Worker Movement Declares Independence from Political Duopoly

By Organizing Committee of the Million Worker March

On June 23, 2004, at the behest of John Sweeney and the leadership of the AFL-CIO, Marilyn C. Sneiderman, Director of the Field Mobilization Department of the AFL-CIO, sent out a Memorandum to “All State Federations and Central Labor Councils of the AFL-CIO” referencing the “Million Worker March,” and directing them “not to sponsor or devote resources to the demonstration in Washington, D.C.”

We take note of the fact that this Memorandum was dispatched without any prior communication with the organizers and official endorsers of the Million Worker March. These include the entire ILWU Longshore Division, the National Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU), the South Carolina State AFL-CIO Labor Federation, labor councils across the United States and national organizations such as the International Action Committee and Global Exchange.

In effect, the leadership of the AFL-CIO has gone over the heads of significant sectors of the labor, anti-war, community and inter-faith organizations in issuing a directive to boycott a labor mobilization in Washington, D.C.

This is unprecedented and requires us to pose the question: Why would the leadership of the AFL-CIO feel threatened by a labor mobilization that confronts the crisis facing working people in America and seeks to reverse the wholesale attacks on our living standards, social services, housing, health, and education while challenging the diversion of trillions of dollars derived from the labor of working people to fund permanent war over decades and a brutal war for oil and occupation in Iraq?

The Memorandum from the AFL-CIO states:

"While we may agree with many of the aims and issues of the March, the AFL-CIO is NOT a co-sponsor of this effort and we will not be devoting resources or energies toward mobilizing demonstrations this fall.

“We think it is absolutely crucial that we commit the efforts of our labor movement to removing George W. Bush from office.

“We encourage our state federations, area councils and central labor councils not to sponsor or devote resources to the demonstrations in Washington, D.C. but instead to remain focused on the election.”

The Million Worker March is organizing working people to put forth our needs and our agenda independently of politicians and parties.

We say that only by acting in our name can we build a movement that advances our needs. The very formation of the trade union movement was the result of independent organizing and mobilizing of working people. The struggle for industrial unionism, the movement for women’s suffrage, the great movements for civil rights—all these flowed from the will to mobilize independently and in our own name.

Our aims, with which the AFL-CIO leadership purports to agree, include universal single-payer health care from the cradle to the grave – that ends the stranglehold of greedy insurance companies.

Will the defeat of George Bush result in this?

Our aims include an end to the corporate trade agreements that pit workers against each other everywhere in a mad race to the sweatshop bottom. Will the defeat of George Bush change this, when the Democratic Party brought us NAFTA, MAI and Fast Track, with Disney and J. C. Penny paying Haitian workers 21 cents per hour?

Will the defeat of George Bush end privatization and the destruction of unions in the public sector, when the Democratic Party privatized and outsourced our jobs under the rubric of “downsizing government?” What was downsized were our social services, while corporate profits and the military sucked trillions of dollars taken from the sweat of prior collective labor.

Will the defeat of George Bush bring a crash program to restore our decaying and devastated public schools, replacing them with state of the art public education in every community in America?

Will the defeat of George Bush result in the rebuilding of our inner cities with free modern, state of the art housing and an end to homelessness?

Will that presumptive defeat see the launching of a national training program in skills and capacities that enlist our people in rebuilding this country?

Will it end the criminalization of poverty or abolish the prison-industrial complex that has destroyed generations of Black and Latino youth?

Will the defeat of George Bush roll back the bipartisan union-busting and anti-labor legislation, such as Taft-Hartley, that has been on the books for 67 years?

Will a Bush defeat secure for us a modern, free mass transit system in every city and town?

John Kerry, outflanking Bush from the far right, has called for an intensification of the so-called “war on terror” by targeting people “before they act”—giving explicit sanction to secret arrests, detention without trial and the labeling of opponents as “terrorists.”

Will the removal of George Bush preserve the Bill of Rights, repeal the Patriot Act, Anti-Terrorism Act and all the repressive legislation that has set the stage for a Police State in America?

Will the defeat of George Bush recover the $4.4 trillion dollars that disappeared from the Pentagon and the Department of Defense as the military industrial complex loots and hijacks government in America?

John Kerry, the presumptive candidate of the Democratic Party, has demanded a dramatic increase in the number of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and the extension of U.S. military control in the Middle East and beyond.

Will the defeat of George Bush end the occupation in Iraq and the plans for greater imperial war?

Will his defeat bring the troops home now or is the plan after the election, as widely reported, for conscription of working class youth and an expansion of militarism in America?

On June 25, the United States Senate voted 98-0 to hand the Pentagon $416 billion. Days earlier, the Senate voted 93 to 4 to increase the troops in Iraq and shortly before this the Congress approved an initial military budget of $1 trillion for the next decade.

We take note of the fact that the Department of Defense Accounting Office acknowledged that $4.4 trillion have disappeared from the Pentagon’s accounts and the books have been cooked for decades.

