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At the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization meeting there was, to the outsider, a bewildering cacaphony of causes championed by protestors in the streets-old growth forests, labor rights, bovine growth hormone, McDonaldization of culture, Nike sweatshops, human rights in Burma, unfair dumping of steel, developing country debt, conspicuous consumption, and certainly the WTO itself. But most protestors understood what they all had in common: opposition to increasingly unbridled corporate power.
"The battle of Seattle" was a turning point in American politics, dramatically expressing broadly shared misgivings about both globalization and the influence of big business. It was also a critical experience for the American labor movement, linking unions with a wide-ranging contemporary critique of "corporate capitalism," as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees president, Gerald McEntee, identified the threat at the week's big labor rally.
No major social movement clashes more often or more pointedly with big corporations than the labor movement. Still, another step in strategic thinking must occur if the labor movement is to mobilize its troops and comprehensively critique the influence of corporate power and priorities on politics, public policy, the environment, and culture. But part of building a progressive coalition, which the labor movement now acknowledges it needs, involves broadening their attack on how individual companies treat their employees into a critique of the corporate capitalism and the untempered dictates of the market. A movement embodying such an anticorporate focus is emerging more clearly in the United States today, and labor is a central force in it. It is a movement that has, at some level, broad support: around three-fourths of Americans, according to a recent Business Week survey, think corporations have too much power. By overwhelming margins, Americans have told pollsters that the rich and big corporations have benefited most from globalization and that the global economy should be more regulated to protect labor rights and the environment. As a result, the labor movement is in the position to play a major role in a new popular movement that could greatly boost organized labor's depleted power and encourage a new populist, progressive politics.
Many obstacles lie in that path, however. With regard to the labor movement, two issues stand out: the complex relationships between unions and businesses whose employees they represent and, second, the challenge of transforming the Democratic Party or finding independent expressions of the political goals of labor and the anticorporate movement. This year's elections brought the most recent variation on that perennial problem, including the issue of organized labor's endorsement of Al Gore for president.
Before examining the prospects and pitfalls of labor's relationship to the new anticorporate movement, it may be worth considering briefly how the relationship between organized labor and this anticorporate movement has emerged. Despite contentious strikes, resistance to unionization by many corporations, and hostile legislation like the Taft-Hartley Act, the labor movement largely assumed, for years after World War II, that corporations had grudgingly accepted their role in society, especially as the radical Left within labor was suppressed. But in the late 1970s, as unions pushed for reform of labor laws to compensate for a mounting "union-free" strategy by many businesses, they were shocked to find even unionized blue-chip corporations of groups like the Business Roundtable arrayed against them. The United Auto Workers president, Doug Fraser, denounced the corporate actions as "one-sided class war."1
The "war" remained one-sided for quite a while. In the 1980s unions were forced on the defensive by the triple whammy of the Reagan administration, deep recession coupled with monetary policies that devastated manufacturers exposed to foreign competition and a new corporate offensive to break strikes and unions. Many leaders retreated to the bunkers, hoping for the shelling to stop one day or for Democratic politicians to ride to the rescue. But even if the party had held more than the House as a redoubt, growing numbers of Democrats distanced themselves from labor-pointedly symbolized when the presidential candidate Gary Hart dismissed unions as a "special interest." Also, the Democratic Party, particularly starting in the 1980s under the influence of then-congressman Tony Coelho, began competing more vigorously with Republicans for corporate money and opening themselves even more to corporate influence. Unions were losing members and political clout and doing relatively little to regain either.
A few unions, however, began to rely on corporate or comprehensive campaigns to bolster organizing drives against outlaws like J.P. Stevens or to substitute for or supplement strikes, which were losing effectiveness as companies increasingly resorted to using replacement workers. These comprehensive campaigns looked for weak points in the support network for corporations or found vulnerable fronts far from the classic picket line at the shop gate, for example, in their environmental behavior or attempts to win tax breaks from a local government. In pursuing these campaigns, unions often discovered new allies, issues, and levers of power, but they were also forced to confront a corporate system, which was different from confronting a single employer in the traditional bargaining relationship.
At the same time, trade crises began to force industrial unions to think more about their relationship to the rest of the world. Their initial impulse was often to abandon the free trade perspective that unions supported in the immediate postwar era, when U.S.-based manufacturers dominated global production, and adopt a protectionist stance against imports deemed unfair. But the effort to limit imports and insure "fair trade" was also often combined with criticism of the hypermobility and irresponsibility of capital and of the rules favoring footloose employers, from the tax code to trade agreements. Also, as more U.S. companies moved overseas and more foreign multinationals set up shop in the United States, some unions began to see the need for closer working relationships with unions in other countries, helping them to organize or turning to them for help against multinational employers in the United States. The AFL-CIO interest in international labor rights was still colored more by cold war politics than by a fight with global capital.
