Excuse me, but does Tom Buffenbarger have a grip on reality? I had to read the Machinists’ president’s most recent letter to the Federation’s Executive Council members several times, each time thinking he’d say at the end, “just kidding!!!” But, it’s scary–he’s serious.
You might remember his previous letter less than two weeks ago. That was a doozy (though, some of my readers here felt I was being unfair to him). But, obviously, he can’t keep those thoughts from pouring out. I just got his July 5th letter (that would be written just four days after his first letter) titled “Rumors of Our Demise.”
Guess what? Tom doesn’t see anything to worry about when it comes to the labor movement. “Wasn’t it Sam Clemens who said, ‘rumors of my demise are premature?’ Well, the same statement could be made about the American Labor Movement,” he begins his most recent musings (Actually, as a commenter pointed out, the quote is “Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated”).
Turns out, according to Tom, the real problem is not that the labor movement’s numbers have sunk so low that it represents just 8.5 percent of the private sector workforce. Nope–the real problem is that the workforce has gotten bigger.
Got it? The AFL-CIO’s membership has remained more or less the same, he contends, at about 13-15 million members. It’s those damn people having sex all the time, adding new people to the world who, then, become part of the workforce–they are the problem. If the workforce remained the same size, then, everyone would see how good a job the labor movement has done.
The breathtaking…eh…absurdity of that scares me. Tom worries that the criticism being leveled at the AFL-CIO will get into the wrong hands and be used by employers. Tom, hello, and your letter tells them what? That we’re pretty damn proud of ourselves–and blind to the impending disaster.
Tom portrays people who believe the labor movement is close to dead as “the-sky-is-falling crowd. And he is darn-right optimistic about the future: “We also know that the American Labor Movement can–and will–grow over the next decade.”
To do so, Tom does acknowledge a fact that is not in dispute (and has been made numerous times here): the task of organizing, and deploying the resources to accomplish that goal, is the responsibility of the affiliates, not the AFL-CIO. But, he, then says, almost every AFL-CIO affiliate has made a good faith effort to grow. That is just flat-out wrong. And pretending like that is the case is precisely a central pathology in the labor movement.
What is particularly instructive about this letter is how the institution of the Federation completely masks, to many of its leaders, the impossible situation facing workers around the country. People like Buffenbarger talk about the danger of dividing the labor movement because they live inside a bubble–the inside-D.C. bubble–which allows them to see the Federation as this big, nasty, tough, important thing that has meetings with people in Congress and other “important” people. When it is close to irrelevant.
I have to think that John Sweeney must thank his lucky stars that he’s got a hold on the delegates leading up to the convention and is still the favorite to be re-elected. Otherwise, if this was close, he’d be assigning a full-time escort whose sole job, between now and the convention, would be to shadow Tom, and if Tom gave any inclination to penning yet another letter, the escort would draw a sidearm and scream, “Put down that pen or shut off that computer and step away, slowly, from the desk.”
You wanna read this letter? Here it is.
