The program of the now-disbanded NUP unions fails to tackle organized labor’s most persistent and profound problem: how do
you build a progressive and democratic trade union movement within the most
powerful empire in the history of the world? Few observers would disagree that the current AFL-CIO structure is anachronistic, and no one doubts that the labor movement, if it could somehow be born all over again, would opt for a leaner and more efficient structure with a few big powerful unions. But the systematic and decades-long decline of trade union membership in the United States is not primarily due to labor’s organizational weaknesses, in my opinion, nor even due to the spread of draconian anti-labor laws. While both these factors have indeed played a role in the current crisis, each is a symptom or product of a more fundamental weakness, one that organized labor shares with the rest of U.S. society.
That weakness—the dirty secret of the American trade union movement—is that pro-imperialist and anti-labor views have found fertile ground among American
workers for decades, and such views have deeply undermined the organizing and fighting capacity of trade unions. SEIU’s ten-point Unite to Win proposal, while it mentions the need to devise new strategies to stem the flight of manufacturing plants to low-wage countries, provides no insight into why so many American workers have so little consciousness of themselves as a distinct class, or why so many are easily won over to nationalist appeals to defend American hegemony abroad.
My many years of reporting on trade unions, and before that as an activist in the Puerto Rican anti-colonial struggle, have convinced me that both the old guard of the AFL-CIO and the new reformers suffer from the same critical malaise. Both fail to comprehend that since the United States is the largest, richest, and most powerful superpower in history, the key test of labor solidarity for American workers is not whether they support fellow members of other unions at home, but how well they defend the most oppressed workers and popular movements in the forgotten outposts of our own empire.