Labor Internationalism, with Carl Rosen & Bob Master

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain minor errors.

[00:00:00] Sound on Tape: This podcast is presented by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights. 

[00:00:07] Bob Master: Truthfully, like in every, almost every major struggle between 1870 and 1937, we lost because the troops came in. Whatever our hesitations are about Joe Biden, we cannot afford to have Donald Trump as president for the next four years.

[00:00:22] He will close the political window that has existed in which the labor movement has started to show some signs of life. The NLRB will be stacked against us again and so on and so forth.

[00:00:39] William Lawrence: This is the hegemonic on podcast where we’re investigating the workings of power. What is power? How does it work? Who has it? What are they doing with it? How the heck do we get it? And other small questions like that. I’m your host, William Lawrence, and I’m an organizer from Lansing, Michigan. Currently, I work with the Rent Is Too Damn High Coalition, an alliance of tenant unions and housing justice groups across the state of Michigan.

[00:01:08] Formerly, I was a climate justice organizer for 10 years, including as a co founder of Sunrise Movement, the youth organization that put the Green New Deal on the political map. Just a quick note. We recorded the interviews for this season between May and July. Now we’re releasing them in August and September.

[00:01:26] A lot has happened in the world in between those times, such as Biden dropping out of the race. So if you hear us speaking with blissful ignorance of what was to come that’s what’s going on. But I think that the conversations are going to hold up very well for our tasks of building an internationalist left in the months and years to come.

[00:01:51] All right. Hello and welcome back to the hegemonic con. I am your host, William Lawrence recording from Lansing, Michigan. We are in the midst of our season two, which is on internationalism and specifically the question, why has it historically proven difficult to build powerful and durable alliances between us workers movements and those abroad and what are the opportunities.

[00:02:16] To do so now, this is a question that many people on the U S left are grappling with. I’m joined today by two esteemed guests who have spent much of their lifetimes thinking and practicing with this question as part of the labor movement. Carl Rosen is the general president of UE, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America.

[00:02:38] UE is a famously democratic, Progressive and independent union. And they have done arguably the best work of any us American union in building mutual alliances of solidarity with labor unions abroad over the last several decades. My other guest Bob master recently retired after 45 years in the labor movement, the last 36 with the communications workers of America.

[00:03:02] He was a founding co chair of the New York State Working Families Party and remains a member of the WFP National Executive Committee. Bob is also a big picture strategic thinker, strategist, and writer about matters of U. S. politics, political economy, and class struggle. Bob and Carl, thank you so much, both of you, for being here.

[00:03:22] Carl Rosen: Thanks for having me. 

[00:03:24] William Lawrence: Thanks, Will. I’d like to start with Carl. The UE has numerous international alliances, but the deepest and most celebrated is with a Mexican union called the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo. Tell us about how this alliance was forged during the struggle over NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the type of collaboration that UE and the FAT have undertaken since then.

[00:03:48] Thanks, Will. 

[00:03:49] Carl Rosen: Sure. Thanks. This has been a very instructive relationship for us over the years. Our members have gotten a lot out of it. I think the members of the thought have also. In the early 1990s, we found each other. Most of the Mexican labor movement at that time was dominated by company unions government controlled unions with a very, corrupt government that was very anti worker and very pro corporate profit at the expense of workers, the environment and everything else.

[00:04:16] And so the thought was, struggling in that environment to try to actually build democratic unions despite a legal regime, which made it almost impossible. And meanwhile, UE was watching. Huge numbers of manufacturing jobs in our original core industry, the electrical parts industry being moved to Mexico and other countries.

[00:04:37] And and unfortunately we had at that period many us unions that were also suffering from the same thing took a anti worker stance in terms of opposed to the workers in those other countries still in their jobs. When we knew. This was not due to the workers in the other countries. This was due to the corporations taking advantage of what had been set up in large part by us foreign policy, us military policy, essentially us imperial policy of encouraging governments that.

[00:05:05] That made things safe for American corporations to move overseas. So we knew the challenge needed to be made to the corporate policy and the government policy that supported that rather than attack on the workers on the other side of the border. And so what was key to that is getting workers to meet each other and to understand each other and to see what each other was going through.

[00:05:24] So that’s, so we started with the policy of what, once we encountered them in the run up to NAFTA and seeing what that was going to do to workers in both countries. And they. We were opposed to NAFTA also because they knew that it was going to, destroy large sections of the Mexican economy and flood literally millions of workers into the cities off of rural areas and other places.

[00:05:44] And that this was going to lead to, greater poverty and miseration. And we, so we joined together to both oppose NAFTA on either side of the border, but also we started worker to worker exchanges and that’s, what’s been So we had general electric workers. From, large plants and the northeast quarter of the U.

[00:06:03] S., who we helped travel down to Mexico and meet the Mexican workers who were being, under the heel of these bosses and who could explain how, vicious the system was, it was keeping them from unionizing and fighting for a better life for them and their families, which would have also raised the standards such as That there wouldn’t have been the downward suck on the jobs from the U S the same way to see the terrible pollution that was going on because there was just zero environmental regulation around these companies as compared to, in the U S they had been terrible for decades.

[00:06:33] They’d finally been being forced to clean up starting in the 1970s. And what are they doing in the 1980s? Oh, we’re going to get out of here and go pollute somebody else’s land and rivers. So that was a genesis of it. Yeah. Ended up going in many other directions with us helping each other in organizing drives doing cross cultural cross border cultural exchanges with murals and music and different things.

[00:06:55] So it’s been just a great relationship now over 30 years. 

