UNITED STATES: Academics, Unions Proclaim New Alliance

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Oct 6 1996 (IPS) - The ivory towers of academe and the shop floors of organised labour are drawing closer this year, as both professors and union leaders pledge support for a common front against economic inequalities.

Part of the surprise is that many academics who have fought for multiculturalism and diversity in the classroom in recent years are embracing unions — not always the most multiracial groups — as the epitome of their values.

“At their best, labour unions have been America at its best,” Richard Rorty, a University of Virginia professor and the most noted ‘deconstructionist’ philosopher in the country, said at the outset of a series of workshops at Columbia University this week.

He argued that, contrasted with the “family values” offered by politicians in election years like this one, the values the unions have embraced — including solidarity and the willingness to face organised violence peacefully — are worthy ones.

But support for organised labour is in decline. Only some 16 percent of U.S. workers belonged to labour unions in 1993, compared to 35 percent 50 years ago.

The more than 13 million workers now belonging to unions also earn less respect for strikes, and encounter more people willing to cross their picket lines, Rorty said, blaming such problems as “a symptom of moral decline.”

Part of the blame, some of the academics at the Columbia forum, ‘The Fight for America’s Future’, said, goes to the proliferation of alliances based on race and gender, rather than class, in recent decades.

Noted feminist Betty Friedan, author of ‘The Feminine Mystique’, said that the civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements had all made accomplishments since the 1960s. But she argued, “we must transcend it all now” in favour of a broader movement that represents all working people.

“While we have been concerned with advancing our own interests…something really dangerous has been going on,” Friedan argued: a growing disparity between the richest segment in the country and the bulk of working people.

From affecting only women and minorities, Friedan said, the growing inequalities in wages are also striking at white men. College-educated white males have seen a 20 percent drop in their incomes over the past six years, she said.

Similarly, although the wage gap between women and men has closed in the past 20 years — women now get 70 percent of men’s wages for comparable jobs, up from 59 percent in 1975 — two-thirds of the change has come from men’s wages declining, not women’s wages rising, Friedan noted.

As a result, she argued, “some of us who have been in the women’s movement feel the need to be part of a larger movement now.”

Professor Cornel West of Harvard University made a similar argument in favour of African Americans, arguing that black participation in organised labour needs to be strengthened. West, the author of ‘Race Matters’, supports a broad front of all working peoples against corporate power, including minorities previously given short shrift by organised labour.

Such support comes at a crucial time for labour, with the lead coalition of unions, the American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO), wooing a work force that is increasingly less white and less male.

“For unions, this is the year we either reverse the long decline in our memberships, or decide to slip into the back pages of our history books,” John Sweeney, the new AFL-CIO president, told the Columbia University audience.

To that end, Sweeney’s administration includes the highest ranking minority and women in union history, AFL-CIO Treasurer Linda Chavez-Thompson.

Recent months have also seen the rebuilding of a labour grassroots coalition, heavily involved in support for President Bill Clinton this election year, and “Union Summer,” a popular project to involve college students in union activities over the summer holidays.

“The labour movement awoke from a long, long sleep,” Sweeney said of the new burst of activity since his election a year ago.

The new unity and growth behind labour, he contended, is a result of the fall-out of corporate downsizing, economic globalisation and the free-market policies of recent governments.

Those factors, he argued, have led to a 5 percent decline in median family income from 1989 to 1994. At the same time, he noted, corporate profits have risen 205 percent since 1980 — with the top one percent of the U.S. income pyramid reaping most of the benefits.

“Because of the wealth gap, America is becoming edgier, angrier and meaner,” Sweeney said, pointedly referring to the growth of right-wing militias in parts of the country.

The crucial task now, many academics feel, is to restore respect for the unions and their history. “Labour has always been at the cutting edge of history,” labour historian Eric Foner of Columbia University argued, noting how unions brought 40-hour work weeks, a (temporary) end to sweatshops and gains for immigrants and African Americans in the past.

Most students in this country know who the Rev. Martin Luther King is, but have no idea why the standard working day is eight hours, lamented Rorty.

A knowledge of the history of labour, Sweeney agreed, may be what is needed in “a country that has lost respect for workers and the jobs they do.”