AFL-CIO shamelessly backs Biden

In December last year, President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr signed into law legislation which made an ongoing rail strike illegal and imposed a ‘deal’ on the members of the four unions which remained in dispute with the rail companies.

The rail workers were fighting against years of staffing cuts and calling for the introduction of sick leave. Yet the US Senate and the President responded, not by intervening to settle the dispute, but by giving themselves sweeping powers to crush the strikes without recourse.

It was an anti-worker reaction to a just class struggle not seen since Ronald Reagan crushed the Air Traffic Controllers’ Strike in 1981.

It was somehow inevitable that the wretched organisation that is the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organisation (AFL-CIO) voted to endorse Biden for re-election in 2024, despite Biden’s role in brutally crushing class struggle and the Presidential election itself being almost eighteen months away.

“There’s absolutely no question that Joe Biden is the most pro-union president in our lifetimes” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler.  “We’ve never seen a president more forcefully advocate for workers’ fundamental right to join a union”, she went on to say.

This was the very same “pro-union” President who made a legitimate strike illegal because the workers had real economic power and both he and his contemptible Senate had no clue how settle the dispute other than to crush it completely.

We must stand with all workers in struggle, wherever they are in the world, but we cannot countenance the disgusting, corrupt and wretched bureaucracies that ‘lead’ their trade unions and deign to speak on their behalf.  Workers need to consign them all to the trash can of history.