INTERVIEW WITH NANCY WOHLFORTH
[Note: The following interview with Nancy Wohlforth, member of the National Executive Committee of the AFL-CIO, is reprinted here from ILC International Newsletter No. 34 (April 29, 2011.) The interview was conducted on April 16, 2011, by Daniel Gluckstein, co-coordinator of the International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples (ILC). Sister Wohlforth is also a member of the newly formed Coordinating Committee of the ILC. She will a participant in the ILC's Annual Conference in Geneva on June 4-5. This year's ILC Conference in Defense of the ILO Conventions and the Independence of the Trade Unions is being held on the occasion of the 100th Annual Assembly of the International Labor Organization -- Editors]
QUESTION: You will be present at the ILC Conference in Defense of the Conventions of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and for the Independence of the Trade Unions, which will be held in Geneva on June 4-5. Some weeks ago, working people throughout the world saw what happened in Wisconsin. What are the lessons that can be drawn from the mass mobilization in Wisconsin regarding the right of trade unions to exist and bargain collectively?
NANCY WOHLFORTH: The lessons are two. The first lesson is build from the bottom up, from the rank and file, to make no concessions, to organize around the issue of "No Concessions!" and organize the fightback against the leadership of the legislators, not just the governor. And find some of the legislators who the unions elected to tell them that if they are going to get elected again, they must stand with us in the trade union movement.
The second lesson is to go to all the unions, and say: "We are all one. We are all in this struggle together. It is not just the public sector workers." We must build a collective leadership out of the rank and file, together with the elected local leaders, all coming together to make decisions as a group -- not as one union here, one union there. In Wisconsin, the building trades, which is usually a much more conservative group, joined with the student movement to fight back against the governor and against the legislators. And they helped get the 14 Democratic senators out of Wisconsin, and they supported them out of state.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian workers supported the Wisconsin workers by sending them pictures and money -- and there was a beginning of understanding that globalization is here to stay and that we are all in this struggle together. Again, this is not just the fight of a public sector worker; it is the fight of a carpenter, an office worker, or a private sector. This globalization process is affecting all of us.
Though the right wing won in Wisconsin -- they took away collective bargaining -- I believe it's a temporary victory. I think we will ultimately win it back if we keep the struggle going, if we keep fighting. And right now, the union movement has sent all its organizers to keep the struggle going, which is very good.
QUESTION: But at this stage, the fightback the occurred in Wisconsin is not going on all across the United States?
NANCY WOHLFORTH: No. There have been mobilizations in Ohio, for instance, but not on the scale of what happened in Wisconsin -- largely because of a lack of young people and of leadership from below, from the local union leaderships.
Wisconsin is historically one of the strongest union states in the United States. My father was one of the founders of the public sector union in Wisconsin in the 1930s. In Milwaukee, we had the right to collective bargaining way before the state gave collective bargaining. The rest of the state did not get this right till the 1970s.
In California, we have the possibility on the ground to duplicate what happened in Wisconsin. If the leadership is willing to fight. I think that they have to, and that they will. There is a lot of strength in the big unions in California. The teachers and the school employees are two of the major unions, representing close to 750,000 members, and the leaderships are to the left of the other unions. So I think there will be a fight there.
QUESTION: In Wisconsin and other states where Republicans are out to smash collective bargaining rights, we saw prominent trade union leaders offer to make huge concessions and to accept budget cuts of up to $300 million in exchange for pledges from legislators to back off on their attacks on collective bargaining. What is your assessment of this strategy?
NANCY WOHLFORTH: There is a widespread belief that there is no money and that therefore we must make concessions in order to keep our jobs, our healthcare, our pensions ... and now our collective-bargaining rights.
There are a number of unions, including National Nurses United, that have been campaigning for funding to be redirected from the Defense budget to the states, so that there is sufficient funding in states across the nation to create jobs and fund social services. But the top leaders of the unions have held back from raising this issue because it directly confronts President Obama. It confronts the war in Afghanistan, where we will be spending trillions of dollars unless we stop this war. This is the big problem.
There is a split within the leadership of the unions over this question, though the bulk of the unions are with Obama and are unwilling to challenge the wars and the war spending. So the movement from below can go two ways. It can go to demoralization, or it can go to continued fightback. If California fights back, it believe the struggle we witnessed in Wisconsin can revive in the other states.
QUESTION: When you say if California fights back, you mean on the line of "no cuts, no concessions"?
NANCY WOHLFORTH: Yes. No concessions on pensions and no concessions on healthcare. We must keep the pensions and the health care. That's critical. But just as important, it is critical that people be out in the streets raising the demands for "No Concessions" -- raising the idea that we must fight back, that we cannot accept these concessions.
When former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was in office, we in the California Labor Federation stated out position unambiguously: "No Concessions on health care!" We have held the line on health care to this day.
The pensions are public in California -- in the public schools and public hospitals. We must wage a struggle to keep this public pension system.
QUESTION: As far as I understand, the attacks waged in Wisconsin and 12 or 13 other states are not only the result of the pressure from the Tea Party movement. These attacks would not have been possible if the Obama administration itself had not paved the way for these attacks?
NANCY WOHLFORTH: Correct. The Obama administration said it was for collective bargaining. True enough. But did they do anything? No. Did they give speeches, did they show up at rallies? No.
When he ran for office, Obama said that wherever collective-bargaining rights were under attack he would "put on his walking shoes" and be "on every picket line." He said he would campaign tirelessly on behalf of the trade union movement.