[00:07:00] William Lawrence: Wow. If you could, just in the simplest terms possible, why has the UE decided that this relationship with FOT is in your members interests? And why has FOT seen it as being in their members interests? 

[00:07:15] Carl Rosen: We’re trying to lift up standards for workers on both sides of the border, I think, is fairly direct.

[00:07:19] Stop corporations playing workers in one country off against another. It’s why you build a union is for solidarity and to keep the boss from, driving you down to the lowest common denominator. This is exactly the same thing. You have to recognize that people in each country have their own circumstances.

[00:07:37] UE has a long history of local autonomy. Where, we, we don’t have a top down order to locals that they all have to do the same thing. You have to convince each other that this is the right right fight to take on the right path to go down. And so our being able to accept that this is a Mexican union with its own thoughts and its own identity and its own needs and that they can recognize us in the same way, that makes it much more possible for us to work together in a real collaborative way.

[00:08:04] But and there’s been a lot of victories along the way. I, one could argue that a lot of the groundbreaking work that we did with them filing challenges under the labor agreement nafta C Cha filing challenges under the International Labor Organization, including, they helped, they filed challenges to repression of US workers UE members in North Carolina.

[00:08:24] In the public sector who are legally denied the right to organize and bargain collectively it’s a definite violation of ILO standards and, they helped shine a light on that. So it’s been a two way street and it’s definitely helped each other, but it also the argument could be made that what we’ve seen in terms of the breakthroughs in Mexico in recent years.

[00:08:45] Grew out of that because it really shone a light on how horrible the labor regime was in Mexico, how undemocratic, how repressive, et cetera, and it created the space that as better leadership came forward in Mexico or better, the animal government that the pressure was there. To require changes, which now are resulting in new organizing and and better unions coming into being and the auto workers for one union has been very successful in working to really have improved unions and improved contracts to support those down there.

[00:09:18] And so this has a definite. material impact on the workers in Mexico immediately, but it also means that the U. S. workers, as they fight to improve things here, are no longer facing quite the same threat in terms of jobs being moved out of the country. 

[00:09:39] William Lawrence: Thanks, Carl. I’d like to turn now to Bob Master. And Bob, let’s start with your time at the CWA, Communications Workers of America.

[00:09:48] To what extent was international solidarity and relationship building a priority for the union during your time there? What forms did that take? And what, in your view, were some of the barriers? 

[00:10:02] Bob Master: It was pretty significant priority, actually. Going back to, in the 90s when there was widespread violence in the nation of Columbia in South America, where there were murders of trade unionists, there was a fair amount of mobilization internally in solidarity.

[00:10:22] With those workers efforts to pressure the United States government to take action against Columbia in order to prevent these murders. But I think that it evolved organically, for example, one of the biggest efforts at international cooperation came during a fairly lengthy effort ultimately unsuccessful that we made to organize T Mobile, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.

[00:10:49] And all of Deutsche Telekom, the German phone company, which had been spun off into a private entity was completely unionized all across Europe. And T Mobile is notoriously anti union in the United States. We developed a very close relationship with the German telecommunications union, a union called Verdi, where we were looking to them to put pressure through their collective bargaining relationship on Deutsche Telekom management to tamp down the real naked union busting that they were doing in call centers and in retail stores across the country.

[00:11:26] That was a significant effort. We, the CWA has many different divisions. We have industrial workers, we have service workers, we have telecom workers. We tend, we, so we ended up relating to multiple different international union federations, industrial, which is the. A group that brings together globally, all of the metalworking unions, the International Federation on the service worker side is uni.

[00:11:52] And so there’s been a lot of exchanges. Most recently there was a significant global effort to go after a company called teleperformance. Which was a big international call center operator. And, I think the reasons for us to go after it are pretty obvious, right? If you’re paying 30 an hour with benefits to an AT& T call center worker in the U S and you can switch it to the Philippines or the Dominican Republic, or, wherever it is, Mexico and pay a couple of bucks an hour with no benefits, there’s a huge incentive.

[00:12:28] And so it was certainly in our self interest. To work with uni to try to achieve a global agreement with teleperformance that to respect union rights, which was accomplished. I’m, I think the final deal was done after I left a couple of years ago, but that was a major focus of effort. I think, you asked about the obstacles and I think I would echo a little bit of what Carl said, xenophobia and the blaming of immigrants for pressure on U.

[00:12:58] S. Standards is a widespread phenomena, right? And certainly our members are not immune from those sentiments and developing these face to face relationships and having these face to face exchanges is the way that you overcome it. And, doing that at scale in order to, beat back those sentiments is challenging.

[00:13:20] And that I think that was, Mhm. That’s a big challenge. And we could talk a lot more about, all the reasons that internationalism is hard to to nurture in, in the U S context. But I, I think that’s probably, one of the things you want to talk about. 

[00:13:36] William Lawrence: Maybe I’ll just jump right off of that.

[00:13:38] And, Carl, you had mentioned previously that during the NAFTA moment some of the other actors in the union movement in the U. S. were taking what you said was a An anti worker approach rather than an anti boss approach or some of that xenophobia was coming in.

[00:13:54] And so it became a story, about, I don’t know, Mexican workers stealing our jobs rather than multinational corporations taking advantage of everybody. And then when we start to move the conversation into policy, which we’ll do a bit later in the conversation, but maybe we can touch on now.

[00:14:12] It’s a little interesting because quote unquote protectionism or the reverse of globalization can take on Either valence, it could be from a place which is about fighting the ability of the bosses to create a race to the bottom, but it can also take on this valence that’s about, whatever it being against Mexican people as such, or Filipino people as such.

