happens
in November, Rev. Jackson turned inward, to the Black body
politic. ’We need to change the direction, not just the
leaders. Why can’t we take a portion of our pension funds to
use the workers’ money to reinvest in our cities.’

Why not, indeed? The answer is: it would require a monumental
education campaign among Black unionists to understand and
reconcile their fiduciary and political obligations and then
put both in service of their people.

Let the process begin. ’Our’ cities are running out of time.

New People to Organize

We are also past time to begin figuring out what the African
American political relationship will be with immigrants, most
of them Latinos - part of the new demographics of cities that
are no longer our own political bases. Only a bar stool fool
doesn’t know when the ’last call’ lights are flashing. Blacks
must work overtime to understand the political and social
motivations of the new population - whether the immigrants
reciprocate, or not.

So swiftly has the immigrant population swelled, large
sectors of Black America have failed to adjust to the new
paradigm, which is no longer Black-White. Who are these
people? ’A lot of immigrants came because they were fearing
political execution,’ said Patricia Campos, of the Labor
Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) and an
activist in the Unite-HERE union. Campos is the daughter of
undocumented workers from El Salvador, where the United
States caused at least 70,000 people to be slaughtered in a
brutal civil war.

’Who are the criminals? The immigrants - or are the criminal
corporations like Wal-Mart?’ The massed CBTU members nodded
their answer.

’We should not let people like (CNN’s) Lou Dobbs tell us that
the worker next to you is your enemy. He’s not your enemy.
The enemy is the government that has ignored this issue.

’We live in dangerous times. After September 11 our
government led us to believe that the reason it happened was
because of insecure borders.

’We were attacked by criminals, not by immigrants!’
[applause] ’If we go around attacking nations whose
governments we don’t like, we will continue to have people
coming to the United States.’

No less than military aggression, U.S. imposition of
corporate schemes such as NAFTA devastate rural economies,
pushing populations to the urban centers (Mexico City is one
of the world’s largest, with a population approaching 20
million) and north to the border. ’Hunger is greater than
fear,’ said Campos.

African Americans have studied the familiar enemy - white
racists - for generations. We must perform the same due
diligence in the presence of a new population, mostly poor
people of color who know full well the workings of racism in
their own countries. We are obligated to school them in the
peculiar racial realities of the U.S. - and then move on to
joint action.

No one leaves home if there is a viable choice. African
Americans in the cities that have become home to the new
population have no choice but to grapple with their immigrant
neighbors and co-workers - as we do with ourselves - to find
common ground. ’If we don’t organize immigrants, this
[labor] movement will continue to dwindle,’ said Campos. ’As
labor leaders, it is our responsibility to make undocumented
workers a part of the system, with all the rights of other
workers. If we don’t defend their rights, who will defend our
rights when we are attacked?’

The young labor organizer invoked the words of Dr. Martin
Luther King, which are part of her Latina American lexicon:
’We will either live together as brothers or perish together
as fools.’

A Sharp Tongue

’There’s an epidemic of ‘Negro Amnesia’ in every region of
the country,’ a trimmed-down Rev. Al Sharpton told the
Saturday morning crowd of Black laborites. ’People can’t
remember where they came from, how they got here.’ [’That’s
right’]

The malady has obvious symptoms, marking three successive
stages of affliction, said Sharpton. Victims of Negro
Amnesia uncontrollably utter inanities such as:

’The civil rights days are over. (That’s a mild case).

’I’m gonna go for myself. (That’s a moderate case.)

’I got here by my own merit. (That’s a terminal case.)

’If there were not a social movement, your merit and ability
would not even be under consideration.’ [Sharpton brings down
the house]

’We are talking about a group that wants to have celebrity
with no struggle.

’Things are better but things are not over. And they are only
better because people did not leave them as they were.’

Both Sharpton and Rev. Jackson were speakers at the March
National Black Peoples Unity Convention, in Gary. Where some
might see same-old-same-old, others see continuity of the
Black conversation - a conversation that is being incessantly
interrupted by forces from outside the African American
community.

’Wal-Mart is buying Negro leaders,’ said Sharpton, pausing to
measure the effect of his words. There are all kinds of
arrangements: ’Long-term leases-short-term leases-campaign
season leases.’

The National Action Network leader and former presidential
candidate railed against ’all the talk about ‘new Negro
conservatives’ and their ‘new strategies.’ There ain’t
nothing new about Negroes being scared. They have a
laboratory where they’re making Negroes now. They all act
like the race issue is settled.’

