WNYLaborToday.com Editor’s Note: Gene Grabiner (pictured above via Facebook), who teaches Sociology at Erie County Community College’s (ECC) City of Buffalo Campus, has been a member of New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) for 36 years.  Grabiner - who is currently represented by the Faculty Federation of ECC, which has 466 full-time and 400 part-time Union Members - recently submitted the following Labor Letter to the Editor at WNYLaborToday.com: 

So U.S. Congressman Christopher Lee has resigned.

Serendipity!

Or is it?

Who will run for his seat?

It will most likely not be a Friend Of Labor.

We will probably not even be given the choice between the lesser of two evils?

No, if the choices given to us are given by those special interests - Big Money and Big Business - it will be the “evil of two lessers” all over again.

Isn’t it past time we spoke our own piece, ran our own candidates, on our own slates, with our own platform?

Or must we always vote for the “Working Families Party?”

And just what is the Working Families Party, anyway?

In the summer of 1996, the late Tony Mazzocchi - Secretary-Treasurer of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union, mentor to activist Karen Silkwood, and a prime mover behind the creation of OSHA - had finally organized Labor Party Advocates to hold a convention in Cleveland.  This was a founding convention for the Labor Party.  I was one of 1,600 or so delegates at that convention. Interestingly, within about a year, the Working Families Party appeared in New York State.

But I’ve noticed the Working Families Party never runs its own candidates in the Buffalo area, instead almost always choosing to endorse Democratic Party candidates (“fusion politics”)… which sort of plays the role of the old Liberal Party.

And what does the name “Working Families Party” really mean anyway?

It seems to imply a moralizing judgment that it’s all about stable people who are stable both because they are working and because they have or are members of families.

And Working Families at that - families peopled by folks who have jobs, who are working The American Dream.

But what about The American Reality - unemployment - a growing nightmare for more and more Working People?

And where does the “Working Families Party” leave our Union Brothers and Sisters who are the unemployed, underemployed or on public assistance?

And what about individual workers who are out of work, but would willingly work if the jobs were available?

What happened to those old Labor Principles of “solidarity” and “organizing the unorganized?”

Maybe the name “Working Families” is a hope for the future.

But what about Labor - right now?

Maybe a name such as “Labor Party” more broadly embraces the truth of Labor - all of Labor; whether in families or not, whether working or not?

The “Working Families Party” seems to me to be more tied to the Democratic Party than anything else, more like the “Democrats in drag” than a party truly dedicated to Labor.

Will the “Working Families Party” become a true Labor Party and include the poor and unemployed and underemployed and those without families in its ranks?

And will it run its very own candidates on its very own platform?

That remains to be seen.

Tony Mazzocchi’s vision is not dead.

We still need a rank-and-file Labor Party.

And we need it now… not later.

Labor doesn’t have time to wait.