Keep Government Out of Union Affairs!
Only a few days after the successful November 24 mobilization at Tweed Courthouse in defense of the ATR teachers, we got some blowback from our union leadership, which had unsuccessfully tried to squelch it. A motion was circulated for the upcoming executive board, and will come up at the December 17 Delegate Assembly. It’s purportedly against the presence of news media, recording, videotaping or transmitting union proceedings. In fact, this is a gag rule.
It’s a given that labor organizations have every right to do business without the prying eyes and ears of management and its hacks and flacks in the media. But that is not what this is about. It grew out of the videotaping, by a union member, not of a regular union meeting, but of a special gathering (complete with wine and cheese) called with the aim of drawing people away from the union protest, which the Delegate Assembly had voted for, outside the Department of Education. But their ploy didn’t work – people came out to the demo in the hundreds.
The leadership could simply rule that there will be no video or audio recordings at meetings and be done with it. But here we have an elaborate resolution about the “free and open debate” in which members can speak “honestly and frankly in union meetings without fear that their words and images will be reproduced in the news media or on the Internet without their knowledge or permission” (our emphasis).
Again in the “resolves” it seeks to demand respect for the right “that their words and images will not be transmitted or reproduced without their permission.” This is not talking about a reporter from the big-business press sneaking into a meeting.
What does this mean? You can’t e-mail back to your chapter what the union reps said at the meeting? That you can’t quote what top union officers said at the D.A. on one of several list serves or blogs? Evidently, only THEY can report on it, and put their own spin on it? In the guise of defending the “words and images” of certain members (the leaders) they really want to stop the words of the membership.
There’s quite a slippery slope here. These open-ended formulations could be used to sanction a UFT member for quoting what an officer (such as president Weingarten) said in her report or discussion at the meeting. While, for now, no specific measures are mentioned, this lays the basis for disciplining dissidents.
What “free and open debate” are they talking about? At the D.A.? You got to be kidding! Two or three delegates get to speak for about one nano-second and the officers drone on for a good hour and a half. Any real discussion is reserved for the last 20 minutes, as most delegates are tromping out of the room. But the bureaucracy has not been able to shut down the free-wheeling discussion on the blogs, which is about the only outlet for real discussion among the union rank-and-file. Our opposition to bonus pay was waged there; our fight to preserve seniority, our struggle to defend the ATRS --- all of these were organized by the rank and file and aided by discussion on the blogs.
Oppose Landrum-Griffin
In objecting to this “inept gag order,” however, a posting on the ICE-UFT blog (November 30) argues that it would be a violation of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959. We strongly object to this appeal to one of the most notorious anti-labor laws regularly used by the government to ham-string, “investigate” and interfere with unions’ internal affairs.
There’s a class line here, and this is where we differ from many union oppositions. It’s an elementary labor principle to oppose all intervention by the capitalist government or its courts in union affairs, just like it’s a principle never to cross a picket line.
Landrum-Griffin grew out congressional investigations of labor, following the election of Jimmy Hoffa as president of the Teamsters union in 1957. It was based on the “perception” that the Teamsters Union was corrupt. What they actually perceived was that under Hoffa the Teamsters were rapidly organizing Midwest over-the-road truckers which a few years later led to the first national Master Freight Agreement, which dramatically raised truckers’ wages. They went after Hoffa in an effort to break union power.
From the moment that trade unions appeared, the government, representing the employers has passed thousands of laws to contain and paralyze if not directly outlaw the labor movement. Even where they ostensibly aided union organization such as the 1935 Wagner Act, setting up the National Labor Relations Board, these bodies are now regularly used to prevent workers from organizing.
These days they don’t use crude measures like the “criminal-syndicalism” acts, and instead profess concern for “union democracy.” But you can be sure that when they pretend to guarantee “clean elections” or “membership rights,” they are doing so in order to control the outcome. Various leftist groups that sued the unions under Landrum Griffin (Miners for Democracy, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, New Directions in the TWU and others) used the government to get into office, and then were beholden to them.
From the Taylor Law (used by Democrat Spitzer against the 2005 TWU strike) to Landrum Griffin (prepared by Democrat Bobby Kennedy), to the Taft-Hartley Act (signed by Harry Truman) which provides the basis for anti-strike injunctions, the government is no “friend of labor.” Where there are problems of corruption, violations of union democracy, etc, labor must clean its own house. It’s our union – we need to take it back.
In the meantime, the answer to the gag rule is “blog away”!
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