While thousands of union men and women in cities from New York to San Francisco expressed their opposition to a U.S. war against Iraq at rallies and vigils and through e-mails, petitions, phone calls and letters, the AFL CIO’s 54-member Executive Council continued its strict, self-imposed silence on President Bush’s relentless drive toward war.
Although AFL-CIO national leaders have criticized President Bush’s anti-union domestic policies, they have conspicuously refrained for nearly a year from even mentioning his “war against terrorism.” At the labor federation’s Executive Council meeting last August, among the many resolutions that were adopted, not even one statement had anything to say about the then national debate whether Congress should give the President a virtual blank check to wage a pre-emptive war against Iraq, with or without the approval of the United Nations.
The Council will not reconvene until Feb. 24, even though the country may be at war before then, with all the consequences and uncertainties that the war will inflict on working families, compounded by a faltering economy that has left more than eight million people without jobs. We have urged AFL-CIO President John Sweeney to call an emergency meeting of the Executive Council, but there is still no sign he will do so.
There has been a complete blackout of international news in the AFL CIO’s magazine, America@Work, and its weekly newsletter, Work in Progress. Not a word about the national debate over Iraq has appeared in the news reports of the federation’s two Web sites.
As though by unwritten agreement, the 54 Council members have steadfastly declined to give their personal views on whether the U.S. should go to war against Iraq or what to do about global terrorism. The only statement to surface was Sweeney’s testimony on Oct. 7 before a congressional committee, just two days before Congress voted on the war resolution. Although he expressed misgivings about President Bush’s rush to war, Sweeney’s statement received almost no publicity, not even in the AFL-CIO’s own publications and Web sites.
Despite the tight-lipped silence of national union leaders, the tide of opposition to war in Iraq is rising steadily. In Washington alone, 200,000 people, including contingents from local unions, gathered to denounce President Bush’s obsessive drive for “regime change.” Polls show that support for the war is declining, with no evidence that Saddam Hussein represents a direct threat to the American people. Can even die-hard Republicans say that when the U.S. military triumphs in Iraq, that this will bring peace and security to the Middle East or here at home?
Inevitably, questions are being raised about the AFL-CIO leaders’ puzzling behavior. How do they justify their silence? How can they pretend that a war in Iraq is of no concern to the nation’s working families? Why are they sitting on the sidelines when decisions are being made that can change the lives of Americans for generations?
By resolutely maintaining their silence, union leaders appear to be reassuring President Bush that they won’t oppose a pre-emptive, unilateral war on Iraq, and that whatever he does about the war against terrorism has their full approval. If that’s not true, they should speak up and say what they do believe.
It’s high time that AFL-CIO leaders leveled with the 13 million union members whom they are supposed to serve.
