Labor Sifts the Ashes

Two days after the World Trade Center attacks, and without any notice by the press, a thousand or more people crowded onto the first-floor gallery of the AFL-CIO's Washington, DC, headquarters to mourn organized labor's soul-numbing casualties. The 350 missing New York firemen were all union members, as were sixty-three policemen and dozens of missing emergency workers. Fifteen unionized carpenters. The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union (HERE) lost almost fifty members who had been working a breakfast meeting at the top of one of the crumbled towers on September 11. Another sixty-two members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)--janitors, window washers, security guards--perished that morning as well. Perhaps as many as 800 unionized workers died in the twin towers inferno, the Pentagon attacks and the crash in Pennsylvania.

The body blow landed against labor provoked crippling pain and, among some, red-hot anger. Much of the new union leadership in place since John Sweeney took over the national federation six years ago are baby boomers whose politics were forged in the antiwar movement of the 1960s. But the prevailing mood among organized labor is not pacifist. On the same day as the AFL memorial gathering, the powerful Machinists union, whose members built, serviced and maintained the four hijacked jets, issued an incendiary statement vowing that it was "not simply justice we seek. It is vengeance, pure and complete."

The Machinists' saber-rattling was on labor's extreme edge (that union also builds F-16s and F-22s). But, in general, labor's attitude toward war mirrors the mixed views of most progressives: Some for peace, a few for all-out war and most for some sort of just response against the perpetrators of September 11, without giving a blank check to the Bush Administration.

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