"NEVER BEFORE IN OUR HISTORY has there been such a passionate and enormous popular resistance to a current war. But one voice is missing - the loud clear voice of labor." The absence of that voice was all the more tragic because it may be the decisive one for tipping the peace.
For the first few years of America's war, Vietnam hardly figured at all in trade union conferences, but was confined to the college campuses. But In 1967 when Martin Luther King delivered the above speech to the National Labor Leadership for Peace in front of an audience composed of over 500 union leaders from across the country, things were about to change.
The bombing of North Vietnam was the tuming point for many. But some voices were beginning to connect US involvement in Vietnam with the war at home.
As far back as 1962, William Ryan of the International Machinists Union expressed the feelings of his members in front of a Senate House subcommittee on the US role in Vietnam; "We have often wondered if at the very bottom of the vicious influence working against peace is the profit motive of private munitions and armament manufacturers.'
The press was full of compelling stories of how war kept down unemployment. Total defence expenditure during the Vietnam War was nine percent of gross national product. But gradually the realisation started to creep in that workers living standards were going down, and that the war lay at the root of inflation.
In 1965, the first teach-in took place at the University of Michigan. The protests also began in 1965 with the first national! demonstration against the war; the 25,000 strong March on Washington to
End the War. Even though! many Karen O'Toole looks at the way in which the mass movement in the USA against the Vietnam War gained strength from a late turn to the trade unions. trade unionists took part as individuals, as yet no union had officially associated itself with the antiwar movement. The leadership was way behind its members.
The first union to come out officially against the war was local 1199, Drug and Hospital Employees Union - representing just 25,000 members, who at the beginning of 1965 sent a telegram to President Johnson urging a negotiated settlement.
Then in May of the same year the Negro American Labor Council unanimously adopted a 'world peace' resolution, quickly followed by the Missouri branch of the Teamsters union, which carried a soft criticism of US foreign policy in South East Asia, arguing that even though they wished to see the triumph of freedom over communism, the 'containment of communism' policy was no longer valid since the actions of the US was delivering the Vietnamese into the hands of the communists.
But these early voices of opposition to US imperialism were drowned out by the din of the main union federation, the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO (US equivalent of the TUC). They applauded the Johnson administration's extension of the war into North Vietnam. Poodles Using the familiar rhetoric we hear today from Bush, Blair and the poodles, AFLCIO leader George Meany - who at the end of his career proudly boasted that he "never walked a picket line" - said:
*In South Vietnam we are there because we have an obligation to be there. We made a commitment to help the people defend their freedom.'
In spite of this, many independent unions, and a number of AFL-CIO affiliates were calling for an end to war, and began to address rallies on the campuses.
The head of the United Auto Workers addressed a rally of 3000 at the University
of Michigan. Even though massive pressure was brought on any union which took an antiwar stance, i the pressure from below pushed the unions into action.
At the end of November 1965 Local 1199 Drug and Hospital Workers Ad Hoc Committee on Vietnam placed an advertisement in the New York Times. Paid for by voluntary contributions of one dollar each by 1,268 named members of the union, it carried an appeal to the President the United States; 'Negotiate - Dont: Escalate The War In Vietnam.'
The turn towards an antiwar stance in this union was easier than for some because it had a history of going beyond the usual bread and butter' issues over pay. It had played a leading role in the Civil! Rights Movement in the South and had! mobilised many of its members in! demonstrations in Birmingham, Selma: and Montgomery. It had organised and successfully improved the conditions of underpaid black and Puerto Rican hospital workers, when other unions barred them from membership.
The union's programme of educational and cultural activities had increased the political level of the membership: they! understood that 'more guns meant less butter."
To say there was tension between student protesters and the pro-war union leadership is an understatement. The AFL-CIO's San Francisco convention was directed towards pulling the federation behind the Johnson administration.
George Meany delivered no less than! four speeches in favour of the war. Student observers from the University of! California at Berkeley were verbally attacked by one union leader after anoth er, and told to 'Go to Russia and debate', 'get a haircut'. Meany's contribution to this was; Will the sergeant of arms clear these kookies out of the gallery.
Yet the debate exposed the tension between the union leadership in the convention hall and their rank and file outside. This fissure became more and more apparent as the war progressed, the antiwar movement developed and workers' living standards continued to be attacked.
The delegates in the convention hall were appointed, not elected, but many workers were growing uneasy that the union leadership was alienating young people who could be important allies.
In 1967 efforts were made to form a trade union anti-war block in the form of a program for the American Labor Movement. Though it concentrated on championing reforms for racial equality, civil liberties and the war against poverty, and said nothing about the war directly, it strengthened the resolve of antiwar activists to oppose the AFL-CIO and set up antiwar committees, which they did with amazing speed and success.
The Wall Street Joumal commented;
*Few American groups have given Mr Johnson such a forever yours endorsement in Vietnam as has the AFL-CIO. Yet not all organised labor is united in backing the war; that is what the dissident union! chieftains want the public to understand.
"If this develops further, it could put a serious crimp in the administration's efforts to continue to sell the war to the American people."
This took the antiwar movement to ! new heights but with new tensions between the increasingly radicalised students who were storming the Pentagon, and the older and moderate antiwar trade union bureaucrats whose main political affiliation was to the Democratic Party. These were the same leaders who had sold out the rank and file over years of negotiations over pay.
This time union members responded by electing the equivalent of the 'awkward squad; a new generation of trade union leaders who at least recognised the beginnings of rebellion in their own ranks. Strikes For their part, students responded by redoubling their efforts to build a wider Standard Oil, General Electric, General Motors and later the post.
These strikes began to involve cooperation between students and workers. In early 1969 a nationwide walkout of oil workers demanding increases in wages and pensions was declared illegal by the high court. The union sent out a call for solidarity, which was met by students and teachers from San Francisco State College.
The students joined oil workers on the picket lines, distributed leaflets, held campus meetings across universities. They cut through any divisions: "Alone the student movement can raise hell. Together with the working class it can raze governments."
Just as oil workers were about to announce plans for an international boycott the company caved in, met the union's wage demand, and reinstated sacked strikers. The pattern of antiwar campus activity in solidarity with workers spread further into a strike at General Electric and helped to cement the antiwar movement with the labour movement.
Unions placed advertisements in national newspapers; Peace can unite America to wage war against poverty, hunger, ignorance and disease:
On the 15th October 1969 the greatest antiwar protest in history brought out hundreds of thousands of trade unionists alongside millions of others. Demonstrations were held outside hospitals, nursing homes, colleges and of course, on the streets.
The Vietnam war came to an end in January 1973. It was by the combined actions of the North Vietnamese, essentially a peasant army against an invader, and the antiwar movement in the US which finally brought the war to an end.
But the coalition of forces of workers and students played the key role in the US. This was no small defeat for US imperialism. For the next thirty years it was unable to wage unilateral war against another country.
Today, imperialist expansion can only be settled two ways; either the US redraws the boundaries of the Middle East through force, from above, or we force