[00:14:37] And so I wonder if, Either of you could speak to that distinction, like what it actually looks like on the ground and In policy, to be approaching this from a perspective that is genuinely about worker solidarity across borders and seeing some sort of shared fate, shared interest versus seeing it solely from the blinded position of a U.

[00:15:05] S. worker and somehow the boss and the foreign worker all end up being in league in your narrative to screw you, the U. S. worker. I think you get the gist of my question here. You’re welcome to take it in any direction you want, but I’m curious to hear your commentary on that. 

[00:15:23] Carl Rosen: Yeah, so you know, the key is that to the extent there’s trade agreements, and there will be, and first of all we’ve never liked the frame of free trade because it, Things are not totally free, even in the so called free trade agreements are always set up basically to, to help smooth the way for corporations but there’s plenty of restrictions put on everyone else other than the corporations and if you’re looking at what’s fair trade we say at the base of it is things that allow workers to organize and to fight for the things that they need in each country, if you have that fairly.

[00:15:59] Then most of the rest of the concerns go away. It’s when workers are suppressed, when environmental movements are suppressed, when the ability to advocate on their own behalf is suppressed, either by the corporations or by the, the government that’s in power. That’s when you’re very unfairly undercutting.

[00:16:21] What’s happening in other countries. Now, the other thing that’s needed is a way that Because you know when look at the human history is advancements and technology advancements and productive methods, etc it’s how you increase the standard of living for Each individual as well as for society as a whole.

[00:16:42] The problem is for the last several decades, almost all of those increases in productivity have been going to the people at the very top in our economy and workers have been at a standstill. And that’s why. The anger at other workers has been able to be exploited from, everyone, whether it’s a, a Donald Trump or or, people who have historically played on anti immigrant, anti people of a different color, et cetera.

[00:17:06] All of that plays out in the context of workers not feeling like they’re getting their fair share and right about it. And in fact, seeing their share declining. Part of this is the fight to make sure that. As these changes take place, whether it’s technology, whether it’s that the technology is in another country.

[00:17:23] You look at the steel industry, for example, the steel industry famously refused to invest in new equipment. In this country from like the 1960s onward and they started doing things at the U. S. Steel bought Montgomery Ward or something like that. They were taking all their excess cash and investing it outside the steel industry.

[00:17:42] And meanwhile, Japan was building all of these modern steel production plants. And then, yeah, so then what happens later is, they’re replacing U. S. jobs. Because they’re able to produce so much more effectively and and, the answer became, oh, we need to, ban these imports when in fact, the answer was the steel industry should have been forced to, reinvest their profits in making a a stronger industry here.

[00:18:10] So you really have to dive into, so when you’re talking policy, it’s all of those things. It’s industrial policy which they have in other countries. We should have in the U. S. We should have, and we do it for certain industries at certain times. Certainly what’s happening with semiconductors right now in this country is an industrial policy, a choice to invest huge amounts of money to build up that industry.

[00:18:28] And it’s going to put a lot of people to work. What we need to be working on is the positive things that build up industry here and then trade agreements that are based on workers being able to fight for themselves in other countries and then being in solidarity with those workers as they do it.

[00:18:44] William Lawrence: Bob, anything you’d want to add to that? 

[00:18:46] Bob Master: Yeah. The challenge on this issue is it’s so multi layered and so complex and the, the historical choices that were made at various points by American decision makers were, had so many different motivations. And I think you can’t really think about this on multiple levels without thinking You know, America’s imperial economic status in the post World War Two era.

[00:19:15] If you read work by the historian Judith Stein, who has written a book she’s, she passed away a couple of years ago wrote a book called The Pivotal Decade about the 70s, written some other essays. One of the things that she points out is the United States was so focused on winning the Cold War that it allowed Japan and the Western Europe to erect tariff barriers so that they could rebuild their domestic industries to Carl’s point, right?

[00:19:46] It was. It was in part that the steel industry and other American industries were sitting on their laurels They were in a completely dominant world economic position But we were more concerned about keeping japan in the u. s Orbit keeping germany and western europe in the u. s Orbit, we allowed there to be a fair amount of protectionism Those industries grew up with modern technology and then began to compete in the 70s very effectively Against the united states and all of a sudden Completely unexpectedly at the time that I came into the labor movement in the late 70s All of a sudden the steel industry was disappearing, right?

[00:20:19] And the auto industry was, losing hundreds of thousands of jobs. And the problem was that there was this exaltation of the idea of free trade, that this was going to solve everybody’s problems. And I think we really, see that come to fruition in the 2016 election where Trump just cleans up.

[00:20:42] In these areas that have been devastated by free trade agreements and de industrialization over the previous decades. And, basically the Democrats, as recently as Obama, Obama fought for the trans pacific partnership until the, which was a kind of Pacific rim version of NAFTA until the last days of his administration.

[00:21:01] And they were telling workers. Oh, you’re going to get a better job, go to community college, and you’re going to develop skills that are going to be much better than working in the steel industry, which was a cruel hopes. And so people became enraged. And then you layer on top of that the wreckage of U.

[00:21:20] S. imperialism in Central and South America. These economies have been destroyed and completely extracted. All of the wealth and profit has gone to U. S. multinationals. And so people are desperate, you know, people in those countries in Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador and wherever are desperate.

[00:21:40] Up to a level of desperation, which is hard for us to imagine putting your kids on your back and walking through the Darien gap in the forest for, months at a time and, an incredible risk. Imagine the desperation to do that. So overcoming that and trying to figure out what is the correct balance between having an industrial policy, which I think Carl correctly said we have, it seems like in semiconductors, but in general, not so much, right.

[00:22:04] For both domestic political reasons and for, rebuilding our economy, we need to have an approach that enables us to, reshore a lot of manufacturing. There’s a lot of different factors here. But it’s, it’s an incredibly complex and, it feels to me like, without a global social democratic program to rebuild some of these economies in the third world, is a politically incorrect characterization in the developing world, I think it’s going to be very hard because people will make this desperate choice to come to Los Angeles, to come to Houston, to come to New York, Because they want to feed their families.

[00:22:43] And how do you argue with that? 

[00:22:45] William Lawrence: Or if they don’t make the move, the cost of labor in those countries will remain very low and the corporations will continue their efforts to, offshore production to those countries from the perspective of the U S worker. It may have the same effect. I really appreciate you taking us into that territory, Bob.

[00:23:07] Sound on Tape: Hello! I’m Marcy Ryan, and I’m the print editor for Convergence. If you’re enjoying this show like I am, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to Convergence. We’re a small, independent operation and rely heavily on our readers and listeners, like you, to support our work. You can become a subscriber at convergencemag.

[00:23:24] com slash donate. You’ll find a direct link in the show notes. Subscriptions start at just 10 a month, or you can make a one time donation of any amount. At any donation level, know that you’re helping to build a better media system, one that supports people’s movements and fights fascism. But at 10 monthly and above, you’ll have access to exclusive content and events.

[00:23:45] If you can’t afford anything right now, don’t worry. Our shows and print content will continue to be free for you to enjoy. You can also help by leaving us a positive review or sharing this episode with a comrade, a friend, or a family member. Thank you so much for listening.

[00:24:07] William Lawrence: I think that this. Assessment that you identified around the chickens coming home to roost in the 2016 election and Trump, of course, being, vocally opposed to, to, to NAFTA and the sort of, resentment, especially across the Rust Belt, then, manifesting in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin all flipped to Trump.

[00:24:30] I think that analysis was broadly taken up by this sort of democratic political class and helped fuel the interest in industrial policy that we’ve now seen under Biden. And, I was seeing that shift also happen as we were advocating for the green new deal. And then we started to see all of these somewhat unexpected allies, I think lining up behind the idea of a green industrial policy.

[00:24:58] Labor was there, which was not so surprising, but then, you get Brian Deese of BlackRock who then became Biden’s economic policy director. He’s a Democrat, he’s a finance guy, and he was a hundred percent, on board with the idea of reshoring and American industrial policy, because there was an analysis that this was necessary in order to try to undercut MAGA or break the fever and build a better deal for U S workers.

[00:25:26] And, I think Biden now Has amidst many things we can criticize around him, he has been generally speaking a pro labor president. He appointed a favorable inner L. R. B. He walked on the picket line with the U. A. W. And he’s conditioned some of these corporate manufacturing incentives through the chips act and the I.

[00:25:42] R. A. On the adoption of labor friendly policies. So there’s been some breakthroughs in various manufacturing sectors. And It goes along, of course, with a general tightness in the labor market in the post pandemic era. So it’s not all about policy. But it is, but Biden’s administration certainly has put its finger on the scale in these matters.

[00:26:03] Now, I think his pro U. S. Worker agenda also comes with this protectionist edge, such as his recently 100 percent tariff on it. Chinese electric vehicles to name one of many examples. We might say so much, the better this helps American autoworkers. And I’m interested to ask some folks from the UAW about that policy in particular, when I talked to them later in this series but many observers are now fearing that by nomics is intensifying geopolitical tensions with China in particular, and risks this spiral of economic and military conflict that.

[00:26:37] People believe could lead to world war three, which obviously we desperately cannot afford. And so what do you think is the responsibility of the U S labor movement to be contending with these types of questions before we even get to what are the answers? What is the responsibility of the labor movement to be contending with these kinds of questions?

[00:26:55] If we support tariffs or we support various, incentives for American manufacturing, but the effect. Is it becomes articulated with a program which includes this geopolitical antagonism to China, not to mention Europe, not to mention apparently the rest of the world. How should the union movement be thinking about that?

[00:27:16] Because we don’t just want to replace the era of letter, rip, trade, liberalization and globalization with an era of economic nationalism that is also militarism. 

[00:27:28] Bob Master: I am not sure. Obviously the labor movement doesn’t want war, certainly not world war three. And of course, any war that takes place is fought by the children of the, of the members of the labor movement, right?

[00:27:46] Not by the children of United States senators. And, that’s something that we know. From all of our experience. So I think that it is a question of how do you strike, how do you strike the right balance, right? On the one hand, with the question is without those tariffs, does the American EV industry get off the ground, which, it feels to me like is a pretty important priority for us to, shift the U S auto industry into the.

[00:28:15] The modern Europe, and obviously the demands of climate change and, impending disaster on that front loom as large as anything, so I honestly, and I’d be very interested to hear what Carl’s thinking is on this. I don’t think there’s a lot of grappling in the labor movement.

[00:28:34] Going on trying to strike much of a balance on these issues. I think, there’s such a a backlash against the era of free trade and of deregulation and financialization that there’s a, a kind of embrace of, of an approach, which really says forthrightly, we want to, we want to rebuild the manufacturing sector, which has historically been the bedrock Of the u.

[00:28:58] s labor movement, so i’m not sure I have a satisfying answer on this question at this point. But I think it’s an important question that we you know, we need to be dealing with 

[00:29:10] Carl Rosen: yeah I certainly agree with bob that a these are difficult questions and b the labor movement is not really grappling with it at this point I’d add a couple more things.

[00:29:20] So my concern in terms of the possibility of You Of a hot war with China here is not so much because of the trade policy. It’s because of our military policy and the brinksmanship that’s going on with, ships almost running into each other or running into each other in the waters around China.

[00:29:40] And, we were talking about industrial policy. One industry we have had an industrial policy on since World War II is the military industry. And the tremendous amount of government money that goes into our taxpayer money that goes into supporting that. And in fact there’s a argument that can be made that some of the deterioration and the U S ability to compete economically in the world is because we’ve poured such a higher percentage of our economy and the military spending than anybody else in the world and and how that has.

[00:30:10] Resulted in, in not having money going to other areas, whether it’s education, technical skills, research, whatever it is there’s been less money for all of that because of what we’ve been spending on the military. And, we’re the country that has bases all over the place.

[00:30:25] Yeah, these conflicts that are happening over there in waters, just off of China are waters, just off of China. It’s not waters just off of the U S yet. Yeah. There’s all these U S. Gunboats wandered around there, ready to run into Chinese boats, and it’s not to defend China’s policies.

[00:30:45] It’s to say, we all need to step back. We need to be negotiating arms control agreements. And again, instead of tearing them up, we’re allowing them to expire here and there including around nuclear weapons and we need to get back to trying to reduce what’s spent on the military and spend more on, on what.

[00:31:01] Helps actually you know what humankind needs. So if we build that into our policy, these other issues around tariffs, et cetera, become a lot less important, but certainly I’m in favor of policies that build up America’s manufacturing power again. And although, some portion of that maybe, direct us investing in those things.

[00:31:21] And if the auto companies don’t want to do it, I’m not opposed to exploring approaches where Where we have government run operations that do these things if necessary. 

[00:31:32] William Lawrence: He, I’m interested in this point you made that one could argue that the U S national economy has weakened due to the overinvestment in the military arena.

[00:31:45] And I think that’s probably true when it comes to the perspective of the U S. Working class who are not directly employed in that sort of military industrial complex I think that I’ve been listening to some podcasts recently with a guy named Ali Qadri who’s he writes about and war, but specifically waste as part of the process of capitalist accumulation.

[00:32:14] And he basically points out that war and de development is part of the process of global accumulation. If you look at it outside the lens of a national economy, but you look at it from the full circuit of the productive process. So if the U S military complex is, Deployed to de develop central America through a series of wars over the 1980s.

[00:32:40] And then those surplus people who are the victims of those wars become. Immigrants who become low wage laborers or their national economies then get redeveloped under NAFTA and CAFTA and are a source of cheap labor in those national economies. All of that shows up as a drain on the US national economy, but from the perspective of finance and the circuit of accumulation overall, there’s actually a Bye.

[00:33:11] A positive productive process that’s happening there from the benefit from the benefit of the people up top. And what you’re saying is it’s producing profits. Yes. Yes. But that these are the, but the profit seekers are the ones setting the policy. And then, I just want to mark what Bob said that.

[00:33:26] Without a social democratic program to rebuild the economies of the global South, it’s very hard to imagine getting out of the spiral of competition among national economies and national working classes. Because as long as there’s a, an imbalance there and finance. There’s going to be a push to, to move across the border in order to get the higher rate of return, the lower cost of labor.

[00:33:51] And so I couldn’t agree with that more. That’s actually something I want to take up in another episode of this series as well. But now we’re talking about basically harnessing the power of the Fed and the IMF to basically pay massive you could call it climate debt. You could call it a lot of different things but unilateral transfers from the North to the South in order to actually invest in that global social democratic program without creating a new debt trap for the South.

[00:34:18] And. I think that may be one of the most critical issues that we need to be bringing into the mainstream in the U. S. In a bigger way. It’s something that people in the south have been fighting for and has been a leading demand for decades and decades. But to bring that call for transfers from the north to the south to the working classes of the north in a way that is unabashedly also about the self interest of the workers of the north, it would be Mhm.

[00:34:43] Maybe challenging to articulate, but if you could make that seem common sense, which it actually is, that would solve a lot of our problems. Let me keep going here. A few of my musings there, but these are obviously big questions. Let’s just keep on with the thread about militarism and The support historically by the mainstream of the U.

[00:35:03] S. labor movement, and there were always dissidents, for U. S. interventionist wars abroad. The AFL CIO was infamously supportive of the war in Vietnam, and this was a position to put them at odds with the anti war movement of the New Left, and eventually with Martin Luther King Jr. And then, More recently, at the advent of the Iraq war in 2003, the AFL CIO at first cautioned against the Bush administration’s unilateral push towards war in the absence of a UN coalition, but then they ended up quote, unequivocal in support of our country and America’s men and women on the front lines.

[00:35:40] In quote, once the war began. So I’ll state this a bit provocatively. I think it’s fair to say that from most of the 20th century through today, us militarism has been not only a bipartisan consensus between Democrats and Republicans, but a cross class consensus between the leading voices of us labor and the leading voices of us capital.

[00:36:02] Is that stating it too harshly? Or if you agree why has this. Either of you can take that one. 

[00:36:12] Carl Rosen: I’ll certainly jump in here that yes, that’s correct, but it didn’t happen by accident. It happened. Very purposefully our union has always argued that a central impact of the McCarthy era in the late 1940s and 1950s was to was to force the labor movement and to just follow behind whatever us imperial policy was us foreign policy that was about extending us empire and not to question it.

[00:36:41] To support it unthinkingly and those who wouldn’t, got purged and in fact, nine unions got destroyed at that time for refusing to go along and then two others. Came under tremendous attack my union, which lost 80 percent of its membership during that decade for standing up on principle and the West coast long shore are the only two that, that said, no, we need to have an independent voice for labor, including on labor issues.

[00:37:05] And the rest of the labor got forced to, fall in line with the two party consensus and increasingly fall in line with both. Just the Democratic Party. But as you pointed out on foreign policy both parties were largely the same. What’s interesting now is the Republican party no longer is necessarily quite the same.

[00:37:20] But the, not for good reasons. , they’re taking a different foreign policy attack than the Democrats are at this point. So yeah, that, that’s been a terrible problem and it’s been a long fight against that. And it is why. through most of the Vietnam War, most of the labor movement, supported.

[00:37:37] What our government was doing there, which was just on its surface. So clearly wrong. And and finally at the end of the war folks started to break with it. But even then, not all unions came out against it and the AFL CIO never did. So then fast forward 30 years and you have the Iraq war and that actually, I’m actually heartened by what’s happened over the last quarter century, actually because.

[00:38:01] It took a few years, but there was a good group of folks working through an organization they set up called U. S. Labor Against the War that went to work in locals and regions and national unions, and then eventually all the way up into the AFL CIO, saying this war is not in the interest of people.

[00:38:18] Working people in either our country or in Iraq, they back that up by having worker to worker exchanges with Iraqi trade unions. Very similar to what we had been doing with folks from Mexico and and, putting a human face on what was going on and understanding it from the worker’s point of view, and eventually it FLCIO actually adopting.

[00:38:38] A a resolution at their convention, I think in 2005. So it took a few years, but we got there to demand that the troops be brought home, that was actually the best way to support the troops was to bring them home and get them out of a situation where, where there nothing good was happening or would happen.

[00:38:55] And that I think developed in part, because by then a big chunk of the folks in leadership and labor movement had been through the experiences around Vietnam. And frequently from the point of view of protesting the war. So they had some good sense there. But it was also because the U S economy is no longer delivering for most working people.

[00:39:15] During the Vietnam war job for plentiful standards of living were going up, all of those things were happening. And so it was a lot easier to continue with the go along to get along. That’s no, this economy is no longer able to deliver in the same way in part, because so much of the money is being spent.

[00:39:30] and stolen by the people at the top. So now we come to the what’s going on in Palestine and Gaza and the fact that the labor movement fairly rapidly within a period of months came out under a democratic administration saying the policy of the U. S. government right now is wrong. We need to be demanding a ceasefire increasing calls that You know, military arms have to be cut off military supplies to the Israeli government because of what they’re doing with them.

[00:39:58] This is unheard of in, in U. S. history in the last hundred years, basically at least the last 90 years. And so we it’s a very good, very healthy development and, uh, hopefully it leads to more of this rather than less. 

[00:40:14] William Lawrence: So you’re saying don’t take this for granted, don’t understate the significance of how fast the AFL was able to come out with a statement for ceasefire, especially under a Democratic president.

[00:40:27] Carl Rosen: That’s right. That’s right. It’s a very significant development and it’s also, I think, no small part of why the the Biden administration. Is has, is on the surface, at least altering their policy at this point and making direct threats to cut off the weapons, et cetera.

[00:40:46] And, in actuality, things haven’t changed enough yet, but it’s happening now, of course, the protests that are happening across the country and on campuses, et cetera, have an impact. And the fact that Biden is worried, as you ought to be, about getting reelected. In no small part because of this issue, and that is probably the reason why some unions were willing to come out over the last several months and push them on this issue is because they knew that amongst their own members and amongst the younger generation and amongst people, who have a little bit more of a broader view of the world than then, then what might otherwise be the case that Biden was losing his standing very quickly because of what was happening here.

[00:41:25] So they were trying to push him to do the right thing even if it’s only to save his own neck electorally. 

[00:41:31] William Lawrence: Yeah. The UFCW in Washington state was a, was an early adopter of the uncommitted campaign and they issued a very strong statement that said we’re against Trump and we believe that voting uncommitted is the best way to to get a democratic nominee that can win in November.

[00:41:52] I thought that was pretty impressive because, they were suggesting. It could be Biden or it could be someone else, frankly, which if they were to do a switcheroo on the ballot now, I won’t speak for that being their position now, but I thought it was remarkable, actually, at a time when lots of, institutions were issuing statements saying this is about pushing Biden.

[00:42:10] We support Biden wholeheartedly and we’re uncommitted. And UFCW in Washington state they didn’t quite say that they said a democratic nominee that can beat Trump, which I thought spoke very loudly and what was a powerful stand by them, Bob, I wonder what you’d add on this historically, but also today on the, U.

[00:42:28] S. Labor movement and it’s it’s engagement with U. S. Foreign policy. 

[00:42:32] Bob Master: I think Carl did a, a great job of kind of summarizing the trajectory of, where we’ve come from since 1946, 1947, and obviously the U. E. Was very much at the center of that conflict and that history.

[00:42:47] The thing that I would add is it’s worth remembering that in the context of the Cold War. The anti Soviet leadership and staff that consolidated control over the AFL CIO and it’s worth remembering that there’s only an AFL CIO as opposed to an AFL and a CIO that were separate. For 15 years, because this conflict was resolved in the favor of anti communist and and support for U.

