There Are Really Two Questions...
By Dave Lindorff
9-2-9

1) Which Side Are the Democrats On?
2) Which Side Are the Labor Unions On?

It is refreshing to hear the new head of the AFL-CIO, former mineworker and Mineworkers President Richard Trumka, get mad at sell-out Democrats and make a threat not to "support" them next year.

As Trumka pointed out in a talk to the Center for American Progress this week, for years, Democratic politicians, and the Democrats as a Party, have counted on the labor movement to get out the vote of its membership on Election Day, only to turn on workers after getting to Washington, on the issues that really matter, like jobs-killing free trade agreements, the gutting of bankruptcy law and credit law protections, and, most recently, the undermining of needed labor law reform.

Trumka, quoting from a famous Joe Hill song, said that going forward, Democrats will have to make it clear to labor "Which side are you on?"

But really, that's only half the question. Joe Hill, in his song, was asking that question of workers themselves. And indeed, the reason Democrats have become such traitors to working class interests in recent decades is that the labor movement itself has not answered Joe Hill's question resolutely or honestly.

The hard reality is that, despite years of betrayal by Democratic politicians and by the Democratic Party, labor unions have continued year after year to answer the call to rally their ever diminishing members during campaign seasons to go door to door doing the hard work of rallying voters for ever more treacherous candidates, and to do massive "get-out-the-vote" campaigns on Election Day, as they did this past November to assure the election of solid Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and the election of President Barack Obama. Labor has also donated princely sums collected from members to Democratic candidates and to the Democratic National Committee.

And just as predictably, Congressional Democrats, and the new president, have been betraying their labor base....

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