First Published: The Call, Vol. 6, No. 7, February 21, 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), an organization of women from more than 50 trade unions, was set up almost three years ago. An analysis of the history of this organization provides some valuable lessons in understanding how the trade union bureaucrats, especially those from the liberal wing of the bureaucracy, try to mislead the struggles of working women.
CLUW was founded in 1974 against the backdrop of a tremendous upsurge of the workers’ movement, and of women in particular. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, unorganized women, many of them Black and Latina, waged bitter protracted struggles for union rights, such as the victorious strikes at Farah Pants in the Southwest and Oneita Mills in South Carolina. Women field laborers became a backbone force in the fight to build the United farm Workers Union. In the auto plants and steel mills, women were fighting for the right to work in heavy industry and for equal pay and seniority rights.
This upsurge represented a challenge to the bankrupt leadership of the U.S. trade union movement. For decades, the bureaucrats have consistently opposed every step to unionize women. As a result, over 87 of women workers are unorganized and remain a source- of tremendous cheap labor and profit for the capitalists.
The sweeping movement of rank-and-file women in the ’60s and ’70s threatened to change all this. Some of the reactionary old guard leadership of the AFL-CIO felt that the best way to stop this movement was to continue ignoring it, making sure that women fighters were cut out of the mainstream of the labor movement.
The liberal wing of the bureaucracy (including the leadership of the auto workers, textile workers, electrical workers, city, state and municipal workers and the teachers’ union, as well as the revisionists of the CPUSA) recognized that women’s demands could not be ignored forever. Their tactics for quelling the rebellion included setting up an organization like CLUW.
To them, the purpose of CLUW was to gather the most active rank-and-file women under a single umbrella by paying lip service, to their demands and talking a lot about “women’s rights.” Ultimately, they would ensure that the rank and file’s fighting capacity was watered down and stifled in the bureaucratic machinery of the trade union movement.
Liberal misleaders like Addie Wyatt of the meatcutters union and Olga Madar of the UAW put out the call to build CLUW, filling it with militant phrases about the role of women in the labor movement, the need for equal pay, maternity benefits, childcare and passage of the ERA.
There was a tremendous response from the rank and file, Over 3,200 delegates attended the founding convention in Chicago.
Communists and revolutionary fighters including the October League participated in this movement around CLUW. Like other trade union organizations, CLUW represented a broad and comprehensive organization of the rank and file, despite the class collaborationist aims of its leadership. But from the founding meeting, CLUW was a battleground between these bureaucrats and the rank and file, who had joined it believing it would be a fighting organization.
For example, the whole question of organizing the unorganized, so vital to building a multi-national organization of working women, was completely shelved by the bureaucrats at the founding conference. Afterwards, every proposal to involve CLUW in organizing drives received the same answer from the bureaucrats: “CLUW is an organization of trade union women,” they said. “It is not for women who aren’t in trade unions.”
Similarly, efforts to establish a Minority Women’s Committee inside CLUW were tabled time and again by the bureaucrats who used the slogan “We’re all sisters” to attack the demands of minority women for special programs and campaigns inside CLUW.
But the leadership did not go unopposed. Many local chapters elected rank-and-file workers and communists into positions of leadership. In Boston, the local chapter fought ROAR and the segregationist movement, trying to defeat its influence in the trade unions and among women in the community.
The CLUW leadership was forced by the rank and file to send a telegram of support to a march for school integration. But at the same time, they charged that this amounted to “bringing politics into CLUW” and used a bunch of parliamentary maneuvers to try to keep the local chapter from engaging in this work.
Local chapters took on many other fighting actions. In some cities, the chapters supported revolutionary-Ied International Women’s Day activities; held educational programs about women’s oppression under capitalism and joined in the work of the fightback to demand jobs or income. It was the chapters that took on this type of activity which succeeded in growing among the masses of women.
When the local chapters tried to bring this fighting program to the national CLUW meetings, however, they were turned back: For almost two years, Madar, Wyatt and Co. insisted that the only task before CLUW was the drafting and adopting of a “charter” which would spell out the rules and regulations of the bureaucratic organization they wanted to maintain.
Every time rank-and-file forces urged action to push their demands forward, the CLUW leaders countered them with a strategy of lobbying, legislating and negotiating.
In spreading this reformism, the CLUW bureaucrats got a helping hand from the CPUSA revisionists and a variety of Trotskyite sects. Using CLUW to gain influence for their own bankrupt line, the revisionists supported the reformists on every question. At one point, the rank and file was struggling to get CLUW to take a stand against the “Consent Decree” on discrimination worked out by the steel bosses and the steel union leaders. The CP attacked this struggle; distributing a leaflet which said, “How can we go against the steel union? We have to follow their leadership.”
The revisionists also joined the other C LUW leaders in praising the Democratic Party liberals. They spread the bourgeois feminist view that Democratic Party hacks like Bella Abzug and Barbara Jordan “reflected the progressive role of women in Congress.” The solution to women’s oppression according to both the reformists and revisionists was to elect more women in Washington.
The revisionists also dutifully promoted the interests of Soviet social-imperialism inside CLUW, often speaking and leafletting on how “detente” was the “road to women’s emancipation.”
But even the work of these phony communists could not stop the rank-and-file struggle. The CLUW bureaucrats resorted to a frantic red-baiting campaign against the genuine Marxist-Leninists and revolutionary forces inside CLUW.
Olga Madar circulated a fraudulent list of October League members and other “known communists” whom she suggested should be barred from participation in CLUW. Recent revelations in the press have shown that Madar was helped in her anti-communist campaign by police agents such as Shelly Lulkin, who was sent into CLUW by the Chicago “red squad” in order to keep revolutionary work from developing inside it.
When all these tactics failed, the top bureaucrats simply declared various chapters “outlawed” or “de-certified” and set up their own chapters instead. At least three chapters were banned in this way, and half a dozen others faced similar threats. Where the chapters themselves weren’t banned, the CLUW bureaucrats engineered special elections to put their hand-picked clique in control, or simply refused to call membership meetings for months at a time.
The result of all this was that CLUW dwindled to nothing more than an organization on paper under the leadership’s stranglehold. There have been no national meetings of CLUW in over a year now. The activity of the leadership is confined to sending out fundraising letters, lobbying for various congressional bills and aiding the campaigns of Democratic Party candidates. The only struggle inside CLUW today is among the bureaucrats themselves over the handful, of salaried positions at the top.
The OL, for its part, was able to advance the understanding of many CLUW women and play a leading role in the struggle against the bureaucrats. While not strong enough to stop their attempt to smash CLUW, the OL was able to rally many forces behind a fighting program for women workers. The destruction of CLUW will only create new areas for continuing this struggle.