It is refreshing to hear the new head of the AFL-CIO, former mineworker and Mineworkers President Richard Trumka, get mad at sell-out Democrats and make a threat not to "support" them next year.

As Trumka pointed out in a talk to the Center for American Progress this week, for years, Democratic politicians, and the Democrats as a Party, have counted on the labor movement to get out the vote of its membership on Election Day, only to turn on workers after getting to Washington, on the issues that really matter, like jobs-killing free trade agreements, the gutting of bankruptcy law and credit law protections, and, most recently, the undermining of needed labor law reform.

Trumka, quoting from a famous mineworkers song by Florence Reece, later popularized by Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, said that going forward, Democrats will have to make it clear to labor "Which side are you on?"

But really, that's only half the question. Reece, in her song, was asking that question of workers themselves. And indeed, the reason Democrats have become such traitors to working class interests in recent decades is that the labor movement itself has not answered Reece's question resolutely or honestly.

The hard reality is that, despite years of betrayal by Democratic politicians and by the Democratic Party, labor unions have continued year after year to answer the call to rally their ever diminishing members during campaign seasons to go door to door doing the hard work of rallying voters for ever more treacherous candidates, and to do massive "get-out-the-vote" campaigns on Election Day, as they did this past November to assure the election of solid Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and the election of President Barack Obama. Labor has also donated princely sums collected from members to Democratic candidates and to the Democratic National Committee.

And just as predictably, Congressional Democrats, and the new president, have been betraying their labor base. After vowing to pass the Employee Free Choice Act this year, which as written would have ended years of weakening of labor's right to organize unions by ending the cumbersome requirement for "secret ballot" elections to establish union representation, in favor of just obtaining signed cards supporting a union from a majority of workers, Obama and the Democrats in Congress caved in to pressure from the business lobby, and trashed the bill. If it passes at all in its present form (which is pretty iffy), it will leave secret ballot elections in place--a process which managements have long ago figured out how to delay endlessly, and to subvert, to the point that it is now next to impossible to unionize new workplaces.

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