One trillion dollars represents $1,000 a minute since the birth of Jesus.

Will the defeat of George Bush recover these looted funds or stop the perpetual siphoning of trillions of dollars into the arms industry, leading inevitably to even more drastic cuts in all social services?

Today, 71% of U.S. corporations pay no taxes, but John Kerry’s principal economic adviser is Wall Street’s Warren Buffett, who, along with George Shultz, performs the identical role for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Do John McCain, who John Kerry sought as his running mate, or Lee Iacocca of General Motors and Chrysler, who endorsed Kerry, represent the interests of labor and working people?

The official leadership of the AFL-CIO, faced with rapidly growing rank-and-file support for a great mobilization of working people in America, has ordered organized labor to cease and desist in its support for the Million Worker March.

The entire labor movement and organized labor has been put on notice to boycott the call for a Million Worker March on Washington on October 17, 2004.

Working people in America are under siege. The corporate and banking oligarchy that has power in this society is waging class war against us all.

In the face of attack after attack, the response of the leaders of the AFL-CIO has been silence and default.

Their voices are stilled. They dare not cry out “Enough Is Enough.” They fail to take note that the two parties are financed by the same people and their address is Wall Street.

Thirty-six years ago Martin Luther King summoned our people to a great Poor People’s March on Washington to address a system in crisis and to confront the hijacking of our government and our country by a banking and corporate oligarchy that has captured the two political parties in America.

Would the AFL-CIO dare send out a directive to all of labor to boycott and sabotage the marches and mobilizations of the great civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm X and Cesar Chavez?

In a very real sense, the labor movement in America is facing a crisis of its own. The unrelenting class war that has been waged against us has reduced the number of unionized workers to twelve percent. This is the result of a conscious campaign by that one percent of the population that owns and controls ninety percent of the national wealth.

Labor is under siege because the corporate bosses know that the trade union movement is the organized expression of all working people and of the vast majority of the population of the United States.

We are at the point of production and when we mobilize our ranks, we represent a force that no illicit power, however concentrated, can hold back.

We have taken the pulse of the rank and file and of unorganized labor. The overwhelming majority of working people want an end to permanent war and the hemorrhage of national resources into military production and war.

Just this past week, AFSCME and SEIU, two of the largest trade unions in America, passed unanimous resolutions calling for an immediate end to the war in Iraq, an end to the occupation and a return of all U.S. troops.

That is why the Million Worker March reaches out to labor. We are proud that labor councils across America have endorsed the March. We are inspired by the knowledge that every ILWU local from San Diego to Anchorage has endorsed. The are energized by the endorsement of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and by national organizations for immigrant rights.

We are organizing in every trade union in America and drawing upon the energy and passion of the labor movement wherever people desire change.

We are summoning working people from every walk of life to mobilize around a working peoples’ agenda, and a vision of an America transformed.

Ours is a March and a Mobilization for all who say “Enough Is Enough!” Infant mortality in Harlem is greater than in Bangladesh and in Bangladesh the same Stevedore Association that sought to break the ILWU is privatize their ports and imposing starvation wages.

Unemployment in our inner cities has reached catastrophic proportions with over 60% of black male youth without work while militarized police units are deployed as an occupation army.

One out of four children in America goes to bed hungry but hundreds of millions of dollars of our union dues fund politicians who do nothing about it.

Our labor movement has the opportunity and the obligation to reach out to hundreds of millions of working people, organized and unorganized.

We need not hand politicians a blank check so they can soft-soap us at election time and destroy our jobs, benefits and social services all the time in between.

Join us in standing up for our rights. Join us in advancing our own agenda. Join us in fighting for our communities and our jobs.

Support the ILWU workers who shut down the port to protest apartheid and launched a mobilization against Taft-Hartley and all repressive anti-labor legislation.

Support the one and quarter of a million women who marched and mobilized in Washington, D.C. for reproductive rights and equal pay for equal work.

Send a message to all the politicians—whoever they are and under whatever banner they parade: We are not for sale; we cannot be soft-soaped, lied to or taken for granted.

Let them know that we have our own agenda based upon our own experience, our own needs and our own vision and that we shall hold everyone’s feet to the fire.

We say to the leadership of the AFL-CIO and to all and everyone who has hopes or expectations of John Kerry or any politician seeking our support: Do not take us for granted; do not confound silence at the top for acquiescence at the base.

Labor has issued too many blank checks only to have our pockets picked and our aspirations ignored.

Let us join together—everyone in the house of labor.

Every gain we have ever made has been won under the signal banner of labor: we are working people proud and strong, union strong, and we fight for our rights with our own voice and in our own name.

Come together, sisters and brothers. Let us tap into our great strength—the desire for change and for social justice.

We call on everyone to endorse, build, finance and mobilize the Million Worker March on Washington, D.C. on October 17—a day when we demonstrate across the United States that labor and working people are on the march and will no longer be denied.

(statement by the Organizing Committee of the Million Worker March on Washington, issued June 27, 2004)

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