Activists Protest NATO – While Biden Seeks Union Support
Report and photos by Phil Pasquini
Washington: In a city snarled with traffic and security barriers related to hosting the 75th anniversary of NATO and attendant summit, President Biden started his day by meeting with national union leaders at the AFL-CIO headquarters near the White House. As Biden seeks union endorsements, the call for him to step aside continues to grow.
A small vociferous group of protesters from The World Anti-Imperialist Platform (PLATFORM), was on hand demonstrating and calling for the disbanding of NATO, an end to Rim of the Pacific Exercise (RIMPAC) — the world’s largest international maritime exercise — and demanding that “No Asian Version of NATO” be forthcoming.
Their concern centers around the inclusion for the third year in a row of leaders from Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea along with the Australian prime minister this year in attendance. NATO’s evolving outward focus on the Pacific oversteps its original mandate to cooperate on Europe’s collective defense and in blocking the Soviet Union’s Cold War expansionist ideology.
By attempting to contain China’s growing power in the South Pacific through such an alliance, activists are fearful of “security creep” wrought with the attendant dangers of creating a more polarized and destabilized world.
Only a few blocks away at the National Education Association (NEA) Union headquarters building, a locked-out union member of the National Education Association Staff Organization (NEASO) expressed her frustration on a picket line by holding a sign saying that “Hypocrisy Starts Here.” She was joined by other members shaming NEA for using union-busting tactics while chanting and ringing school bells in calling attention to their expired contract labor dispute.
The NEA founded in 1857 is the nation’s largest labor union representing three million members in its 14,000 locals across the country and on military bases around the world.
One would imagine that a union advocating for its membership in negotiations with employers would in its own negotiations with its staff’s union respect and hold in high regard the very rights and values they so rigorously champion elsewhere. However, as unions have become larger and more powerful, they have instead begun to counterintuitively utilize the very tactics their adversaries partake of when negotiating with their in-house employees.
Last year, union staff members at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) headquarters in Washington picketed on their 334th day of working without a contract by calling on SEIU to “Act more like a union, not like a corporation.” Frighteningly, the irony of such “corporate” tactics being employed by organized labor against their own workers is growing.
In this case, the union has taken the extraordinary measure of locking out 300 of its staff who are NEASO union members in the aftermath of their strike during the NEA’s largest assembly of the year in Philadelphia last week.
The strike in Philadelphia infuriated the union and in turn saw President Biden cancel his planned speech at the large gathering because of the labor unrest.
Staff members who participated found their union-issued credit cards canceled forcing them to pay out of their own pockets for hotel rooms and other convention-related expenses as they prepared to return to Washington. The union has indicated that those locked out will not be allowed back at their jobs until the contract is settled.
The members, who have been working without a contract since May 31, are committed to holding firm in their efforts to see a just and fair contract implemented with the NEA.
(Phil Pasquini is a freelance journalist and photographer. His reports and photographs appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.ink. He is the author of Domes, Arches and Minarets: A History of Islamic-Inspired Buildings in America.)