But Obama and his administration did nothing, absolutely nothing, to fight these attacks and advance the workers' demands.
Now they claim behind the scenes that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Obama were meeting to try and cut a deal to save collective bargaining -- I have no idea if this is true ... by giving concessions. That was the idea: "We will save our collective bargaining by giving all these concessions." But how can this be considered acceptable: "If you give up everything in advance, if you have nothing left to bargain, what's the use of collective bargaining?" It's an empty shell.
Maybe some day it will make it a little easier to get back what we gave up; this is their line: "It will make it easier down the road." But this entire approach makes the unions look irrelevant. A worker will ask: "Why should I be joining you. Why should I join the union if in fact I cannot gain anything, I cannot gain any of my demands or even preserve what I have won. Why should I join a union that is not willing to put up a fightback?"
QUESTION: The idea here, which is also the idea of the International Labor Organization (ILO), is to say that by these kinds of concessions, they are preserving the "general interest" -- that is, the common interests of everybody, workers and bosses alike. Is it the same line of argument in the United States?
NANCY WOHLFORTH: Yes. Very similar. The argument is that in order for us to have anything, we must go along with the concessions, because, again, there is no money. There must be a "shared sacrifice." Of course, there really is no sharing here. The government has given billions to Wall Street to bail it out, and billions more to General Motors to bail them out. But Wall Street and the corporations are paying us back peanuts, at the very same time that they pay themselves big bonuses and pay no taxes.
And this, in turn, means that we can't give billions to the schools, to the public sector employees, and to all the other people who desperately need it. It makes no sense. The government find billions to bail out the banks. And remember that, theoretically, they were going to lend this money to the corporations, to the small business, to the mortgage people to stimulate the economy. Š But they did nothing of the sort.
What they have done is pocket trillions of dollars. They have trillions of dollars literally sitting in their coffers. And their line is: "We are waiting to see what happens with the tax cuts. If the tax cuts are OK, then they will release some funds." But you can be sure these will not be funds for housing, they are not going to make that "mistake." But they are going to release some funds, to do what, I don't know.
They surely don't want to release these funds to the State to use on public sector employees. They clearly want to do away with civil servants. They want the right to fire whomever, hire whomever, get rid of seniority, get rid of grievances, and get rid of all the rights that we have won over the years.
About the only funding we are seeing to support the public sector is the funding for charter schools or for "Race to the Top" -- where you get a maximum of dollars when you perform well on forging tests. These funds are ultimately aimed at privatizing public education.
QUESTION: Is trade union movement in the United States become weaker under the Obama administration?
NANCY WOHLFORTH: Yes, and I'm extremely worried about that. We are now perhaps 7% to 7.5 % in the private sector, and about 36% in the public sector -- which is why the right wing is going after public sector unions with such a vengeance. But the percentage of the organized workforce keeps going down -- and this is because the unions have not mounted a fightback.
Under the New Deal there were the bonus marches. It was a real fightback movement. We have done none of that. Nobody sees the unions doing those things -- until Wisconsin. We did see the emergence of a fightback in Wisconsin, which inspired unionists all across the United States. We saw the local leadership and the rank and file challenging the gang of politicians that had screwed them.
But even in Wisconsin things are going to be rough for the unions. The unions have set out to fund a campaign to recall the Republican senators who voted for Governor Scott Walker's attacks. It won't be easy to raise this money from union members in Wisconsin who have lost their jobs, or have to pay a lot more for their health-care coverage or whose pensions are frozen. A union member will ask: Why should I pay more $30 more a month to recall politicians when the unions did not stand up to stop the attacks on my pensions or health care.
As for Obama, millions of people who voted for him -- especially youth, Latinos, African American workers -- are very sad and despondent. They say Obama is being screwed by the Republicans. They blame the Tea Party and the racists for all the problems, not understanding that it's the entire system that's at fault.
QUESTION: But at the same time, millions of people who voted for Obama in November 2008 abstained in the November 2010 election. ...
NANCY WOHLFORTH: Yes. The progressive voters did not turn out to vote, while the Tea Party people turned out all their people. This is why Tea Party people got elected in Wisconsin. If the Obama people who had voted in 2008 had gone out and voted in 2010, that would not have happened.
QUESTION: So the discussion is going on in the trade union movement about all these issues?
NANCY WOHLFORTH: Yes. It's getting a little bit more heated internally. There has been real discussion about the need to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and slash the Defense budget. At the same time, we are now entering the 2012 election period, and there will be renewed pressure to re-elect Obama. We will be told this is the most important election in our lives. We will be told to re-elect Obama because there is no alternative -- and the reality is that the alternative is very frightening.
Of course, the growing popular support for the Tea Party and the drift of mainstream politics to the right is all happening because of the lack of leadership in the trade union movement, because there has not been leadership at the local level to help workers understand that the cause of all our problems is Wall Street and the wars.
Instead, what's happening is the corporations are taking advantage of this situation to explain that the main problem is the deficit -- and that we have to reduce government spending to close the deficit. This is crazy. It's going to continue to kill jobs. And Obama will continue to go down the path of cutting entitlements and killing jobs, because the unions are not standing up forcefully and building the fightback.
The situation is very bad. Wisconsin showed that when there is a leadership willing to fight back, the workers will be inspired and willing to fight. We now have a challenge before us of extending this fight to California. This is the challenge ahead. There is still time to turn things around. But we are running out of time.
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