The PBS NewsHour is currently discussing the recent schism in the American labor movement. (See Harold Meyerson’s summary.) If only the representatives of the more established unions could see how tone-deaf they come across. John Sweeney launches into a tirade against the split, but his “that makes me angry” is a thin whine like Marvyn Martian’s from Bugs Bunny cartoons. And Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, talks in the very bureaucratic doublespeak that seems to prove the SEIU’s point.
I happen to think the split will, if anything, be beneficial for the labor movement, allowing it to undertake a division of labor. But no matter; whatever one thinks should have happened, this was almost a structural necessity. Class relations simply aren’t what they were in the postwar era. Today, large swaths of the white collar workforce have been proletarianized, and service labor now accounts for a large portion of the working class. What’s more, the new service workers - ignored by the AFL-CIO until the problem of declining union membership reached a crisis point - by nature have different stakes in unionizing than industrial workers who have been part of a stable oligopoly for years. Something had to give.
Even more than a disagreement over tactics or a power grab (it may well be both), this split represents a division between those who want to realign the labor movement with class struggle and those for whom unions once meant a seat at the table of the Keynesian welfare state. To borrow Claus Offe’s formulation, this isn’t a crisis in labor, but is simply the playing out of a crisis in crisis management that began with the close of the 1960s.
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