The national leadership<\/u> of the largest labor federation in the country is trying to stop one of its affiliates from debating and voting on a resolution that condemns Israeli violence against Palestinians, calls for an end to U.S. aid to Israel, and endorses the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement known as BDS.<\/p>\n
In late September, an AFL-CIO official sent a memo<\/a> to the San Francisco Labor Council with the subject line \u201cBoycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Resolution.\u201d The memo, obtained by The Intercept, said the council \u201cmay not hold a vote on [the] resolution and thus any debate is not germane at your meeting,\u201d and it cited a procedural stipulation that appears to disallow local affiliates of the AFL-CIO from codifying positions that do not align with the AFL-CIO\u2019s.\u00a0Copied on the letter are the AFL-CIO\u2019s highest-ranking officials: president, executive vice president, general counsel, and several directors.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is direct censorship,\u201d said Monadel Herzallah, a member of the national committee of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network and a teacher with the San Francisco Teachers Union, part of the SFLC. \u201cAnd it is a slap in the face to every Palestinian.\u201d He said the AFL-CIO\u2019s leadership seeks to stop the resolution from \u201cthe top down.\u201d The leadership knows that the SFLC, which represents more than 150 unions and 100,000 workers, \u201chas a rich, progressive history of supporting movements around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n The AFL-CIO did not respond to a detailed list of questions.\u00a0Fernando Losada, one of the officials copied on the memo, told the Jewish news\u00a0outlet J. last month that foreign policy issues are determined at the national level. \u201cExpressions of solidarity [are] always good,\u201d said Losada<\/a>, a national bargaining director and Western regional field director<\/span>. \u201cBut in terms of setting international policy, that is the purview of the national AFL-CIO through our organizational processes. There\u2019s an existing policy in solidarity with working people in the Holy Land. It does not include BDS.\u201d<\/p>\n\n The resolution was originally introduced on June 14, weeks after Palestinian resistance to Israel\u2019s planned expulsions<\/a> of Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah<\/a>, a neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, precipitated Israeli assaults on Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel proper and drew international attention. On May 18, Palestinian unionists held a daylong general strike and called on trade unions around the world to join them in solidarity. Across the U.S., large contingents of organized labor staged actions for the first time. Unionized teachers, roofers, electricians, tech engineers, janitors, and journalists issued resolutions and statements condemning Israeli violence against Palestinians. In the Bay Area, stevedores in Oakland refused to unload Israeli shipping cargo, as they did during the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2014. Many of the union locals are affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Only one of them, the teachers union in San Francisco, which is part of the SFLC, endorsed BDS \u2014\u00a0the first K-12 union<\/a> in the nation to do so.<\/p>\n The SFLC resolution<\/u> endorses BDS \u201cagainst Apartheid in Israel,\u201d and calls upon President Joe Biden to halt the U.S.\u2019s $3.8 billion in annual military aid to Israel. The BDS movement is a nonviolent challenge to the corporate and governmental operations of a state that administers a \u201cregime of racial discrimination against the Palestinian people,\u201d wrote<\/a> numerous Palestinian advocacy organizations in a joint report to the United Nations, in 2019. As BDS has gained prominence since its 2006 founding, however, numerous allies of Israel have worked to delegitimize the movement and to conflate it with antisemitism. Thirty-two states in the U.S. have anti-boycott laws<\/a> on the books, and the German\u00a0Parliament\u00a0designated<\/a>\u00a0BDS as antisemitic.<\/p>\n In telling the SFLC not to debate a resolution on BDS, the AFL-CIO cited the following rule: \u201cCentral labor councils, as chartered organizations of the AFL-CIO, shall conform their activities on national affairs to the policies of the AFL-CIO, on state matters to the policies of their respective state federations, and, if applicable, on regional matters to the policies of their respective area labor councils.