Let’s Find Real Pro-Worker Candidate

Tony Mazzocchi, veteran union leader and longtime Democrat, talks and writes like an old-fashioned Populist when he furiously charges that giant corporations really call the shots for the Democratic and Republican parties these days.

“The bosses have two parties. Working people should have at least one,” declares the fiery secretary-treasurer of the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers.

It will take a few years to get the Labor Party he wants, Mazzocchi says, so in the meantime he and his supporters have formed Labor Party Advocates, an interim organization that will not run or endorse political candidates but “will agitate for a new economic, social and political agenda for working people.”

Mazzocchi says he is getting an “enthusiastic response” to his call for a Labor Party, but few top union leaders think much of his idea. AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland dismisses the idea as “a formula for wandering in the political wilderness.”

Kirkland isn’t much happier with the Democratic Party leaders than Mazzocchi. The AFL-CIO president told Washington Post columnist David Broder that he does not want a confrontation with the Democratic leadership.

But he says “the vagueness of the Democratic message” causes many working families “to question if it really makes a difference” who gets elected. “I would go a step further and say that is why they are losing at the national level.”

Mazzocchi agrees, saying widespread dissatisfaction with both parties is exactly why a Labor Party is needed.

However, his proposal isn’t going to fly any time soon, if ever. But certainly, as some union leaders suggest, it makes sense for organized labor to formally develop its own, clear progressive agenda and then ask presidential hopefuls to respond to that agenda.

The AFL-CIO would evaluate the responses, poll the 14.5 million members of its affiliated unions, then try to reach a consensus on one candidate they could endorse before the Democratic primaries next year.

The relatively few advocates of a Labor Party and those who say it is unrealistic all agree on the urgent need for Congress to pay more attention to poor and middle-class workers.

Congress ought to give us national health insurance, decent unemployment and workers’ compensation systems, a fair tax structure, maternity leave and other programs that should be on labor’s agenda to be submitted to the candidates.

It would of course include proposals for labor law reform, especially a bill prohibiting the legal trick that allows employers to “permanently replace” strikers despite an unequivocal law that also says workers cannot be fired or otherwise punished for exercising their right to strike in our free society.

The first and only time the labor federation made a pre-primary endorsement was in 1984, for Walter F. Mondale. That was the major reason why Mondale won his party’s nomination, and the fact that he lost to Ronald Reagan was not due to labor’s early endorsement, as some critics claim.

Mondale was just not as attractive a candidate as Reagan was.

Neither the unions nor the Democratic Party itself should ignore surveys made by the Labor Institute showing broad rank-and-file unhappiness with both major parties and significant support for creation of a Labor Party.

The institute surveys are yet another indication of the justifiable frustration caused by the Republicanization of many top Democratic Party leaders.

If unions, the single strongest force within the Democratic Party, work to mobilize their own members and get the Democrats to avoid copying conservative GOP policies, there would be a vast difference between the two parties. That could reduce the push for a Labor Party, and we might once again have a compassionate, progressive President in the White House.

Those conservative Democrats are coming under increasing criticism from many in the old alliance of liberals, labor and minority groups that once was the foundation of Democratic power.

To publicly display their unhappiness with Republicans and those Democrats who mimic the anti-labor, conservative GOP positions, officers of the AFL-CIO are rallying their allies and their own members for a massive march on Washington Aug. 31. It is called Solidarity Day II. Solidarity Day a decade ago attracted several hundred thousand marchers to protest President Reagan’s economic policies and cuts in longstanding social programs.

The march on Washington over the Labor Day weekend is expected to attract even larger numbers, and it could help reunite liberals, labor and minority groups behind common-sense goals.

They don’t differ on the fact that low- and middle-income families generally have been badly hurt by the “voodoo economics” of former President Reagan and President Bush. Incidentally, it was Bush himself who coined the phrase when he fought Reagan for the presidential nomination in 1980.

It refers partly to that false premise that if the taxes of the rich are reduced, they will use their additional wealth to create more jobs and their money will trickle down to the rest of us.

The trickle-down theory neatly defines voodoo economics as practiced by Reagan and now by Bush.

Liberal, moderate and conservative Democrats will continue to fight each other as they always have. But so many people have been hurt by the perverse notion that all of us are helped by helping the rich get richer that something must be done to change course.

Labor could do that by laying out a progressive agenda and then putting its still substantial political strength behind a candidate who would show more concern for the average American than for the rich and powerful.