{"id":1043458,"date":"2023-03-29T12:38:14","date_gmt":"2023-03-29T12:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2023\/03\/veterans-labor-movement-military-unions-organizing\/"},"modified":"2023-03-29T12:39:11","modified_gmt":"2023-03-29T12:39:11","slug":"veterans-can-help-reinvigorate-the-labor-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/03\/29\/veterans-can-help-reinvigorate-the-labor-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"Veterans Can Help Reinvigorate the Labor Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Military veterans like the great labor leader Tony Mazzocchi have played a central role in US labor battles in the past. And if the union movement is to rebuild itself, working-class veterans will have to play an important role today too.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n Service members, military veterans, and civilians honor Veterans Day and attend a naturalization ceremony in Triangle, Virginia, 2014. (Alex Wong \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

Like fifteen million other veterans returning from military service after World War II, Brooklyn-born Tony Mazzocchi<\/a> needed a job. He was a high school dropout, from a union family, who enlisted at age sixteen and then survived the Battle of the Bulge as a combat infantryman.<\/p>\n

After his discharge, Mazzocchi worked<\/a> in construction and in several manufacturing plants. He got hired at a Long Island cosmetics factory, with a local union in need of revitalization. By 1953, he had been elected its president and, over the next twelve years, turned this affiliate of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) into a catalyst<\/a> for new organizing, progressive political action, and contract victories like winning one of the first union-negotiated dental plans in the country.<\/p>\n

Mazzocchi later became one of the best-known labor radicals in the country, but he was not an outlier in the postwar era. In the 1950s and \u201960s, tens of thousands of World War II veterans could be found on the front lines of labor battles in auto, steel, electrical equipment manufacturing, mining, trucking, and the telephone industry.<\/p>\n

And veterans from working-class backgrounds continue to do so in modern-day campaigns. Today, about 1.3 million former service members work in union jobs, in both the private and public sector.<\/p>\n

According to the AFL-CIO, veterans are more likely to join a union than nonveterans. In a half dozen states, 25 percent or more of all working veterans belong to unions. Vermont State Labor Council president David Van Deusen sees veterans as \u201can underutilized resource for the labor movement,\u201d particularly in high-profile organizing campaigns. No one, he believes, is better positioned to \u201cexpose the hypocrisy and duplicity of \u2018veteran-friendly\u2019 firms like Amazon and Walmart, who wrap themselves in the flag, while violating the rights of working-class Americans who served in uniform and the many who did not.\u201d<\/p>\n

That’s why labor consultant and author Jane McAlevey recommends<\/a> unions today follow the example of Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organizers. In the postwar era, she reports, labor better appreciated the \u201cstrategic value\u201d that former service members can bring to strike-related PR campaigns, not to mention their \u201cexperience with discipline, military formation, and overcoming fear and adversity\u201d \u2014 all very useful on militant picket lines.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

An OCAW Role Model<\/h2>\n \n

Mazzocchi was a leading figure in this postwar generational cohort. When he became his national union\u2019s legislative-political director in Washington, he helped shape the labor movement\u2019s successful campaign for the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, which now provides workplace protections for 130 million Americans. During his five-decade career, Mazzocchi also pushed for civil rights, nuclear disarmament, labor-based environmentalism, single-payer health care, and independent political action.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, Mazzocchi helped found the union-backed Labor Party<\/a> and popularized the demand that public higher education should be free for all. He was inspired by the liberating experience of veterans from his generation, who were able to attend college as a result of the original GI bill<\/a>, which he regarded as \u201cone of the most revolutionary pieces of legislation in the 20th century.\u201d According to<\/a> his biographer Les Leopold, Mazzocchi believed that an all-inclusive twenty-first-century version of the GI bill could plant the \u201cseeds of the good life\u201d for millions of poor and working-class Americans today.<\/p>\n

Post-9\/11 veterans continue to benefit from their hard-earned access to affordable higher education. Will Fischer, a marine who served in Iraq before becoming director of the AFL-CIO Union Veterans Council, reports that he was able \u201cto graduate from college and do so without the yoke of student debt.\u201d Fischer now favors universalizing such benefits<\/a>. He believes all student debt should be canceled and public higher education, including vocational schools, made tuition-free. As Fischer sees it, this would free poor and working-class young people from having to choose between \u201cputting on a uniform and participating in never-ending US wars or taking on crushing debt.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Veteran and labor organizer Tony Mazzocchi.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Vets have also worked within organized labor to create civilian job opportunities, which don\u2019t require trading one uniform for another. Fischer\u2019s successor at the Veterans Council is Will Attig, a member of United Association Local 160, Plumbers and Pipefitters in southern Illinois. Attig helps fellow Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans find building trades jobs through the Helmets to Hardhats<\/a> program. He introduced the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) to Common Defense,<\/a> a post 9\/11 veterans group, which has helped train members of CWA\u2019s \u201cVeterans for Social Change<\/a>\u201d network. Unveiled three years ago by CWA president Chris Shelton, a former telephone worker who served in the Air Force, this program seeks to \u201cdevelop and organize a broad base of union activists who are veterans and\/or currently serving in the military.\u201d<\/p>\n

As CWA notes, veterans, active-duty service members, and military families “are constantly exploited by politicians and others who seek to loot our economy, attack our communities, and divide our nation with racism and bigotry so they can consolidate more power amongst themselves.\u201d CWA hopes to counter this ongoing right-wing threat by encouraging veterans in its own ranks to engage in bottom-up campaigns with community allies.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

Public Sector Defenders<\/h2>\n \n

That includes fighting privatization of two federal agencies that employ many former soldiers: the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which serves nine million patients in the nation\u2019s largest public health care system, and the US Postal Service (USPS), which delivers mail to 163 million homes and businesses. Both have long been the target of corporate-backed efforts to reduce their staff, downsize operations, and outsource functions to private firms.<\/p>\n

During the Trump administration, right-wing political appointees at the VA launched a major assault on the workplace rights of three hundred thousand workers represented by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), National Nurses United (NNU), and other unions. A White House advisory panel on the future of the postal service called for the elimination of collective bargaining to help pave the way for privatization and job cuts that would hit more than a hundred thousand veterans.<\/p>\n