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Sweeney Receives Lifetime Leadership Award at America’s Future Now! |
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The Campaign for America’s Future awarded AFL-CIO President John Sweeney its Lifetime Leadership Award last night in a gala dinner that capped the first two days of the three-day America’s Future Now! conference in Washington, D.C. In presenting the award, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin noted how Sweeney’s commitment to working families began when, working as a caddy at a golf course, the teenage Sweeney organized a work-stoppage for a wage increase.
Hosted by Rep. Donna Edwards (Md.) and the Campaign’s Roger Hickey, the tribute also featured a short video with highlights of Sweeney’s life and events from his years as a union leader—from creating the nationwide Justice for Janitors campaign, while president of SEIU, to spearheading the now 2.5-million member AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America.
Sweeney called his 55 years of service to working families an honor and noted that when he steps down as president in September he does not plan to retire but will carry on as a “union warrior at large.”
I have been privileged to…represent the millions and millions of working families who make our country so extraordinary. Serving working people is the biggest honor anyone could have. I have been so fortunate to do this work—and now what a great future we are facing together.
As Durbin stated, the efforts by the AFL-CIO union movement with Sweeney as leader were critical to the election of President Barack Obama and a host of working family lawmakers in the U.S. House and Senate.
The hundreds of guests at last night’s gala, part of the conference’s annual gathering of progressive leaders and activists, also honored California Rep. Barbara Lee, who received the Campaign’s Progressive Champion Award, and Deepak Bhargava, director of the poverty-fighting coalition, the Center for Community Change, who was awarded the Paul Wellstone Citizen Leadership Award.
Writing at the Our Future blog, Isaiah Poole noted that the “three fighters for economic and social justice”
used their gala speeches to challenge progressives to ensure that the movement works to have a substantive impact on the daily lives of working families.
(Click here to read more news and views from the America’s Future Now conference. You also can listen to the conference sessions live on BlogTalk Radio here.)
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AFL-CIO President John Sweeney “steps down as president in September”. The critical questions about the future of the AFL-CIO and the existence of the organized labor movement must now be asked.
Will the new president merely continue the “status quo” of “simple” trade unionism of the last 30 years?
Or will there be a realization that the many crises now facing working people, organized and unorganized, demands a radical break with the perspectives of the past.
The devastating social, economic and political conditions have smashed the now facing all working people demands radical change in perspective.
The “simple” trade union model of organizing working people has been effectively destroyed since the 1970s. Some factors:
*Globalization. Capital has off-shored millions of labor intensive jobs, to maximize profit in virtual slave-wage areas such as China. Manufacturing in U.S. simply could not compete against the high wage and benefit costs. EFCA, even if it passes,
will not change this economic reality of capitalist economics.
* Unending fraudulent and bloody global wars on “terrorism” actually waged for profit, power and resources (oil, etc). Funds for public schools, health care, state governments, services essential for working people, are sucked up by “defense” budgets and end up in the pockets of the privatized military-industrial corporations.
* Massive tax cuts for corporations and wealth individuals.
* Privatization of essential social services to remove them from the tax supported.
* The massive looting of the public to restore the wealth of the banks, Wall Street gangsters. Obama and the Democrats fully support the continuation of the people and conditions that created this collapse of global capitalism
What can “simple” trade unionism do? Not much with the present perspective of maintaining the “status quo”.
LESSONS TO BE LEARNED FOR CHANGE IN PERSPECTIVE:
1. Labor must cease to be a “business partner” to corporate capitalism. Capital views organized labor as the enemy. Corporations do everything possible to minimize the cost of labor,
which forever diminishes the essential basis of capital - to maximize profit. Without this fundamental understanding of
capitalism, organized labor will forever remain marginal. Working people will forever be exploited, impoverished and destroyed.
2. Corporations don’t want to pay good “union” wages, even if it means moving to China where possible. Corporations won’t pay for health benefits, pensions, overtime, vacation time or any
other benefits. U.S. corporations must compete against all other corporations globally to sell and maximize profit.
Lesson: Essential needs of working people must now be secured
through POLITICAL STRUGGLE and not just economic struggle (union struggles).
POLITICAL STRUGGLE AND CONTROL OF GOVERNMENT at every level is essential to secure and maintain social security, public education, public health, and TO END WARS that are impoverishing us all.
The overwhelming power of corporate corruption must be identified and opposed. The capitalist economy that enriches a few at the expense of the majority must be ended. A transition to a socialist economy that seeks to fulfill the economic needs “of, by and for the people” must become the new goal of organized labor.
THUS: Labor must dump the Democrats. End all political support for the Democratic (and of course Republican Parties).
A new socialist political party must come into existence that rallies all working people to the creation of a new economic order.
New mass media must be created to inform, educate and organize all working people to combat the corporate controlled mass media.
Is there anyone in organized labor understanding these few realities with a new vision and purpose for organized labor?
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