Early last century, the press corps attacked Bill Haywood, leader of the leftwing "Wobblies" labor union, for smoking expensive cigars. Mocking their demand for hairshirt ascetiscm, Haywood declared, "Nothing's too good for the working class." Even as the press worships luxury and excess by the titans of industry, the smallest luxuries by labor leaders or even their members are treated as proof of the moral degeneracy of unions.

Such is the most recent attack on the United Auto Workers, the rightwing moral condemnation of their education and retreat center at Black Lake, Michigan. The horror is apparently that the UAW would own a $33 million asset; of course, this asset is 1000 acres with 27 miles of shoreline. Oh yeah, and this education center was used by 10,000 visitors last year-- as opposed to many a $33 million private home owned by a "master of the universe" living in and around New York and other financial capitals. Oh yeah, and to make the UAW crime complete, there is actually a golf course on those 1000 acres; working class folks actually have the audacity to enjoy a round of golf occasionally.

The response of the media and UAW critics is to demand that the union sell-off Black Lake. Of course, not only didn't the financial bailout not involve restraints on the income of executives, bond holders and investors, but there were no reviews of the wealth of individuals and demands they sell off homes or other assets.

Part of the supposed story is that the UAW "lost money" on the resort in recent years. Considering the union was running ongoing conferences and training sessions for thousands of its members, one might expect crack journalists to ask how much the UAW would have spent on doing those trainings at hotels or other alternatives over that period? They of course didn't since that would actually require understanding why the union made the investment in the first place. So let's get a description of the program as described to the members for whom the program was created:

Since the center opened in 1970, thousands of UAW families have participated in the Family Scholarship Program for a weeklong experience that combines education with relaxation. Here's how it works:

During the day, parents participate in workshops with lively discussions and interactive exercises while children go to age-appropriate day camps with creative arts, music, games, athletics and swimming. The age groupings are 3-7 and 8-11.

Youngsters ages 12-15 will enjoy union involvement workshops, golf, swimming and gym games. And teens ages 16-18 are offered a program to prepare them for the working world.

Other afternoon and evening activities include laps at the indoor pool, a walk on the Black Lake beach, various sports and Karaoke Night. In addition, golfers can play the award-winning Black Lake Golf Club.

The UAW pays for all lodging, food and program costs. Participants may choose to pay for other things such as group photographs, gift shop items, golf or activities in nearby communities...To be eligible for a family scholarship, you must be a UAW member in good standing for at least a year and never have attended the scholarship program. This summer's three sessions are July 6-11, July 13-18 and July 20-25 (which also offers a session in Spanish.)

Essentially, local union leaders and activists are asked to use a week of vacation to sit in union training sessions for a week; in exchange, the union covers lodging and food costs and keeps their kids entertained. The union, like every union, has an ongoing need to train its activists, most of whom are volunteers, and Black Lake is used as an attractive venue to provide that education and build that sense of solidarity among members. How many venues exist for training people in labor values while providing a day camp for their kids? The cost in the open market is no doubt many multiples of what the UAW has spent on Black Lake in the last few years.

This newest attack on the UAW is a basic attack on the idea that unions should be able to engage in the kind of staff training and community building that is common with every other institution in the world that holds conferences and retreats in this world. In fact, we have cities and states subsidizing the building of massive convention centers for business meetings around the country on top of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on conventions. Yet the few million spent by the UAW on its training meetings is actually worth column space?

But then this is nothing new and actually unrelated to the current crisis in the auto industry. It's part of the routine attack on unions. Just a couple of years ago, when the lavish spending of Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski became news, the NY Daily News tried to create an equivalency with a party for 4000 union members run by the New York-based health care union, SEIU 1199. The party was held as a reward for volunteer work by its key activist members. As I wrote:

So that $500,000 party helped motivate more than 80,000 separate volunteer activities by the 4000 members attending the party-- a pretty damn smart investment aside from just being a good way to build camraderies among union activist leaders scattered across the local's territory.

But again, don't expect even the most minimal analysis of why a union would invest in rewarding volunteers or spending money on a training center like Black Lake. The decision is made by a labor union, so de facto it must be a corrupt decision with no economic logic.

Just a side note on Black Lake; the UAW has been running training centers in Michigan for decades before the most recent version was created. For those with a sense of progressive history, an earlier version was at Port Huron. Back in 1962, a bunch of young left activists came together at the UAW's summer camp at Port Huron and penned what became known as the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto of what would become Students for a Democratic Society and much of the early New Left in the 1960s.

The rightwing doesn't want a home for progressives where people can comfortably dream of having more, of demanding more of our society than the day-to-day grind of daily life. They don't want a summer camp for such training and they ultimately don't want a union which can sponsor such training in the first place. The goal is to atomize the working class so that they have no collective institutions to build collective power. No collective trainings, no collective outings, and no collective bargaining-- just bad individual deals for individual workers with shitty individual paychecks and shitty individual vacations devoid of political or social content. That's the rightwing goal.