The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

AFL-CIO:
Steering Workers from One Dead End to Another

Jun 21, 2004

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) said it will hear a case against the "card-check" procedure for unionizing a workplace.

The AFL-CIO has raised an alarm–but a strange sort of alarm. Instead of organizing actions to mobilize workers to fight this latest attack, the AFL-CIO says that workers should respond ... by voting for John Kerry for president.

In other words, workers should vote for the Democratic Party candidate and wait for him to defend them. AFL-CIO leaders have been around longer than that. They know full well that no president gave in to workers’ needs–unless workers were already mobilizing to impose what they wanted.

We can see what happens when workers don’t make a fight–and not only by looking at the Bush administration. When Clinton, a Democrat, had a Democratic majority in Congress during his first term, the union leaders themselves complained that Clinton stiffed them, wouldn’t give them his time. He didn’t need to, since the working class was quiet–waiting for Clinton to do something.

Depending on Democrats or Republicans is nothing but a dead end. But apparently, some people prefer a dead end to an open highway.