By the time the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was proposed, many unions had developed an analysis that went beyond the gut fear of job flight. Their opposition slogan-"Not this NAFTA"-held up a model of slower North American economic integration that first raised Mexican living standards and also demanded respect for labor rights from both governments and multinational companies. The environmental movement, which had become increasingly attuned to the ravages of big multinationals in developing countries, also demanded that NAFTA include environmental protections. Although a few unions had histories of working with environmental groups on workplace safety, clean air or other issues since at least 1970, the NAFTA fight brought unionists and environmentalists closer together, both in Washington and in local communities. Indeed, it was the grass-roots movement against NAFTA that ultimately pushed the AFL-CIO to take a more active opposition role.
While the development of corporate campaigns and the fight against corporate globalization were especially important, public employee unions were also confronted with the threat of privatization, and nearly every union faced, at least indirectly over the bargaining table, the crisis of an increasingly profit-oriented, corporatized health-care system. Deregulation in industries like trucking and air transportation also quickly destabilized relatively comfortable relationships between unions and employers. At the same time, the consumer movement (epitomized by Ralph Nader's network of organizations) and citizen groups (like the now-defunct Citizen Action or the Citizen/Labor Energy Coalition) continued to challenge corporations, often in alliance with the labor movement. Labor's new efforts after 1995 to reach out to university students reaped an unexpected bounty. Tapping into some earlier protests, for example, against Nike commercial contracts with universities, campus antisweatshop movements sprang up all over the country. These spawned yet other campus campaigns on behalf of worker rights, in the United States and abroad, as well as a more comprehensive anticorporate movement among students.
Although the AFL-CIO did not mount a major campaign to oppose the transformation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade into the World Trade Organization, labor's globalization campaign under Sweeney's leadership increasingly focused on rewriting the rules of the global economy rather than pursuing earlier sectoral strategies, such as negotiating voluntary restraint agreements on steel or cars. The labor movement called for protection not just of labor rights but also of environmental and consumer rights. While some elements of the antiglobalization movement-typically, more localist, environmentalist, or anarchist-simply wanted to stop globalization, labor was moving increasingly in the direction of a social democratic regulation of the global market-a global New Deal, akin to what John Maynard Keynes had argued for in the waning days of World War II. But individual unions were also building more global campaigns against individual corporations, much as some citizen/consumer movements had done (dating at least from the international battle with Nestlé over promoting infant formula).
These coalescing anticorporate movements from labor, environmentalists, students, and other constituencies developed at a time when popular sentiment in the United States was also slowly shifting from the conservative, antigovernment, backlash politics of the 1980s. Globalization, which contributed to a widespread corporate reorganization toward more contingent relations with employees and subcontractors, heightened popular anxieties about job security and the country's economic future Moreover, the quarter-century rise in inequality of income and wealth has led to distrust of and resentment toward big corporations. Even during the long boom of the 1990s, the income gains most families made came from working longer, and the share of corporate income claimed by capital grew at the expense of employees for the first time since the end of World War II. The metastasis of campaign fundraising from corporations added to resentment of corporations and distrust of politics in the 1990s, but there has also been a growing desire for government to more effectively provide income security, health care, and educational opportunities.
Although the political climate has shifted in recent years toward support for more active government and restraint on corporate abuses, the Democratic Party has shifted away from both under Clinton, who has probably been the Democratic president least sympathetic to labor and most anxious to serve and please big corporations (making the Commerce Department a marketing arm of corporate America). Clinton, of course, was constrained by the post-1994 Republican congressional power, but he also bears some responsibility for that Republican victory. His strategy of corporate accommodation contributed to his political trap. Pushing through NAFTA alienated many working-class Democrats and independents, who stayed home in 1994. His health-care plan did not have the simple, straightforward popular appeal of establishing a single government insurer, as in Medicare. However, it was attacked as mercilessly by businesses with the same "big government" rhetoric they would have used against a single-payer plan, even though it had preserved the private industry role as a hedge against such attacks. The heritage of Clinton, then, was largely to fend off some of the most outrageous Republican assaults by taking the Democratic Party further in retreat from its fading legacy of progressive politics.
