AS working people in the US are gearing up to get out and vote in mid-term Congressional and state elections on November 4, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka had this to say on one of the top issues on people’s minds:
‘Raising wages will be a driving force at the polls in the approaching mid-term elections.
‘Working people will turn out for candidates who support solutions that will make a difference in the real world – from raising the minimum wage to ensuring that all workers can bargain collectively and make a livable wage.
‘The labour movement stands in strong support of the broad campaign to bring attention to raising wages leading up to and following October 10 (a national day of awareness about raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour), and it’s our responsibility to keep it going.
‘Labour is perfectly positioned to unite a massive movement, to raise wages and to lift up our communities.
‘We have an opportunity to show every elected leader, from the White House on down, that those who stand proudly with working families will win in November. It’s that simple.’
Meanwhile, Thomas Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers told delegates at the Missouri AFL-CIO’s 27th Biennial Convention in St. Louis that Missouri, that its ongoing fight against anti-union ‘right-to-work’ legislation, ‘is critical to the future of the American labour movement’.
Buffenbarger warned: ‘I don’t know if any of us can really absorb the importance of it.’
The Missouri legislature is dominated by the Republican Party, with Republicans making up 110 members in the House to Democrats’ 52. In the Senate, there are 23 Republican senators to nine Democrats.
Defeating ‘right-to-work’ (RTW), paycheck deception and anti-prevailing wage measures this session required a concerted bipartisan lobbying effort that almost certainly will be tested again next year when the legislature comes back in session.
Buffenbarger said that twenty-four states currently have RTW legislation on the books. He warned that the fight for fairness for working families and union members has reached the tipping point.
Buffenbarger told delegates: ‘All it takes, brothers and sisters, is one more state to fall to RTW and we will have a national RTW law!
‘The Heritage Foundation (the conservative anti-union think tank based in Washington) has already drafted the legislation. It will pass, because it is already the law in the states. We are one state away from a catastrophe.’
The only hope, Buffenbarger said, is to fight by voting for worker-friendly candidates who can return balance to the state legislature in Missouri and throughout the country.
It will require defeating Wisconsin’s RTW Governor Scott Walker and making Michigan a union shop state once again.
Buffenbarger stressed: ‘We have to make sure no state falls. We’ve got to start taking them away from RTW. We have to go on the offensive. We’ve been on the defensive since 1959.’
This was a reference to when the United Steelworkers (USW) went on strike against the major US steel companies over management’s insistence that the union give up a contract clause to change the number of workers assigned to a task and introduce new work rules.
The strike prompted then-President Eisenhower to invoke the back-to-work provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act. The union sued to have the Act declared unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court upheld the law.
Buffenbarger declared in Missouri that ‘it’s a big fight, a tough fight’, trying to hold back RTW, protect pension plans, provide health care coverage and craft trade agreements that actually protect American workers instead of selling them out.
But it’s a fight we have to take on at the ballot box, he insisted. The Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) made pension plans more stable, Buffenbarger said.
But he added: ‘Congress, in its wisdom, started to chip away at laws that ensure this stability, and deregulated pensions laws to the benefit of big banks and Wall St. and to the detriment of us!’
Buffenbarger said: ‘You’re at the mercy of politicians when you’re on a pension plan. Start to worry, get pissed off, and do something about it!’
He went on to warn that health care is also under assault.
The Machinists leader told Missouri AFL-CIO delegates: ‘Obamacare is a step in the right direction, but not far enough.
‘We should have a single payer health system like they have in the rest of the industrialised world.’
In his wide-ranging speech, Buffenbarger went on to warn against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). TPP is a proposed regional free-trade agreement to enhance trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region.
But like NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), it threatens to make it easier for companies to offshore their work – and our jobs – to low-wage workers in other countries in order to increase the companies’ profits.
NAFTA sent manufacturing work south of the border, Buffenbarger said. Since 1994, when NAFTA was implemented, 700,000 jobs have been shifted south of the border. General Electric, just one of the companies that benefited, laid off 2,304 workers to shift jobs to Mexico.
Buffenbarger said: ‘We hurt Americans. Our Congress did that. There’s something fundamentally wrong in the mindset of people who guide business in this country, and the politicians who follow them, that we would hurt American workers so somebody on Wall St. can get a bigger paycheck.’
Meanwhile, Buffenbarger said, Republicans want to kill the Export-Import Bank, which guarantees loans to foreign customers who buy products made in the US.
In his concluding remarks, Buffenbarger said: ‘Elections have consequences. In this state, a consequence of an election could be a RTW law and worsening conditions for public sector workers.’
He warned against being a single-issue voter, saying: ‘I’m a hunter and a shooter. But the most important thing in my life is a job. Without a job, you can’t afford ammunition for your gun, fuel for your boat or anything else.
‘You think you live in the land of the free and the brave. I know you’re brave, but I want you to have all the freedom you have a right to, and that will be governed by politics.’
While speaking out against the anti-worker Republican agenda, US union leaders are keeping workers tied to the coat-tails of the Democrats.
But there is no future for US workers and youth under capitalism. The US unions must break from the bourgeois Democrats and form a Labor Party to represent the interests of the working class as it advances to the US socialist revolution.
This means building a US section of the Fourth International to lead the great class battles for workers power and a US Socialist Republic to victory.