\u201d<\/p>\n\n The letter does not specify what policy an endorsement of BDS would contravene, and the federation did not respond to a question about its policy on boycotting Israel. But AFL-CIO leadership has come out against BDS in the past. In 2007, the AFL-CIO\u2019s leaders signed a statement<\/a> opposing BDS. \u201cSome of them have retired or died since the statement was first put out,\u201d said the labor historian Jeff Schuhrke, a lecturer at the University of Illinois Chicago. \u201cBut there\u2019s been no shift in policy since then.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2009, then-president of the AFL-CIO Richard Trumka explicitly called<\/a> anti-Zionism antisemitic. The AFL-CIO and its affiliates have purchased millions of dollars in Israeli bonds. \u201cInvest,\u201d said then-secretary Trumka in 1999, \u201cin the bonds that are such a tangible link between our movement and the continuing struggle to nurture and protect the State of Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n Decades ago, when two AFL-CIO affiliates joined a committee<\/a> opposing bank loans to apartheid South Africa in 1977, national leadership did not get in their way. (Not until 1984 would the national AFL-CIO take its first action against South Africa, banning goods<\/a> imported from the country.) \u201cWhen you go back and look\u201d at those affiliates\u2019 boycotts, Schuhrke said, \u201cyou won\u2019t find AFL-CIO officials jumping in and waving obscure rules in people\u2019s faces to try to derail things.\u201d<\/p>\n The leadership\u2019s intervention<\/u> comes after several months of delays<\/a> within the SFLC. On June 14, the council voted by a slim margin to table the resolution 42-38, according to a source granted anonymity to speak about internal proceedings. A subcommittee was formed to \u201ctry to find common ground\u201d on the resolution, the source said.<\/p>\n Leaders of the SFLC met with national representatives of the AFL-CIO after the resolution was tabled, according to Rudy Gonzalez, a member of the SFLC\u2019s executive committee. Two senior officials \u2014\u00a0international director Cathy Feingold and Losada, the bargaining director \u2014\u00a0told SFLC leaders that the resolution was divisive, said Gonzalez, who also co-chairs the subcommittee on the Palestine resolution. They recommended that the SFLC try to change the AFL-CIO\u2019s policy on boycotting Israel at the national convention, scheduled for June 2022. \u201cThat change in policy would have to originate within an affiliated council or an affiliated national union,\u201d said the source. \u201cIn the case of SFLC, it\u2019s a catch-22.\u201d\u00a0(Feingold and Losada did not respond to requests for comment.)<\/p>\n The subcommittee has not found a compromise. And the AFL-CIO\u2019s letter levies considerable pressure on the labor council. The council\u2019s pro-Palestinian unionists are pushing for a vote, and one of them intends to bring the resolution at the SFLC\u2019s next meeting, on October 25. \u201cIf people want to symbolically do that, they can, but it would be out of order\u201d given the AFL-CIO\u2019s directive, said Gonzalez.<\/p>\n Frank Lara, vice president of the San Francisco Teachers Union and an incoming delegate of the SFLC, said the memo contravenes basic union principles. \u201cI want to believe that unions are one of the most democratic institutions,\u201d he said. \u201cTo suddenly see a labor organization trump the membership? That\u2019s problematic to say the least. If you\u2019re the president [of the AFL-CIO] sending daily emails saying \u2018Stand up for Black lives,\u2019 and then you say \u2018Don\u2019t touch this issue,\u2019 I think any educator would see this as terrible pedagogy and politics.\u201d<\/p>\n The post AFL-CIO Leadership Tries to Block Affiliate\u2019s Vote on Endorsing BDS<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" AFL-CIO leadership cited a procedural rule to tell the San Francisco Labor Council it couldn\u2019t even debate a resolution on BDS.<\/p>\n The post AFL-CIO Leadership Tries to Block Affiliate\u2019s Vote on Endorsing BDS<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":953,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357532"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/953"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357532"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":357929,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357532\/revisions\/357929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u201cTo suddenly see a labor organization trump the membership? That\u2019s problematic to say the least.\u201d<\/blockquote><\/p>\n