CHICAGO—With a warning from a veteran unionist and political activist Joe Henry ringing in their ears, attendees at the CPUSA Labor Commission’s special session in Chicago started laying political plans for 2024.
The Iowa activist, a veteran of the Teamsters’ 15-day forced strike against UPS in 1997, warned the packed session that “what you win on the picket line, you can lose at the ballot box,” paraphrasing a 1970 statement by the late United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther.
And what you win at the ballot box helps you win on the picket line was shown in results from the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections, Henry told the crowd on August 14.
With CPUSA advocating a “Communist-plus” platform, showing what quality CPUSA can add to various causes and crusades, speakers said such success can continue next year, too. Final plans will be laid at the party’s next convention, June 7-9, 2024, in Chicago.
The session to plan 2024 mobilization capped the two-day meeting of the Labor Commission at the Workers Education Society offices on Chicago’s South Side. Speakers included party co-chairs Joe Sims and Rossana Cambron, and special guest Evette Hamilton, who seeks re-election as one of a 17-person slate of progressive veterans on the New Haven, Conn., Board Of Alders.
Victory is even more vital next year, speakers stressed. Triumph by a progressive united front is absolutely necessary to stave off the incessant assaults, often corporate-backed, by the Trumpite fascist MAGA movement, its leader, and his clones at all political levels.
“Due to the ongoing attacks by the extreme right and corporate America, such as the enactment of voter suppression laws in many states…and the reactionary rulings of a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, organized labor must unite with a broad coalition of like-minded groups in 2024,” said Henry.
“This may be our last chance to save democracy!”
News reports, in the People’s World and even in some mainstream media, provide evidence of that threat:
Former Oval Office occupant Donald Trump has openly said he would trash the U.S. Constitution to regain and retain the White House.
The right-wing High Court majority stripped women of the national right to abortion. Those justices also blasted holes in workers’ rights, handed win after win to the corrupt corporate class, and blew holes in protecting workers and citizens against the coronavirus pandemic, for example. The right wingers packed the lower courts with ideologues in black robes, too.
The right also gerrymandered legislatures and congressional districts to have 2020 Trumpite election deniers turn the congressional Republican Party and state legislators into the cult of Trump.
To counter that onslaught, “We must provide a narrative to unite labor and its allies about the importance of voter turnout in 2024,” Henry said. But turnout doesn’t mean just making sure people come out to vote next November and before, but also to ensure they are legally able to vote and not running afoul of Republican-enacted state and local voter restrictions and denials.
The second part of that effort is to elect pro-worker candidates, and workers themselves, to local office.
Unite Here member Hamilton was the last of an 18-person slate of unionists first elected to the Yale-dominated Connecticut city’s council in 2011. More than 1,000 unionists have been elected in New Jersey alone, from Democratic U.S. Rep. Donald Norcross on down the ballot.
Evette Hamilton, one of the group of Yale activists who ran for City Council in New Haven, said she realized political activism was the path to trying to solve her and her neighbors’ problems, especially the problems facing neighbors of color left out of the political process and the economic mainstream.
Since their initial election, the group, a council majority of the Alders supported the demands of the unions at Yale and forced Yale to hire 1,000 workers in five years from the Black and brown people whose communities are near the Ivy League institution’s New Haven campus.
Unite Here Locals 34 and 35 got language into their contracts covering Yale’s clerical, technical, service, and maintenance workers to “change hiring practices and create pathways to jobs.”
Tax-exempt campus
Yale’s tax-exempt campus covers 56% of New Haven’s land, depriving the city of needed revenue. The majority supported a grass-roots movement and forced the institution into a $56 million yearly “payment in lieu of taxes.”
But the capper was to help Unite Here Local 33 win its 30-year campaign to unionize Yale’s 3,000 grad student workers—research assistants, teaching assistants, and the like. That election victory enabled the local to be in bargaining with the school for higher pay and decent benefits they rarely if ever had.
