By Joshua Freeman
This election season has seen an unusually open battle regarding political strategy among New York unionists and progressives. At stake is a crucial issue: how to balance the demands of building a movement that can fundamentally change a political and economic system that fails to serve most Americans against the existing political arrangements that benefit particular groups of workers. This was the key issue at the Working Families Party convention last May.
In 2010, the WFP backed Cuomo even as he attacked public sector unions and ran as a pro-business centrist. Once in office, he forced state workers to accept repugnant give-back contracts under the threat of mass layoffs, fought to lower taxes at the expense of services, and blocked various progressive initiatives.
This year, many WFP activists vowed not to go down the same road again. But key unions affiliated with the party felt differently, not wanting to jeopardize their insider influence and private deals with the governor. When things got so tense that it looked like the party might split apart, Bill de Blasio stepped in to broker a deal to give Cuomo the WFP endorsement in return for a few concessions — most importantly, his agreement to work to give the Democrats control over the state Senate. Even with the deal announced, the then-relatively unknown Zephyr Teachout managed to get the votes of 41 percent of the WFP state executive committee members for the endorsement.
Left-wing New York unions have a long history of cutting deals with centrists. In the early 1960s, Local 1199 courted Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller to win a collective bargaining law covering non-profit hospitals. In 1977, D.C. 37 head Victor Gotbaum built ties to Republicans in the state Senate to win passage of an agency shop law covering public employees. From the 1990s on, 1199 was a mainstay propping up Republican control of the Senate in return for a robust flow of state money into healthcare.
Unions won institutional stability and gains for their members through these arrangements. Hospital workers went from being so poorly paid that many collected welfare to having decent pay and benefits, while New York built one of the best Medicaid systems in the country. Still, the price has been high: keeping in power political operators with little devotion to a broad progressive agenda.
Teachout’s refusal to surrender to liberal pragmatism by plunging into the Democratic primary set the stage for round two of the battle. In a measure of how disgusted many New York unionists are with the governor, the New York City Central Labor Council declined to endorse him. Though only possible because 1199SEIU, the governor’s most important labor ally, is not affiliated with the council, the non-endorsement was an amazing development, a sign of how much the landscape has shifted since Occupy Wall Street. Teachout even managed to get the endorsement of one of the two main state worker unions. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, 1199 and the Hotel Trades used their very considerable resources to bolster Cuomo’s vote.
Of course, Cuomo won — that much was inevitable. But Teachout’s extraordinary showing, winning 34 percent of the vote (with running mate Timothy Wu topping 40 percent) suggests just how great are the possibilities for a different politic, one in which people vote for folks who actually share their views. Imagine if 1199, the Hotel Trades, and the Building Trades had joined forces with other unions and community groups in a full-fledged fight to nominate Teachout. Maybe Cuomo would have won anyway. If he had, no doubt he would have taken every bit of vengeance he could on the unions and other groups that opposed him. Still the short, brilliant political career of Zephyr Teachout leaves a lot to ponder, putting a bit of air into that left-wing cliché, “a better world is possible.”
Dr. Joshua Freeman is a Professor of History at the Murphy Institute, Queens College, and the CUNY Graduate Center.
(Photo via teachoutwu.com)
