Teach-In Demands: “Bail Out Working People - Not Banks!”

by Jeff Mackler / June 2009

SAN FRANCISCO—Close to 200 labor and community activists attended a May 9 teach-in initiated by the San Francisco Labor Council, the Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign, and four other Bay Area labor councils.

The teach-in was an experiment of sorts, an early effort to mobilize a broad range of labor’s rank-and-file, community social organizations, antiwar groups, socialist currents, and many others to discuss and debate how to respond to the massive attacks on working people and the oppressed in massive and independent mobilizations.

The "Call to Action" proclaimed, "Together, Let’s Build a Nationwide Movement to Demand: Bail Out Working People—Not the Banks." The program put forward by the organizers of the teach-in demanded: Not One More Layoff! Massive Jobs Program to Put Every Unemployed Worker Back on His/Her Job! Employee Free Choice Act Now! Single-Payer Now! End the Wars and War Funding Now! Moratorium on Foreclosures and Evictions Now! Affordable Housing For All Now! Papers for All Now!

An organizing committee was established to build the action, with the initial planning meeting attracting 67 activists, the great proportion of whom were experienced labor activists, various currents in the socialist and antiwar left, and some leaders of community-based organizations. About 65 local and regional organizations signed on as teach-in endorsers.

Time limitations compelled the organizers to cancel scheduled workshops designed to come up with action proposals. Instead, the continuations committee coming out of the teach-in voted to undertake a series of actions, beginning with a June 13 San Francisco rally and march from the Federal Reserve Building to the new S.F. Federal Building.

Alan Benjamin, a member of the Executive Committee of the San Francisco Labor Council and co-chair of the council’s Economic Crisis Committee, presented the teach-in’s central themes at the opening session, attended by over 150 people. Benjamin is also a central leader of the Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign (WERC), an effort initiated by his Socialist Organizer group, an affiliate of the International Liaison Committee for a Workers’ International.

Benjamin pointed out that the labor movement “cannot become partners with Wall Street and the corporations because the interests of workers and those of the bosses are separate and opposed….”

He continued: “Our Labor Council's Economic Crisis Committee urged the government to enact a real jobs-creation program. But the various Obama stimulus plans have resulted, and will result in relatively little job creation at a time when unemployment continues to soar. These are not job-creation plans.

"If the government did not give $1 trillion in PPIF funds to the banks, for example, it could put 20 million people back to work for one year at a living wage of $50,000 to rebuild schools, bridges, hospitals, public services—not to mention New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region.....

"When our union leaders accept this snake oil, this fraudulent notion that we can bail out Wall Street and Main Street at the same time, this leads to paralysis—at a time when we should be mobilizing in defense of our own interests. Or worse, it leads our unions to go along with and accept the unacceptable."

Unfortunately, most of the other featured speakers (mainly union officials) limited their remarks to empty platitudes far removed from any serious plans to mobilize labor’s ranks in the kind of independent mass struggle that Benjamin had posed.

Despite the endorsement of the Bay Area’s five AFL-CIO labor councils, few rank and filers were present. In the face of decades of demobilization and the subordination of labor to the boss class’s offensive, the ranks had no reason to believe for a second that union endorsement was a prelude to union action.

Nevertheless, the teach-in presented a political program and perspective that was worthy of support as an educational effort. Its general outlines will in the not-too-distant future connect with a rejuvenated labor movement that has shaken off the historic defeats imposed on it by the boss class and the stranglehold of labor’s misleaders—who remain tied in a death grip to the Democratic Party.

The May 9 San Francisco teach-in will be recorded as one of many such efforts aimed at testing the waters for a resumption of the kind of class-struggle politics and action that are a prerequisite for future victories that will change the relationship of forces between capital and labor.