On Feb. 23, the Teaching Assistants’ Association passed a resolution that said the TAA would only consider endorsement of a candidate for the recall on the condition that they pledge to repeal Wisconsin Act 10. This includes the restoration of collective bargaining, “fair share” dues for public sector unions and restoration of public employee benefits to pre-Act 10 levels as well as the restoration of all cuts made to social services in the 2011-13 budget and a veto for any legislation which imposed barriers to unionization or unjustly burdened working people.
To date, we have no such candidate. The most likely Democratic hopeful, Kathleen Falk, has instead emphasized as a point of pride her ability to cut wages while maintaining collective bargaining. While she has pledged to veto any budget that does not restore collective bargaining, she has made it clear that she intends to balance budgets on the backs of workers. Falk’s statements suggest a belief that we must not expect a minimal, basic restoration of wages and rights to pre-Walker days. Falk appears to agree with the political consensus: Working people must pay for a crisis they did not create.
At our membership meeting on March 20, there was a motion to rescind the resolution. It passed, and the resolution no longer stands. The membership also voted against a Falk endorsement. We are proud that our union dared this crucial discussion. We believe that the political direction suggested by the resolution is the correct one for the TAA and for the labor movement, and wish to elaborate upon our position.
First, the unwavering support unions have long given Democrats is directly implicated in the weakening of organized labor over the last several decades. Instead of putting pressure on Democratic politicians, organized labor has always guaranteed them votes and volunteers. Yet there is no shortage of examples of Democrats’ willingness to ignore – or attack – workers. Most recently, it was the failure of the Obama administration to pass the Employee Free Choice Act in a Democrat-controlled Congress. In Wisconsin, state Democrats Russ Decker and Jeff Plale supplied the votes needed to cancel 17 union contract extensions weeks before Walker took office. In the past year, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has threatened to scale back contributions to Democrats. However, as of this writing, the AFL-CIO’s endorsement of Obama in 2012 is all but assured. As long as the threat of withdrawing support from the Democrats remains empty – as Trumka’s apparently is – organized labor will continue to degenerate.
To endorse a candidate who does not meet the resolution’s criteria is to partake in the myth that workers are to blame for the state’s debt problems. This myth has been demolished several times over since last year, so we’ll not dwell on it here. In practical terms, union endorsement of any of the current candidates means accepting a discourse that depicts public employees as high-rollers with plush salaries and benefits, whose burden on taxpayers must be reduced. At a time when those same myths will be increasingly mobilized to undermine unions, we cannot afford to support it in any form.
Unions are in a special position to defend the public goods from which all workers benefit, organized or not. They are the strongest organizational representatives of workers’ general interests, and if the goals of the Wisconsin Uprising and the Occupy movement are to be realized, the fight must be, in large part, led by them. At a more tactical level, when labor involves itself in broader social struggles on behalf of working people, they win much-deserved legitimacy from unorganized workers. Focusing narrowly on collective bargaining may be perceived, with some justification, as the unions continuing to play an inside game to win back their seat at the table, regardless of where everyone else gets to sit.
If the TAA makes no endorsement in the recall elections, some may feel that we’ve opted out of politics altogether. We disagree; on the contrary, we will have made a political intervention that supports the political independence of the labor movement and that says we refuse to be a rubber-stamp department for the candidate who happens to be someone other than Scott Walker. We will have made a contribution to the return of a fighting labor movement. In refusing to endorse Kathleen Falk, who appears committed to the use of collective bargaining as a method of extracting sorely-needed benefits and wages from workers, the TAA has begun to make just such a contribution.
Matt Reiter ([email protected]) is a history Ph.D. student and a member of the TAA.
Michael Billeaux ([email protected]) is a sociology Ph.D. student and a member of the TAA.
