“Interfering with our country’s foreign policy? Sure as hell are!…
…That’s our job. That’s our privilege. That’s our right. And that’s our duty.” These are the words of Harry Bridges, founding president of the International Longshore Workers’ Union (ILWU) which represents longshore workers on the West Coast of the US. He had been asked about the ILWU’s support and leadership of work stoppages in the late 1930s. First, San Francisco dockworkers had refused to load food onto an Italian ship after fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia. A few years later, ILWU workers would refuse to load scrap metal onto a Japanese ship after Japanese imperialist aggression on China. Skirting the limits of what was legal under their union contracts, they joined thousands of Chinese American community members on the picket lines, facing not just police repression, but also employers and federal arbitrators weaponizing labor law against them. They were also met with disapproval from none other than President FDR, often hailed as an ally of organized labor, for “interfering in the good diplomatic relationships between two nations”.
By 1940, FDR himself would order an embargo on scrap iron exports to Japan. Looking back on these struggles 30 years later, Bridges would say, “Why, that’s what unions are for, to help make foreign policy in the interest of the majority of people in this country and other countries.” [1]
This outlook towards what unions are meant for may seem strange today. It’s hard to imagine such militant labor actions being carried out on US soil in solidarity with victims of imperialist aggression abroad. Unions in the US just don’t do these things any more. They do try and influence policymaking, but predominantly through lobbying in electoral campaigns and elected politicians – and they pour a LOT into that. In the last decade, the seven biggest US labor unions spent a combined $1.9 trillion on such lobbying efforts, compared to just over $150 million (0.8% of their revenue, or $1.60 per member per year) on strike benefits. [2] The results of such massive spending have not been particularly impressive either. But regardless, this is very different from what the ILWU was doing to “interfere in policy” – they were using their power in the workplace, and taking on the bosses, the state, and labor law, to take a stand on a broader socio-political issue.
We should briefly note here, given the informal taboo on any kind of political involvement among a lot of international workers in our unit, that F1/J1 visa status does not prohibit political speech (though progressive political speech is increasingly being criminalized for draconian reasons). What is prohibited is participation in election campaigns, lobbying, and the like. For members of our union, unless you donate to CWA’s Political Action Fund, you are not participating in this kind of “political activity” in your capacity as a union member.
The kind of anti-war, anti-imperialist and anti-fascist labor unionism exemplified by the ILWU is almost non-existent today, even as we are nearly 1,000 days into a US-backed genocide in Palestine, even as the US bombs Iran and Lebanon, even as they strangle Cuba with a brutal economic blockade and steal Venezuela’s oil at gunpoint. Despite popular support for the US’ warmongering and for US backing of Israel being at a historic low, labor remains on the periphery of the anti-war and Palestine solidarity movements. In fact, many of them have supported US-led imperialism. In 2024, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) on the East Coast of the US went on strike for a better contract, specifically exempting weapons shipments. After US aggression in Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Maduro, US maritime workers called for a mandate that Venezuelan oil be carried on US vessels, in the name of “national security”. In Long Island as well, developing anti-war coalitions largely lack union or organized working-class involvement, despite weapons shipping centers in our backyards at places like JFK Airport.
This lack of solidarity goes hand-in-hand with the overall weakness of the US labor movement. Unionization rates in the US workforce are at a historic low point in nearly a hundred years. Roughly 10% of US workers are unionized, and in the private sector, that figure is under 6%. Labor has been impotent in fighting the fascist attacks of the Trump administration, and has in many cases accommodated it. These weaknesses, when compared with the relative strength and militancy of labor in the 1930s, are closely correlated – they are the result of a long trajectory of unions attempting to compromise with, and eventually capitulating to, ruling class attacks.
Bread-and-Butter Issues, Principles, and Long-Term Interests
What are unions for, then? They are often presented as organizations that stand for the economic interests of workers – wages, working hours and other workplace protections, benefits, etc. We, as wage-workers, sell our labor power to employers, and unions negotiate the terms of the sale. To an extent, these are indeed a primary focus of unions. But should this entail making these issues (“bread-and-butter” issues) the sole focus of union work, subordinating workers’ struggles inside and outside of the workplace to the negotiation and implementation of contracts?
This belief has been the dominant trend in US unions for most of their history. And US organized labor has reflected the interests, not of the masses of workers, but of a small, privileged stratum of union officials and bureaucrats distanced from the workplace. William Z. Foster, long-time labor organizer and communist, noted nearly one hundred years ago that existing AFL unions were dominated by a labor bureaucracy, who acted to monopolize control of union resources, suppress union democracy by a variety of means (rigging elections, stealing votes, and even using connections to the criminal underworld), suppressed workers’ militancy, and turned unions into their tools to accumulate privileges through collaboration with employers and the political establishment. [3]
Alongside this “business unionism”, another tendency has emerged since the 1980s, described by Joe Burns as “labor liberalism”. [4] The old-time labor bureaucrats emerged from workplace struggles, only to eventually abandon them for cushy salaries and social status. In the recent decades, however, unions have recruited legions of staffers from white-collar and professional strata, whose expertise is not in workplace struggles but in understanding and influencing courts, politicians and the NLRB. Nowadays, US unions employ well over 100,000 paid staffers who are not part of elected leadership. As a result, their methods have become more focused on lobbying elected officials (primarily Democrats) to pass progressive legislation, and their tactics rely far more on pressure campaigns, one-day publicity strikes, and choreographed campaigns – placing the staffers and their expertise at the forefront, rather than rank-and-file workers. Again, workers’ militancy is shunned in favor of “optics” and the relations of union officials with the ruling class. Class collaboration ties labor liberalism to the seemingly different approach of business unionism.
