by Mike McCallister
One of the biggest delegations to the Labor Party founding convention came from one of the country’s smaller cities: Madison, Wisconsin. The South-Central Wisconsin chapter organized 45 people to come to Cleveland, many riding the chartered bus.
Since November 1995, Madison-area Labor Party Advocates won the endorsement of 15 local unions, along with the area’s central labor body. Thus nearly every delegate was a union member, and about half were representing their locals. Politically, our delegation was diverse, though mostly to the left of the LPA leadership. We arrived with high hopes and a certainty that we were making history. We left with a realization of the hard task we face in building a real party of the working class.
One could tell the minute you walked into the convention hall that the primary endorsing unions, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, United Electrical Workers and International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, were determined to keep control of the weekend’s events. Delegates from those (and other endorsing) internationals were seated at the front of the hall. The second-class endorsing locals were in the middle and the untouchable chapter delegates were at the back.
This tight control was emphasized again in the discussion over convention rules. In his only session as convention chair, Bob Clark, vice-president of the UE, spent much of his time ruling motions out of order. Clark’s heavyhandedness was perhaps even too much for the leadership itself, as he disappeared from the chair for the rest of the convention.
Delegates were greeted Friday morning by newspaper headlines which drove home one of the main reasons we had assembled. Cleveland Mayor Michael White, a liberal Democrat elected with labor support, was caught complaining about the state’s public-employee collective bargaining law. Because the city has failed to bargain a contract with the city’s police and firefighters for over two years, White urged the state legislature to repeal the statute, which he said was stacked in the unions’ favor. Later that day, virtually the entire convention moved down to demonstrate at City Hall, later marching through the streets of downtown Cleveland, chanting "We want the mayor—out!"
Most of the time, however, delegates worked at the mundane though historic tasks of adopting the party’s constitution and platform. There were three major fights and innumerable smaller battles, as the delegates discussed virtually every paragraph of the constitution drafted by a committee organized by the leading unions. While important language placing the Labor Party on the side of workers around the globe was adopted from a floor motion, the internationals vetoed anything that the drafting committee didn’t approve.
While the high-profile fights over electoral strategy and the platform drew most of the attention from convention observers, two organizational points stood out. From the perspective of the chapters, where most of the grunt work of organizing the party is carried out, these may have been at least as important. The composition of the National Council, the party’s leadership body, keeps the affiliated internationals firmly in the saddle for the time being. The constitution as adopted would have created a council consisting almost exclusively of those internationals. The interim plan agreed to at the convention puts the emphasis on organizing, both inside the unions (who have to recruit 10% of their members to the party) and in party organizations (locals, states, or regional organizations with over 1000 members get a seat on the council). Chapters will get a single vote on the interim council, divided five ways, after a convention of chapters is called, probably next year.
The other point which might have significantly hampered organizing were the proposed affiliation fees for local unions. While the party needs money to be a viable force on the political terrain, the already difficult political task of convincing mid-sized locals to be a part of this party would have been considerably harder if a $500 fee (for locals bigger than 100 members) went with it. After many protests from the floor, and an additional hearing, the committee agreed to lower the fees. Individual dues remain at $20 per year, with the unemployed, retired, and those earning less than $10 per hour getting in at half price.
As expected, electoral strategy was the central debate. LPA founder Tony Mazzocchi of OCAW had been saying for months that the Labor Party would not run candidates "initially." It was the convention’s job to define what "initially" meant. Various forces attempted to launch the discussion in the context of the Constitutional debate, but a separate document delaying electoral action till the next convention in two years, adopted by both the constitution and platform committees finally arrived Saturday morning. This discussion marked the first time the united front of OCAW, UE and ILWU broke down, with the longshore workers leaving local areas the option to run candidates in the intervening period.
For a moment there, it looked as if the ILWU amendments would not even reach the floor. Debate had been closed while the motions were being distributed to the delegates. A subsequent request for a roll-call vote on the committee document allowed OCAW President Bob Wages to declare a lunch break to broker a deal before all hell broke loose. After lunch, language requiring the LP to recruit "hundreds of thousands" of workers to the party before taking the electoral field was deleted from the committee document, and another hour of debate on the ILWU amendments was permitted. The local option language was then defeated, and the original motion passed.
The convention displayed many of the strengths, and more than a few of the weaknesses of the US labor movement. The delegates’ quick response to the mayor’s challenge surprised even the bureaucrats of the local labor council who called the action, but those same delegates by a substantial majority ruled out any Labor Party electoral challenge to White, or any other politician who sells labor out, for the next two years. If the AFL-CIO would ever adopt the platform presented by this Labor Party, it would mark a sharp left turn for the labor movement. Yet the party has virtually no foreign policy, aside from promoting higher labor standards in countries the US has trade agreements with.
While there was a lot of disappointment expressed on the bus ride home to Madison, many of us believe that there is nothing wrong with this party that more organizing can’t solve. Our task is to bring more workers, union or not, to our banner.