Stern to WaPo: Labor Movement ‘Had Socialist and Communist Tendencies’; Change the Tense, Andy
Retired Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern was recently interviewed by Journolist organizer and Washington Post staff writer Ezra “the Constitution is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago” Klein. In response to a question from Klein about “the animosity between unions and workplaces” (that is what Klein says he said), Stern made an interesting assertion that most readers probably took at face value: We grew up in that culture. In the '30s, people didn't want us to exist. We had to do sit-down strikes . . . we had socialist and communist tendencies. We grew up, to speak in Marxist terms, in a world with a lot more class struggle. It's not viewed through that light anymore. Really? “Permit” me to disagree. Stern's statement about the relative lack of socialist and communist tendencies was arguably true of the U.S. labor movement until the mid-1990s. It was then that Lane Kirkland, famous for orchestrating aid for Poland's Solidarity movement in the 1980s, stepped down as head of the AFL-CIO, after which the organization, according to an Arch Puddington column at Freedom House, deliberately disengaged from international involvement with worker organization efforts in totalitarian countries. Since then, the leadership of the U.S. labor movement has lurched steadily leftward. That this directional shift has occurred as public-sector union representation has grown, while private-sector representation has declined, is hardly a coincidence. So what other evidence is there that Big Labor in the U.S. and world socialists have once again become quite cozy? On Friday, Meredith Jessup at The Blaze, Glenn Beck's online journalism outlet, provided some (bolds are mine): Last fall, leftist ideological groups of socialists and communists teamed up with American labor unions to march together for “One Nation.” Now, as labor leaders struggle to maintain a stranglehold on collective bargaining privileges in Wisconsin, the same groups are once again marching together under a banner claiming unions are the heart of the American dream.
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on March 1, 2011. Filed under