Unions to Wal-Mart: The Gloves Are Off

As the debate concerning labor's future rages on, prodded by Andy Stern, international president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and answered by one union after another, Sweeney has agreed on the need for debate and the need to form committees to discuss the various proposals generated. Workers in general and union members in specific can hardly find cause for inspiration or action in these multi-point programs. This is true, except in one very important area: the proposal for a full-scale campaign against Wal-Mart.

In the case of Wal-Mart, Stern has argued that one clear "purpose" for the AFL-CIO is in leading campaigns which transcend the interests of any single union and find common cause for all unions and indeed all working people. He has publicly argued in the debates around restructuring the federation that as much as $25 million should be set aside for the Wal-Mart campaign, virtually earmarking all of the HSBC/Household credit card money that goes to the federation. Sweeney has shrewdly stated publicly that perhaps even $25 million is not enough to fight Wal-Mart – indicating that it might take even more! Disappointingly, very few other unions have taken up the battle cry over Wal-Mart, perhaps because they believe that this is all just an argument between one or two people and a half dozen unions, rather than a fight for the future for American workers.

I would argue that a campaign on all fronts against Wal-Mart is the single organizing effort that offers the most hope for working families. Furthermore, driving an organizing program around Wal-Mart and its workers could potentially change the tide for labor and create organizational capacities that would give us fighting and winning forces for our future.

Wal-Mart and its wannabes are the GMs, Fords, Chryslers and U.S. Steels of our time. The great organizing drives of the 1930s were mounted around an understanding that there was a new industrial force reorganizing all of mass work. Wal-Mart and its clones have similarly restructured the nature of mass enterprise in service industries today, and therefore are transforming the fundamental business model that drives both domestic and international commerce. <snip>

http://www.alternet.org/rights/21531/

...and determine what color paper the proposals should be copied on, and then argue whether a Xerox or a Canon copier should be used, and then form an exploratory committee on language to be used...

...and by then it'll be 2009, and another Republican will be in the White House, and people will be more miserable than before.

Labor unions have had ample warning about this. Where have they been? Where have their spokesmen been? Where is their Battle at the Overpass at Ford's Rouge Plant?