Economy & Trade, Headlines, Labour, North America

POLITICS-US: Labour Stakes Hopes on Obama Presidency

Bankole Thompson

DETROIT, Michigan, Sep 19 2008 (IPS) - After losing over a million jobs in the manufacturing industry in the last eight years, U.S. labour leaders are saying no more to another Republican administration.

In 2000, on the eve of George W. Bush's first term, labour statistics show that 2,832,000 union members were employed in manufacturing jobs across the country. By 2007, after seven years of the Bush era, the number of union jobs in manufacturing had plummeted by 39 percent to 1,734,000. That amounted to an estimated loss of 1.1 million union jobs.

That is why the 2008 presidential campaign has seen the U.S. labour movement taking a central role in strongly backing Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama as the candidate for labour. Obama has agreed to sign the Employee Free Choice Act allowing workers to freely form unions in the workplace, unlike his Republican opponent Sen. John McCain who participated in a filibuster to kill the bill.

"The labour movement has been under sustained corporate and right-wing attack for the greater part of the last 60 years, and these attacks have intensified during the [Ronald] Reagan and Bush II Republican eras," said Sheldon Friedman, a noted economist and research coordinator for the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO).

"Against this backdrop, it is remarkable that we still have a labour movement in this country. It is easy, but fundamentally incorrect to blame the [union] leadership for the troubles of the labour movement and the dire straits of America's working class," he said.

Friedman said while the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) did its part to outsource jobs from the working class in the U.S. to other nations like Mexico, rising trade deficits with Canada and Mexico, according to the Economic Policy Institute, have also cost the U.S. about one million jobs, two-thirds of them in manufacturing. That figure represents non-union as well as union jobs.

"Sen. Obama has said that if he becomes president, he will renegotiate NAFTA to provide better protections for American workers, consumers and the environment," Friedman said. "The AFL-CIO certainly would be in favour of that. McCain by contrast was and remains a staunch supporter of the NAFTA we have now."

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said labour's future would be safe with Obama.

"Sen. Obama has a plan to increase jobs and put necessary checks on Wall Street. He is calling for 1,000-dollar tax breaks for middle class families to bridge the crisis; re-regulation of Wall Street so the savings, pensions and 401(k)s of working people are safe; fast-tracking investments in clean American energy that will create millions of jobs; cracking down on lobbyists; and ending the Iraq war so we can rebuild our own country and its bridges and highways and schools that are crumbling," Sweeney said.

"America doesn't have to be country where hard working people have to struggle," he added.

Obama has secured the endorsements of virtually every union in the U.S., small and big, including United Auto Workers (UAW), Teamsters, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Service Employees International Union (SEIU) amongst others.

Friedman said amid a dire economic climate with the recent fall of the major investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc and the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch & Co, Obama will address what he calls "the imbalance of power that has developed between workers and corporations."

"Worker productivity has risen by 20 percent since 2000, but after nearly eight years of Bush misrule, median family incomes are lower today than they were," Friedman said.

"An additional nine million Americans lack health insurance coverage. Home foreclosures have skyrocketed, billions of dollars of home equity owned by working families has evaporated, gas prices are in the stratosphere, and the financial system is in the grip of its most serious crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s," he noted.

Ron Gettlefinger, UAW president, told thousands of Obama supporters at a Labour Day rally in downtown Detroit Sep. 1 that, "28 million union voters have made a choice" to send Obama to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

"We love our country too much just to accept things as they are today," Gettlefinger said. "Barack Obama can count on organised labour and working people to stand with him on the road to change."

In return Obama told the crowd, "I'm a labour guy. I believe in the labour movement. I believe in the American worker. I believe they have a right to organise. I believe they have a right to collectively bargain. I believe it's important to have a president who doesn't choke on the word union. And I believe we've got to have a Department of Labour that believes in labour."

With Michigan losing about 400,000 manufacturing jobs under the Bush economy, Gettlefinger's UAW members accounted for a significant number of that loss.

As the seat of the country's automotive industry, Michigan's largest city Detroit has been in the limelight lately because of the toll the economic crisis has taken on carmakers General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Chrysler – known as the Big Three.

Recently GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner testified before a U.S. Senate committee for a 50-billion-dollar loan request to the automakers from the federal government. All three carmakers are arguing that the loan guarantees are not a bailout because it would speed up the production of fuel-efficient cars and reduce dependence on foreign oil.

Obama has criticised McCain for not supporting the full loan request. Others have questioned the wisdom of the federal government's foot-dragging on the issue because unlike Washington's takeover of ailing Wall Street firms, the auto industry has repeatedly emphasised that it is only seeking a loan from Congress, not a bailout.

Some analysts have said Congress's failure to authorise the loans could mean more drastic cuts in the industry, consequently affecting union jobs.