The Labor Movement has to do what it does best: Raise
Wages
By Ed Ott
Communique
January/February 2011
www.cwa1180.org/Communique/Documents/1180%20JanFeb%
2011e.pdf

Ed Ott, former executive direc- Tor of the New York
City Central Labor Council and currently Teaching at
CUNY's Murphy Institute, made this address to About 150
union communica- Torso at the International Labor
Communications Association's Awards luncheon. There is
Some editing for length and Grammar, but not for
content.

I'll start trying to describe the Labor movement's
relation- Ship with the Democratic Party. There's a pop
singer Named Duffy. She has a song Called "Mercy." It's
about a young Woman whose lover is married, and he's
got her under control. And it's against her morals, but
he has her misbehaving. She knows better. He wants
something on the side, and she wants to be seen in
public hold- ing his hand. And I think that that's kind
of the Party's attitude. They don't want to be seen in
public with us, holding hands.

We're in the hole, and it's a political hole,
it's an economic hole
because a Democratic Congress--not in my lifetime-- never
does what they say they're going to do. Democrats not
our friends We have to figure this one out. We are in a
situation where we have so many people who are discon-
nected from possibility, that is, on the brink of
social dynamite.

Huge swaths of this country have lost
everything that defined their culture. Our own
Congress has played a seditious role in our economy.
They have used their political power to rig the tax
laws to shift the wealth disproportionately to the top.
And they used that same power to break the back of
organized labor in the private sector by the wholesale
export of our industries.

If we ran the street and
someone grabbed our wallet, we would be screaming for
the police. They stole our entire livelihoods. They
stole entire communities. They stole everything that
defined generations of hard work. And they walk around
now, within blocks of this building, prepared to tell
us how we're going to live for a generation. We are in
the situation in New York City, as an example--and the
national numbers are similar, where 72 per- cent of
union members are in the pub- lic sector. That is not a
good thing.

This is a movement that will live or die in
the private sector. We have a working class, many of
whom are working for $10 an hour and under, no sick
days, no holidays, no benefits. You think about that
for a sec- ond. People don't understand how the
Republicans, how did the Republicans, and about a third
of the Democratic Party, get traction on the notion
that the teachers who teach our children are bad guys?

How did they get traction on the notion that the people
who provide vital services are the bad guys? It
happened because, if you're working for $10 an hour or
less, and you look at somebody who has a job that, the
day they're hired, they have 12 sick days, 12 holidays,
five personal days, three weeks' vacation, you've got
almost 40 days off the day you're hired, at any job.
Some Republican or Blue Dog Democrat comes on the TV
and says, "I want to take away five days," and we
scream like our children are being murdered. But for a
working class that has nothing, that doesn't make
sense. And I could submit to you that the social base
for our undoing is in an impoverished working people.
Every labor person understands social wage. Increase in
rent, wage cut. An increase in the cost of
transportation is a wage cut. Well, a tax cut is a
raise.

And the reason that Republican and Blue Dog
Democrats get traction on that issue is that if you're
working for nothing and somebody sends you a $600 check
in the mail, and it's from the U.S. government, it's a
raise. And they are seducing generations of workers.

And we need to come to terms with what the dynamic of
this discussion really is. This is a period for the
labor movement to take inventory. Part of that
inventory has to be the political reality of what it
means that our public sector is 72 percent of our union
members. We need to raise wages I believe we need to
reform our message to Democratic politicians. You want
more revenue? Raise wages. They shouldn't be the guys
running around telling people they've got to pay more
taxes. When he attacks the rich, some of your own
public school teachers, public sector workers, think
you're talking about them. Because certainly, in some
of the cities like New York, they are rich folks in a
lot of people's eyes. And tax questions are not
resonating with our own members, and you all know it.

Raise Social Security. Raise the minimum wage. Raise
prevailing wages wherever they exist, fight for living
wages where there are none. Democrats want to do
something for working people? Raise wages. You want
more revenue? Raise wages. We should not support any
tax increases unless they raise wages. We can't afford
it. The tax laws are what they are because we ... the
labor movement, are weak. The tax laws are rigged. This
is a casino and we're not playing.

I began to change my thinking as I engaged the
organizations of immigrants.

Taxi workers in New York City are contract workers.
They have no rights as workers under any law. There are
unions in our city--I won't name names--that spend more
money on catered food than they do on organizing. Taxi
workers run around to little foundations looking for
$10,000 donations. They pass the hat at the airport
parking lots among the drivers to get money they need,
sometimes to pay their rent. They use interns from
various institutions, including the Murphy Institute of
the City University of New York. They have have led two
strikes. Without any union contracts. The industry
negotiates with them all the time. The City, which
regulates that industry, does not make a move without
trying to at least neutralize them. And they are in and
out of City Hall all the time. The domestic workers,
who are poorer than the taxi workers, 99.9 percent
women, working in isolation under the worst of
conditions, consciously left out of the National
Labor Relations Act for racist reasons, left out of the
labor laws in 50 states for the same reason, were the
only leg- islative victory we had in New York state
this year with the passage of a modest Domestic
Workers' Bill of Rights, and they don't have two nick-
els to rub together.

Two labor movements

We work with about 18 million people in the unionized
sector of this country, and we are walking around
wringing our hands, "What are we going to do?
What are we going to do? What are we going do?"

There are two labor movements in this
country. One, based on an incredible record of
struggle, and a modicum amount of security, decent
incomes, they've still got some health care, although
we're paying increas- ingly for it. The other works in
the non-unionized sector, largely in the private
sector.