Yale’s also one of an ever-lengthening string of victories among grad student workers at top college campuses, including the University of Chicago, Dartmouth, Northwestern, MIT, Harvard, and the entire University of California system.
All those wins and more, by various unions—Unite Here, the Teamsters, the Communications Workers, the United Electrical Workers, and the Auto Workers among them—came about in large part by preceding political action of union-led coalitions opening the way for unionizing those exploited collegiate employees.
“Little by little we are making differences. Nothing is won overnight,” said Hamilton. “It’s about unity within the coalition to move any agenda forward—unity, organization, and working together. It has taken marches, rallies, civil disobedience, weekly one-on-one meetings, and regular door knocking to learn what is on people’s minds and engage them.”
“The first thing I ask [voters] is ‘What do you need me to know?’”
New Haven is just one example of how sustained and persistent unity, coalition-building and year-round campaigning on issues important to workers can pay off. Others described at the session include:
A decade-long effort in Michigan to rebuild the progressive coalition eviscerated by a 2010 right-wing rout. The culmination was a pro-union 2022 sweep of all top state offices and both houses of the legislature, producing complete Democratic control for the first time in 40 years. What’s followed includes the first-in-the-country repeal of so-called “right to work” laws.
“Many successes are the result of community action with civil rights groups,” explained a Detroit unionist. Besides the RTW legislative repeal, voters enshrined “the right to reproductive freedom” in the state constitution, while the “promote the vote” winning referendum extended and expanded voting access in the Wolverine State.
The new pro-worker legislative majority also restored prevailing wages on state-funded construction projects and restored local control of government functions. The previously ruling Republicans had overridden local control—with state takeovers aimed primarily at Black-majority Detroit and Flint—and dumped prevailing wages, driving down construction workers’ pay.
The Minnesota Miracle
The “Minnesota Miracle” gave the pro-worker Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party complete control of the governorship and the legislature for the first time in more than a decade. It’s been followed by wage gains, better labor relations between workers, and re-elected DFL Gov. Tim Walz—a teachers’ union member—an ambitious public works program creating union jobs and enactment of paid family and medical leave, among other achievements.
Now it’s time to preserve and extend those gains on the national level, again, Sims and other speakers said.
“There’s a chance to regain the [U.S.] House and retain the Senate if the labor movement does its part—if we identify and convince our members to have a plan to vote” and to ensure, beforehand, that their vote counts and will be counted, despite the Republican-MAGA schemes, the Iowan said.
“We’re facing a particular struggle in every aspect of society,” an Indianan told the crowd the day before. It’s “a fascist threat in every section of the U.S….They’re trying to erase the history of African-Americans in this country.”
To combat that threat, he added, “We will fight for every national, state and local elected official” who supports workers and their causes “that we can find.” That also means opposing workers’ foes starting with Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., and running all the way down party tickets.
Besides the local actions against the MAGAite/Trumpite legions and the corporate-backed politicians who toady to them, the AFL-CIO has already given an early endorsement to the Democratic ticket of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, seeking re-election next year.
But the real impulse is more than just bread-and-butter issues, as important as they are, for the CPUSA, said Sims, the party’s co-chair.
“We are rebuilding the party in many ways and rebuilding relationships with sections of the trade union movement we hadn’t been in contact with,” he explained. “The door is wide open for Communist trade unionists to play a public role in the union movement,” Sims declared.
That’s even though several union constitutions, including the Electrical Workers and the Auto Workers, still ban Communists. Those relics of the Joe McCarthy-era repression are in their constitutions.
All this is with an eye towards creating a united front against fascism, which speakers stressed. Campaigning and participating in union leadership “is not only part of the class struggle, but of the struggle for democracy,” Sims stated.
“We support the people’s front against the MAGA right, and in particular the right of the working class to lead it…Where is the labor movement at this point in time?” he asked. With some fractures and differences, “Let’s bring all those disparate parts together…to develop a common approach.”
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
Comments