March 1, 1996
by Tim Costello and Jeremy Brecher
Labor Research Review #24:
PART I: THE POLITICS OF REFORM
PART II: THE FUTURE OF THE REFORM AGENDA
JOHN SWEENEY RESPONDS
RON CAREY RESPONDS
JANE SLAUGHTER RESPONDS
PART I: THE POLITICS OF REFORM
A lot has changed since the formation of the AFL-CIO 40 years ago. A regulated national economy has been transformed into a global economy-one in which American workers can be put into competition with others anywhere in the world. Corporations have decentralized their activities, downsized their in-house operations, and outsourced their production even while concentrating their power around the globe. Large urban industrial complexes like Detroit and Pittsburgh have been replaced by small, highly mobile production units, which can easily be relocated. White men have become the minority of the U.S. workforce and women and people of color the majority.
Meanwhile, no major American institution has changed less than the labor movement. Today’s unions are as poorly adapted to today’s economy and society as were the craft unions of iron puddlers and cord wainers to the mass production industries of 70 years ago.
The insurgent campaign, “A New Voice for American Workers, which recently captured leadership of the AFL-CIO, has called for a “new labor movement,” but the effort to construct a new labor movement comes up against the fabled rigidity of the AFL-CIO. Labor historian David Montgomery once compared the AFL-CIO to a great snapping turtle, “hiding within its shell to shield the working class from contamination.” How can the emergence of New Voice contribute to the development of a new labor movement, given its location within the rigid and contorted shell of the old?
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF LABOR
For the past two decades the AFL-CIO has executed a stately, slow-motion collapse. Membership has plunged to 15.5 percent of wage earners, with only 11.2 percent in the private sector. Major strikes and lockouts-for example Bridgestone, Caterpillar, and Staley-have ended in devastating defeats. Not surprisingly, many workers will accept almost any concessions rather than strike. In the past year, there were only 385 work stoppages compared with 3,111 in the peak year of 1977. Real wages have declined about 15 percent since 1973; real incomes for young families have decreased by one-third. And, after its greatest grassroots mobilization in 20 years, labor saw a Democratic President and Congress it had worked hard to elect pass a NAFTA agreement that poses the threat of a personal pink-slip to large numbers of American workers and union officials. Maine AFL-CIO President Charles O’Leary observed that labor’s public image is that of “white-haired old men meeting down in Bal Harbor talking about the past.” The once powerful AFL-CIO seemed little more than an empty shell.
During the past two decades of labor’s decline there have emerged a considerable number of reform movements, local activists, leaders, and staff members with progressive political ideas. They have been visible in official and insurgent strikes like the Pittston coal strike and the Austin, Minnesota Hormel strike; the biannual labor convocations held by Labor Notes; the militant AFL-CIO Organizing Institute; the transnational and strategic corporate campaigns of the Industrial Union Department; the local coalitions against NAFTA; the cross-union activism and solidarity promoted by Jobs with Justice; and the successful reform movement in the Teamsters union. Until 1995, however, barely an echo of these new forces was audible inside the AFL-CIO’s headquarters in Washington or its council meetings in Bal Harbor.
NEW VOICE
Early in 1995, leaders of the biggest unions-well aware that inertia at the very top of the AFL-CIO was contributing to the decline of their own organizations-attempted a conventional power play. They asked Lane Kirkland, for 16 years the president of the AFL-CIO, to step down and let his second-in-command, Tom Donahue, take over. When Kirkland said no, they asked Donahue to run against him, but he declined. John Sweeney, head of the large and fast-growing Service Employees International Union, emerged as the insurgents’ alternative. Sweeney says he launched his candidacy only because Donahue refused to join the drive to unseat Kirkland. “I decided to run for president of the AFL-CIO because organized labor is the only voice of American workers and their families, and because the silence was deafening.”
As Kirkland continued to hang on, the Sweeney campaign dubbed itself “A New Voice for American Labor” and developed a momentum of its own that went far beyond the initial palace power play. To Sweeney, generally regarded as a dynamic but mainstream trade unionist, the New Voice ticket added Richard Trumka of the United Mineworkers, for many a symbol of militancy, and Linda Chavez-Thompson, representing women and people of color, groups notoriously under represented in the AFL-CIO’s top echelon.
New Voice developed a trenchant critique of two decades of labor movement failure. Sweeney scored the AFLCIO as a “WashIngton-based institution concerned primarily with refining policy positions” instead of a “worker-based movement against greed, multinational corporations, race-baiting, and labor-baiting politicians.” He charged that the American labor movement is “Irrelevant to the vast majority of unorganized workers in our country” and added that he had deep suspicions that “we are becoming irrelevant to our own members.” Linda Chavez-Thompson attacked “30 or 40 years of AFL-CIO isolation and inaction.”
Further’ the national union presidents who initiated New Voice turned to forces from outside the palace. New Voice mobilized thousands of activists and progressives and promoted many of their ideas and programs. By the time Kirkland finally accepted his opponents’ original demand and stepped down in favor of Donahue, it was too late-there was no going back for the forces the Sweeney campaign had mobilized. It is symbolic of the new forces at play that the reformers who have taken over the Teamsters provided Sweeney’s margin of victory at the AFL-CIO convention in October; it is indicative of the continuity in the AFL-CIO’s power structure that the presidents of a few large unions called most of the convention’s shots.
NEW DYNAMICS
New Voice has shifted the AFL-CIO’s rhetoric from that of business unionism toward that of a social movement and proposed institutional vehicles for making that rhetoric real. But the new AFL-CIO Executive Council is composed primarily of the same officials who have presided over the last two decades of the labor movement’s decline. