At a time when labor militancy is on the rise, Fain has continued the path of labor misleaders falling in line behind the Democratic Party. Where O’Brien went into enemy territory to give the closest thing to a class-based speech a Business Unionist can give at the RNC, Fain, while also using the language of class, showed up to play fealty to Democratic Presidential Nominee, Kamala Harris. Harris, who in her only chance to back up her pro-worker rhetoric with action, went missing in action when she had the opportunity to use her power as Vice President to override the Senate Parliamentarian’s blocking of increasing the federal minimum wage in 2021. A move that contradicts Fain’s claim that Kamala Harris is a “fighter for the working class.”

What these speeches make clear is that when push comes to shove, the misleaders of labor will fall in line with the Democrats rather than see the workers’ fight all the way through. One noticeable example was the silence of the majority of labor “leaders” as the Biden Administration brought the hammer down on railroad workers as they were about to go on strike over disastrously dangerous working conditions, increasing the possibility of a major accident like the East Palestine, OH derailment in February of last year.

While much of the substance behind O’Brien’s and Fain’s speeches is true, their coddling of the two parties of monopoly capital shows the rank-and-file members that they are not prepared for the fight against what Shawn Fain calls corporate greed. In reality, the fight is against monopoly capitalism, and their financial backers, the system which pits workers against ever-increasing profits. Without a full-on struggle via anti-monopoly labor, the working class as a whole, will continue to fall behind.

We cannot agree more with Shawn Fain when he said, “We need a defender of the working class in the White House, someone who is one of us, and someone who knows how to fight.” The only way to do this is the building of a Party built out of an anti-monopoly coalition led by a class-oriented trade union movement. Hitching our wagons to either Party owned and operated by our bosses is not a path forward for an offensive fight from labor, we need our own Party that unites all the truly progressive forces in the US.

While it is too late to build an anti-monopoly coalition to affect the 2024 National elections, now is the time to start the struggle. Workers who are not regularly active politically are more engaged, now is the time to reach them. All class-oriented trade unionists need to heed this call and start pressuring your unions to steer resources away from political campaigns and toward organizing the unorganized. Step up, stand up, and organize the rank-and-file of your locals. Join the campaign started by Railroad Workers United in the struggle for nationalization of the railroads. Come, join LUEL and lead the fight, we have nothing to lose but our chains!

The post EDITORIAL: Political Conventions Show the Only Path Forward for Working Class is an Anti-Monopoly Coalition first appeared on Labor Today.

Many of Fain’s comments are true. Trump laughed about Elon Musk firing striking workers and Republicans often use race, LGBTQ+ and the border issue to keep the working class divided. There is no doubt that corporate greed and stock buybacks hurt the working class. But to claim that because Harris walked a couple picket lines with UAW (one in 2019 and another in 2023 allegedly) she is suddenly an advocate for workers wipes away how President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have actively aided the bosses. Let us not forget in December 2022, Biden used the Railway Labor Act to prevent a railroad strike and instead forced workers to accept the tentative agreement even though it had been rejected by a majority of rank and file union members.

This is especially egregious considering at the time, negotiations had been ongoing since 2019. Companies like BNSF were granting workers zero sick time and with the implementation of precision scheduled railroading, gave workers less free time, required them to be on call for weeks at a time and saw railroad fatalities increase from staffing cuts. President Biden objectively helped the bosses in preventing a strike in an industry where workers are abused daily and that is in need of tremendous reform. Simply walking a picket line is using workers as a prop to claim a pro-worker image.

Then there’s her work as an Attorney General in California. Harris was notorious for being the “Sheriff of Silicon Valley”, but even worse was her opposition to releasing non-violent offenders from prison (even after they served their full sentence) claiming it would hurt the prison’s labor program. Prison labor is well-known for paying abysmal wages, often pennies per hour, for products to be manufactured and even recruiting inmates into fighting California wildfires.

Shawn Fain’s comments on auto plants closing while “Trump did nothing” during his presidency and Biden walking picket lines acting as a catalyst towards the UAW win undermines the work that union rank-and-file members put towards securing a huge win with the big three auto manufacturers (Ford, GM, Stellantis).

Fain’s cheap use of the phrase “which side are you on”, a common lyric from a song by Florence Reese (and later sung by Pete Seeger) of the same name, to describe this upcoming election, is insulting. In the song, Reese describes the fight the United Mine Workers (UMW) went through in Harlan County and that “you’ll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair”. Divorcing the phrase from the struggle for workers’ rights to then use it in reference to voting in an election between two parties that are both objectively puppets of the bosses spits in the face of those who have fought hard for workers across this country.

It is true, the American working class “is fired up and fed up”. Workers are seeing their paychecks swallowed by inflation while they’re given crumbs and told they should be grateful. The solution to this though, is not to entice them to vote for Democrats once again. A party that, as of 2022, has shown how it really feels about workers.

The post EDITORIAL: UAW President Shawn Fain’s DNC Speech Shows Labor Leadership Still Beholden to Democrats first appeared on Labor Today.