Kennedy’s Sins Against Labor
By STEVE EARLY, Counterpunch
I was raised, like most Irish-Catholics, not to speak ill of the dead—at least while the wake is still underway. Of course, the affliction known as “Irish Alzheimers” exerts a powerful tug in the opposite direction. Forgetting everything except the grudges keeps you focused on those parts of a departed politician’s legacy that won’t be highlighted from the pulpit or, in Ted Kennedy’s case, in fulsome obituaries run as front-page news stories, op-ed pieces, editorials, and internet encomia throughout the nation.
Here’s my own view of the senator. I was not a fan of Ted when he was alive and expressed this dissenting opinion, on several occasions, in our local rag, The Boston Globe, after Kennedy’s reccurring lapses as a friend of the working class became too painful to ignore. Ted Kennedy was not on labor’s side when key public policy shifts were engineered that disastrously weakened and marginalized American unions. After helping to deliver these legislative hammer blows, Ted was quick to offer his hand to a labor movement now lying flat on its back. But forms of assistance like boosting the minimum wage, helping immigrants, securing local defense plant jobs, or co-sponsoring the Employee Free Choice Act have hardly compensated for the ravages of “neoliberalism” that Kennedy aided and abetted. In the case of EFCA, any fundamental repair of federal labor law gets more unlikely every day, even if our vacant Senate seat gets filled sooner, rather than later.
Of course, all who speak officially for “labor” would strongly disagree with this assessment. They are busy heaping praise on our fallen champion, as labor’s best friend ever. Compared to centrist Democrats who are quick to abandon workers at the drop of a campaign donation, Ted did appear to be the true “liberal lion” and patron of union causes everywhere. But here’s what I remember about the same Ted Kennedy, who sided with corporate America in its late 1970s drive for deregulation, who was MIA during the biggest anti-concession battle of the 1980s, who pushed trade liberalization in the 1990s, and who settled short on health care reform for the last several decades. (By the usual count at Fenway Park, it’s three strikes and you’re out. Being a Kennedy, Ted always got an extra pitch—so, in the box score below, the strikes against him number four.)
An Architect of Deregulation
In several key industries—trucking, the airlines, and telecom–nothing has undermined union membership and bargaining power more than de-regulation. Kennedy embraced de-regulation with gusto and, despite his other differences with Jimmy Carter thirty years ago, helped ram through industry restructuring harmful to hundreds of thousands of workers and their union contracts. By 1985, as Kim Moody describes in U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition, the number of workers covered by the Teamsters’ biggest trucking contract had been halved. Today, fewer than 100,000 work under the National Master Freight Agreement (NMFA)—down from 450,000 before Carter and Kennedy transformed the role of the Interstate Commerce Commission and codified that regulatory change via the Motor Carrier Act of 1980. The business-backed policy agenda “that would become known as ‘Reaganomics’ or more generally as neoliberalism,” had its roots in the Carter Administration, Moody points out. Two of its key objectives were deregulation and free trade; the first having been accomplished under Carter, the second was pursued with equal fervor and further Kennedy legislative vigor after Clinton became president.
A No-Show At NYNEX
Twenty years ago this month, 60,000 telephone workers in New York and New England began a bruising tussle with our regional phone company, then known as NYNEX. Two workers died, directly or indirectly, as a result of this strike. Hundreds were arrested, fired, or suspended (discipline that was, in some cases, later modified or reversed). Rallies of up to 15,000 people filled the streets of Boston, as IBEW and CWA members demanded “Health Care For All, Not Health Cuts At NYNEX,” and explicitly tied their fight against give-backs to political agitation for national health insurance. To break the strike, management cut off medical coverage for all strikers and their families.
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