After the Newt Gingrich takeover in 1994 and the victory a year later of the Sweeney team at the AFL-CIO, labor tried to revive itself by rebuilding its grass-roots politics of door knocking, leafleting, and personal persuasion. Unions said that they were going to emphasize issues much more, giving members the information and popular economics education to make their own decisions, rather than focus on simple union endorsements. In some areas, unions and central labor councils much more actively encouraged union members to run for office or educated candidates better on union issues. The AFL-CIO tried, with limited success, to build grass-roots political operations that would last beyond election day to keep mobilizing members on legislative issues and hold politicians accountable. Taken as a whole, the strategy greatly boosted labor member voting, which was a major factor in unexpectedly strong Congressional Democratic gains in both 1996 and 1998 and the reelection of Clinton.
But the old ways of doing politics remained important: unions still gave heavily, mainly to Democratic campaigns, and made endorsements. The old realities of American politics had not changed either. Especially in presidential politics, the two major parties are like parliamentary coalitions in other countries, except that they are assembled before, rather than after, the election. The dominance of the Democrats and Republicans is overwhelmingly reinforced by the logic of winner-take-all elections. Without some form of proportional voting, votes for alternative parties are almost always expressions of protest that may influence the debate but affect the election outcomes only by depriving one of the two major-party candidates of potential votes. Yet this system has the well-chronicled effect of mushing politics to a narrow middle range. The power of big money in politics further constricts debate. But unions, especially union officials, are highly pragmatic and, as in recent years, still extremely defensive: they realize that the loss of somewhat sympathetic control of either the Senate, the House, or the presidency can be very costly for their members and their organizations. As a result of the conservative realignment of the Republican Party, labor sees fewer Republicans who are even remotely prolabor, and its dependence on the Democrats grows, despite the rising influence of the conservative, probusiness "third way" politics within the party.
How can organized labor reconcile its commitment to the rising anticorporate movement with its reliance on an increasingly corporate-influenced Democratic Party? How can labor reconcile its strategy of emphasizing issues, not parties or candidates, with its pragmatic recognition that choosing the lesser of two evils-since either Democrats or Republicans will almost certainly be elected-may make a difference in a committee vote on an important bill in the next legislative session? The standard answer from part of the Left has been to form a Labor Party (or Citizens Party, New Party, etc.), and some unions have done that. However, the new Labor Party does not yet run candidates, and most of those same unions continue to practice electoral politics much like the unions that have not joined the Labor Party. Yet without structural change in the American political system, nobody has offered a persuasive argument about how to win power with a Labor Party (or other minor party that cannot endorse other major-party candidates, as allowed by the law in a few states, such as New York, with its Working Families Party). Although there are a few significant exceptions in national politics, like Rep. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and many opportunities in local elections (providing a progressive alternative where conservative Democrats dominate or running in nonpartisan elections), minor parties usually can hope to do no more than influence the major parties by seeming likely to lure away supporters.
The early decision to endorse Al Gore was critical in salvaging the vice-president's sagging primary campaign, but it represented an abandonment of labor's professed interest in focusing on issues and letting members decide. It was very much a top-down decision, though Gore probably would have won a majority of union members' support in the primaries without the endorsement. Many labor leaders liked Gore because they knew him, he had come to their conventions, and he had-with the AFL-CIO's education and prodding-spoken out (though only to union audiences) more strongly than even most Democratic politicians about employer obstruction of workers' right to organize. But several key unions were deeply disturbed by Gore's support of "free trade" agreements (he had been the administrations' point man in debating NAFTA with Ross Perot), and endorsements from the Autoworkers and Teamsters came only in the late summer of 2000. Gore promised that he would incorporate labor rights and environmental protection in future agreements (Clinton in 1992 had promised the same with NAFTA), but both he and the AFL-CIO were caught in a bind as the administration pushed permanent normal trading relation status for China. Gore tried to distance himself from the controversy, and Sweeney tried to give him cover, but the debate was a painful reminder that Gore was seriously wanting on one of labor's key issues.
Ralph Nader, on the other hand, had been an early and effective critic of globalization, and his campaign hit hard on abuses of corporate power and forcefully advocated before all audiences the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act and strengthening of labor rights domestically. Simply judged on the issues, Nader was far closer to labor's position on virtually every important point. Yet only the independent California Nurses Association and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, along with a smattering of local leaders, supported Nader. If the labor movement had taken its own issues more seriously, it would have pushed for Nader to be included in the debates, or the big industrial unions could have sponsored a debate in the key Midwest states and invited Nader, Buchanan, Gore and Bush. There were lots of reasons, both strong and weak, for avoiding Nader (for instance many labor leaders did not have a personal relationship with him, hard-core working-class Democrats were reluctant to switch, and the Green Party itself was not an attractive vehicle for labor interests). But the overwhelming logic was simple: it was virtually certain that Bush would win if Nader ran a strong race. If the labor movement had backed Nader, he might well have done better than even Ross Perot, but such an outcome would have mangled the Democratic Party and made Bush president, with the remote prospect of creating any lasting political institution. But it certainly would have changed the terms of debate and given expression to the new anticorporate politics.
