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U.S. Labor Battles Over World Affairs
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13958 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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2 / 1988 |
3,503 Words |
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A.H. Raskin
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At top-secret meetings of organized labor's high command, no challenges precipitated by plant shutdowns, mass layoffs, or employer-sponsored unionbusting stir nearly as much angry division as do debates over AFL-CIO policy on international affairs.
The emotion labor's upper echelon invests in wrangling over convoluted AFL-CIO pronouncements on flash points between the superpowers such as "Star Wars" and aid to the Nicaraguan Contras may seem strange for an organization that remains curiously lethargic in its efforts to unionize the five American workers out of every six who are still unorganized.
This apparent disproportion in the intensity of summit-level union involvement in foreign policy is easier to understand when one remembers that, in the quarter-century of George Meany's imperious reign as "Mister Labor," including the turbulent years of the Vietnam War, the federation was the most forceful voice outside the White House and the Pentagon in support of United States Cold War positions.
Indeed, Meany's disenchantment with the Nixon presidency was sparked in large measure by Nixon's 180-degree turn toward fraternization with the Soviet Union and Communist China. "This was the Number One anticommunist that the country had," Meany used to say. "I know because I was Number Two." Those were the days when Meany's hard-hatted constituents expressed their patriotism by picking up wrenches and staves and chasing long-haired Vietnam War protesters through the canyons of New York's financial district.
Lane Kirkland, the soft-spoken union technocrat who was Meany's handpicked successor in 1979, is no less fervent than his mentor in abhorring communism as a totalitarian suppressor of democracy and human rights. Kirkland's own mistrust of Soviet good intentions, however seductively put forward, is reinforced by his wife's experiences. Irena Kirkland, a Czech-born Israeli, developed a passionate hatred for all forms of totalirianism as a World War II prisoner in two Nazi concentration camps and, after her postwar return to Czechoslovakia, as a prisoner again for resisting Moscow's puppet government in Prague.
Conciliation and compromise
But among the princes and potentates of unionism who comprise the 36-member Executive Council of the AFL-CIO, Kirkland has never been able to exercise the iron control that Meany regularly commanded by sheer force of personality. Consultation, conciliation, and compromise are the tools Kirkland has wielded skillfully over the last nine years to maintain a high degree of unity on pivotal issues among the often fractious leaders of the federation's major unions.
In foreign affairs, the quest for consensus has obliged Kirkland to retreat substantially from the policies that traditionally made the AFL-CIO a mainstay of the forces lobbying for ever-bigger defense budgets and uncompromising resistance to Soviet expansionism, whatever its guises.
The federation's hard line against world communism started softening long before Mikhail Gorbachev began beguiling the West with glasnost. In fact, the change has much less to do with the twists and turns in Kremlin policy or even the December love-fest in
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