UE meeting and comment

[Michael Yates <mikey+@xxxxxxxx>]

I delivered an address to the officers, staff,and organizers of the
United Electrical Workers (UE) in Wilkes Barre, PA. this morning.  I
thank those of you who commented on a draft of my talk. Your comments
were most useful to me.  The talk was a great success and generated a
long discussion. These brothers and sisters are about as left as you get
in the US labor movement. President John Hovis and the other officers
are remarkably unpretentious and down to earth.  Of course, no officer
earns more money than the highest paid member (today the president earns
$45,000!!). They are keen on empowering the members.  Not servicing them
or mobilizing them, but helping them to control their own union.  Most
remarkable.

I went to the meeting early so I could hear the other presentations. The
first speaker was Mike Dolan of Seattle WTO protest fame.  I must say
that I have seldom seen a person so full of himself, even holding up a
picture of himself in a Wall Street Journal article about him (why did
he bring this with him?) and refering to his organization's website as
"his" website. I shook hands with him before the meeting, but he was not
at all interested in learning anything about me.  He just shook hands
and then went off to continue whistling the song "Union Maids."  He gave
a rather canned pitch complete with annoying histrionics and dumb jokes
and many references to himself.  Most troubling to me was the incredible
China bashing spiel he gave, complete with numerous handouts.(He argued
that we cannot let capital win any victoreis and this alone is reason to
go all out on keeping China out of the WTO).  Now I understand that the
China issue is complex, but his talk verged on the worst kind of
jingoism and racism.  Not one mention of prison labor in the US or
sweatshops here or racism here or anything like this or what his
organization proposed we do about these things.  Nothing about attempts
at direct solidarity with Chinese workers.  Nothing about what next if
China is not admitted to the WTO. He had a lot of slogans but not much
in the way of analysis. In addition, he seemed the kind of person not
one bit interested in anyone other than himself. Fortunately the
unionists seemed in agreement with me when I said in my talk that the
China issue needed to be carefully considered, especially in light of
the long history of absolutely horrible racism of US labor against
Chinese immigrants.

On my way home I couldn't stop thinking about Dolan. I can't see how a
radical movement, one aimed at worker self-emancipation could ever be
led by such a person. Perhaps others can enlighten me on his good
qualities, but I was very much unimpressed.

Michael Yates