Indeed, Gore was forced to turn to a populist campaign of defending working families-the rhetoric favored by the AFL-CIO-against powerful interests, such as the drug and tobacco companies, in order to revive his campaign, reduce the threat of defection to Nader, and consolidate his own party base. In mid-September this new strategy had put Gore plausibly on the road to victory. Gore's choice of Joe Lieberman as vice-president was, of course, to play to the center-right of his party and to suburban, middle-class independents, but the populist, "fighting Al" campaign message was less directed at the Volvo-driving soccer moms and more pitched to the checkout counter moms, that is, white working-class voters, those whom Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers identified in America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters as the key swing
constituency for the Democrats.2
With the big money still flowing into Democratic Party
coffers from many of the same corporations
that bankroll the Republicans, however, there is reason to ask what these political marketing strategies have to do with what an Al Gore might actually do in office. But the strategic choice of a more populist campaign critical of big business, especially if it succeeds for Gore, could help slow the party's drift to the Right and give progressives more political space.
Even with his populist rhetoric, candidate Gore still proposed modest steps on most issues and relied more heavily on targeted tax cuts rather than direct spending or intervention in the economy, which in many cases would have been more effective and equitable. He criticized Republican tax cuts for the rich but offered weak proposals for reversing the long trend to inequality, and his most important initiative for economic growth and greater equality was the highly dubious plan to pay off the national debt. Despite a welcome but downplayed pledge to make it easier for workers to join unions, this was hardly a program to match the new fighting Al rhetoric. Labor could count on Gore to resist most efforts, with the probable exception of international trade, to harm unions or deliberately redistribute income and wealth further to the rich, but it could not hold much hope for dramatic gains.
Yet the labor movement and its allies in the new anticorporate movement will quite clearly have to keep the pressure on the Democrats, win or lose. In part, that means continued demonstrations, although the routine of trying to replicate Seattle at every major international gathering risks becoming stale and counterproductive at some point. More important, labor must deepen the grass-roots organizing and take seriously its decision to build political networks that last beyond the election. (Some unions, such as the Steelworkers, are far ahead of others in this work.) The labor movement, which is on the record as supporting public financing of campaigns and which joined with a host of public interest groups attacking corporate television for profiteering on campaigns rather than providing free air time, has to make radical campaign finance reform a top priority. (Unions have at times been reluctant to raise the issue, since Republicans turn every campaign finance debate into a crusade to make union political activity nearly impossible.) It is also worth escalating what has been a minor discussion thus far about changing voting mechanisms to provide more proportional representation-undoubtedly a long fight, but one worth waging. Labor 2000 in 2000, an effort to get more union members to run for office, has been successful and holds out long-range promise of changing the Democratic Party from below. Unions have pushed for a "working families" agenda that many Democrats wanted to ignore, reviving issues like raising the minimum wage and proving that they both make sense and win politically. But often union issue advertising and education have simply ratified Democratic Party priorities rather than pushing the party. Likewise, labor and its allies need to take the risk of challenging more conservative or unreliable Democrats in the primary elections, as the Los Angeles Federation of Labor and several unions did in 1999, by throwing out veteran Congressman Marty Martinez and selecting the more progressive State Representative Hilda Martinez as the candidate. As a national fundraising institution, the Democratic Party may be corrupt, but as a political organization it is undisciplined and open to insurgencies. Indeed, at the grass-roots level, party organization often barely exists. (Ralph Nader would not have defeated Al Gore in the Democratic primaries, but his influence running there would have been salutary, strengthening progressives within the party in ways not likely to result from his Green candidacy.) The biggest constraint on reforming the party is not organization but money, including the distortion of campaigns by fundraising, the influence of major funders, and ultimately the power of money over the system as a whole.
Labor has clung to the Democrats in recent years largely for protection. The party's ability and will to defend unions and workers have obviously declined, but it is still understandable why unions prefer even a faulty defense to a full-scale assault. But it is becoming clearer that unions must rely more on their own forces and their immediate political allies for the most effective defense. However, there is no escaping the need to use that same anticorporate alliance to reform both the Democrats and the electoral system. Ultimately, as the Service Employees International Union president, Andy Stern, has argued, labor needs more than a defensive political shield. It needs a party that can and will take the political offensive.
