Guns and Butter: Labor Takes on Afghanistan

Though labor’s response to Iraq and Afghanistan has been dampened by unions’ preoccupation with domestic issues, according to Labor Notes, many labor activists are agitating to expose the contradiction between pushing economic recovery and funneling blood and treasure into an unwinnable conflict.

USLAW President Michael Eisenscher told Workers Independent News this week: 

LBJ took the same path in Vietnam. It cost him the Great Society. It set our country back decades, both socially, morally, economically and politically. And President Obama risks walking into the same quagmire.

The quagmire is dragging down more than politicians and troops. According to a recent study by Foreign Policy in Focus, the war’s human toll stretches across every sector of the economy (amounting to “$2,000 for every resident of the country” as of 2008). And while the White House grapples for job-creation strategies, the study projects that:

$1 billion spent on each of the domestic spending priorities will create substantially more jobs within the U.S. economy than would the same $1 billion spent on the military…. investments in clean energy, health care, and education create a much larger number of jobs across all pay ranges, including mid-range jobs (paying between $32,000 and $64,000) and high-paying jobs (paying over $64,000). Channeling funds into clean energy, health care and education in an effective way will therefore create significantly greater opportunities for decent employment throughout the U.S. economy than spending the same amount of funds with the military.

Some labor groups refuse to keep picking up the Pentagon’s tab. USLAW has helped push through major resolutions calling for an end to Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts from local and national unions, including the AFL-CIO. Another resolution passed in September expressed solidarity with Iraqi labor unions.

Following Obama’s election, USLAW warned the labor movement not to lose sight of the costs of war as it pursued domestic agenda items like the Employee Free Choice Act:

As unions confront the impact of the economic crisis on their members, the membership may be less inclined to think about, less spend time addressing issues that they don’t see directly reducing the threat to their jobs and incomes, and helping to turn things around. That is more likely to the extent that labor leaders fail to make the connection clear between adopting a new foreign policy, ending the militarization of our economy and solving the economic crisis….

We must make clear that the labor movement – and both of its federations – must not focus exclusively on domestic reforms because the domestic crisis cannot be resolved so long as the U.S. is straight-jacketed by a foreign policy that puts us at odds with the rest of the world, and military spending that actually undermines our economic security. We must challenge the ​‘guns and butter’ assumption.

That assumption has wavered in recent history. During Vietnam — a debacle that begs comparison with today’s militaristic adventures — the mainstream labor leadership, particularly the AFL-CIO, clung stubbornly to pro-war boosterism. But gradually, opposition swelled among more radical labor activists, broadening the antiwar movement beyond the ​“intelligentsia.”

Today, with both labor and the antiwar movement straining to articulate a unified message, the words of Falah Alwan might put things in perspective. On a tour of the United States with a delegation of Iraqi labor leaders, the President of Iraq’s Federation of Workers Councils and Unions described the impact of the (supposedly waning) U.S. occupation in an interview with Democracy Now!:

[L]et me give you an image about what happened to the society, not only to the activists, after the occupation. All what we gained is the devastation of the fundamental basis of the industries and the infrastructure of the society and lack of the rights of the women and reducing of the financial to support or to provide the services in general. Until now, there is no law to protect the workers or all — there is no labor law to the workers to protect their rights to organize themselves or to create their unions.

And now about 30,000 more troops are slated to deliver this triumphal vision to the people of Afghanistan. Rising anxieties over the country’s military ventures reflects in part the public’s desire to withdraw from global entanglements and focus on domestic needs. But the emerging solidarity between American and Iraqi workers reveals not a retreat, but a more courageous kind of diplomacy. Fraught with infighting and institutional baggage, the American labor movement may find some inspiration in the communities living under U.S. occupation: they have no choice but to confront the brutality of war and economic injustice as parallel fronts in a single struggle.