Unions increasing anti-war presence

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Labor increases presence in anti-war movement

by Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, January 16, 2003

As tens of thousands of anti-war activists head to
San Francisco for a high-profile protest Saturday,
organizers are thrilled that the march down Market
Street will include representatives from more than 50
Bay Area labor unions, twice as many as attended
October’s anti-war rally down the city’s main drag.
Saturday’s rallies in San Francisco, Washington and
other cities around the nation come a week after 100
labor leaders, including several from the Bay Area
met in Chicago to plan how to sway their
memberships toward opposing a possible war with
Iraq and assume a bigger role in the anti-war effort.
So labor union banners will be a highly visible
presence at Saturday’s march and rally afterward at
the Civic Center. The event is expected to draw at
least as many people as attended the Oct. 26 rally,
which police estimated at 42,000 and organizers
placed at 80,000.
Labor’s support is a boon to peace activists, who
know that the image of longshoremen and nurses
speaking out against a possible war in Iraq puts a
“real people” face on their message. It would run
counter to the Vietnam-era conflict of hard hat vs.
hippie, which splintered the progressive community’s
opposition to the war and reflected a larger divide in
the country.
Plus, given the potential of reaching the nation’s 14
million union members, including an estimated
558,000 in the Bay Area, anti-war activists could
broaden their support.
BOOST TO ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT
“It definitely helps to mainstream the movement,”
said Jason Mark, an organizer with Global Exchange
in San Francisco, one of the nation’s biggest anti-war
groups.
“It shows people that it’s not just a bunch of people in
dreadlocks out there,” Mark said. “Blue-collar people
are seen as having a lot of salt-of-the-earth wisdom
and legitimacy. They’re not the usual suspects when
it comes to peace and justice issues.”
However, Hoover Institution research fellow Joseph
McNamara doubts how much impact labor, or any
group, will have on the Bush administration’s policy
toward Iraq.
“No demonstration in San Francisco is going to have
the slightest amount of impact on the
administration’s policy,” McNamara said. As for
labor’s influence on people debating their own
position on Iraq, McNamara said, “it all depends. If
the person watching this on television is anti-union,
then it won’t matter much.”
FOREIGN POLICY ISSUE
Some rank-and-file union members wonder if their
union should take any position in what they perceive
as a foreign policy issue.
In an October poll of its 85,000 Northern California
members, the Service Employees International Union
found that a little over half the respondents wondered
if the union should take a stand against the war.
“It told us that we haven’t done a good enough job
explaining to people how this war would affect them,”
said SEIU Local 250 president Sal Roselli, whose
leadership endorsed Saturday’s rally and passed a
resolution opposing unilateral U.S. action against
Iraq. This week, the union’s staff met to plan how to
discuss a war’s implications with its membership.
UNIONS’ REASONS
In general, union leaders are urging their
memberships to oppose the Bush administration’s
position on war with Iraq for the same general
reasons.
If the war costs the federal government $200 billion,
the figure cited in some administration estimates,
that could mean less federal spending on
unemployment benefits, health care and other areas
that affect working class families, said Dave Welsh, a
retired Bay Area letter carrier who is working with
labor groups at Saturday’s rally on behalf of
International ANSWER, the group coordinating
protests on both coasts.
“Plus, every union family knows somebody in the
military,” said Bob Muehlenkamp, a former
organizing director of the Teamsters union who
organized U.S. Labor Against the War, the meeting
of 100 union representatives last Saturday in
Chicago. “Their children will be the ones fighting this
war.”
Some blue-collar workers, however, will be tough to
recruit.
“The people I worked with are pretty much behind
George Bush,” said Bob Stine, who retired as lead
mechanic for United Airlines in December and is now
a spokesman for Local Lodge 1781 of the
International Airline Mechanics, with 1,300 Bay Area
members. The local in Burlingame has not taken an
official position on the war.
Stine added, however, that many mechanics are
concerned that a war would further depress the
commercial airline industry, which would affect their
jobs.
ANTI-BUSH POLITICS
Some critics say labor’s new high-profile position on
Iraq is little more than anti-Bush politics at work.
Labor leaders agree that Bush, who had practically
no labor support during his presidential campaign
didn’t make any blue-collar friends when he invoked
the federal Taft-Hartley Act in October to reopen
West Coast ports where longshore workers were
locked out. Union leaders said the move gave port
operators leverage in their dispute.
Still, Welsh and others say union opposition is about
the war, not politics, even though some rank-and-file
will march Saturday behind a banner reading, “Stop
Bush’s war on working people here and abroad.”
“While there are a lot of sincere feelings among the
unions, there’s a partisan aspect to this, too,” said
the Hoover Institution’s McNamara. “It’s no secret
that most unions strongly support Democrats.”
To Barbara Williams, opposing the war is a health
care issue. The Santa Cruz nurse and California
Nurses Association leader plans to march Saturday
to show how the war would put an additional stress
on the nation’s hospitals.
“If there’s retaliation, (our hospitals) are totally
unprepared to deal with that,” said Williams, 57, who
hasn’t protested a military action since the Vietnam
War. “I know. I work in the emergency room every
day.”