Union Rumblings

By Gerry Scoppuottelo

It has been nine months since the United Electrical Workers (UE) and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 3000 issued an online petition calling for a ceasefire to the ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinian people. There has been noticeable growth in organized labor’s opposition since then. The trajectory and speed of this movement has accelerated recently to the point that seven International unions representing nearly six million union members organized by the National Labor for a Ceasefire went on record July 23 demanding an end to U.S. arms shipments to the zionist entity.

This was followed the very next day by the UAW endorsement of the massive July 24 protest against Netanyahu’s address to Congress in Washington D.C. Labor’s new militant demands are an implicit challenge to the AFL-CIO’s 53 seat Executive Board. The new demand was sent by letter to President Biden following the July 5 report by the British Medical Journal, the Lancet, that the true Palestinian death count will likely reach 186,000, the majority being women, children and the elderly:

There will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water and shelter; the population’s inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), one of the very few humanitarian organizations still active in the Gaza Strip.

The United Auto Workers (UAW) was the first AFL-CIO international union to call for a ceasefire and now has gone further with other internationals to demand an end to arms sales to the Zionist entity, a position called for by the Palestinian Federation of Trade Unions which can be viewed here: https://www.laborforceasefire.org/.

The UAW’s leadership has become more steadfast since several of its locals (UAW 2325, and 4811 representing collectively 50,000 members) have faced trumped up Congressional investigations, subpoenas and anti-strike injunctions for showing solidarity for the Palestinian struggle. Unsurprisingly, former President Donald Trump called for UAW President Sean Fain to be “fired immediately” on the last night of the Republican National Convention, apparently not realizing that Fain was elected democratically by rank-and-file members of his union and could not be fired.

Recently the ADL (Anti-Defamation League, an IRS tax-exempt, non-profit) complained to Neil Barofsky, the union’s federal monitor, about the UAW’s earlier ceasefire resolution. Barofsky then communicated his “concern” to Fain, relying on the now familiar “anti-Zionism = antisemitism” canard. UAW’s Union Counsel, Benjamin Dictor, fired back to Barofsky; “Your call to President Fain on an issue so blatantly outside of the Monitor’s jurisdiction was inappropriate as your Office holds disproportionate power over the UAW,” Dictor wrote,“and even a ‘strictly personal’ sharing of opinion implicitly implicates such power dynamic.”

Readers may remember how another federal monitor appointed by a similar consent decree, Kenneth Conboy, in 1997 disqualified then Teamster reform President, Ron Carey, from running for office on charges of financial misfeasance, charges which were later overturned. That earlier interference was widely interpreted as payback by UPS for the Carey-led highly successful Teamster strike against UPS that year.

The ADL is politically aligned with AIPAC (the American Israeli Political Action Committee) which is in lock step with the zionist entity, the U.S. State Department, the Democratic and Republican parties, and arms suppliers like Lockheed, Grumman, and Raytheon et al. These are leading forces of global imperialism. Powerful as they may be, they are being slowly replaced by a shifting global realignment, a multipolar challenge to post WWII western G 7, Anglo-European hegemony.

The BRICS countries, Brazil, China, Russia, India, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are dumping dollar-denominated trade with each other, a process of “de-dollarization” which is on a course to replace the international debt traps upheld by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the US Treasury Department. This world historic development is providing new material conditions for the coming class struggle, conditions in which workers, organized and unorganized, must take the lead.

SOURCES: https://www.laborforceasefire.org/; the Lancet, July 5, 2024; Detroit News, July 3,2024