The corporate signature is plain on the growing list of
bought-off African Americans, and Black labor recognizes the
handwriting. Sharpton knew his crowd.

’We cannot fight this unless labor is strong and on the
ground. We need labor to be the muscle of the human rights
movement. ’No football team lets the other side’s coach
choose its quarterback and fullback.

’Sometime back in the Nineties, somebody decided that the
leader of Black America would be Bill Clinton. Now I guess
Mrs. Clinton will become Mrs. Black. [the crowd explodes in
laughter]

The New York-based preacher challenged Black America in
general:

’Martin Luther King didn’t have no cell phone. A. Phillip
Randolph had no FAX machine. You are sitting up here, on-
line, e-mail, all this technology, and can’t get ten Negroes
together.’

Black labor had succeed in bringing 1,700 activists and
organizers together, at Disney World. But Sharpton is right.
African Americans possess infinitely more skillsand material
resources than in 1972. And we have the benefit of having
made massive mistakes in the two generations since MLK and A.
Phillip Randolph, from which we must learn - and quickly.

What a Difference a Year Makes

Just a year ago, during the Phoenix CBTU convention, the AFL-
CIO was preparing to split. Insurgents led by the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU) and Teamsters demanded
an overhaul of the federation that would have resulted in the
purging of most Blacks from the executive council. (See BC,
’No Real Labor Reform Without Blacks,’ March 3, 2005.) The
effect would have been to roll back Black and minority gains
achieved in 1995, when the AFL-CIO expanded its council to
better reflect the diversity of the membership. To many Black
unionists, it appeared that 2005 labor reform and white
backlash went hand-in-hand.

Black labor was reeling:

’-black union workers took a walloping hit last year: 55
percent (or 168,000) of the union jobs lost in 2004 were held
by black workers, even though they represented only 13
percent of total union membership.

’More stunningly, African American women accounted for 70
percent of the union jobs lost by women in 2004. Yes, 100,000
black union women - many the sole or primary breadwinner in
their households - lost their paychecks, their job security,
medical insurance for their families and their retirement
nest eggs in just one year. Gone!’ (See Dwight Kirk, BC ’Can
Labor Go Beyond Diversity Lite?’ February 24, 2005.)

The CBTU and other minority constituents of the AFL-CIO had
not yet recovered from their near-total shutout from labor’s
and the Democratic Party’s electoral activities in 2004. The
handwriting seemed to be on the wall - independent Black
organizations not wanted.

But the CBTU, by far the largest of labor’s minority
constituent organizations, fought back. They organized Town
Hall meetings across the country, and made it clear that
’white’ labor - because that is how they were behaving -
would find that shunning Black workers would be an even more
horrendous mistake than splitting the AFL-CIO.

In 2004-2005, Black labor successfully faced the federation
down and - rather than being purged - won an even greater
role on the executive body. CBTU Executive Vice-President
Willie Baker, recently retired as International VP of the
United Food and Commercial Workers union (now part of the
breakaway Change To Win federation), noted that ’minorities
and women on the AFL-CIO executive council will increase by
50 percent.’

’There ain’t no labor movement without us,’ Baker told the
opening session of the CBTU convention. ’We were considered
expendable when the debate over the future of labor started a
few years ago.’

The labor federation did split, with the Change To Win
faction spinning off in its own orbit. But Black labor did
not.

At Disney’s Contemporary Hotel convention center last week,
all one saw were Black folks in struggle - together, bound by
their own history. The CBTU’s leadership and membership spans
the divide between the AFL-CIO and Change To Win, almost as
if it isn’t there. In truth, the labor dispute is white
folks’ problems, which will be solved largely by Black folks’
intervention, just as America’s structural flaws have always
been identified and confronted chiefly by African Americans.

When Blacks hold high the banner of solidarity, they affirm
the principle to everyone else.

Among the many resolutions passed by the CBTU’s 35th annual
convention in Orlando, at least one has the force of history
behind it. By unanimous vote, delegates urged - demanded! -
that labor ’Make the House Whole,’ meaning the House of
Labor. The AFL-CIO and Change To Win were told to identify
the critical issues that divided them and to take action to
reconstitute the American labor movement.

Only Black solidarity could marshal the moral authority to
make such a demand. And only solidarity will bring us through
the crisis of Capitalist Disorder.

[Glen Ford and Peter Gamble are writing a book to be title,
’Barack Obama and the Crisis in Black Leadership.’]

http://www.blackcommentator.com/186/186_cover_black_labor.html