They are making $10 an hour or less, and huge
pieces of the old U.S. industrial workforce is
descending toward that number. And yet these
organizations, deeply rooted in their communities, are
creating new forms of struggle, new forms of
organization, and they are winning fights. That
working- class, largely immigrant, noncitizen, is the
new labor movement. Immigrants are not helpless. Who
the hell were our grandparents and great-grandparents
who built this building that created the movement that
allowed this to happen? Well, these folks in those
communities, in those kinds of organizations, they are
our great-grandparents all that many years ago. We in
the movement, we need to sidle up alongside of them,
support them, nurture them, fund them. Let them
organize the rest of the working class. They will build
great, great legacies. And we will change the politics
of this country.

If our response to this immediate
period is to circle the wagons, and try to hold on to
what we've got, they will continue to chip away at us.

Three weeks ago, front page of the Wall Street Journal,
an article about "the victory"... and the last line of
that article is some whack governor who says, "Well,
now we can have a real discussion about whether we
should have collective bargaining and unions in the
public sector at all."

If you're in the public sector,
you've got a bull's-eye right here. And don't think
that they will not put the boot to us. This is their
moment. The one big difference between the Republican
Party and the Democratic Party, for all the wrong
reasons, I might add, is that the Republicans, since
Ronald Reagan, have consis- tently stated up front what
they want- ed to do and they have done. And if they're
talking about taking away collective bargaining in the
public sector, you can believe that there's at least a
substantial number of them that are going to try it.

You will see governors trying to abrogate contracts,
eliminate pensions. In New York State, we're going to
fight to try to stop a constitutional convention from
hap- pening, because the only thing that guarantees the
public-sector pensions in our state is a little line in
the state constitution which says, "... membership in
any pen- sion or retirement system of the state or of a
civil division thereof shall be a contractual
relationship, the benefits of which shall not be
diminished or impaired." [Article v, Section 7]

If they can convene a constitutional convention and
knock out that one line, they'll stop funding these
pensions and then let them bleed out. And I would
assume that that's the same thing that goes on in
other places.

And yet, there is this other working class that has
very little protection under the law. Government statistics
say there are about 15 million people who work and live in
this country without full legal status as citizens, or
even visitors. Now, I would argue that if there were
150 folks who snuck across the border in El Paso, we've
got a legal problem. Maybe at 15,000, we've got a bit
of a social problem. But at 15 million, it was public
policy that brought them here. Employers wanted them
and employers needed them. And the government
facilitated them getting here.

Where do we go?

And we've got to be stupid not to recognize that that
is a poten-tially powerful force that should be part--
a full partner of the labor movement. Taxi workers were
the first workers' center of its type to affiliate under
the AFL-CIO's Worker Center Program to a central labor
council. I consider that work, the work that I did with
the domestic workers, to be the best work I have done
in 42 years in the labor movement. You, who are a huge
piece of our intellectual talent, need to engage this,
study this. I'm going to say this--some people are going
to be offended by it--we cannot finish the civil
rights movement unless we organize immigrants. It is
not possible. It will be the unanswered labor
question on the table.

For our enemies--and they are our
enemies, this is not the Republican Party of the
Scrantons and the Rockefellers--this is a mean-spirited,
class-conscious group of haters. Those of you, and I
respect the fact that 40 percent of our members are
Republicans and describe themselves as such, they need
to understand that this is not that old Republican
Party.

There are elements of potential violence in that
Tea Party move- ment. There are elements of reason.
Some of our own members are sympathetic to the Tea
Party. But in the end, we have seen some of this
before. We have seen this in the history books. Some of
us have experienced it at the dinner table. They did
this in Germany. This is a movement that will lend
itself out to the worst elements, and they will try to
put the boot to us. I argue right now that this labor m
ovement needs to rethink what we do best. What we have
done best in our history is raise wages.

There has to be a component of this movement in the public sector
who has fabulous wealth even in this downturn that
needs to think what has to be done to organize in the
private sector. Forty percent of the construction work-
ers--unionized construction workers in New York City--are
not working today.

We haven't seen numbers like that since before
World War II. If we don't figure this out,
we don't do it at our own peril. There are risks that
need to be taken. There are things that need to be
changed. But most important, we need to understand this
other labor movement and forge with it, and we will
reshape this country for gen- erations to come. If we
reduce these next two years to a fight over budgets, we
lose. The solution to the public sector budget problem
is not in the budget process. It is in the economy,
and the private sector economy, we need to make demands
on. You could raise wages in this country by employing
the really 20 percent of people who don't have either
full-time jobs or work. There's a middle-strata
organiza- tion in the city of New York called the
Freelancers Union.

I say middle strata because they
tend to represent people who have particular skills or
education that they can sell. But they are offered
work, not jobs, and the Freelancers Union has developed
strategies so that they can get health care. They, in
fact, have an organiza- tion that chases down people
who buy their skills and don't pay them.

Work, not jobs

We have those traditions in our movement. The actors'
unions, the arts' unions, were basically set up for the
same reasons. They were offered work, not jobs. They
found strategies to survive within that. This is a new
moment.

This is a new moment that was dropped at our
feet by defeat. When I teach my students at the Murphy
Institute, I tell them there's always two questions yo

____________________________________________

PortsideLabor aims to provide material of interest to
people on the left that will help them to interpret the
world and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

PS Labor Archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate