Protestors march near the White House during a push for immigrant reform on May Day, in 2010.

The "Gang of Eight" hammering out a bipartisan immigration reform bill will release their proposal any day now. The legislation will offer a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants and protections for the labor rights of immigrants—but is also likely to step up enforcement and border security measures and worker verification systems. The Nation invited four immigration activists and policy experts—Kica Matos of the Center for Community Change, Sarahí Uribe of the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, Ai-jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and Janice Fine of Rutgers University—to outline what the bill absolutely must include, and what it can't, to be a fair and just solution.

A Clear and Direct Path to Citizenship
Kica Matos is the director of immigrant rights and racial justice at Center for Community Change.

If we want to resolve the status of undocumented Americans and fix our patchwork system of failed and misguided policies, we need to make it possible for all 11 million immigrants to have a clear and direct path to citizenship. While there are a myriad of issues that comprehensive, compassionate immigration reform legislation must address, citizenship must be the centerpiece. Because Congress is fond of alphabet soup when it comes to naming legislation, we urge them to think about the A-E-I-O-U of immigration reform.

Attainability and Affordability:
The 1986 reform bill excluded the 600,000 immigrants who had entered during the previous four years. This failure was the beginning of the situation we find ourselves in today.

For the next wave of reform, immigrants will likely have to prove they were in the United States as of a certain date. The date imposed should be a recent one so that it covers the vast majority of undocumented immigrants who are settled in our communities.

According to the National Council of La Raza, 43 percent of all immigrants who attended naturalization workshops delayed applying because of cost. The new law should not impose excessive fines and additional fees that will make it impossible for eligible immigrants to earn legal status.

Expediency and Eligibility:
We should avoid obstacle courses and shifting goal posts. The legalization process should happen entirely within the United States. It should also not be contingent on arbitrary metrics such as increased border security or additional interior enforcement.

Inclusiveness:
A broad spectrum of immigrants with varying family, work and immigration histories must be eligible, including day laborers and stay-at-home parents. The new law should not only include those who are fluent, but must include English-language learners. The proficiency standard should be realistic and we must ensure that immigrants have the resources available to learn the language. And family unity waivers must also include same-sex relationships.

Openness
The path to citizenship must not contain arbitrary deadlines and must provide continuous enrollment for those eligible. People shouldn’t be excluded for minor crimes of necessity, such as driving a car without a license. Since the 1986 immigration laws went into effect, the number of crimes that make one ineligible for immigration status has grown tremendously. Even long-term legal residents with families in the United States now face deportation for minor and nonviolent charges. The new legalization program should not add more restrictions to these already extreme standards. Instead, the reform law Congress passes this year should restore humanity to the entire system, so that minor mistakes no longer mean automatic banishment for immigrants with roots in the United States.

Unity
Immediate family members should be able to join their loved ones while applying for permanent status.

Every day that Congress fails to address our broken immigration system, 1,100 families are torn apart, workers are suffering abuse and children are traumatized by the loss of their parents.

As our families continue to suffer, our communities become more frustrated and angry with the politicians delaying progress. Politicians must choose people over politics. The time for immigration reform is now.

The Federal Government Must Ditch Its Discredited Deportation Programs
Sarahí Uribe is the national campaign coordinator at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

It’s no secret that a quota of 400,000 deportations per year drives immigration enforcement in the United States. Will federal immigration reform change this? Will deportations decrease, remain the same—or worse, increase?

The strongest federal bill would, of course, qualify all 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the country for relief. However, the Obama Administration’s discredited deportation programs, like “Secure Communities” (known as S-Comm), remain as the biggest obstacles in getting us there.

S-Comm turns every police officer into a gateway for deportation by using pre-conviction arrest data to conduct immigration checks. As a result, thousands of families have been torn apart for offenses as minor as driving with out a license and immigrant communities across the country live in constant fear of interacting with local police because of their key role in funneling people into the deportation and detention system. 

The President must undo the damage he caused over the last four years by ditching S-Comm and instead codifying “TRUST acts.”  TRUST acts direct local authorities to limit or entirely ignore request from federal immigration authorities to hold individuals in their custody for 48 hours longer than they otherwise would to facilitate transfer to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Across the country, local jurisdictions and state governments are proposing and enacting these new policies to alleviate the deportation crisis. Just yesterday, the California state Assembly advanced its TRUST act, a bill that could have prevented more than half of the 90,000 deportations in the state as a result of S-Comm.

The fight for legalization is inextricably linked to the fight against deportations.  It is axiomatic that deportation is the biggest barrier to an immigrant’s path to citizenship. Each time we collectively organize to stop an individual’s deportation, the scales tip a bit closer to legalization for all immigrants.  When a day laborer falsely accused of stealing stops his deportation through a very public campaign, the case for the inclusion and legalization of all day laborers is advanced. When a previously deported parent returns to this country to be reunited with their children and fights to stay, the conversation of who has the right to remain is broadened. When a local jurisdiction or state adopts a TRUST act (thus refusing to blindly participate in the deportation apparatus), we get closer to legalization.

Even if immigration reform legislation passes this summer providing a path to citizenship for 11 millions immigrants, S-Comm and other deportation programs still must be ended for reform to be truly comprehensive. Here’s why: for millions of people who will be on the path to citizenship, which will include a wait time, S-Comm is like a line backer knocking people off the path before they even reach the finish line. People in the process of applying will continue to be deported by S-Comm and other deportation programs. The consequences of interactions with local police will be heightened. And in some jurisdictions, local police will be more motivated to racially profile and arrest would-be- citizens knowing their arrest could prevent their adjustment of legal status.

In the coming days, we will be pushing Congress to pass legislation that provides political equality for millions of immigrants.  And we will be fighting back hard against punitive enforcement measures that will be deemed as tradeoffs in this process

But we should also push those Mayors, Governors, and Congressional representatives who are eager to voice their support for comprehensive immigration reform.  Rather than allowing these local officials to provide mere lip service, they should work to stop deportations by crafting legislation too.  For years, lawmakers have been content to voice support for reform while ignoring deportations.  That is changing.   At all levels of government, there is now a resounding demand of  “ni una mas,” not one more deportation.

Immigration Reform Must Work for Women
Ai-jen Poo is the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the co-director of Caring Across Generations.

Immigration reform won’t work unless it works for women like Pat Francois.

Pat is a nanny in New York City who has given many years of her life to raising and nurturing other people's children. Pat takes great pride in her role:  Arranging play dates, taking the children to the ballet and children’s museum, reading stories, playing in the park and most importantly, keeping them safe. Millions of working moms and dads count on women like Pat in order to participate fully in today’s workplace. But Pat is undocumented and cannot participate fully in our country that she now calls home.

Pat, like most domestic workers, does not have pay stubs and tax forms to prove she worked for her employer. Her world, like much of the informal economy, is a paperless world.  In a survey of over 4,000 low-wage workers in three largest cities in the US – New York, Chicago and Los Angeles—workers in occupations with high percentages of women did not receive pay stubs with their pay.  New York, Illinois and California do require employers to provide a pay stub or a wage statement with pay. But 98% of surveyed undocumented nannies, 92% of maids and housecleaners, and 77% of garment workers did not receive any pay stubs. Immigration reform that requires paperwork conclusively proving a history of employment will automatically exclude these workers and many others.

In isolated and informal workplaces it is unrealistic to expect workers to ask their employers for documentation, especially immigrant workers with little control over the terms and conditions of their work in the first place. And often, employers who are asked for documentation simply fire their workers fearing their own liability. Linking eligibility to proof of employment at any stage on the road to citizenship could exclude Pat and hundreds of thousands like her. And it would also exclude an estimated 40% of undocumented women work as stay at home moms, spending their days and nights caring for their own families.

Any common-sense immigration reform legislation must include a roadmap to citizenship that acknowledges the contributions of the millions of mothers and women like Pat who make invaluable contributions in our communities everyday. Instead of requiring proof of employment, a flexible proof of residence should be a permissible alternative for immigrants in the informal economy.  A “road to citizenship” that is littered with obstacles, roadblocks, dangers and detours isn’t much of a road at all.

Unsurprisingly, under the current immigration policy, two-thirds of women enter as dependents with no official ability to work on their own. Immigration reform must ensure that women who come via future legal channels can be employed, and apply for papers on their own without depending on an employer or a spouse by allowing for expanded self-petitioning options.  Sponsorship relationships have notoriously created a breeding ground for violence against women and abuse of women on the job.  And specific immigration relief must be made available for women who are victims of trafficking and other severe workplace violations so that they are not discouraged from reporting abuse by threats of deportation.

Immigrant women workers will only a play a greater role in America’s economy going forward. 2011 marked the first year of the “age wave,” when the baby boom generation has begun to turn sixty-five at a rate of a person every 8 seconds. In less than 20 years, 75 million Americans will have reached retirement age. The aging of America means the overall demand for direct-care workers, who are predominantly women, is projected to increase by 48 percent over the next decade. But the population of US-born workers is only growing by about 1%.  Immigrant women are needed to fill this labor shortage.  Now it’s up to us to make our nation’s policies match our nation’s needs.

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A Temporary Worker Program Must Empower Immigrants
Janice Fine is an associate professor of labor studies and employment relations at the School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University.

Immigration policy has always posed difficult choices for organized labor: should it advocate for restrictive policies in order to preserve labor standards for the existing native and naturalized workforce, or champion more open policies and focus on the preservation of labor standards through organizing the immigrant workforce and fighting for more effective labor standards enforcement?  To be sure, in its responses over the long sweep of labor history, one can observe a “movement wrestling” between “restrictionist” and “solidaristic” positions. But today it is undeniable that the national labor movement has never been more actively pro-immigrant. The AFL-CIO, UNITE HERE and SEIU, in particular, have become linchpins of the immigrant rights movement.

In the wake of the Congress’s failure to reform immigration in 2007, the AFL-CIO and the US Chamber of Commerce have come to agreement on the broad outlines of a “future flow” program that would regulate immigration into the country.  This is essential, because even after the estimated 11.5 million undocumented workers in the US today are provided some kind of legal status, immigrant workers will continue to enter the country. A new build-up of undocumented workers will be the inevitable result, unless a system is put into place that provides a practical, legal way of entering the country to work.

The future flow proposal will attempt to stem illegal immigration by identifying labor shortages and creating opportunities for immigrants to migrate and take up jobs legally. The program has two components: a new research bureau that will study the impact of immigration on low wage labor markets, identify labor shortages and make annual recommendations to Congress, and a new visa program for employers to petition for foreign workers in lesser skilled, non-seasonal, non-agricultural occupations called the W-Visa. Unlike the existing temporary worker programs—in which employers hold all the cards—the W visa would allow workers to move between employers rather than be bound to a single one and to self-petition for permanent status after a year. (This will make organizing immigrant workers much more feasible.) Workers will be covered by all state and federal employment laws. Employers will be required to pay all fees under the program and to offer W-visa-holders wages and working conditions that will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of US workers. Those who have laid off workers within 90 days or whose workers are on strike or locked out will not be eligible to apply for visas.

Debates about guest workers and contract laborers have been at the center of labor’s struggles over immigration since reconstruction. Contract labor has always been viewed, with good reason, as both anathema to union interests and exploitative of the temporary workers who participate. Also implicit in labor’s placement of strong limits on temporary programs is the ideal that in a democracy, economic and political citizenship must always go hand in hand—and that it is never acceptable to allow workers access to a state’s labor market without access to equal political rights.  Although understandable, this traditional stance has profoundly hindered the ability of organized labor to address the reality of labor migration, which is intrinsic to globalization. The difficult question is whether, even in the face of limited rights, these workers are better off being able to access American labor markets.

Lant Pritchett has highlighted the astonishing impact more open migration policy would make to economic development of the global south. Pritchett calculates that the industrial world currently transfers about $70 billion a year in overseas development assistance but that allowing just a three percent increase in the migrant labor force through relaxing restrictions would result in a $300 billion increase to poor country citizens—dwarfing any aid or trade programs.

The bureau and W-visa reflect a commitment to protecting native and naturalized workers in the United States while still welcoming and defending the rights of newcomers. To accomplish what the W-Visa is intended to do, there must be enough visas available for immigrant workers so that they can choose to come to the US legally—and there must be strong commitment to ensuring their labor rights once they’re here.

Read Aura Bogado's post on undocumented youth infiltrating immigration detention centers.

Editor's note: Gordon Lafer and Doug Henwood debate organized labor's electoral and organizing strategies in the wake of its defeat in the Wisconsin recall, with new contributions from Bill Fletcher and Jane McAlevey, Adolph Reed, Jr, and Mike Elk.

Why Unions Are Struggling

Is it because of selfish, inept leaders, as Henwood suggests—or because of a ruthless right-wing campaign against them?

by Gordon Lafer on July 3, 2012.

My disagreement with Doug Henwood has nothing to do with whether unions should be “sucking up to Democrats” or pursuing “business as usual.” I believe that Doug and I see the same crisis; we disagree about what caused it, and what is to be done.

The loss in Wisconsin, Henwood argues, came about for two reasons. First, elected union leaders act like “feudal vassals”—exploiting rank and file members as “serfs who pay compulsory dues”—so that members themselves are alienated. The fact that many union family members voted to keep Walker in office, Henwood suggests, shows that “union members aren’t even able to convince their spouses that the things are worth all that much.” Second, broader public opinion has turned against unions, which Henwood believes is because “unions …[are] too interested in their own wages and benefits and not the needs of the broader working class.”

Henwood argues that the root cause of the crisis confronting labor unions is unions' own selfishness and refusal to innovate. He offers a “systemic critique” – aimed not at any particular union practice or leadership, but at the very model of workplace-based organizations that represent the interests of their members. To restore popular support and prevent a future of repeated Wisconsin-style losses, he suggests, unions need to abandon the model of workplace organizing in favor of agitation on behalf of broad social goals like single-payer.

 In a time of crisis, it’s important to consider a wide variety of proposals, including this one. But the more one examines it, the clearer it is that the presumed facts behind this argument simply don't stand up.

Public confidence in unions has declined, which Henwood insists is because the public correctly perceives that unions are selfish and fail to promote the common good. Yet the most important facts at the heart of Henwood’s argument—42 percent of the country would like to see unions have less influence, and only 30 percent want more influence – are a product of the last five years. Another part of the same poll, which Henwood chose not to discuss, shows that as recently as 2006, the proportions were reversed, with 38 percent of Americans wishing unions had greater influence, and only 30 percent preferring less. So something happened in the last five years to turn public opinion against unions. What’s the more likely explanation—that unions actually became more self-serving in the last five years, and the public correctly perceived this? Or that a massive campaign of corporate advertising and right-wing newscasters encouraged downwardly-mobile Americans to vent their anger on unions?

For that matter, these same polls show that desire to limit union influence is overwhelmingly Republican; 69 percent of them want to see union influence curbed, compared with only 17 percent of Democrats. So for Henwood’s theory to be true, it would have to be the case that Republicans are much better than Democrats at perceiving the truth about unions, and that many Republicans would turn pro-labor if only they saw unions advocating for Canadian-style healthcare. Uh, right.

The truth, as I wrote earlier, is that Americans’ interest in forming unions remains surprisingly strong. Something like 40 million non-union workers wish they had a union in their workplace. Henwood questions these numbers, pointing readers instead to the "Public Service Research Council," an anti-union advocacy group that boasts of having led the campaign to support President Reagan's firing of air traffic controllers. Yet even that organization’s data suggests that between 30-50 million Americans wish they had a union; and a recent Fox News poll puts the number at 59 million. What stops these people from being able to realize their wish is not union bureaucracy but employer intimidation and coercion. 

It’s easy to imagine that a lot of people who wish they had a union for themselves may also be resentful at those who do. Classic right-wing strategy in a time of economic decline is to encourage people who are full of insecurity and anxiety to channel those emotions not against those who actually rule the country, but against others in the broad working class – unions, immigrants, welfare recipients, public employees. This is cookie-cutter corporate strategy, and it works pretty well. But that doesn’t make it true.  

Henwood’s assessment of union organizing strategies – charging labor leaders with a blind fixation on “business as usual” – is similarly disconnected from reality. As long as 20 years ago, labor organizers saw clearly the crisis that Henwood imagines he has just now revealed. In the 1990s, the AFL-CIO launched a series of bold experimental campaigns – an industry-wide, community-based campaign for farmworkers in the strawberry industry; a multi-union, city-wide campaign to organize the Las Vegas construction industry, which included protecting undocumented workers from being deported in retaliation for workplace activism; a novel strategy to organize tens of thousands of people working ships that supply oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico; and in Seattle, a campaign to turn a dynamic labor movement into something bigger than the sum of its parts, where workers in different unions would support each others’ strikes and unite to push city politics in a progressive direction. 

The point of highlighting these and more recent campaigns is not to be a cheerleader for union accomplishments, but the opposite: to be clear-eyed about the fact that if all it took to win was unions' willingness to think outside the box, we’d have been celebrating a long time ago. While these campaigns won some important local victories, they all failed to achieve their goals. Everyone I know who worked on them, including myself, had plenty of criticisms of them and ideas about what could have been done better. Importantly, each of these campaigns was a first – first time figuring out how to organize an entire construction market; first time trying to understand economic power in the strawberry industry. What I really wish is that the labor movement had enough money that we could have taken the lessons from those failures and tried again, in smarter ways. But for unions, there are few chances to fail. Each loss means starting the next campaign with fewer resources, weaker reputation, and shakier internal support for experiments. Trying to learn from these experiences, to maintain members’ support for untried tactics, to keep trying new ways to help people organize and win decent contracts – this is the real challenge. For Henwood to characterize this history as thirty years of refusing to engage in “self-reflection” is as uninformed as it is insulting. 

Henwood's critique is fundamentally distinct from other debates ongoing within the labor movement over union democracy. Indeed, it's hard to think of a single union that satisfies his demands. One of the unions I've worked most closely with is the west coast Longshore Workers -- a politically progressive union that was kicked out of the AFL-CIO for refusing to purge its leftists during the McCarthy period, and that shut down the ports in one-day strikes over Mandela and the Iraq war; whose officers' salaries are constitutionally tied to those of the rank-and-file, and whose paid staffers are elected by the members. Yet the ILWU is as guilty as anyone else in Henwood's book. It is predominantly focused on organizing workers and negotiating contracts; and despite boasting a talented, hard-working and creative staff, its organizing drives have confronted many of the same hardships as other unions. The union also devotes significant resources to training workers to police contract violations, and is deeply engaged in electoral politics.

Henwood champions theoretical unions that exist in imagination, but seems to harbor something bordering on contempt for most actually existing unions. His distaste for the real labor movement is palpable: facts are suspect if they come from the AFL-CIO; worker education centers are compromised if they have actual unions on their advisory boards; unions that focus on workplace organizing or engage in the dirty world of political compromise are pathetic or bankrupt.

This condescension is evident in the dismissal of worker education centers for teaching people how to negotiate contracts or police their rights at work. Learning to fight the boss over contract violations is not revolutionary. But for many, it is the starting point for any larger activism. The most heartfelt injustices are the arbitrary firing or mistreatment of oneself or one’s friends. Serving as a shop steward is often the first place where someone becomes a leader of co-workers; where they stand up to management as an equal; where they take risks and fight injustice in the most tangible way. To sneer at this is to misunderstand how people are gradually transformed into workplace leaders. Furthermore, if unions are not going to raise a lot of dues money to hire staff – as Henwood says they shouldn’t -- and are also not going to equip rank and file members to negotiate and police their own contracts, the labor movement will die out and millions of people will see their wages and benefits cut and their protection against arbitrary management dwindle.

Ultimately, the harshness of Henwood’s critique raises the question: why focus on the labor movement? After all, 93 percent of the private sector is unorganized. If the primary barrier to progress is bureaucratic union leaders, the field is – unfortunately – wide open to go around them. Why not create the people’s movement in the 93 percent of the economy, instead of harping on the 7 percent?

To move forward, we need to clearly identify the primary cause of the crisis, which is not the failing of labor unions but the machinations of those who actually rule the country. This is not to deny that there’s much unions can improve on, or to downplay how much that matters. But it means being serious about how hard organizing is, and not imagining that movements come into being in response to the call of a bold leader. And it means staying focused on the right target. The goal of union organizing is to take ordinary people and engage them in a fight against the most powerful forces in the country, at the most critical site where that power is created and maintained: in the workplace. However difficult or obscure the specifics of that fight may be, it still remains the right fight.

On ‘Left Anti-Unionism’ and the Reason We Lost Wisconsin

By shrinking away from direct action and organizing, labor lost the ability to harness the people power that occupied the state capitol.

By Mike Elk on June 28, 2012

As a labor reporter, I was dismayed to see Gordon Lafer’s "Left Anti-Unionism?" that begins this forum. In his first post, Lafer attacked pro-union writers for critiquing labor leaders in the wake of the Wisconsin recall election. He went on to write, "The only serious choices we have are to keep fighting even though times are hard, or to give up, or to enjoy the momentary rush of being on the same side as power and join in the anti-union attack." 

While Lafer has apologized for the remarks and said he made them in a “moment of anger,” variations of the term “left anti-union” are often thrown around to silence critics of union leaders. For example, a recent Wall Street Journal article highlighted how AFSCME’s outgoing President Gerald McEntee spent $325,000 on charter jet flights since 2010, instead of flying coach the way most of the workers he represents do. AFSCME’s response was to blast the report for being published by “the mouthpiece of right-wing, corporate America.” Incoming AFSCME President Lee Saunders went on to say that those within the union who leaked the information “knowingly gave ammunition to the union’s enemies at a time when the right-wing media want nothing more than to destroy the labor movement.”

In the wake of the Wisconsin defeat, there has been far too little concrete criticism of why organized labor lost. The analysis pushed by unions has relied on claiming that Walker outspent his opponent by a margin of 8-to-1. However, the great champion of labor, Paul Wellstone, was outspent 7-to-1 in his first election for Senate right next door in Minnesota, and he still managed to beat an incumbent senator. Strong, organized labor candidates have always been outspent, but they are able to win by harnessing people power the way Wellstone did.

At the height of the occupation, when 100,000 protesters were occupying the capitol, polls showed Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett beating Governor Scott Walker 52-45. The key question is how did the movement in Wisconsin lose this people power?

Quite simply, union leaders have just not invested their members with that much people power—before or after the Wisconsin recall. In February 2011, two union leaders—Marty Beil, one of AFSCME Wisconsin’s Executive Directors, and Mary Bell of the Wisconsin Education Association Council—agreed to across the board wage cuts averaging $4,400 a year for their members. They did so without even taking a vote from their members. You can argue that agreeing to the concessions was a smart strategic move to win public support for collective bargaining rights, but shouldn’t unions let their own members make that decision? How do unions distinguish themselves from corporate America if they don’t allow their own members to even vote on whether or not to accept a $4,400 wage cut?

Once Walker’s bill passed and the drastic wage cuts went into effect, the avenues of protest for union supporters were limited. And by failing to show that they would fight for workers in their day-to-day struggles through direct action, unions lost not just public support, but support from their own membership. After Walker’s anti-union bill went into effect outlawing automatic collection of dues, the majority of AFSCME’s members in Wisconsin chose to leave their union. Membership in AFSCME declined from 62,818 in March 2011 to less than half of that —just 28,745 in February of 2012. A majority of AFSCME members decided not to renew their membership in AFSCME—not exactly a vote of confidence for the union.

In right-to-work states where members can opt out of unions anytime, like public employees can do now in Wisconsin, unions have to maintain their organizational and financial strength through strong, non-stop internal organizing drives, encouragement of collective action on the job and the development of rank-and-file leadership that's very sensitive to the concerns of members. Had AFSCME engaged in a strategy of direct action in the workplace, similar in spirit to the capitol occupation, things might have gone differently.

The momentum of such a movement could have forced candidates like Tom Barrett to be more adamantly pro-union, like the fourteen Democratic state Senators who fled the state and became much stauncher union supporters. That would most likely have attracted more Wisconsin voters. Instead of engaging in direct action in the workplace, revitalizing their unions and changing the political terrain in Wisconsin, the state’s labor leadership backed two Democrats, one in the primary and another in the general election, both of whom bragged in their public appearances about forcing concessions from public workers in the past.

Lafer dismisses the possibility of a direct workplace action, arguing that it’s too difficult for “normal, apolitical, nonconfrontational” people to engage in workplace actions against their employers. He ignores, however, the fact that in response to Walker’s bill, thousands of “normal, apolitical, non-confrontational” people working in public-sector jobs did go out on mass strikes. Thousands of teachers in numerous school districts across Wisconsin, including in Milwaukee and Madison, went on illegal, three-day sick-out strikes to protest Walker’s bill. The illegal sick-out strikes swelled the size of the crowd then occupying the capitol to nearly 100,000.

Anyone who has ever been around a strike or union organizing drive knows that often in the course of being engaged in a labor struggle, people get inspired out of a sense of solidarity to do things that they never would have thought possible. Sure, these kinds of actions are tough to initiate, but Wisconsin labor leaders could have at least tried to motivate workers in their workplace. Instead, Wisconsin Executive Council 48 Director Rich Abelson came out saying, “there has been no talk of a general strike, there has been no talk of targeted strikes, or job actions or anything else. Our dispute is not with our employers. Our dispute is with the Republicans in the Wisconsin Senate, the Republicans in the Wisconsin Assembly and Governor Walker.”

Lafer then dismisses claims that unions were unable to fight in Wisconsin because they were saddled with “overpaid union bureaucrats” and were unwilling to take on the Democrats. In a factually inaccurate statement, he claims that a union like “United Electrical workers—unburdened by highly paid staff or Democratic politics—should be meeting greater success in organizing. But, of course, they are not. The problem is not what unions are doing; it’s the coercive power of employers.”

But the United Electrical Workers (UE), which caps its leaders salaries at $56,000 and does not typically endorse Democrats, is indeed growing in states where collective bargaining for public employees is outlawed— states with Democratic governors like West Virginia and North Carolina. On the other hand, AFSCME, who reportedly pledged to spend $100 million to re-elect Obama and whose outgoing president Gerry McEntee made a salary of $387,000 (nearly seven times that of UE’s president), has lost union members in those same states, according to UE Political Action Director Chris Townsend.

As AFSCME has seen its ranks dwindle in West Virginia, UE has become the biggest public-sector union in the state. Despite lacking collective bargaining rights in West Virginia, UE has been able to win small wage increases and grievances for its members by providing very intensive education to a network of shop stewards who then train their own union members in how to be militants.

Instead of building a rank-and-file system of strong shop stewards who could mobilize their members, AFSCME chose to continue giving money to the Democrats in West Virginia in the hope that these Democrats will come to their rescue. AFSCME continues to give to them despite the fact that the Democrats have controlled both the governor’s house and the state legislature for the last twelve years, but refuse to grant collective bargaining rights to public employees in West Virginia. In the past, AFSCME has also given money to Democratic Governors in Virginia and North Carolina who also refused to grant collective bargaining rights. AFSCME saw their union ranks dwindle while the shop-floor-oriented UE surpassed AFSCME’s membership in those states, according to Townsend.

Is UE successful because they cap their union organizers salaries at $56,000? I would say yes. People often ignore the importance of capping union leaders’ salaries in their conversations about union reform. In the 1930s, UE Organizing Director James Matles said that maintaining salaries for union leaders similar to the workers they represent is important because “union leaders should feel like their members, not for their members.” Union organizers feel like their members when they make comparable salaries and live in the same neighborhoods; they have a greater sense of urgency about fighting for their members as a result. (Full disclosure: my father has worked as a union organizer for UE for thirty-five years and makes $50,000 a year).

It also makes sense from a practical financial standpoint. Why pay one union leader a $387,000 salary when you can employ seven full-time union organizers for the same cost? A study of Department of Labor Records done by Labor Notes in 2010 showed that if you capped the salaries of nearly 10,000 union leaders or staffers making above $100,000 to that amount, you would save $294 million dollars a year that could be spent on organizing. Post-Citizens United, when corporations can spend all the money in the world to attack workers, the labor movement simply cannot afford to be paying union leaders more than $100,000 a year.

Instead of trimming executive salaries, perks and maybe scaling back on AFSCME’s pledge to spend $100 million on the re-election of President Obama, AFSCME laid off half of its organizers in Wisconsin, according to AFSCME Wisconsin Council 40 organizer Edward A. Sadlowski, at a time when they should have been hiring more organizers in order to stop their membership losses and fight back against concessions.

Organized labor’s current approach is not working, and we need all the critiques of labor leaders and organizing approaches in order to save the labor movement. As a labor movement, would we rather have a few union leaders embarrassed by how much they make, or do we want a serious discussions about how we revive the movement. Accusing pro-union people, who raise serious questions about the strategy, finances and political orientation of unions in effort to save unions of giving ammunition to union’s enemies or being “left anti-union” is more than just absurd. It could kill the labor movement.

Lessons from Wisconsin

One: Unions need to invest in mass participatory education. And two: they need to stop focusing on union rights.

by Bill Fletcher and Jane McAlevey on June 26, 2012

Before Wisconsinites voted down the attempt to recall Governor Scott Walker, and certainly since, principled progressives inside and outside of unions have disagreed on whether or not the campaign should have happened. In fact, between the two of us, we don’t fully agree about whether or not the recall was the correct tactic. But with the defeat in the rear view mirror, two clear lessons can be drawn from Wisconsin: unions need to reinvest in mass participatory education—sometimes called internal organizing in union lingo; and, unions need to stop focusing on “collective bargaining” and actually kick down the walls separating workplace and non-workplace issues by going all-out on the broader agenda of the working class and the poor.

Once you get past the reports that Walker outspent the Wisconsin workers by 7:1, the next most startling fact is that 38 percent of union households voted to keep the anti-worker Governor. That’s slightly more than one third, and had the pro-recall forces held the union households, Walker would no longer be Governor. With major media outlets drubbing us with the 38 percent number, the liberal political elite seem stuck on a rhetorical question: why do poor people and workers vote against their material self-interest? Actually, in our own experience, the poor and working class don’t vote against their self-interest—but there’s a precondition: we have to create the space for ordinary people to better understand what their self-interest is, and how it connects with hundreds of millions in the US and globally.

Participatory education can best be carried out within unions through an on-going organizing program. We know from years of experimenting that adults learn best through taking direct action. Actions themselves are often transformative. And how to calibrate the learning and action dialectical is the work of good organizers—paid and unpaid. But today’s unions have all but abandoned organizers, educators, organizing and radical, participatory education. Why?

First off, many union leaders, despite their rhetoric, do not believe in the critical importance of worker education. Instead they believe in "PowerPoint."  They invest truckloads of money into pollsters who perfect their quick and fancy presentations with graphics which all too often aim to dazzle rather than educate.  They believe that worker education cannot be quantified and does not necessarily translate into a specific, tangible outcome, thereby making it worthless.

A second reason for the anemic internal education is the legacy of the Cold War and McCarthyism. "Big Picture" education that truly examines the roots of the current economic crisis and the nearly forty year decline in the living standards of the average US worker leads to a fundamental critique of capitalism. This conclusion scares many leaders who fear being red-baited, or may even harbor a fantasy that that they will at some point be re-invited to the ruling circles of the USA.

A third reason is that an educated and empowered membership can be unpredictable. They may start asking questions that many leaders wish to avoid. They may start suggesting different directions. And, horror of horrors, they may actually run for office in the unions themselves.

The second big lesson from Wisconsin is that we can’t do it alone. While the attack by Walker was a frontal assault on women, people of color, workers, the poor and more, unions all too often kept the focus on collective bargaining. When unions allowed the battle in Wisconsin to go from mass collective rage over the excesses of the One Percent to a battle for union rights, it was all but game over. Criticism of Democratic candidate Barrett’s refusal to go along with labor’s messaging on collective bargaining is beside the point—in our opinion, the campaign was lost before the May primary. Reassured by polls showing a majority of Americans (61 percent) support the “right” to collective bargaining, union leaders failed to anticipate the power of a barrage of wedge messages about over-paid government bureaucrats, taxes, union bosses, the unfairness of why public sector workers get pensions and so-called private sector ones don’t and much more. Walker had the apparatus of the state and he had bought the media—he essentially turned Wisconsin into one big captive audience meeting, subjecting Wisconsites to the kind of unbearable pressure that workers in private sector union elections are all too familiar with. We don’t poll in elections where workers are going to vote as to whether or not to form a union because we understand polling is useless in a hotly contested, deeply polarized fight.

In union elections, the sophisticated union busters want to ratchet the tension up so high that everyone associates the new tension in their life with this thing called “the union.” And the boss drives a message that if the union goes away, everything will go back to normal. And normal, which wasn’t OK before the campaign, suddenly sounds good because the venom and hate feel much worse. To have any chance of beating these kinds of campaigns, the campaign can’t be about “collective bargaining” or “the union.” It has to be about a bigger fight for dignity and economic justice that can deeply appeal to a much wider audience.

It is true there’s been an uptick of unions declaring the importance of building allies and  “working with the community,” but still the community is too often treated as if it’s a separate species from “the workers.” The workers are the community, and yet union leaders act like ‘the community’ is some foreign land that requires visas, formal paid ambassadors and a Rosetta Stone language learning kit. The reason most labor leaders don’t understand the community is because they stopped trying to understand their members and the unorganized workers who live side by side in every union member’s house. The way back to winning big majorities of Americans to the cause of labor is for labor to take up the causes of the majority. This isn’t rocket science, it doesn’t require pollsters or power point—it requires thousands of meaningful conversations with tens of thousands of people. It requires rebuilding our organizing muscle.

But the phrases, “organizing doesn’t work, it’s too slow,” or the variant, “organizing doesn’t work, it’s too expensive,” have become like a mantra in union headquarters (and the offices of foundations). And yet for our entire adult lives, almost every time we have seen workers and poor people given the opportunity to stand up and fight back, they did.

What about the recall? Wisconsin was a wicked short timeline—unions and their supporters were trying to overcome forty years of no real education or organizing among the rank and file. The recall failure has led to an open season on unions, but this isn’t just a problem with unions. Multiple institutions have failed workers for decades, starting with the Democratic Party. And if that’s not enough, there’s our public school system—including universities and legions of intellectuals—that fail to teach students how to understand the actual power structure in our country or what unions are or have done. And, corporate owned media that have long distorted the real story of unions.

The reason that unions themselves, not front groups, need to take up the key issues facing their base when they aren’t at work is because this model of community work helps to develop even more worker leaders—it provides an ongoing action-learning program for the members when their contract has been settled. And, pedagogically, it helps the members to better understand all the forces keeping them down. “The boss” becomes the economic and political system rather than simply the swing shift supervisor or the foreman or the CEO.

There are plenty of important structural issues that the rank and file could be engaging, including the on-going housing, credit, climate, public transportation, and child care crises. And there’s the matter of bringing the worker’s sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, brothers and sisters home from unwinnable wars of aggression. The very best way for unions to build real alliances with non-union groups is via their own members—the very people who make up “the community.” If unions expanded their issue work by engaging their own rank and file, we could develop even more skilled leaders, not simply ‘worker faces’ for a press conference. The organizing-education model assists people in creating better lives for themselves, rather than relying on paid professionals to do the work for them. And the results are that we build mini social movements, not special interest groups.

Organizing is incredibly hard work. And it’s messy work. And the liberal elite, including most union leaders, are constantly investing in everything but deep organizing. The real reason we lost in Wisconsin is the same reason that progressives have been on a four decade decline in the US: it’s because of a deep and long-term turn away from organizing and education and towards something that more resembles mobilizing. Organizing expands our base by keeping our energy and resources focused on the undecideds, and on developing the organic leaders in our workplaces and communities so that they become part of an expanding pool of unpaid organizers. Mobilizing focuses on the people who are already with us and replaces organic leadership development with paid staff. That and the split between “labor” and “social movements” account for the failure of progressive politics, the loss in Wisconsin, the ever shrinking public sphere, and the unabashed rule of the worst kinds of corporate greed. 

The work we are describing isn’t an election 2012 program, it’s not a 12 month program; it must happen every day, every month and every year. It’s ongoing. Workers are every bit courageous enough and smart enough, but they experience a lifetime of being told they are not worthy, not smart, and not deserving. In other words, sit down, shut up and listen. Unions have to challenge this paradigm, not reinforce it. When conservatives suffered their own strategic defeat and lost the election in 1964—by much larger margins than the recall in Wisconsin—they didn’t say, “well, no point trying.” They instead built for the long haul and in 1980 it paid off with Reagan.

And with the Supreme Court edging eerily close to a ruling that will make all of America governed by “Right-to-Work” laws, unions have to start acting like they are already operating in a “right-to-work” environment. The education-organizing program outlined here is the very same program unions will need to survive let alone thrive under the current Roberts Court. The sooner unions stop acting like a special interest and start behaving like a social movement; the closer we will be to making lasting, positive change.  

Beyond the Echo Chamber

There are no shortcuts to building a movement—and it can’t be built in the heat of a fight like Wisconsin.

by Adolph Reed, Jr., on June 27, 2012

I suppose I should begin by noting that, although I don’t know Andy Kroll, I’ve counted Doug Henwood, Gordon Lafer, and Matt Rothschild as friends and comrades for twenty years or more. I know, and they all do as well, that each of them is a committed leftist. Each of them has been a staunch critic of how an ever more neoliberal Democratic Party has corralled progressive aspirations and screwed us over. So we can dial back on the breathless rhetoric about “silencing” and the like. No one is trying to silence anyone; nor is anyone, contrary to some of the overheated, scurrilous attacks on Lafer that have flown over the internet, angling to become a pinky-ringed lapdog of a stereotypically corrupt “union bureaucracy.” 

The problem beneath this debate about the labor movement’s role in Wisconsin is that since the economic crisis we’ve all been confronted by our weakness and irrelevance as a left in American politics. This isn’t really news, or shouldn’t be. The left has been a solipsistic fiction in this country for years. It lives in an echo- chamber universe of actions, critiques and debates that have no institutional connection to anyone outside our own ranks and no capacity to influence the terms of national political debate. Reluctance to face up to that grim reality is understandable, and the relentlessness of the right’s increasingly bloodthirsty attacks – on multiple fronts simultaneously -- also understandably inclines progressives to look ever more desperately for hopeful possibilities. That in turn fuels a tendency to discover magic bullets, single interventions that will knock the shackles from the people’s eyes, spark popular outrage and mobilize it into action. The Democrats’ fecklessness in responding to these attacks and their acquiescence and, often enough, active collusion in supporting a regime of intensifying regressive transfer of income and wealth only exacerbates the problem.

Thus we’ve seen proclamation after proclamation that some new right-wing move has gone too far, or some new line in the dirt – Jesse Jackson’s and Ralph Nader’s presidential campaigns, Seattle, Katrina, Jena, the 2006 immigration marches, Barack Obama’s election, Republic Windows, Wisconsin, wage theft campaigns, Occupy Wall Street -- will galvanize the popular movement that will begin to turn the political tide back in our direction.  Merlin Chowkwanyun (“The Crisis in Thinking About the Crisis,” Renewal [2009]) catalogues the hyperbolic proclamations that the 2008 crisis itself would automatically bring about – if it hadn’t already brought about -- the death of neoliberalism. That essay should be a cautionary tale for those tempted by this sort of wish-fulfillment politics. We didn’t wind up in this situation overnight, and we aren’t going to get out of it overnight. Yes, the dangers that confront us are truly nightmarish, and the thought that we may not have the capacity to curtail the worst – elimination of protections on the job, pensions and benefits, including Medicare and social security, destruction of the public sector, if not the very idea of the public, the panoply of can-you-top-this assaults on women’s reproductive freedom, just to name a few – certainly can push toward despair.

But there are no shortcuts to building a movement capable of responding effectively. The Spark is a myth, and the tendency to believe in it – consciously or not – will generate unreasonable expectations and then dash them. There is no ready-made constituency out there waiting to support a left political program if only it were properly announced. That constituency has to be built, and it can’t be built in the heat of a fight, least of all when we’re on the defensive.

That fact should inform how we think about the Wisconsin defeats. The initial defeat was that Scott Walker won the 2010 election. Everything after that was an uphill fight, and increasingly so because Walker had the huge advantage of control of public authority, including a state legislative majority, and then there was that cornucopia of right-wing corporate money. Yes, the response mobilized against his legislative blitzkrieg was impressive and inspiriting, but it was also a struggle against very long odds. And there was always a tendency among leftists, in keeping with the myth of the Spark, to romanticize the “taking to the streets” element of the Wisconsin fightback, which meant that a couple of important lessons were, if not missed, at least underappreciated. Many observers have noted that the Madison occupation depended on intense, aggressive, even extraordinary mobilization by unions, and not only unions in Wisconsin. That point has underscored the labor movement’s centrality to any mass action of that sort because it alone has the capacity – people and organizational and economic resources -- to pull it off and sustain it. The other side of that coin, however, is that the intensity of effort required to sustain that kind of action could not be maintained indefinitely. It is too easy to imagine, as the numbers in Madison grew, that the mobilization had taken on a life of its own, that the People were rising. However, generating and sustaining that mass action required great commitment of effort and resources – effort and resources that weren’t going toward meeting other pressing needs and commitments. In addition, while attention and focus were on the battleground in Wisconsin, other states passed legislation every bit as anti-labor and hostile to the public sector as Wisconsin. We couldn’t match the Wisconsin mobilization everywhere.

I don’t mean at all that the effort in Wisconsin was misplaced. Rather, my point is that mass protest is not the end all and be all of political action. It does not necessarily mark going on the offensive or seizing political initiative; it can just as easily be the opposite – an act of desperation or an attempt to create a little space or breathing room to try to recover from a serious blow. It is only the fetish of the Spark that underwrites the default assumption that mass protest or street action equates with radicalization and expansion of the struggle. How many of us have ever really seen (i.e., not simply read or heard about – everybody tells that fish story) a protest action grow entirely on its own to a point where it overwhelms political opposition or converts into a new insurgency?

The belief that politics works that way suggests a perspective similar to what Doug Henwood, along with Liza Featherstone and Christian Parenti, quite perceptively criticized some years ago as “activistism” – a commitment to public action as the sole meaningful and intrinsically self-justifying form of political engagement. [“’Action Will Be Taken’: Left Anti-Intellectualism and Its Discontents”]. So what gives?

The tendency to scapegoat the labor movement for Walker’s most recent victory in Wisconsin – and, to be clear, that is what I see in Henwood’s, Rothschild’s and Kroll’s arguments – stems from frustration and desperation and, ironically, recognition, if only backhanded, of the fact that labor was the only element of the coalition challenging Walker with the material and organizational capacity to set and pursue a strategy. What other organized political forces could be identified in order to be blamed? This scapegoating not only rests on a naïvely formalist juxtaposition of street action and electoral action; it also feeds on a long-standing suspicion in many precincts of the post-Vietnam era left of a politics rooted in institutions in general and unions in particular. Gordon Lafer is correct that these criticisms misunderstand what unions are and how they operate as democratic structures, the realities of union leaders’ accountability to their members. I don’t need to reiterate that argument, which he makes very well. I would also commend Corey Robin’s blog posting offering a “Challenge to the Left” to consider what actually attempting to organize a constituency to support an unconventional program requires. For those who want to build a left, that’s the mindset of slow, steady, face-to-face base-building we need, not lurching from one self-gratifying but unproductive action to the next. The point of politics is after all, to resuscitate an old Maoist dictum, to unite the many to defeat the few. Our objective has to be to create that “many,” not merely assume it’s out there already.

At bottom, the problem is that this left has lived in the fictional echo-chamber universe for too long. Not being connected to practical politics anchored in institutions removes an important constraint of interpretive and strategic discipline and leaves too much space for indulging appealing but simplistic fantasies about political mobilization and what it requires. To wit, Matt Rothschild’s and Andy Kroll’s assertions that the popular actions in Wisconsin could easily have been expanded and sustained over a wider span and longer period fundamentally misunderstand the limitations of political action. Electoral mobilization is difficult enough; trying to spread the Madison direct action over the state would have been exponentially more so.

On that score, Bob Fitch was an exemplary person in many ways and a good guy, and we are all that much lessened by his death. That said, Doug knows, I suspect all too well, that I’m one of those who “detest” Bob’s views of unions. Ultimately, as I said more than once to Bob himself, in his view the only sort of union worth having is one that it’s not possible to imagine existing in the circumstances in which we have to operate. He was quick to reject out of hand as tainted beyond hope initiatives that had support of existing union leadership. Like so many flavors of Trotskyists, syndicalist romantics, and rank-and-file fetishists, he saw unions less as vehicles for workers to define and advance their interests than as corrupt entities holding back the development or expression of their members’ “true” interests. To the extent that that view of unions dovetails with the right’s contentions that unions are, well, corrupt entities holding back the development or expression of their members’ true interests and stealing their dues money like a collective Johnny Friendly, and to the extent that it proposes eliminating protections like the union shop, Gordon is correct that it is substantively a form of left anti-unionism. I don’t see how that is at all like a McCarthyite charge. It’s closer to, as we used to say when I was a kid, calling the thing by its natural name.

Like Doug, I think Sam Gindin, the long-time Canadian Auto Workers official, is very much a person whose perspective on the relation between the left and the labor movement is worth taking to heart. In an article in the forthcoming 2013 Socialist Register Sam makes the point that a labor movement that is disconnected from a vibrant left is impoverished, and a left that is not linked in some dynamic way to the labor movement is ultimately impossible. The project most vitally confronting us, Sam argues, is to begin trying to build a left that is committed to a socialist vision linked directly to the felt and expressed concerns of workers as articulated largely, though not exclusively, through their unions. If this debate can help throw that project into relief, it will have been productive.   

I have one final comment about the “silencing” issue. I think it is appropriate to consider that some topics are, for reasons of political sensitivity (and, yes, concern that statements could wind up on the National Right to Work Committee’s homepage qualifies as such a reason), best not discussed in open forums like The Nation or the Progressive. I do not think that such concerns violate some principle of responsible left journalism. Rather, denial of such constraints speaks to the left’s disconnectedness from actual struggles; it is a luxury of our irrelevance as a left.

Labor's Many Dead Ends

The current union strategy of sucking up to Democrats and organizing in the workplace alone are no longer viable. We need a new approach.

by Doug Henwood on June 19, 2012

Gordon Lafer apparently thinks I’m some sort of reactionary. Because I’ve written critically about unions and dared to say that they have a lot to answer for over Scott Walker’s victory in Wisconsin, I’m enjoying “the momentary rush of being on the same side as power” and joining an “anti-union attack.”

Aside from being a low, dishonest charge, that sort of defensive reflex isn’t going to help anyone but employers and their politicians. You might think that an endless series of defeats, going back at least thirty years, would lead to some self-reflection in the labor movement. But it hasn’t. Lafer might find it hard to believe, but there are few things I’d be happier to see than a revived labor movement. It’s hard to see how we can have a better society without stronger unions. We’re not going to get those by just doing the same thing a little better.

“The work of organizing,” Lafer discloses, “is slow and incremental.” In fact, the current model of labor organizing is impressively decremental. Last year, 6.9 percent of private sector workers were organized—that’s half as many as in 1986 when private sector unionization stood at 13.8 percent. The decline in the overall union density rate has been milder—from 17.7 percent in 1986 to 11.8 percent in 2011—thanks to stability among public sector unions. But that looks to be changing rapidly. Already under attack for the last few years, Walker’s victory is certain to intensify the war on public sector unions.

Those attacks have been made easier by the fact that unions aren’t all that popular with the broad public. In my original piece, I cited a number of Gallup polls showing that people thought that unions had too much power, were too interested in themselves and not the broader public and ranked toward the bottom of the list (rivaling banks and HMOs) in Gallup’s annual survey on confidence in major institutions.

To this, the standard union response—and Lafer is no exception—is to cite polls showing that 40 million American workers would like to join a union. The source for this is usually a series of surveys by Peter D. Hart Research Associates. Hart is a Democrat, and his firm lists sixteen unions among its clients on its website. I’m not saying that Hart cooks his results, but it is curious that independent pollsters find nothing like the support that Hart does. (For a review, see the Public Service Research Council.) But the election results in Wisconsin, as well as overwhelming votes to cut public sector pensions in San Jose and San Diego, suggest that the public is not overcome with love for organized labor.

In the face of all this, the reaction of many union people is to blame corporate power, big money, relentless antiunion propaganda, restrictive labor laws and the far right. All true enough, but that’s only a partial explanation. Those obstacles are going to be with us for a long time. So the question really is, How do you operate in this world?

The traditional approach towards organizing the private sector—trying to recruit a majority of workers and win a representation election—looks as good as dead. (For example, there were about 6,000 representation elections in 1980 and not quite 1,600 in 2010, the latest year available, a decline of almost 75 percent.) Employers are unfraid of breaking the law, and workers are afraid of losing their jobs. And the traditional approach to organizing the public sector—electing sympathetic politicians—looks seriously ill, if not terminal. Next to this, slow and incremental progress would seem quasi-revolutionary. Though it’s hard to get the likes of Lafer to admit this, business as usual is no longer an option.

So what then? I argued that if it’s ever to turn things around, organized labor has to act consistently and convincingly in the interest of the broad working class and not just its members. The United States would be a very different country had unions—which still have a lot of money and people to work with—spent the last five years agitating for single-payer health insurance. Or, as Sam Gindin, a long-time staffer with the Canadian Auto Workers’ union now teaching at York University in Toronto, told me in a radio interview , public sector unions could bring up the quality of public services in bargaining, threatening to strike over them if necessary.

Unions have to think about how to root themselves in communities and not think of the workplace as what it’s all about. Turnover is too high, and people have lives outside of work. Or, less politely, unions could take a page from the Occupy movement—maybe help bring it back to life even—and occupy. Many techniques of direct action were practically invented by unions—in days when strikers could get shot by Pinkertons. Some of these things may be against the law, but unions were not organized by people in thrall to the law.

Now, labor’s notion of political action is contributing to and campaigning for Democrats—and that’s about it. It’s donated enormous sums to a party that has given it little in return. The Democrats are not actively hostile, like the Republicans, of course—though that distinction may be eroding quite rapidly. Remarkably, the building trades unions in New York have contributed to governor Andrew Cuomo's SuperPAC, which has been going after public sector unions for givebacks. It is very hard to see what return labor gets on its investment. Shouldn’t business unions ask businesslike questions?

In response, Lafer contends several things. One is that the unions have no choice but to get active in electoral politics, especially in the Walker case. But unions have almost no leverage over politicians after they take office. They never withhold money or endorsements. No Democrat need fear retribution. The relationship gets pathetic at times. According to former top AFL-CIO officer Bill Fletcher Jr., a senior union guy once told him that it was better to be at the table and not listened to than it would be to be outside. But outside is labor needs to be if it’s ever going to have any influence.

Lafer, who is not shy about painting others as identifying with power, is certainly embedded in the union status quo himself. Tom Chamberlain, the president of the Oregon AFL-CIO, is the chair of the board of advisors at the University of Oregon’s labor research institute, where Lafer is an associate professor. Its board is full of other union leaders. The institute’s curriculum is heavy with service-y stuff like grievance handling, bargaining technique and even labor-management cooperation. While these aren’t all evil pursuits, they don’t seem the most compelling material for labor’s intellectuals to be concentrating on in a time of institutional crisis.

Along with declarations of the need to go along comes the assertion that labor is already doing many things on behalf of the broad working class that mere bloggers like me don’t understand. Unions are at the forefront of efforts to protect the minimum wage and promote pay equity, says Lafer. Nice, and true in some sense, but these commitments lag badly behind the devotion to electing Democrats—Democrats who do almost nothing to advance these causes and who can’t always to be counted on to defend them.

Lafer points to the nurses’ union’s efforts to tax the 1 percent. By that I presume he means National Nurses United (NNU). NNU is doing many very good things, but they’re outliers in the labor movement. And in this little spat, it seems more on my side than Lafer’s. NNU’s Michael Lighty said of my first Wisconsin blog post: “Terrific piece that challenges much conventional thinking.” NNU also recently revealed to the world that the Service Employees International Union was working with the California hospital industry to weaken minimum staffing requirements—the opposite of agitating for the public good.

Sam Gindin makes several other points worth stealing. One is that the labor movement has suffered from the decline of the left, one that could provide history and systematic analysis—and with some critical distance. Such a left, he says, should be both inside and outside labor. And unions organized along sectional—professional or industrial lines—may not be the ideal agents of a broader classward turn. To do that you’d need what Gindin calls “intermediate” organizations, coalitions of members of many unions (and why not nonmembers too?) rooted in communities rather than around employers. These are important things to think about.

But, really, whatever the details, the most urgent thing to do is admit that things are dire and a serious rethink is in order. Dismissing critics as giving aid and comfort to the enemy will virtually assure that the union density rate will approach zero in a decade or two.

Left Anti-Unionism?

In the aftermath of the defeat in Wisconsin, left critics attacked labor’s decision to invest in the recall. But none of them offered a realistic alternative.

by Gordon Lafer on June 15, 2012

In the days following the Wisconsin election, a number of progressive journalists responded to the heartbreaking defeat by venting their anger at a surprising target: the very unions that Scott Walker waged war on. Doug Henwood in Left Business Observer, Matt Rothschild in The Progressive and Andy Kroll of Mother Jones each have different analyses of what went wrong, but all agree that unions were guilty of what Henwood terms the “horrible mistake of channeling a popular uprising into electoral politics.”

The Wisconsin movement “began to disintegrate the moment the leaders decided to pour everything into the Democratic Party,” Rothschild explains. That decision, he argues, “destroyed the lesson that you can exercise power outside the electoral arena.” Indeed, Kroll insists that the electoral strategy would have been a “loss” even if Walker had been defeated, since “the Madison movement would have found themselves in…the same broken system, with…little hope.”

Really? The limitations of electoral politics are obvious, but the assumption that electoral strategies per se are always wrong is hard to fathom. The loss in Wisconsin is very serious. But that loss would be the same if unions had forsworn the recall. Around 175,000 employees would still be stripped of union rights, with all that entails for them personally and for the material and organizational basis for progressive mobilization. And while the electoral loss no doubt emboldened anti-union conservatives, not challenging the governor would have conveyed much the same message: It’s politically safe to follow Walker’s example—after all, the unions didn’t even have the guts to take him on! Labor leaders confronted a genuinely hard choice: roll the dice on the recall, which everyone knew would be an expensive and uphill battle, or give up.

For that matter, how should we account for last fall’s referendum in Ohio, where voters overturned a copycat law modeled on Wisconsin’s? The Ohio labor movement chose an electoral strategy—and won big. Was that also a “horrible mistake”? If not, what—besides the outcome—makes the Wisconsin choice obviously wrong, a crime instead of a tragedy?

Critics insist that union leaders should have chosen a more radical path, overturning the Walker regime by harnessing the people power of the capitol occupation. Rothschild calls for mass civil disobedience, slowdowns and strikes; Kroll for consumer boycotts and a new political party; Henwood for grassroots education and lobbying.

But none of these offers a realistic alternative for restoring labor rights in Wisconsin. At their core, these prescriptions fundamentally misunderstand the reality of how unions generate mass action. Both the tremendous strength and real limitation of the labor movement is that, alone among “left” organizations, it is not a vanguard movement. Unlike the Sierra Club or Occupy, its members do not join based on pre-existing ideological beliefs. Overwhelmingly, they become members because they get a job someplace that happens to have a union. Union members are, almost entirely, exactly the same as any other working-class Americans.

Pundits sometimes write as if all that’s needed is for a union leader to make the right decision in order to generate radical action (thus Rothschild suggests that “unions could have told their members simply to ‘work to rule’,” assuming that hundreds of thousands of employees would risked their jobs to answer this call.) This imagines an institutional discipline that doesn’t exist. The work of organizing is slow and incremental. The task of building a serious workplace or political organization entails taking normal, apolitical, nonconfrontational people and moving them to a clearer understanding of the economy and a fiercer will to confront those who rule it. For any reader to sense what this is like, just go into work tomorrow and start asking co-workers to put their jobs at risk by striking over a demand for single-payer or taxing Wall Street. How long would it take to get your fifty closest co-workers to strike? How many would stay out after their personnel supervisor calls them at home telling them to come back?

How do employees go from being mild-mannered workers to fighting the power? Many get transformed through struggles in their workplace. Workplace fights are where the hypocrisy of management is unmasked; where the injustice of budget priorities becomes apparent; where people experience the capriciousness of elites and the potential power of collective action in a very visceral way; where people who are personally conservative and not activists end up doing things that require bravery (in most jobs even signing a petition creates some risk of retaliation) and emerge from it feeling more powerful and more ready to do the next thing. In a less transformative way, many more people are educated through conversations with stewards who are carrying out union education programs. Generally, these conversations are short and few—so union members end up thinking and voting more progressively than otherwise similar people, but not hugely so.

Radical actions remain possible. But we have to be realistic. The notion that the path to victory is clear if only dim-witted union leaders would listen to progressive bloggers reflects not just magical thinking about organizing but also the hubris of being far enough removed from the action to believe you’re the only one to have thought of a new idea.

In fact, hundreds of union leaders and activists have been working for years to build a broader movement—stronger, more militant, with a broader reach into the community and a more expansive vision. Apart from Occupy, the main organization running big public actions to tax the 1 percent is the nurses’ union. SEIU sent hundreds of field organizers to working-class neighborhoods in seventeen cities, knocking on doors of non-union families, seeking to build a progressive political movement to the left of the Democrats. The Laborers’ union launched efforts in multiple cities to team up with immigrant day-labor centers in order to reorganize parts of the residential construction industry. The UFCW is organizing Wal-Mart employees to fight store- and community-level battles over back wages long before there’s any plan for a union contract. The AFL-CIO itself has devoted significant resources to Working America, a program of political and educational outreach to non-union workers.

My point is not that everything is already being done that should be done. We’ve been losing, so obviously the current strategy can’t be sufficient. But the problem is much more serious, and more difficult, than just the strategic choices of union leaders.

Many unions can do a lot of things better, and should. But the depth of the attacks from the left—and the choice to launch them at this particular moment—is curious.

Henwood sees Wisconsin as evidence that the American public has turned against unions—and for good reason. “Unions just aren’t very popular,” he explains, because people correctly perceive that “unions…are too interested in their own wages and benefits and not the needs of the broader working class.” The core problem, apparently, is that unions are too focused on organizing workers and negotiating contracts, activities no longer viable in the twenty-first century. “Unions have to shift their focus from the workplace to the community,” he says, proposing a popular campaign to “agitate on behalf of the entire working class and not just a privileged subset with membership cards.”

But unions are supposed to be organizations of workers who improve their own conditions in their workplace. The problem is not that the model is bad, but the opposite: the best thing that could happen in our economy is for more people to have the right to bargain with their employers in exactly this way.

Here too Henwood blames unions. American workers don’t join unions, he says, in large part because they’re controlled by cronies who enrich themselves at the expense of their members; he approvingly quotes Bob Fitch’s equation of elected union officials with “feudal vassals” living off “serfs who pay compulsory dues.”

At this point we’ve left real economic analysis. Polls show that 40 million non-union American workers wish they had a union in their workplace. This is unsurprising—all other things being equal, workers with a union make 15 percent more and have a 20–25 percent better chance of getting healthcare or pensions than similar workers who have no union. The top reason that more Americans aren’t union members is not because they’re alienated; it’s because the anti-union industry is so aggressive (almost 20,000 Americans a year are economically punished for supporting unions in their workplace), and the law is so toothless that workers correctly fear for their jobs if they try to organize. After all, if the real problem was overpaid union bureaucrats, then radical unions like the Wobblies or United Electrical workers—unburdened by highly paid staff or Democratic politics—should be meeting greater success in organizing. But, of course, they are not. The problem is not what unions are doing; it’s the coercive power of employers.

Furthermore, even while workers mostly focus on improving their own conditions, unions are by far the biggest force working to protect the interests of working people in general. Even as unions have been under such ferocious attack in state legislatures and struggling to repel those assaults, they’ve also been at the forefront of fights to protect minimum wage, child labor laws, unemployment insurance, pay equity, class size, immigrant rights and tax fairness—none of them union-specific issues. That, indeed, is why Walker and his corporate backers are so intent on dismantling them. The past two years have seen some of the country’s biggest private corporations devote millions of dollars to attacking public sector unions. This is not primarily because of ideological beliefs or a desire to pay less taxes. They see what some critics apparently miss—that unions remain the only serious counterweight to the unbridled power of the corporate elite.

Most employees naturally want their dues money to be mainly devoted to caring for themselves and their co-workers. Every time a campaign is undertaken to preserve class size or fight free trade agreements, people are making a decision to spend their dues money on something other than themselves. So, while more could be done, the criticism of union members and leaders for being too selfish is not based in reality.

Here’s the hard truth. We’re living in a dark time, and it’s gotten very hard for normal working Americans to win either at the workplace or in politics. We are massively outspent, and people are so scared of losing their jobs that it’s hard to fight back on a large scale. We have not figured out a reliable way to win. But the fundamental dynamics of power are the same as they ever were. We need to fight as smartly and as powerfully as we can, understanding that the game has not changed but simply gotten a lot harder. Of course there are things unions can do to be better and more effective, and those matter. But declaring organizing and contracts a thing of the past is not part of that.

The only serious choices we have are to keep fighting even though times are hard, or to give up, or to enjoy the momentary rush of being on the same side as power and join in the anti-union attack.

Author’s clarification (June 19, 2012): While I have serious criticisms of the columns about Wisconsin written by Matt Rothschild, Andy Kroll and Doug Henwood, it was wrong to term their writing “left anti-unionism” or to suggest that they were driven by the desire to cozy up to power or enjoy the thrill of attacking unions. Those words were written in a moment of anger, and they were a mistake. There are real enemies of working people and workers’ organizations, and they’re not these three authors. Nothing in this piece, or anything I’ve ever written, was designed to silence anyone. The tradition of left criticism of union practices—while I agree with parts and disagree with others—has helped make the labor movement more accountable, more democratic, and stronger. I posted an “author’s clarification” comment on the Nation website within hours of the piece going up, but knowing most people don’t read the comments, I wanted to append this note to my original piece. These authors do important work and don’t deserve to have their motives called into question.

The body of the piece—in between the headline and last line—I stand behind. I look forward to moving on to have a debate on the substantive issues on which we disagree. For now I want to be clear that from my point of view, that’s a debate that will take place among people who, in the most important way, are on the same side, and want to apologize to Matt Rothschild, Andy Kroll and Doug Henwood for implying otherwise.

In this Sunday, April 22, 2012, photo, Israeli flags fly over the Ulpana neighborhood in the West Bank settlement of Beit El near Ramallah. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

Round Two

BDS: A Call for Solidarity and a Challenge to the Status Quo

Critics of BDS who call for a settlement-only boycott ignore the vast range of political and economic forces inside Israel that sustain and profit from the occupation.

by Lizzy Ratner, on May 25, 2012

Before tackling all the bluster and hysteria around Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions—before diving into critics’ knee-jerk manipulations and angry accusations—let’s start with the facts: the ugly ones, the undeniable ones, the ones that have been created on the ground over six brutally deliberate decades.

Let’s start, for instance, with Gaza, that locked-down, bombed-out latter-day ghetto where “refugee” has become a permanent category of existence and an endless, five-year siege has turned collective punishment into the daily norm. Let’s talk about East Jerusalem, where the native Palestinian residents are being forced from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers. In the West Bank, illegal Jewish-only settlements hulk over a landscape denuded of olive groves. Settlers guilty of violence against Palestinians go free, while Palestinians are hauled to jail for “stealing” their own water. More than 230 kilometers of segregated roadway, and 760 kilometers of the “Separation Wall,” have convinced even the most unlikely sources that something is desperately wrong. “While the world’s statesmen have dithered, Israel has created a system of apartheid on steroids,” wrote Stephen Robert, former CEO of Oppenheimer & Company and an “ardent Israel supporter,” in The Nation last year.

Finally, let’s talk about refugees, the ones who have been living in exile for decades, often in appalling conditions and have the right to return home under international law. And let’s talk about Israel itself—“democratic,” post-1948 Israel, where, despite their having the right to vote, Palestinian Israelis are subject to a dizzying concoction of discriminatory laws.

Let’s talk about all of this, because this is the reality for 11.2 million people—and this is the reality from which BDS has sprung.

“We have lived the past six decades going from one trauma to another, one tragedy, one slaughter, one theft to another…,” said author and human rights activist Susan Abulhawa in her address to the 2012 National Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Conference. “The boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign is our nonviolent response to this violence.”

In the frenzy to discredit BDS, it’s perversely easy for critics to forget these facts, to get lost in the abstraction (and sometimes distraction) of arguments about the uplifting effects of transnational corporations, the benevolence of 1948 Israel and the lurking anti-Semitism of the BDS agenda. These arguments are not just misleading but often downright dangerous and offensive; the anti-Semitism charge in particular is probably the most often cited and potent. So let’s be clear: vile and frightening anti-Semitism certainly exists, but BDS is not an example of it. As a nonviolent movement dedicated to human rights and nondiscrimination it is, in many ways, its opposite: the lesson of “Never Again” interpreted universally, a reminder that in the face of extreme horror, it is incumbent upon people of conscience to rally around the inalienable rights of the abused.

And there is more: while BDS remains a fundamentally Palestinian call, it nonetheless speaks to some of the best strains within Jewish tradition, from Rabbi Levi Yitzhak’s famed eighteenth-century matzo factory protest to the great, women-led kosher meat boycott of 1902 to some of the most potent phrases in Jewish religious texts. “Do not profit from the blood of your neighbor,” the words of the Leviticus 19:16 command. And another oldie but goodie, from the Talmud Bavli: “Whoever is able to protest the wrong doings of their community and doesn’t, it is as if they themselves did it and are punished for it.” And what about “Justice, Justice, shall you pursue?”

Sadly, these arguments haven’t stopped people from hurling accusations at BDS supporters, just as the Gordian knot of the Palestinian situation hasn’t stopped people from arguing that BDS should be weakened, diluted. Such is the case with Bernard Avishai’s essay, “BDS Abandons Progressive Israelis,” in which he argues that BDS should be toned down to avoid alienating enlightened Israelis living inside the Green Line. BDS, he says, is “too righteous to distinguish baby from bathwater.” So while he supports the idea of a narrow, settlement-only boycott, he condemns the full-throttle BDS effort as “confus[ing] anger with serious politics.”

And yet, it is precisely Avishai’s desire to force a distinction—to cordon off the outrages of the occupation, to separate reality from serious politics—that is the problem with his position.

Let’s start with Avishai’s own example, the narrow example of the settlements, since it demonstrates how quickly distinctions crumble. Though it would be convenient if settlements were simple, sui generis eruptions, the truth is that they don’t just pop up across the landscape like a new species of flower. They are seeded and sustained by an intricate system of political laws, government incentives, financial investments and military might—and this root system sprawls deep inside Israel’s pre-’67 borders. As Dalit Baum and Merav Amir of the Coalition of Women for Peace wrote in a 2010 essay, “Any clear-cut distinction between the Israeli economy as a whole and the economy of the occupation can no longer be justified. The Green Line border has all but disappeared from the corporate activity map. Even if we only look at the Israeli settlements, and then again only focus on settlement construction, we will discover that the major players in the Israeli economy are deeply complicit. For instance, our findings show that all major Israeli banks have funded and supervised construction projects in the settlements.”

As Baum and Merav’s work makes clear, the settlements will not be dislodged through boycotts of settlement goods alone (essential, righteous and important though such boycotts are). There is a vast economy at work in keeping the settlement enterprise alive—and not just the settlements but the whole infrastructure of inequality and control that stretches in varying degrees from the southern tip of Gaza to the northern tip of the Golan.

So the question must be asked, What is to be done? How do you bring justice to a system that in the last few years alone has given rise to Operation Cast Lead, the attack on the Mavi Marmara, the ongoing colonization of East Jerusalem and countless other outrages?

For those of us who support the call for BDS, the answer, or an answer, lies in the collective action of civil society. It lies in action that is nonviolent, rights-based, grassroots, galvanizing, targeted, tactical and capable of shaking Israelis from their torpor—because Israel won’t do it on its own, and our leaders won’t pressure them to do it either. The status quo is too cozy, too “desirable” from a “cost-benefit perspective,” as Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf recently noted in an important column titled “Ending the Occupation: No Way Around Direct Pressure on Israel.”

And so, here is pressure—pressure that does not necessarily fill me glee, but that does give me hope. “It opens up a whole world for us of effective local action that adds up to movement building,” said Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, which has initiated boycotts of companies like TIAA-CREF that profit from the occupation. “I believe that BDS as a tactic overall—not as the only one—is going to pressure Israel to change the status quo in a way that peace talks have not.”

This is where critics like Avishai once again chime in. Though it’s certainly fair to question the efficacy of BDS, Avishai makes the perplexing claim that in cutting off the salutary spigot of corporate capital, BDS risks alienating the very Jewish Israelis who are most primed to be sympathetic to Palestinians’ plight—namely, its “most educated and cosmopolitan people.” This is an odd formulation for several reasons, the most notable being the most obvious: Since when was morality the privilege of elites? And at what point did corporations become the avant-garde of enlightened behavior?

But there is another problem, which is that the available evidence doesn’t seem to support the theory. During the years that capital has poured into Tel Aviv, nightlife may have boomed but anti-occupation protest has not. More to the point, one of the prime, historic examples of boycott and divestment—the international campaign to end apartheid in South Africa, which inspired BDS—was enormously effective, as both Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu have argued. (And they should know, to quote Omar Barghouti.)

Will BDS work this time around, in Israel? Israel’s leadership has certainly poured enough resources into stopping it to suggest they’re concerned. Still, we can only hope and try. Because amid all the uncertainty, the one thing we do know is that the time for dithering is long past, and the moment of peaceful, persuasive solidarity has arrived.

BDS’s Conditions Spell the End of Israel

By insisting on the right of return, proponents of BDS only undermine the progressive Israelis and Jews who would champion the Palestinian cause.

by Eric Alterman on May 25, 2012

As both a liberal and a pro-Zionist Jew, I’ll admit to feeling considerable trepidation whenever I check the news coming out of Israel and the occupied territories these days. There is no question that the most regressive, racist and anti-democratic elements of Israeli society have been on the upswing. Illegal settlements—judged by Israel’s own generous standards—are being justified in a hasty, ex-post-facto fashion. Laws are being introduced to reduce the freedom of debate and democratic discourse and to outlaw the work of peaceful NGOs and civil liberties organizations—who find themselves under attack by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman as alleged “collaborators in terror.” Journalists’ ability to report on these matters is being hampered by draconian new slander penalties. The Supreme Court is at risk of seeing its power curtailed, and respected religious figures are calling for explicitly racist actions to be taken against Israel’s Arab minority. For instance, not long ago, dozens of municipal rabbis issued an edict against renting or selling real estate to non-Jews, and a group of rabbis’ wives joined together to instruct Jewish women avoid all contact with Arab men.

What explains this destructive dynamic? Clearly a significant portion of it is driven by genuine threats combined with psychological and political factors that together produce an irrational reaction. For instance, Iran’s nuclear program, coupled with the hateful rhetoric of its leaders, has helped to empower the Holocaust-related psychosis among Jews, both inside and outside Israel, that lay barely beneath the surface of most Jewish discussions of Israel’s safety and security. According to a recent poll reported on in Haaretz, “about 40 percent of all Israelis believe the Holocaust could happen again, and 43 percent are reportedly concerned the State of Israel is in danger of being destroyed.” Another significant segment of the population are not interested in democracy or human rights but only in their extremely literalistic and restrictive interpretation of religious law. Yet another sector is comprised of right-wing nationalists who could care less about democracy and prefer to see Israel turned into a modern day Sparta.

Yet even allowing for the increasing influence of these segments of society, a majority of Israelis consistently tell pollsters that they would prefer a two-state solution to the current occupation and would welcome the opportunity to work out a compromise that would end the occupation and allow Palestinians to fulfill their national aspirations in the context of security guarantees for Israel and a genuine willingness to end hostilities. But they feel themselves to be without a credible partner in the peace process and hence don’t have sufficient confidence in the concept of political and territorial compromise to challenge the scare tactics of their internal political adversaries.

For this pro-peace majority to become politically empowered, Israel’s citizens must be able to trust that the Palestinians with whom they negotiate are able to enforce the agreements they reach. This is, literally, the only path to genuine Palestinian self-determination. No American president, much less Congress, will ever attempt to force Israel into a peace agreement against its will. Neither would the Europeans, who are actually irrelevant since they lack both the power and the means to do so. Terrorism aside, Palestinians have no credible military option vis-à-vis Israel. Their only hope can come by convincing Jewish Israelis that the risks and benefits of peace outweigh the risks and benefits of continued conflict.

It is true, of course, that Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinian people breeds hatred rather than a desire for cooperation with their oppressors. Even so, it cannot possibly serve the cause of peace and self-determination for the Palestinians for their spokespeople and supporters to demand that Israel, as currently constituted, commit suicide. They may think it just. They may think it right. They may think it fair or even ordained by God. But so long as they insist, as Omar Barghouti does, on the achievement of a set of goals that would mean the end of the Zionist project, then they will only strengthen those who seek to keep them in a permanent state of oppression and immiseration as they simultaneously undermine those who would champion their cause.

Barghouti claims that equal rights for Palestinians must include “at minimum, ending Israel’s 1967 occupation and colonization, ending Israel’s system of racial discrimination and respecting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their lands from which they were ethnically cleansed during the 1948 Nakba.” If so, there is really nothing to talk about. Six or seven million Palestinians cannot be reintegrated into Israeli society based merely on arithmetic, much less all of the obvious problems that would arise from the fact that the two populations happen to hate one another. Barghouti’s conditions demand that Israelis voluntarily forfeit their commitment to their history, their national identity and their understanding of Jewish history. He might as well insist that they convert to Scientology in the bargain.

Barghouti apparently thinks that the support of a food coop or an obscure pop singer somehow constitutes the beginning of Israel’s ultimate destruction. By talking in these terms and by employing the analogy of Israel not only to South Africa but also to Nazi Germany, as he has done in the past, he strengthens the case of Israel’s hardliners and actually helps to ensure the permanent oppression of the Palestinian nation. No less foolish is his mockery of those Jews who are committed to compromise, including those who support the notion of a “Zionist BDS.” By spitting in the face of the very people who are in the best position to help Palestinians progress toward the goal of statehood and self-determination, including those willing to put themselves on the line for the cause, he furthers demonstrates the disjunction between his hollow rhetoric and the political reality he allegedly seeks to influence.

Finally, while I genuinely despair for Israel’s future under this unhopeful scenario, as I also grieve for the victims of its occupation, I was, however, deeply impressed to learn that Barghouti, who in effect calls for Israel’s destruction, has earned a masters degree in philosophy from Tel Aviv University. Alas, it is impossible to imagine the situation in reverse: an outspoken, foreign-born Jew who called for the boycott and destruction of the Arab or Islamic nation in which he resided living long enough to see himself denounced in the next day’s newspaper. The near-complete lack of democratic practices within Israel’s neighbors in the Arab and Islamic world, coupled with their lack of respect for the rights of women, of gays, indeed, of dissidents of any kind—make their protestations of Israel’s own democratic shortcomings difficult to credit. This is not merely a debating point. This democratic deficit also calls into question the ability of a future Palestinian leadership’s to enforce a peace agreement that is opposed—as appears inevitable—by significant segments of its population. Unfortunately, the signs from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in this regard are hardly encouraging.

Were Barghouti to ask American Jews to join him in pressuring Israel to come to its senses and negotiate a secure settlement based on the 1967 lines, with necessary adjustments on both sides and some sort symbolic (and perhaps financial) redress for Palestinians without the “right of return,” he might stand a chance of attracting significant support even among American Jews and within the Israeli peace camp. As his plan now stands, it is of a piece with the programs of Hamas and Hezbollah and with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent call for “the destruction of the Zionist regime” by peaceful means.

Good luck with that.

Round One

BDS for Palestinian Rights: ‘Equality or Nothing!’

The BDS movement is not asking for anything heroic from people of conscience. It is merely asking them to desist from complicity in oppression.

by Omar Barghouti on May 3, 2012

The Palestinian right to equality is neither negotiable nor relative; it is the sine qua non of a just peace in Palestine and the region. As Edward Said once said, “Equality or nothing!”

Anyone who supports Palestinian self-determination while calling only for ending the forty-five-year-old Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is only upholding most of the rights of just 38 percent of Palestinians while expecting the rest to accept injustice as fate. According to 2011 statistics, of 11.2 million Palestinians, 50 percent live in exile, many denied their UN-stipulated right to return to their homes of origin, and 12 percent are Palestinian citizens of Israel who live under a system of “institutional, legal and societal discrimination,” according to the US State Department. More than two thirds of Palestinians are refugees or internally displaced persons.

Equal rights for Palestinians means, at minimum, ending Israel’s 1967 occupation and colonization, ending Israel’s system of racial discrimination and respecting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their lands from which they were ethnically cleansed during the 1948 Nakba. The 2005 Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) call was endorsed by an overwhelming majority of Palestinians because it upholds all three. By appealing to people of conscience around the world to help end Israel’s three-tiered system of oppression, the BDS movement is not asking for anything heroic. It is merely asking people to desist from complicity in oppression.

Moreover, given the billions of dollars lavished by the United States on Israel annually, American taxpayers are subsidizing Israel’s violations of international law at a time when American social programs are undergoing severe cuts. Striving to end US complicity in the occupation is good for the Palestinians and for the 99 percent struggling for social justice and against perpetual war.

Building on its global ascendance, the BDS movement—led by the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society, the BDS National Committee (BNC)—is spreading across the United States, especially on campuses and among churches, scoring significant victories such as at the Olympia Food Co-op. Globally, trade union federations with millions of members have endorsed BDS. Veolia and Alstom, two corporations complicit in Israel’s occupation, have lost contracts worth billions of dollars. Deutsche Bahn, a German government-controlled rail company, pulled out of an Israeli project encroaching on occupied Palestinian land. The University of Johannesburg severed links with Ben Gurion University over human rights violations. World renowned artists—including, most recently, Cat Power and Cassandra Wilson—have canceled performances in Israel, heeding the cultural boycott and transforming Tel Aviv into the new Sun City.

BDS advocates equal rights for all and opposes all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. This universalist commitment has won hearts and minds globally, triggering panic and over-the-top bullying attempts to crush BDS in the United States, as witnessed with the national BDS conference at the University of Pennsylvania and the Park Slope Co-op ballot on boycotting Israeli goods, where almost 40 percent voted for BDS. Perhaps provoked by the mainstreaming of BDS, President Obama attacked it for the first time in his recent AIPAC address, joining numerous US politicians whose vehement vilification of BDS puts them on a moral plane with those white Americans who opposed the Montgomery bus boycott and/or the boycott of apartheid South Africa.

With impressive successes in the economic and cultural fields, and with the increasing impact of its Israeli supporters, BDS is viewed by Israel’s establishment as a “strategic threat” to its system of oppression—namely occupation, colonialism and apartheid. This explains the Knesset’s passage of a draconian anti-boycott law last year that drops the last mask of Israel’s supposed democracy. But multimillion-dollar campaigns by Israel’s foreign ministry to counter BDS by “re-branding” through art, science and cynically using LGBT rights to “pinkwash” Israel’s denial of basic Palestinian rights have largely failed.

Among international supporters of BDS, Archbishop Desmond Tutu is among the most eloquent in arguing that Israel practices apartheid. The Russell Tribunal on Palestine in its recent Cape Town session determined that Israel is practicing apartheid against the entire Palestinian people. Similarly, South African Christian leaders have condemned Israel’s apartheid as “even worse than South African apartheid.” And the publisher of Haaretz, an influential Israeli daily, recently described a fanatic Israeli ideology of “territorial seizure and apartheid.”

With its continued siege of Gaza; its untamed construction of illegal colonies and the wall in the occupied West Bank; its “strategy of Judaization” in Jerusalem, the Galilee, the Jordan Valley and the Naqab (Negev); its adoption of new racist laws and its denial of refugees’ rights, Israel has embarked on a more belligerent phase in its attempt to extinguish the question of Palestine through literally “disappearing” the Palestinians, as Said would say.

Israel and its well-oiled lobby groups, who Thomas Friedman charges with buying allegiance in Congress, have been trying to delegitimize the Palestinian quest for equal rights by portraying the nonviolent BDS call’s emphasis on equal rights and the right of return as aiming to “destroy Israel.” If equality and justice would destroy Israel, what does that say about Israel? Did equality and justice destroy South Africa? Did they destroy Alabama? Justice and equality only destroy their negation, injustice and inequality. The BDS movement’s effective challenge to Israeli apartheid and colonial rule petrifies Israel and its lobbies.

Desperate to “save Israel,” essentially as an apartheid state, and motivated by genuine fear of the demise of Zionism, “liberal” Zionists are under exceptional duress given the fast spread of BDS. Cognizant of its appeal to an increasing number of younger Jewish activists, some are muddying the waters by suggesting a Zionist-friendly boycott to undermine the movement. But BDS is an ethically consistent, rights-based movement that cannot coexist with racism of any type, including Zionism. A “Zionist BDS” is as logical as a “racist equality”!

BDS addresses comprehensive Palestinian rights, not simply ending the Israeli occupation of some densely populated Palestinian territory in order to save Israel as a “purer” apartheid. Even those who seek ending the occupation only, disregarding the basic rights of most Palestinians, struggle to explain their opposition to a full boycott of Israel, the occupying power, which under international law bears full responsibility for the occupation and its manifestations. The BDS movement calls for boycotting Israel just as South Africa was the target of boycotts due to its apartheid regime, China due to its occupation of Tibet and Sudan due to its crimes in Darfur.

Still, BDS is not a dogmatic or centralized movement—it is all about context sensitivity and creativity. BDS supporters in any particular context decide what to target and how to mobilize and organize their local campaigns. So long as they uphold the basic rights of all Palestinians, international partners may decide to selectively target companies implicated in Israel’s occupation or colonies only out of pragmatic considerations rather than approval of Israel’s other injustices.

A movement that dwells in citizens’ consciences, that is rooted in an oppressed people’s heritage of struggle for justice, and that is inspired by the rich and diverse legacies of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr. cannot be defeated or co-opted.

Our South Africa moment has arrived.

BDS Abandons Israeli Progressives

A boycott of Israel’s settlements makes sense, but a broader boycott will most hurt those forces inside Israel that are best poised to change Israeli state policy.

by Bernard Avishai on May 3, 2012

The American response to Peter Beinart’s New York Times op-ed calling for an economic boycott of Israel’s West Bank settlements—what he calls, usefully, “non-democratic Israel”—will strike Israeli liberals as just a little melodramatic. Not very much is produced in the settlements, which are largely bedroom communities. Most liberal Israelis have been boycotting products from the settlements for years: Dead Sea creams, organic eggs, boutique wines and spices.

Recently, various scholars, artists and scientists signed statements announcing our refusal to cooperate with, or even visit, the college established in the settlement of Ariel, between Ramallah and Nablus; a college originally established by Bar-Ilan University, but now applying—with the support of Netanyahu’s government, and in the face of considerable opposition from the Council of Higher Education—to be upgraded to an independent university. A couple of years ago, writing against the BDS movement against Israel as a whole in these pages, I called for just such a boycott myself.

The settlers have, let us say, a problem with boundaries. Boycotting their products is simple, direct and clearly targeted: if a settler business loses customers, its settlement may prove less viable. This is a way of using obvious market freedoms to manifest our dissent or opposition to the settlement project as a whole. (For their part, and by the same token, most settlers don’t subscribe to the liberal daily Haaretz—in effect, they boycott the newspaper, and want it to go away.)

And Beinart is right to want the boycott of settlements to be international. Presumably, this will pressure Israeli companies, too, into dissociating themselves from the settlements and, in some cases, proving that they are not using settlement components or raw materials. The Israeli right wants to establish facts to erase the boundary between Israel and the occupied territories. A boycott of settlements establishes counter-facts that reinforce an eventual boundary: about a fifth of Israel’s GDP is from exports, and any serious Israeli company is global.

But the settlement boycott has another virtue, which is to bring into relief the kind of boycott that should not be entertained, namely, a general boycott of all Israeli products and institutions. That boycott would erase another boundary, between the Israeli state per se—the country and its civil society—and the state apparatus under particular elected leaders.

Erase that boundary, and you erase the discrete facts of Israeli politics; you repudiate the idea that a more moderate government could ever be elected again, though polls show that a split in the Shas party, or the emergence of a charismatic centrist, or a shift in Israeli Arab electoral strategies (all of which, or none of which, may happen this year), would tip the Knesset and government back to what it was under Ehud Olmert, who just attended the J Street conference, by the way.

Israel, in other words, is a complicated place. Its democracy is certainly more than what produced the occupation of Palestine. Imagine European officials, intellectuals etc., reading grim headlines about America’s invasion of Iraq, and concluding that the war was the product (as it was to some degree) of America’s imperial political structure and peculiar concepts of liberty. Imagine their advocating a boycott of everything American, from Google, to The Nation, to Berkeley—in effect, an end to the United States as we know it, including Bush’s internal opposition. Would this have been thought sane?

To be sure, Israeli democracy is not what it could be. I defer to no one in having risked what writers risk to tell hard truths about it. I wrote in The Tragedy of Zionism, nearly thirty years ago, that settlements were only the most vivid proof of Israel’s democratic deficiencies; that some of its legal structures amounted to discrimination against Israeli Arabs and valorization of religious orthodoxy—more precisely, reflected the absence of a liberal social contract needed to allow all citizens to meet as equals. And, yes, Israeli state agencies and the IDF have been instrumental in making the occupation what it is.

Still, Israel is also a place of progressive and creative forces, concentrated in Israeli elites: again, artists and scholars, but also entrepreneurs and professionals. BDS aims to hit global companies doing business with Israeli ones. But, as a group, international companies are the most important allies Israeli liberals have. These companies are learning and teaching organizations: Intel’s impact on Israel is like MIT’s on Cambridge. Opposing the bloc of parties favoring Greater Israel is a (somewhat weaker) bloc working toward Global Israel. What would BDS do to the latter, the very people in Israel whom the liberal world needs to strengthen?

You see, the implicit premise of BDS is that the occupation flows from the fact of Israel itself: that Israel is inherently a kind of occupation machine, beginning with 1948 and followed by 1967. In effect, BDS advocates accept the grotesque view of settlers and Hamas both, that the claim of Jews to Hebron in 2012 is exactly like the claim to Degania in 1912. It is not: the actions of a desperate movement are not to be copied by a triumphant state; after he became mayor, Jean Valjean did not keep stealing candlesticks. On the other hand, BDS advocates argue that the stock of global companies making things used by occupation forces—United Technologies makes IDF helicopters, for example—should be divested, as if companies are big collaboration machines. But the same company’s air-conditioners may be cooling a school in Afula—or Gaza. In both cases, looking at Israel, or at companies, we need to up the magnification.

Some will say, fine, force the implosion of Israel’s private sector and this will finally force Israeli elites to seek political change more urgently. This is mechanistic and shortsighted thinking. Economic implosion, which a fully implemented BDS would bring about rather quickly, will cut the ground out from under Israel’s most educated and cosmopolitan people. It will not just pressure them, it will destroy them—ruin their lives, force the emigration of their children. Settlers and their ultra allies, in contrast, have no problem with Israel turning into a poorer, purer, Jewish Pakistan. Do we really want to cause Israel’s private sector to collapse or its universities to be isolated?

I suppose what offends me most about BDS is that it confuses anger with serious politics. It is something like the Tea Party, mad at “government,” too righteous to distinguish baby from bathwater.

What we need, rather, is a vibrant, globalizing Israel, businesses, universities, etc. that expect to be part of the world and show the way to it; people who find Greater Israel an embarrassment and, indeed, will see an international boycott of settlements as a way of selling their case for compromise. Such people will be strengthened not by BDS but by a general, persistent anxiety about the conflict’s “opportunity cost”: the conviction that Israel’s manifestly improving quality of life will be a far cry from what it could be with peace.

That is the vision a re-elected President Obama should be preparing to bring: for Israel’s security everything, for Israel’s occupation nothing. That is the vision he tried to bring before 2010’s electoral reversals spooked all Democrats into the arms of AIPAC. With the Palestinian Authority on the brink of collapse, and successive Centcom commanders warning of a mean turn in the Arab street if the settlements are not stopped, is it too much to hope that the embrace is not permanent?

Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs of Columbia University speaks about potential geopolitical implications of the financial crisis at a panel discussion at Pace University in New York on October 16, 2009. Reuters/Nicholas Roberts
 
Editor’s Note: Jeffrey Sachs’s candidacy for World Bank president has drawn the backing of a number of progressives, who laud his focus on ending extreme poverty and hunger and improving agricultural outcomes in developing countries. Should we throw our support behind Sachs? John Cavanagh, director of the Institute of Policy Studies, and Robin Broad, professor of international development at American University, argue that his approach to development sounds good but remains flawed. Jeffrey Sachs himself responded. Immediately below, we’ve published Round Two. In this round, Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and president of Just Foreign Policy, who has supported Sachs’s candidacy, responds to Cavanagh and Broad.
 

Round Two

Why We Are Still Not Supporting Jeffrey Sachs to be World Bank President

Even today, Sachs’s approach to development remains top-down and formulaic.

by John Cavanagh and Robin Broad on March 20, 2012

Thanks to The Nation for creating the forum for this important dialogue on the World Bank presidency and also to Jeffrey Sachs for participating. Progressives should not expect that we will always march together to one song; we should savor the venues like this where we can debate as allies. We appreciate the many comments that have been posted and others that were sent to us privately.

We will use our limited “rebuttal” space to respond to two key issues.

Some progressives are urging us all to be more “strategic,” to support Sachs for World Bank president because he is better than possible Obama pick Larry Summers. We agree that Summers would be a terrible choice to head the Bank and, indeed, have joined tens of thousands to sign a petition to the Obama administration opposing his candidacy. However, the deadline for governments to announce their candidates is not until March 23. By then, several governments will nominate Sachs. The United States will announce a candidate. And, other governments may nominate someone else. After that point, it will be important for progressives around the world to debate who, if anyone, deserves our support. Before the 23^rd, we believe that one productive strategic role for progressives is to critique the traditional presumption that Americans will support the European choice for the IMF head and Europeans will back the US choice at the Bank, virtually assuring that the rich countries get their way. We commend the Bretton Woods Project for their open letter arguing for a reformed selection process.

So too do we think it strategic for progressives to put forward the best candidates from across the globe, candidates with the qualifications to run a large organization and with the vision, humility, sensibility, and ability to listen to the 99 percent—all necessary to transform the Bank. Since we wrote our initial piece, dozens of people have sent us such names: Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, former UNDP head Gus Speth, urban poor advocate Sheela Patel, Greenpeace International chair Kumi Naidoo, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier de Schutter, former Brazilian president Lula, and ActionAid International head Joanna Kerr, among others. Any could be a great leader of the Bank, but people and governments hesitate to put “best” names forward so long as the US-European grip on the selection process continues. If US progressives spent as much time promoting a “best” candidate as they are backing Sachs, that person might take-off as a candidate. Such a “best-person” list also presses those who are running to prove they match such high credentials, not that they are better than the worst.

Our second rebuttal issue has to do with the development record of Jeffrey Sachs. Knowledgeable commentators below have added their reflections on Sachs’s role in “shock therapy” and its impacts, particularly in Bolivia. In terms of Sachs’s current work, we note that nobody supporting Sachs has demonstrated that the Millennium Villages represent a “sustainable” future; whatever the fertilizer costs per person, fossil-fuel dependent agriculture is not the way forward. We have spent time on the ground with sustainable farmers and “farmer scientists” who are restoring the soil, cutting costs, and raising yields without chemicals. In the era of climate catastrophe, they are the future of agriculture. Millennium Villages and the World Bank should be on board to accelerate the transition to post-chemical, sustainable farming that is good for farmers, consumers, the land, and the climate. Agribusiness firms and fertilizer corporations will fight this transition every step of the way; we need a World Bank president who will stand up to them.

Sachs’s Candidacy for World Bank President Has Helped Create a Real Contest

Whether or not he becomes World Bank head, Sachs’s candidacy has paved the way for future change.

by Mark Weisbrot on March 22, 2012

Let me address the two points that John and Robin have made. The first concerns strategy. Four days before the deadline for nominations for World Bank President, and at the time of their writing, there was only one candidate nominated: Jeffrey Sachs. Thus, Sachs was the only opposition to whichever crony that Washington would pick, most likely Larry Summers. Sachs has a reform agenda for the Bank, including having the Bank focus more on treatment and prevention of infectious diseases, support for small farmers, education and primary health care, and renewable energy (as opposed to fossil fuels). He also has a track record of having fought for debt cancellation, an end to the World Bank’s policies of imposing user fees for primary health care and education, for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (which has saved millions of lives), increased access to essential medicines, and having been outspoken against war and other abuses by the US government. So this was an easy choice.

Now there are news reports that two more candidates may be nominated by developing countries: José Antonio Ocampo, a former Colombian finance minister, head of the UN Economic Commission on Latin America, and UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs; and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, currently Nigeria’s finance minister and formerly managing director of the World Bank under Robert Zoellick.

Given the timing of these possible late entries, I think Sachs—as well as the dozen or so governments that have supported him—deserves some credit for helping to open up a process that has been closed and restricted to a US “coronation” for sixty-eight years. If he had not busted through the saloon doors and shot up the place, it seems likely that the US political appointee would have prevailed. That could still happen, but now there is a contest including qualified candidates. The New York Times reported just nine days ago that Washington intends to “retain control over the Bank;” but now it will not be so easy. An analogy to the 2005 election of José Miguel Insulza as head of the Organization of American States is apt: for the first time in over fifty years, a candidate that the US initially opposed (and twice tried to block) was chosen. If the developing countries decide to take a stand, the US and its rich country allies will not be able to muscle their way through on the basis of their voting shares; that would be politically unacceptable.

And in five years, if you start now and can find governments to support someone that you like better, maybe you get them in the race next time. Regardless of outcome, Sachs’s candidacy will have helped pave the way for any future changes.

As for the second point on agriculture: I would say that we all favor organic agriculture and reducing the use of fossil fuels, but there are tradeoffs. You don’t eat organic food when it’s too expensive or inconvenient, and you don’t ride a bicycle or walk everywhere. Farmers in poor countries also have tradeoffs to make, and much tougher choices: e.g. their children and those of their community may be malnourished if they cannot produce enough food. They may want to add nutrients to the soil, in order to improve yields. So I would be careful about “one size fits all” policies regarding agricultural inputs. Poor farmers, villagers, and countries should not have to bear the brunt of the world’s transition to more environmentally sustainable agriculture, although they will do their part. And in any case it should be their choice, not imposed on them from outside.

Round One

Why We Are Not Supporting Jeffrey Sachs to be World Bank President

Even today, Sachs’s approach to development remains top-down and formulaic.

by John Cavanagh and Robin Broad on March 13, 2012
 

Jeffrey Sachs—economist, author and United Nations adviser—has publicly launched his candidacy to become the next World Bank president. Several prominent progressives whom we respect, including Congressman John Conyers, the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Mark Weisbrot, and Just Foreign Policy’s Robert Naiman, have publicly endorsed Sachs’s candidacy. We disagree.

Over the years, Sachs has championed some key progressive policies, including debt cancellation for the poorest countries and a financial speculation tax to generate revenues to fight global poverty. He also advised the Congressional Progressive Caucus on their outstanding “People’s Budget.”

But this does not make Sachs the right person to lead the World Bank. For starters, this is a moment when we should be actively seeking a candidate from the South—someone who has walked the walk to embrace a bottom-up approach to development. Many names come to mind, including the South Centre’s Martin Khor and Charles Abugre of the UN Millennium Campaign. The so-called gentlemen’s agreement that allows the US government to select an American to head the bank was wrong in the 1940s; it is even more illegitimate now.

Moreover, Sachs’s overall policy record remains disturbing. Over two decades ago, he burst onto the scene as an adviser to governments that adopted “shock therapy” to tame inflation. In countries like Bolivia and Russia, the austerity became infamous for the havoc it wreaked on ordinary people.

Today, Sachs’s approach to development remains, at its core, top-down and formulaic. Elsewhere, we have critiqued Sachs’s book The End of Poverty for overemphasizing the power of trade and new technologies to put the poorest on a ladder to modernization. (He once famously said, “My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops but that there are too few.”)

Sachs has applied this approach in his well-publicized Millennium Villages in Africa. African colleagues have relayed criticisms that mesh with our own. Through these villages, Sachs has been a promoter of outside money to pay for (among other things) chemical-dependent “green revolution” farming. One village alone is reported to have had a $50,000 a year fertilizer bill. While this undoubtedly can lead to an initial boost in agricultural yields, it is hardly sustainable in the longer run economically (yields dwindle as soils get compacted from chemical inputs), socially (farmers drown in debts), or environmentally (fossil fuel-based chemical fertilizers contribute to climate change).

The reality of the villages’ chemical-dependent agriculture undermines Sachs’s reputation as an expert on climate change and other environmental issues. UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier de Schutter has pulled together years of evidence to show that small-scale farmers can grow ample food and can reduce fossil-fuel emissions by shifting from chemical to “agro-ecological” farming. The international small-scale farmer-led Via Campesina movement has embraced such an environmentally sustainable “food sovereignty” approach.

The next World Bank president should support this shift. Farmers and the poor need more control over natural resources, not a transfer of aid-dependent inappropriate technologies which serve neither farmers, nor consumers, nor the planet.

It is also time for a World Bank president with a bit of humility. Sachs has never, to our knowledge, apologized to those who suffered as a result of his early adherence to austerity measures, just as the bank has never apologized nor made reparations for its mistakes. The bank needs a president who cannot just look back at past mistakes, acknowledge them and learn from them but who also understands the real costs of such mistakes. Children starve. Natural resources are plundered. People die. If it is to have any legitimacy whatsoever, the World Bank needs a president who can gain the trust of and then learn from the experiences of farmers and fisherfolk and the urban poor who are all too often the victims rather than the beneficiaries of faulty World Bank loans and conditions.

Why I’m the Right Candidate for World Bank President

Who else but me among the widely rumored candidates has a record of standing for the poorest of the poor?

by Jeffrey Sachs on March 14, 2012
 

I greatly thank The Nation for taking up the important question of the next World Bank president. Several developing-country governments, including Haiti, Jordan, Kenya, Malaysia and Timor-Leste, have already nominated me, and several more will do so in the coming days, because they know me as somebody who has stood firmly with them for more than a quarter-century in the fight against poverty, hunger and disease. My track record as the adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and to former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals is warmly appreciated. My recommendations on how to achieve the MDGs have been very widely adopted and have contributed to significant advances in the fight against disease and poverty in recent years.

I would be the first-ever development practitioner and anti-poverty professional to be World Bank President, just what is needed given the bank’s mission of a “world free of poverty.” It is high time that the institution is led by a professional with a lifetime of commitment and achievement in the fight against poverty. The first eleven World Bank presidents came from banking, defense or politics.

While Cavanagh and Broad might not like everything about me or about my ideas in The End of Poverty, they should be more careful about what they wish for. The other US candidates for the position are certainly not development leaders and have no track records fighting poverty. Some have track records quite to the contrary. President Obama, as far as we know, is not considering Martin Khor, but he is considering Larry Summers. Who else but me among the widely rumored candidates has a record of standing for the poorest of the poor for decades: on debt cancellation, disease control, climate change, peace through development, support for popularly elected governments and many other issues?

The Bank president should be a highly qualified development leader from any country. I am seeking the position as a world candidate, not a candidate of the United States alone. I am gratified that so many governments around the world agree and endorse my candidacy. I hope that the US government agrees as well, since the US nomination will likely determine the next World Bank president.

My own track record has been consistently on the side of the poor. Starting more than twenty-six years ago I called for debt cancellation for over-indebted developing countries, and I led the fight for debt reduction from the earliest days of that battle, helping to win debt reductions for Bolivia, Poland, Nigeria and many other countries. I am also very proud that my recommendations a dozen years ago to establish the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and malaria, and then the US PEPFAR and PMI programs, are now contributing to millions of lives saved from malaria, AIDS and TB.

There is some misunderstanding about the macroeconomics of stabilization in Bolivia, which is not surprising since those events occurred more than two decades ago. I urge readers to look at the data, not the rhetoric, and have prepared a short presentation showing the main economic outcomes. My role in Bolivia was to help the country end a devastating hyperinflation of 24,000 percent, fight successfully for debt cancellation and stabilize the economy, which allowed Bolivia to return to growth and significant social improvements. I worked there for two years, not more. I was not a long-term adviser. As for Russia, I simply wish that my advice had been heeded, both inside Russia and by the Western powers. Alas, Mr. Cheney was guiding US policies in 1992 (as defense secretary) and as a result, the United States and the West withheld vital help to Russia when it could have made a vast difference. What the West offered to Poland it denied to Russia. I resigned at the end of 1993, after two frustrating years, and after that was consistently an outspoken opponent of corrupt privatization. (Ironically, I have been often blamed for the very policies on privatization that I ardently opposed.)

As for the Millennium Villages, I warmly invite Broad and Cavanagh to check the facts. The Millennium Villages are African-run, with the agronomy at each village cluster based on local conditions. African agronomists are selecting the mix of organic and inorganic soil nutrients on the basis of local scientific recommendations in view of the soil types, soil nutrient conditions, crop varieties and climate conditions. There is no formula imposed from the outside. That would indeed be absurd. And the $50,000 a year for fertilizer for a village 5,000 people that Cavanagh and Broad cite comes to $10 per person in a year, a minimal sum to help get the poorest farmers out of poverty. It has done that. The project is not based on “giveaways,” as the initial fertilizer vouchers were used only to help impoverished farmers—without credit, income, bank balances or collateral—to get started in raising their productivity. The strategy has worked. The farmers now generally obtain their fertilizer as do farmers anywhere: with seasonal credits.

The results are very powerful, and continue to improve as the project progresses. Farmers’ incomes are increasing sharply in most sites, and that is net of the costs of farm inputs. Mortality rates are way down, and so too is stunting, meaning that under-nutrition is falling. Readers can follow Millennium Villages to get the most recent scientific publications of the project. An important publication will soon appear regarding the health improvements in the villages. Scholars interested in further information about the project can also contact the leaders of the project in East and West Africa.