Guest speakers at the most recent meeting of the AFL-CIO Maritime Trades Department’s executive board urged labor officials and rank-and-file members alike to elect pro-worker candidates in November.U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka and Maritime Union of Australia National Secretary Paddy Crumlin each noted the importance – and effectiveness – of grassroots political action when it comes to empowering working families.
Both Abercrombie and Trumka pointed to the erosion of U.S. workers’ rights and stated that the best way to start rectifying that decades-long trend is by supporting pro-worker candidates.
Abercrombie said it’s a plain fact that the majority party sets the agenda in Congress. Therefore, he said, working families must elect and support – and hold accountable – representatives who will look out for their interests.
“We’ve got to put American workers back in the center of the political agenda,” said Abercrombie. “Every single vote counts, and the difference in whether or not the working people in this country are going to come back to the center of the agenda is going to be whether labor turns out in this election and sees to it that the Electoral College goes the right way.”
The congressman noted he recently read a biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Abercrombie said that during World War II and the years that immediately followed, there was strong support for the working class at all levels of government. He said the nation clearly would be best served by returning to that standard.
He reviewed the day’s newspaper headlines and explained how the weakening economy hurts working families. Illustrating corporate greed and the weakening of workers’ rights, he mentioned a recent contract negotiation in which newspaper reporters were asked by the company to a accept only a one percent wage increase in conjunction with health care cuts, despite soaring company profits.
“If the United States is going to be strong in the world, we have to be strong ourselves,” Abercrombie said. “We have to have a sound economy. We have to have workers that understand not only that prosperity depends on them, but that productivity is going to stay with them when they earn it by their productivity.
“The most productive and important thing we can do right now is organize,” he concluded. “Let’s get this movement organized for November so there’s no question in anybody’s mind that America is back. When America’s workers are in charge, America is back.
Trumka presented a startling series of statistics showing the enormous (and still growing) income gap in America. He cautioned that this isn’t a new development, but rather one that dates back to the 1970s.
“Our economy was failing working families long before there was a housing crisis and mortgage crisis and a stock market crisis,” Trumka said. “These crises are in fact the direct result of imbalances in our economy that already existed. That has been propelled by neo-liberal economic policies that have been grinding down working families for the last 30 years.
“Why is it so hard for so many workers to make a decent living in the richest country in history at its most rich point in time?” he continued. “We work more hours than any other developed country, but massive job loss has created widespread economic insecurity. The U.S. economy generates more than 13 trillion dollars a year in income but health care and retirement benefits are vanishing. For the last 30 years wages have been going down and it’s meant longer working hours, higher consumer debt, and a greater reliance on home equities just so that families could keep up with their bills. It doesn’t have to be this way because the economy is not like the weather. The economy is a set of rules; those rules are made by people we elect. Those rules decide winners and they decide losers and it’s up to us to elect people that start adopting rules that make all of us winners.”
As he showed the board data reflecting the struggles of working families, Trumka emphasized, “The policies that have been adopted over the last 30 years have two things in common: They shift power from workers to employers and they create fewer jobs. The increased power of employers has allowed them to outsource our work and deregulate our industries. They privatize our government, they deny wage increases, and they walk away from their obligations to provide health care and retirement security for employees.”
Among the statistics he shared: Since 1973, household income for richest Americans has increased anywhere from 353 percent to more than 500 percent. By comparison, the poorest Americans’ wages have gone up only three percent; for those squarely in the middle range of earnings, the increase has been 23 percent.
“What you’re seeing is where we used to grow together as a nation, right now we’re growing apart economically, socially and politically,” Trumka said. “The productivity-wage relationship was the foundation of the social contract negotiated between labor and employers after World War II. Today the imbalance of power has ruptured that relationship and the social contract with America’s workers is being shredded.”
Trumka concluded by saying the labor movement must be at the forefront of efforts to “change the direction of our country…. None of it is possible, though,
unless we do our job in this election and take back control of our government and our elected officials for working families.”
Crumlin, whose position with the MUA is equivalent to that of a union president in the U.S., also serves as an official with the International Transport Workers’ Federation – a global organization consisting of nearly 700 transport unions. He focused on a U.S. maritime law (the Jones Act) as an example of why political action is so important for workers. He noted that all segments of the U.S. maritime industry repeatedly have united to stand up for the Jones Act when it has been attacked by so-called free traders whose apparent motivation has nothing to do with security or working families and everything to do with making a quick buck.
The law stipulates that cargo moving between U.S. domestic ports must be transported on vessels that are built, owned, flagged and crewed American. It is widely recognized as a regulation which bolsters national and economic security. It also helps preserve tens of thousands of jobs, if not more. Without grassroots support, its status would be in question, at the very least.
“The Jones Act really is the global benchmark for maritime cabotage,” Crumlin said. “It underpins all of the regulations and the [protection] of labor but also the national interest in regards to not only labor standards but security, economic development, the ability to develop a genuine economy in the interests of working men and women. The Jones Act really does lead the way, and it’s bipartisan. That’s a very important message.”
He credited MTD President Michael Sacco and others for demonstrating the soundness of working with those who support the industry, regardless of political affiliations. “Political cycles come and go. Our industry must remain,” Crumlin observed.
He recounted problems faced by Australian workers because of weak or unenforced cabotage laws. However, he noted, the old government regime in that country has been voted out of office, which bodes well for the future.
Crumlin wrapped up his comments by stating that bilateral trade agreements remain very important to workers around the world. “We have some big challenges to be able to translate the protection of our own national industries and the development of proper standards and safe minimum manning requirements elsewhere in the world,” he said. “This is where the ITF comes in. For example, we recently developed a consolidated maritime convention that extends protection to mariners who otherwise never would have had it. We had strong U.S. support. That is a remarkable achievement, and it could not have happened without U.S. intervention – and the U.S. intervention could not have been achieved without the strength and the solidarity and the determination of the AFL-CIO and all the labor leaders in this room.”
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