Afl-cio Ignore Miners

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The leadership of America's main trade union federation, the AFL-CIO, kept the line of the movement firmly in the camp of class collaboration during its biennial congress in Los Angeles last week.

Octogenarian George Meaney, leading agent of American imperialism, was reelected to two more years as AFL-CIO President.

But Meaney and his fellow leaders remained as hostile as ever to a policy to mobilise the working class around an independent policy. • However, with unemployment still well over. 7% ot the labour force, these bureaucrats realise they must appear to demand some remedial action.

The convention passe 1 one resolution pleading wit! the Carter Administration for major tax cut.

The other policies which Meaney and his henchmen supported were almost entirely protectionist.

Meaney said, was being "destroyed by foreign competition"

He made a call (before the Congress) for sweeping import controls, rigid enforcement of anti-dumping laws and an end to foreign investment by US companies.

Meaney makes no secret of his attachment to the main bourgeois parties and America's imperialist foreign policy.

Strange, or perhaps not so strange, then, that his reactionary protectionist answers to economic problems are identical to those of the British so-called 'lefts' of the Tribune Group and the Communist Party!

All these 'leaders' of the working class reject independent policies. to resolve the problems of the working class.

They ally themselves to their national capitalist class following it everywhere in its call for trade war.

For the working class this amounts to advocating fratricide.

As the AFL-CIO bureaucrats conducted their congress not even the slightest ripple or echo of the current miners' strike broke the unruffled surface.

Yet the miners are locked in a life and death struggle to preserve their union against a concerted attack by the coalowners and their big business allies.

Worried at theit falling profits, relative to the extensive non-union section of the industry, the bosses a e also driven on in their att: ck by the requirements of Carter's energy programme.

Stockpiles have been built up, and unless the miners stay out for three months they stand no chance of defeating the employers.

Bat no thought could be further from the minds of the AFL-CIO leaders than to organise the necessary support in the transport and steel industries, and the trade union movement as a whole.

Furthest of all from their intentions was any political break from the two parties of big business-the Democrats and Républicans-that are both lined with the employers against the miners.

The fight for a Labour Party in the USA based on the trade unions is inseparably linked to the fight to remove the reactionary AFL-CIO bureaucracy, and for a programme to defend the class interests of American workers.