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:: Saturday, March 01, 2003 ::

The Village Voice: Labor's 'No' to War by Tom Robbins
In the afternoon of May 8, 1970, some 200 construction workers attacked a Wall Street rally against the Vietnam War. It became one of the searing images of the nation's wrenching internal debate on the conflict and helped draw a dividing line right through the middle of millions of American living rooms: flag-carrying hardhats pummeling longhaired protesters.

President Nixon was so pleased with events that he named then New York City building trades leader Peter Brennan, who egged on the workers, as his labor secretary.

Organized labor, with only a handful of exceptions, was squarely in the pro-war camp then. Cigar-chomping AFL-CIO chief George Meany led the charge. Years later, after 58,000 body bags had come back from Indochina, Meany had second thoughts. "If I had known then what I know now, I would have acted differently about the war," he told an interviewer not long before he died in 1980.

That quote was included in a letter sent to current AFL-CIO president John Sweeney last October by Gene Bruskin, who now heads the AFL-CIO's food and allied services division. Bruskin is one of the leaders of an effort to get American unions to take a dramatically different stand on the looming war in Iraq. The effort has already borne remarkable results.

Leaders of more than 400 labor organizations, representing 4.5 million union members, have signed on to a tough resolution condemning the Bush administration's push toward war. The statement is an expression of the deepest mistrust about the administration's central claims.

posted 12:25 AM :: reference link :: 0 comments ::

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