Beyond the complications of political strategy, there is a second major obstacle to labor's consolidating the new anticorporate politics: most unions-and most workers-have a profoundly ambivalent relationship with corporations. On the one hand, there
is perpetual tension and a fundamental
conflict over power and distribution
of corporate income. On the other hand, workers inevitably cooperate with their employers simply by going to work, and they often feel a stake, however perilous, in the success of the company (much as they want to feel they are doing well in their own job, even if they resent the company and their own bosses). Unions must establish working relationships with companies. Often they benefit from tactical alliances with more cooperative employers to isolate and pressure the more recalcitrant. Unions often go beyond this inescapable ambivalence to establish cooperative workplace agreements or to support employers or industries before government. Without going into the complex and rancorous debate about whether such cooperative agreements can actually promote workers' interests, it is simply important to note that workers feel dependent on their employers for their jobs, even when they are prepared to fight with those employers. Similarly, despite the widespread public view that corporations have too much power, varying sentiments exist toward particular companies and industries. (For example, the recent Business Week poll showed that while there was overwhelming dislike for health maintenance organizations, there was fairly wide satisfaction with computer companies.) People feel ambivalent about corporations, both distrusting and even hating some of them but depending on them for jobs, products, and services and even admiring some of them.
This ambivalence can pose problems for the new anticorporate politics. For example, although unions and many major environmental groups have grown closer together in their critiques of the global economy and its governing institutions, they have not been able to reach a common understanding on global warming-neither the extent of the problem nor what policies to adopt. The United Mine Workers, which fears that combating global warming will cost coal mining jobs, have taken the lead in organizing a group of unions (some building trades, the Boilermakers, the Teamsters, and a few others) that have allied with and taken funding from the coal industry and other corporate interests. Together they argue that the threat of global warming is not scientifically established, that the Kyoto climate-change agreement is an economic threat to the United States (especially since developing countries do not face the same requirements as the rich countries), and that the United States should not act to reduce carbon emissions. Sweeney would like to reach some agreement with environmental groups on global warming, and there are unions that support him solidly such as PACE (Paper, Allied, Chemical and Energy Workers), AFSCME, UNITE, the Steelworkers and the Service Employees. But many union leaders tend to defer to another union that claims its own interests are threatened, especially when the union has played such as historic and largely progressive role as the Mineworkers.
Other unions-building trades, auto workers, hotel workers, garment unions, steelworkers, and more, both progressive and conservative ones-often go to bat for industries with which they otherwise fight. At times, they may have good reason to support their industries, based on their own interpretation of their interests, but at times they may simply be doing what the corporations ask because they think such action will create more jobs.
In many cases, unions can develop alternative strategies. For example, even though global warming policies will cut the number of coal miner jobs, more jobs are now lost to the industry's technological advances. Also, strong environmental regulations could create new jobs involving the clean up of messes the industry has left behind. The coal industry-or other industries that may be phased out, like organochlorine chemical production-could be taxed to provide a fund to provide long-term education, income support, and community rebuilding. It is possible for the United States to generate jobs by leading the way to new generations of energy-efficient products and production processes that developing countries could also adopt. In the meantime, tax and tariff policy can be used to ensure that global corporations will not flee developed countries with strong global warming regulations and simply shift polluting production to poor countries.
European unions have fewer problems accepting the need for a stronger response to global warming, even though many participate in codetermination of corporate policies or other cooperative actions with employers. Although U.S. unions often fight individual corporations with an intensity rarely found in Europe, European unions seem to have a more consistently critical view of corporate power. That view results partly from the legacy of socialist and social democratic politics, partly from the more extensive social welfare system, which makes workers less dependent on an individual employer.
To the extent that the broad anticorporate movement in the United States develops, then the labor movement may turn less to employers as allies and more to that progressive movement, especially if labor and its allies also can remake the Democratic Party. But the tensions over strategy toward particular companies or industries that arise because of the ambivalent nature of the relationship between workers and employers are not likely to disappear.
The political potential of the "Seattle coalition" is only beginning to unfold. Despite the obstacles, it could develop into a broad movement for both greater political and economy democracy. Whether it develops depends a great deal on how vigorously the labor movement will be willing to push the critique of corporate power, in their own day-to-day dealings with employers and in their political work both inside the Democratic party and beyond. Once again, as in the early 1900s, the question of the role of the corporation in American life may take the political center stage, if labor and its allies decide to put it there.
Notes
1. Kim Moody, An Injury to All: the Decline of American Unionism (New York: Verso), p. 148.
2. Ruy Texieira and Joel Rogers,
America's Forgotten Majority: Why the
White Working Class Still Matters (New
York: Basic Books, 2000.)
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