This is the third of a series of blogs written by Stewart Acuff titled The Future of the American Labor Movement.
You can read the Part 1 by CLICKING HERE and Part 2 by CLICKING HERE.
Welcoming All Who Organize
We must broaden our definition of the labor movement to include worker organizations that don’t have the opportunity to bargain collectively, but represent and organize workers. It is critical that organized labor’s tent is big enough to include immigrant worker centers, Interfaith Worker Justice, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and others. I had the privilege of helping to negotiate the relationship between the National Day Laborers Organizing Network and the AFL-CIO and to fund that partnership from the AFL-CIO’s organizing budget. With immigration, a changing economy, and different forms of worker organization, the traditional labor movement must welcome as full partners all who organize and represent and build power for workers.
Staying Attuned to the Needs of Workers
We must give up our membership in the Washington Elite, the Beltway Elite. That only poisons our thinking and deafens us to the needs and desires of America’s workers. Our thinking should not be guided by the chattering class and the Beltway punditry, but by research, the voices of workers, and our knowledge of what working families need and want.
Our Values
We must talk openly, freely, and confidently about our values. These are fundamental human values: human dignity and respect, social and economic justice, the tearing down of the OTHER, the goal of eradicating poverty, collective action, fairness, peace, and the one family of humanity.
We Must Rebuild
It goes without saying that we must rebuild. The American labor movement is at a tipping point, under assaults we haven’t seen since the 1920′s and 30′s. We are already funding way too many unions with savings put away by past generations.
American democracy cannot survive the death of American unionism. We have to rebuild, and we have to rebuild from where we are now, not where we used to be.
Creating an Open Movement
We must stop acting like an exclusive club and create an open movement. When I was president of the Atlanta AFL-CIO, all sorts of people said the best place to find out what was going on in Atlanta was the labor council. The bosses and the rightwing will never like us. Good. We will get bad media. OUR PURPOSE IS TO PUSH WEALTH AND POWER DOWN FROM THOSE WHO HAVE TOO MUCH TO THOSE WHO HAVE TOO LITTLE. That makes the rightwing, the bosses, the Financial Elite, and lots of media mad. Fine. Our goodwill should come from the workers we help fight. We will not finesse or cutesify our way out of our crisis. We have to fight our way out.
Global Solidarity
We have to take a leadership role in reforming and rebuilding our global instruments of solidarity so that high-minded statements can become down and dirty actions.
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Stewart Acuff is the former organizing Director of the AFL-CIO. Acuff has also written two books: Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing, and Getting America Back to Work.
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