Unions March on Detroit!

By NAT WEINSTEIN

DETROIT - Action! Motown '97 was a two-day event that attracted tens of thousands of trade unionists from many parts of the country.

The largest contingents were from Detroit and the surrounding industrial towns. In addition to the locked-out Detroit newspaper workers, auto workers and Teamsters were especially numerous in the mass march that wound through downtown on Saturday, June 21, and at the rally that followed.

Among the speakers at the rally were AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney and Secretary Treasurer Richard Trumka, and Teamster President Ronald Carey.

The first day of Action! Motown '97, Friday, started with officially approved actions"prayer vigils" in the daytime and a "teach-in" attended by over 1000 strikers and supporters in the evening.

However, an independently organized group of rank-and-file activists, the Action Coalition of Strikers and Supporters (ACOSS), had other plans. They hoped to mobilize enough picket line reinforcements from those arriving on Friday to block scab delivery trucks from distributing the next day's scab newspapers.

The strike activists distributed thousands of leaflets during the day's events inviting those who had come to Detroit in solidarity with striking newspaper unionists to join a picket line after the teach-in had ended Friday evening.

The picket line was held in Sterling Heights, a suburb where Detroit Newspapers Inc. has a printing plant. But the plans of ACOSS to get hundreds of reinforcements, which were needed to shut the plant down, were scuttled by the "pro-union" ruling issued by an NLRB judge. (See accompanying story.) Only a few hundred pickets showed up.

According to people involved in the plans for that action, they had hoped that even a near-successful plant shutdown during a hoped-for dramatic confrontation between pickets and cops would spark more massive picketing to shut down scab newspapers the next day.

They had hoped that a successful plant shutdown on Saturday might inspire supporters from the Detroit region to stay over to at least keep it closed long enough to break through the virtually complete blackout of news of the national labor March on Detroit.

Union tops stonewalled action

They understood that such a course of events would be possible, however, only if the AFL-CIO had made a serious effort to mobilize a massive national turnout.

But it was clear many weeks ago that the federation's bureaucratic hierarchy had done next to nothing to mobilize what could and should have been one of the biggest labor marches in U.S. history.

Socialist Action has received quite a few reports from around the country from rank-and-file unionists who first read the AFL-CIO letter in our March 1997 issue and in other left publications that published it soon afterward.

The typical response received by those readers to inquiries they made to their own unions, or to the Central Labor Councils in their cities, or to the national AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C., was evidence of bureaucratic double-dealing.

Our readers reported that the response they got to their requests for information on the officially sponsored labor March on Detroit was: "What letter? What march? Why, I thought that the newspaper strike in Detroit was over!"

It's obvious that the labor federation's top officialdom had no intention of allowing the piece of paper they signed to become a genuine call to action.

It will be remembered that the AFL-CIO top officers reluctantly endorsed the action called for by striking newspaper workers after rejecting it twice before.

But they were experiencing intense pressure; they were being inundated by a flood of letters, faxes, and electronic mail drummed up by newspaper strike activists supporting the demand for a national solidarity action. Consequently, they felt compelled to sign the letter calling for a march on Detroit. They apparently feared standing exposed, once again, for allowing another strike to be crushed without lifting a finger to help the beleaguered unions.

However, notice of the June 20-21 action was not published in any official AFL-CIO publication until months after the letter was signed. And even then, it appeared as an ad in the April 1997 edition of America @ Work, a narrowly circulated magazine published by the AFL-CIO Public Affairs Department.

But there was no word inside the magazine, then or since, motivating the action in support of the 19-month strike.

The estimate: 120,000 or 50,000?

Despite the irrefutable efforts by the labor bureaucracy to keep a lid on the action they called, and thus keep the attendance down to a minimum, AFL-CIO top officers apparently got word that a sizeable turnout was expected from rank-and-file trade unionists.

Thus, although there had been no discernible indication that Sweeney and other top officials were scheduled to appear at the rally, appear they did!

The Sunday Journal, the strikers' weekly newspaper, reported on their web page that representatives of the AFL-CIO speaking at the rally had claimed that "over 100,000 former striking Detroit newspaper workers and their supporters from throughout the U.S. and Canada marched and rallied Saturday.

(One speaker had announced that "120,000 participated in the march and rally.")

We were confronted with the anomaly of those who had tried to keep the march and rally down to a minimum exaggerating the size of the turnout!

While estimates of crowd size always vary, they varied wildly at this one. Some participants estimated attendance as low as 15,000 and as high as 75,000. Detroit newspaper strike activists intent on trying to come to a realistic estimate arrived at a consensus figure of between 50,000 and 60,000.

One thing for sure: The march, which proceeded briskly a couple of miles through downtown Detroit, was impressive. One reporter described it as a "dense wall of angry trade unionists from all over the country extending from sidewalk to sidewalk as far as the eye could see. They seemed to be there to tell the world: We've had it up to here, and we ain't going to take it anymore!"