“We Need a Workers Party”
Challenging the UFT’s Love-Fest for Clinton
 |
| CSEW at New York May Day 2016 |
Class Struggle Education Workers delegate presented a resolution against both parties of capitalism and called for a workers party.
The October 19 Delegate Assembly of the United Federation of Teachers, with 120,000 active service educators the largest union in New York City, was an election rally for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. UFT president Michael Mulgrew gave an hour-long report centered on a pitch for Clinton, asking people to sign up for phone banking at the union hall (free dinner included) and praising the big UFT retirees chapter in South Florida for its efforts in that swing state.
The October 19 Delegate Assembly of the United Federation of Teachers, with 120,000 active service educators the largest union in New York City, was an election rally for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. UFT president Michael Mulgrew gave an hour-long report centered on a pitch for Clinton, asking people to sign up for phone banking at the union hall (free dinner included) and praising the big UFT retirees chapter in South Florida for its efforts in that swing state.
When the floor was finally opened for the “question period” (15 minutes), delegate Marjorie Stamberg rose
to say that the union should oppose both the racist misogynist pig Trump and
Wall Streeter Clinton and asked to open up more time to discuss this. Naturally,
this was met with a chorus of boos, shouts of “sit down,” etc. from the 600+
supporters of the bureaucracy’s Unity Caucus. Ever since the UFT was founded in
1960 by the arch anti-communist Al Shanker it has been bound hand-and-foot to
the Democratic Party.
Four years ago when Stamberg (a member of Class Struggle
Education Workers) sought to present a motion to repudiate the national AFT
endorsement of Barack Obama and calling for “no vote for Democrats, Republicans
or any party or politician representing the interests of capital against the working
class, poor and oppressed,” she was ruled out of order. The UFT leadership even
refused to allow her or anyone else to speak against its motion calling to vote
for Obama, a Unity hack called the question, debate was cut off, its motion was
voted up, and that was that (see “UFT
Censors Opposition to Obama Endorsement,” CSEW web site, 6 November 2012).
But this time around Mulgrew was in an oh-so-democratic
phase, explaining to the new delegates how the union has diverse political
views, ranging from far left to far right, and said that if someone wanted to
put up a motion about the elections, that would be appropriate. So in the
motion period, after some wrangling over whether a motion from the floor could
be no more than three lines or three sentences, Stamberg presented her motion:
“We in the UFT should not support either candidate of the
Democratic or Republican parties of capitalism. Donald Trump is a racist
misogynist xenophobe. Hillary Clinton is beholden to Wall Street, and the
Clinton Foundation bears major responsibility for the $5/day starvation wages in
Haiti's sweat shops. We need a workers party.”
When the chair asked for someone to second the motion, there
were a number of takers. Since no discussion is allowed on such motions, there
was an immediate vote. Significantly, several dozen delegates raised their
hands to vote “yes.” Then, as usual, the Unity machine went into action and the
motion was duly voted down. After the
meeting, people came up to say thank you for putting up the motion, reflecting
significant discontent among teachers over the endorsement of Clinton, the
former Wal-Mart counsel and board member who has been a supporter since Day One
of corporate “education reform” to gut public education.
While some leftists in the Movement of Rank-and-file
Educators (MORE) voted for the motion, this liberal/reformist caucus did
nothing to oppose the union’s support for Clinton. After MORE and the New
Action caucus won all seven executive board seats for the high school division in
UFT elections last Spring, these would-be union reformers are settling in as a tame
house “opposition” whose program doesn’t go beyond simple trade-unionism (and
sometimes not even that). Class Struggle Education Workers, in contrast,
distributed hundreds of leaflets at the door for a protest it co-sponsored the
next day calling for an end to the deportation and exclusion of Haitian
immigrants.
For over a century, labor in the U.S. has been chained to
the Democratic Party. Even at the height of the sit-down strikes in the 1930s,
reformist leftists led militant unionists to embrace Democrat FDR. The current
labor bureaucracy is the product of the Cold War purges that threw out the reds
who built the unions. The AFT/UFT is a product of this purge under Shanker and
other supporters of the anti-communist Max Shachtman, playing a prominent role
in the machinations of the “AFL-CIA” from Chile to Poland. Today the labor
fakers still have a stranglehold on the
unions, and will continue to throttle class struggle until they are defeated
by an opposition that fights the pro-capitalist bureaucracy politically.
As shown by the challenge to the AFT/UFT endorsement of
Wall Street war hawk and corporate education deformer Clinton, this task falls
to the CSEW which has uniquely fought for class-struggle opposition to the
“labor lieutenants of the capitalist class.”
Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed rather than, as it is at present, an instrument for the disciplining of labor in the interests of capital. See the CSEW program here.