Is disaffiliation left-wing?

Submitted by Anon on 7 April, 2007 - 10:58

By Rhodri Evans

Australia’s Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) has announced its intention to affiliate to the Australian Labor Party.

The leadership of the union — which organises federal and state government workers — asserts that they are affiliating in order to use the union’s vote within the ALP to make sure that Labor scraps the current conservative government’s anti-union WorkChoices legislation.

That is good. To make it reality, the union leadership will have to persuade the different sections of the union — which is, for most purposes, a loose federation — to affiliate to the ALP at state level. The ALP is right-wing and suffers from a decay of rank-and-file activism since the 1980s. But unlike Blair-Brown “New Labour”, it retains relative open and flexible structures, allowing large union input at various levels — if the unions mobilise to use it.

Winning the state-level affiliations may not be easy. There is understandable scepticism among the CPSU membership at a decision taken by a right-wing leadership at a union Council meeting with no prior widespread debate among the membership.

Members also know that whether a union is formally affiliated or not is a lesser question than whether it uses its industrial muscle for independent working-class interests.

The CPSU’s move, by a union whose leadership was already Laborite though unaffiliated, forms an instructive contrasting pair with what the Canadian Auto Workers did a year ago, in April 2006.

The CAW has long been one of Canada’s more left-wing unions. On 21 April 2006 it voted to leave the New Democratic Party (NDP), Canada’s union-based labour party, to which it had been affiliated since the NDP was founded in 1961 from a merger of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF, an agrarian socialist party) and the Canadian Labour Congress (equivalent of the TUC).

CAW statements claimed that the union had shifted from tepid social democracy and narrow electoralism towards “movement politics.” But in fact the trigger for quitting was that the Ontario NDP had expelled CAW leader Buzz Hargrove - for backing the Liberals, the softer-line of Canada’s two big bourgeois parties, in the 2006 federal election.

Hargrove had greeted Liberal leader Paul Martin to the the platform at the CAW convention, during the election campaign, demonstratively hugged him, and given him a CAW jacket.

Under Hargrove’s leadership, CAW had also supported Liberal candidates who were car company bosses - Belinda Stronach of Magna and a Toyota executive, both representatives of notoriously anti-union companies.

Hargrove got away with it all because most CAW activists were disillusioned with the NDP, and with “official” politics in general. The union had set up “Union in Politics Committees” in September 2004, but they had been largely dormant, although local CAW activists play impressive roles in specific campaigns such as those around health care.

So, right-wing though both the ALP and NDP are, affiliation does not make the CPSU more right-wing, and disaffiliation does not make the CAW more left-wing.

In fact, the CPSU affiliation decision, made by right-wing bureaucrats for their own reasons, will at least open up possibilities for working-class reassertion in politics; the CAW disaffiliation, though “spun” as left-wing, has done the opposite.

Of course, it all depends on whether rank and file CPSU activists can use the new possibilities — whether, for example, they can get good union activists, committed to working-class interests, elected as union delegates to ALP conferences at the various levels; and whether they can use a political fight to react back into the union, strengthening the left there.

• More on CPSU: www.workersliberty.org/node/8034

Information on CAW drawn from:
www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet027.html

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