FORMER NY COUNCIL HEAD OTT: LABOR MUST
RETHINK METHODS, TARGETED WORKERS
By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer
WASHINGTON (PAI)—Saying the methods labor used to gain political clout and the targets it sought among workers both flopped, former New York City Central Labor Council head Ed Ott urged unions to rethink both, long and hard.
In a keynote address Nov. 19 to the awards luncheon of the International Labor Communications Association, Ott warned that otherwise unions would be left behind by groups – particularly of immigrant workers – organizing outside labor’s structure.
Ott took over the New York City CLC several years ago when former head Brian McLaughlin, who was also a state legislator, was found guilty of misappropriating funds and sent to jail. After straightening out the problems McLaughlin left, Ott handed the council over to newly elected leadership.
During Ott’s tenure, three big groups of unorganized workers made great strides in New York: Taxi drivers, domestic workers and free lance writers. Ott’s proud his CLC worked with all three. But he’s even more interested in how they organized, who they organized and why they did it outside of the structure of the labor movement.
One big reason, Ott said in his hard-hitting speech, is that the labor movement in general spent its time these last several years working closely with the Democratic Party. And that relationship was like the song “Mercy,” he said: “He wants something on the side, and she wants to be seen in public holding hands.
“And they don’t want to be seen in public holding hands with us,” Ott said of the Democrats. The party turns to labor for money and ground troops but ignores labor’s causes, he declared.
Other union leaders have made the same point, but behind closed doors. AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka has, since the Nov. 2 Democratic electoral debacle, admitted it. But Trumka also ruefully says there are no Republicans to work with.
Ott said politics should take a back seat to organizing, and organizing in new ways. “The question for the House of Labor is where do we go from here?” Ott asked. Saying that so far labor has “played the cards you’re dealt…and we were dealt a bad hand,” he advocated looking to ways the new groups of workers organized themselves.
Those were three different methods, he added:
* The taxi drivers organized themselves through personal contact, especially at New York City’s airports, talking about working conditions and banding together on their
own to force the city’s taxicab firms to bargain with them – even without a contract. But they also shone the public light on their plight and exploitation and enlisted political allies. The firms had to bargain with the city’s politicians looking over their shoulder.
* The domestic workers turned to the state legislature, and, with union help, convinced lawmakers to approve a domestic workers’ bill of rights, virtually the only labor legislation to clear Albany this year.,
* The Freelance Writers organized their own union, mostly via the Internet. And that group’s leaders quickly determined that what the writers wanted and needed most was group health insurance and a method to ensure that employers would not welsh on paying for their work. The power of the group led to discounted insurance and forced publishers to sign written guarantees of payment.
All three efforts resulted in mass organization of workers and all three took place outside the established union structure, though with union aid and support. They were “the most-gratifying things that ever happened to me in my 42 years” in unions, Ott said
“Immigrants are not helpless…We need to side along with them, support them, nurture them , and find them. They will build the working class,” he declared. Such outside-the-box organizing, rather than politics, should be emphasized, Ott contended.
Allying solely with the Democrats didn’t work, he pointed out. Ott said that if labor was a corporation whose director came in and said “we spent $200 million” on a campaign – “And that’s low,” he added – and utterly failed, “He’d be shown the door.”
A shift from politics to organizing, especially private sector organizing, is especially important, Ott said, because the incoming congressional Republicans “will put the boot to us,” and because the majority of unionists are now in the public sector.
That’s not a knock on those teachers, Fire Fighters, sanitation workers and other public employees, he pointed out. But the imbalance – as high as 70% in New York City – is not good, he admitted.
“The big difference” between the two political parties “is that the Republicans have consistently said up front what they’ll do” to break unions “and they’ve done it. This is not the GOP of Bill Scranton and Nelson Rockefeller. This is a party of haters.”
The Democrats, however, mouth pro-worker words but don’t go to bat for labor, Ott said, recalling cases where the party abandoned labor’s causes going all the way back to labor law reform in the late 1970s. So unions can’t depend on them, either.
“There has to be a component of the labor movement that can step back and think what has to be done to organize the private sector,” Ott said. “Forty percent of construction workers in New York City are unemployed. If we don’t figure this out” about how to get them jobs and unionized “we will do so at our peril.”
###