[00:43:23] S. imperial policy abroad, in the era when I came into the labor movement, which was 1977, it really felt like the U. S. labor movement was spending more money undermining left wing unions in South Africa or Central America. or in the Philippines than it was on organizing new workers in the U.

[00:43:45] S. That that is literally not an exaggeration. The offices of an outfit called a field The American Institute for Free Labor Development were in the offices of the C of the CWA on K Street at the time before we moved to our current headquarters. And, this was a group that was training, Central American trade unionists to undermine left wing unions and to try to build Pro U.

[00:44:12] S. Unions. And so that came to an end when John Sweeney was elected president of the A. F. L. C. I. O. In 1995 or 1996. And, they established a department called the Solidarity Center, and they really completely shifted the orientation of the foreign policy of the F. L. C. I. O. Having said that, I think that Popular attitudes are run deep, right?

[00:44:40] And there, has always been a very strong strain of patriotism in the U. S. Working class and dealing with that and dealing with the contradictions of that have always been a challenge. But I think Carl is absolutely right that, you had a generation of major U. S. labor leaders, quite varied, but, people like Larry Cohen and John Wilhelm, at Unite Here and, Andy Stern at SEIU who were college students in the late 60s and early 70s and participated in the anti war movement and took that orientation into their leadership, 20 years later.

[00:45:20] I think there has been a shift. And it’s something that, a lot of good work, like U. S. Labor Against the War, has been done, and it’s something we need to continue to build on. 

[00:45:30] William Lawrence: This is really interesting, because I feel like I’ve been asking a pretty dour and critical set of questions, and you all have met me there.

[00:45:39] But you’re also leaving me with a slightly more optimistic perspective than I had anticipated. Which is that, even if the tangible output of solidarity work still is much lower than, and the strength of the international alliances and the demands that U. S. workers are making on behalf of workers in the global south and in alliance with work is still, none of that is where we would want it to be.

[00:46:09] You’re describing an arc from, 19. 46 or so through now that is moving in the right direction and the situation even in the Iraq war days was better than it was in the eighties and during Vietnam and the situation now in Gaza in the cause of conflict. It is better when it comes to the prospects for aligning U.

[00:46:34] S. labor with the people of the global south than it was even during Iraq. And so that’s, I think there’s a lot of reasons for that. Some of it is the consciousness of the leaders that you describe. Some of it may be the shifting conditions of the global economy. So the, literally the.

[00:46:53] The super profits of U. S. empire are less overwhelming than they were during Vietnam. And Bob was Carl was speaking about the just how strong the economy was in those days and how that helped fuel a nationalist sentiment. That’s obviously less so the case now. So this is something I want to keep grappling with and I’m going to speak with some of our other guests about Getting a little deeper into the conditions of political economy in the 21st century.

[00:47:17] And I think one of the key questions we need to be asking is by nomics going to work and how is it going to work? Will there be a success in revitalizing the manufacturing sector and other sectors to the extent that we get something like a 20th century American middle class revitalized and reinvigorated, or is the reality that the conditions of global economy will not allow that?

[00:47:39] And. I don’t know. I would like to play that out. If yes, what will that mean for the conditions for solidarity? If no, what will that mean for the conditions for solidarity? And, so there’s a lot to sort 

[00:47:50] Bob Master: out here. Yeah. A couple of things I just wanted to emphasize. One is, we should remember that the American labor movement, the mainstream of the American labor movement was virulently anti immigrant almost from its inception.

[00:48:07] Until, Sweeney took over in the 19, in the late 1990s, huge across the board support for the Chinese Exclusion Act in the late 1880s, right? Absolutely keep all Chinese workers, all Asian workers out, very supportive of all of the anti immigration legislation in the, first half of the 20th century.

[00:48:28] So there’s been a, a very substantial shift. And, and I think that is, there has been a significant change. The challenge, I think, going and on the question of by nomics. One thing that you’ve heard people like Brian Deese and Jared Bernstein say, which no Democrat has said in, throughout my career is the economy can’t work And Without a certain measure of worker power.

[00:48:53] I’ve seen this language worker power coming out of the lips of decent and Bernstein Which is like no democrats have talked about that basically since roosevelt, and On the other hand, we’re living in this era where you know Neoliberalism and corporate elites have been discredited and it’s being replaced by this these contending forces of right wing and left wing populism and the right wing version is You know, the traditional labor movement, virulently anti immigrant and, blaming poor people and darker people for all the problems of the Wharton class.

[00:49:30] And then you have this left version of populism, which is unformed, is influenced by Bernie and Occupy Wall Street. And, obviously affects the Biden administration and yet the political system is frozen and the ability of the Biden administration to really deliver. Is hamstrung by the, very deep limitations in the American political system, the filibuster, et cetera.

[00:49:50] So it’s a, it’s both a promising moment. And an unbelievably dangerous moment. And obviously Trumpism is not a us phenomenon alone. We have war bond, we have Putin, we have Modi, et cetera, et cetera. You have all these characters who are preying on these, ethno nationalist sentiments as a way of solving.

[00:50:10] The addressing the needs of people for whom the financial elites are just not delivering it. It’s quite a moment. . 

[00:50:17] Carl Rosen: And if I could add to that the right wing populism that Bob is talking about there, there is a material basis in it and will, I think you might’ve. Alluded this to this a little bit that, the fact that so much manufacturing got wiped out in rural areas or mid sized towns, 50, 000 population type things over the decades.

