Rush to compromise: labor hits the canvas for Clinton - Cover Story

Progressive, The, June, 1993 by Laura McClure

Another big organizing job is in store for unions that want to stop NAFTA. While many unions are still steadfastly opposed to approval of the Agreement as it has been negotiated, the AFL-CIO seems to have backed off its previous insistence that the pact be renegotiated to insure that labor and environmental standards are not compromised. At the annual February gathering of the AFL-CIO Executive Council in Bal Harbour, Florida, Kirkland said he viewed renegotiation of the treaty or the negotiation of side agreements (which Clinton has advocated) as a semantic issue he doesn't want to "quibble about" - "negotiations or side negotiations or additional agreements, or whatever you call it."

This was bad news for the many grassroots groups and unions that continue to organize for a complete renegotiation of NAFTA. Says Teamster Vice President Bill Urman: "We don't see side agreements as taking care of the fundamental flaws in NAFTA. We're looking at tens of thousands of trucking jobs that are quite likely going to be lost." NAFTA would allow Mexican companies to truck their goods into and around the United States, using drivers paid a small fraction of what U.S. drivers make.

Organized labor is divided on another top legislative priority: health-care reform. For years, labor has been split into two camps. Many big industrial and service unions supported a Canadian-style single-payer plan (which eliminates the private insurance industry and makes the Government the universal insurer), while construction unions and others backed plans that maintained continued employerbased, private health insurance.

AFL-CIO spokesman David Saltz insists that rift is over now: "Single-payer versus managed competition is not the criterion anymore within labor. It's about three basic principles: cost containment, universal coverage, and quality care. Tbose are the three basic principles that we feel any solution has to be based on."

But such unions as the Teamsters, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, and the Communications Workers of America don't see the battle for single-payer being over at all. In fact, says the Teamsters' Bill Urman, his union has just collected 200,000 "Teamstergrams" from members urging Clinton to support a single-payer health-care plan. The messages also call for labor-law reform and a renegotiated free-trade agreement.

Urman says he understands how some unions and the AFL-CIO are inclined to look for compromise with Clinton: "There's been such a drought on labor's side for so long," he says. "Some compromises have been made just to try and get something in return. And to a certain extent, I think that's unfortunate."

Lifelong political and union activist Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers observes, "I've never in my life in the labor movement seen people want to conform like they do today."