By Ralph Nader
Rose Ann DeMoro is the Executive Director of the California Nurses Association (CNA) – the country’s fastest growing union. Since 1992, union membership has grown from 13,000 to the present 63,000. And it was since 1992 that the nurses became more prominent in participating in and running their own unions. No coincidence.
Here is her succinct critique labeled “Top 10 Problems with the Current Debate in the Labor Movement”.
“1. There are no real ideological disputes, in part because the current AFL-CIO leadership and programs were, mostly, put in place by those now challenging them...
2. No workers or rank and file union members are involved, and it is their labor movement...
3. No issues affecting the majority of working Americans are being debated – declining real wages, the health care crisis, the continued erosion of democracy in the workplace, outsourcing of jobs across the skill and pay spectrum, a deteriorating social safety net, declining support for public education, environmental degradation, social justice and ongoing racial and gender inequality, alienation and disaffection from the political process.
4. No real solutions to these problems are being proposed...
5. The specific proposals by the Change to Win group are structural and bureaucratic, not programmatic...
6. The notion that the salvation of the labor movement reduces to "density as manifest destiny" is historically false, and analytically shallow...
7. If the issue of organizing was simply dues rebates we could all rest easy. But that notion is painfully oversimplified...
8. Perhaps because the corporate right is so extreme, some “progressive” analysts have been portraying the dues rebates and proposed forced mergers as core issues...
9. Limiting the executive council to the biggest unions would further reduce the influence and voice of women and people of color in labor leadership.
10. No discussion of non-bureaucratic strategies are on the table..."
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I didn't realize there was still a labor movement going on. Of course, when you read Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the Unted States", you find out that the labor movement has always been much more present than it seems.
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