[00:50:36] Those, a lot of that had unions. And that was the one voice in that area in those areas for, somewhat of a a progressive or at least, not a tech, each other type of point of view. And those are gone and it’s, replaced with right wing radio and extremely conservative churches, et cetera.

[00:50:54] So there’s a material basis for it but also this right wing juggernaut is extraordinarily well funded. By a section of the capitalist class. Yeah what do you have is you’ve got some of the capitalists realize they went too far. And because of that they’ve under cut the, the ability of this economy to continue to grow and just take care of people’s needs because you’ve siphoned so much money to the top and you have other folks who are just, Purely still in the greed is good.

[00:51:20] And the two parties, look, the U. S. The UE has said for a long time capitalists have two parties. Workers need one of our own. We understand that the democratic party has. Corporate sponsors like the Republican Party does and but the Republican Party wants tend to be the ones that are some of the most destructive at this point when you look at, it’s the oil industry, the coal industry, et cetera.

[00:51:40] So you, but you’ve got tremendous money coming in from there to prop that up. And and then you look at the courts. And how much of the court’s going to help us hold us back. So I, there was plenty of money in this economy to allow a rebirth of American productivity American economy that can take care of the needs of the American people.

[00:52:00] The question is yeah. Will these fights amongst the elites allow that the true elites, the corporate elites allow that money to flow in such a way that this country gets rebuilt or is the political system now so gummed up that. That it’s not going to get there, but we’ll determine it in no small part is can we organize workers into fighting for themselves?

[00:52:21] And if we can, then we have a chance to shift the whole narrative. 

[00:52:26] William Lawrence: Yeah. In addition to the organizing on the shop floor, which is the foundation of all of it. What would you say are the tasks before the U. S. labor movement when it comes to integrating its struggle with the working class around the world?

[00:52:40] Carl Rosen: Number one is organizing at scale. The labor movement is way too small in this country. And the last couple of years have shown that worker to worker organizing can be tremendously effective. A few unions are supporting it. Most are not. The other ones need to start doing it. They have to get over their fear of people coming in who have their own base of power within their union.

[00:53:00] They have to get over their refusal to spend money on these things. And instead, say, look, there’s no future for the labor movement unless we grow tenfold. Literally is close to what we need to do. And and when that happened in the 1930s, the last time we grew at that rate was because it was worker to worker organizing was not top down.

[00:53:19] It’s what it’s gotta be unleashed. Now, when we do that, then we will have the power to actually help workers in other countries again, too. But we should be also reaching out directly and building the bonds and doing the kind of things that have been done in the past, including, you think back even in the 1980s, the West Coast Longshore played an important role in supporting the anti apartheid movement, the workers in South Africa fighting to be free by refusing to hire handle goods from there.

[00:53:45] That’s, we have the ability to do those and it’s no surprise. It was that union that, had survived on the left from the McCarthy era, but also they were a union that had a strong internationalist bent that dock workers across the country or the world work very closely together and they understand each other and learn from each other and build on each other.

[00:54:03] And I think that’s what we need to do for the whole labor movement. 

[00:54:06] William Lawrence: Thanks, Carl. 

[00:54:07] Bob Master: Bob. I wrote an article that was recently published on convergence, addressing this question of what do we do? How do we build off the militancy of 2023, which was quite extraordinary with the UAW strike and the higher ed strikes and so on?

[00:54:21] And, the one thing I would add to Carl’s analysis, it’s obviously we, we need mobilization at the base, but we also need a political environment which is favorable to organizing. And I would argue that one of the key reasons that, the labor movement made its breakthroughs in the 1930s was when push came to shove, for example, the governor of Michigan, Frank Murphy, did not send the National Guard in to evict the Flint sit down strikers and truthfully, like in every election.

[00:54:49] Almost every major struggle between 1870 and 1937, we lost because the troops came in. Whatever our hesitations are about Joe Biden, we cannot afford to have Donald Trump as president for the next four years. He will close the political window that has existed in which the labor movement has started to show some signs of life.

[00:55:10] The nlrb will be stacked against us again and so on and so forth at the same time we need to You know, and this is a you know Obviously a theme that convergence, has been pushing pretty strongly is you know This idea of block and build like we also have to continue to do, to build efforts And this is a whole nother conversation right to create independent political Capacity for the labor movement to put pressure on the democrats aren’t going to do it without us pushing them from below And I think But I do think that, we’re in a kind of desperate situation here because, the reelection of Trump would unleash the worst forces in American society.

[00:55:48] And by the way, and this is the last thing I would close on, is, this Project 2025 thing that, the Heritage Foundation, the, the 900 page blueprint or whatever it is, there are sections of the corporate elite who have overcome their distaste for Trump and now see this as an opportunity.

[00:56:04] If you can, subordinate the Department of Justice to the president then you can strip the EPA and OSHA and the DOL and the NLRB of all of its independent power and make it work for corporations. And so we have to build a, We got to do everything we got to see at the grassroots and we got to build a political movement at the same time.

[00:56:23] William Lawrence: Let’s go do everything. Bob and Carl thank you so much. This has been really terrific. So much respect to both of you and your work. Thanks for having thanks for bringing us together. This was great. This podcast is written and hosted by me, William Lawrence. Our producer is Josh Elstro, and it is published by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights.

[00:56:45] You can help support this show and others like it by becoming a subscriber of Convergence at convergencemag. com slash donate. Standard subscriptions start at 10 and really help support the sustainabilities of shows like this one. One time donations of any amount are welcome there as well. You can find a direct link to donate or subscribe in the show notes.

[00:57:05] This has been the Hegemonicon. Thanks for listening, and let’s talk again soon.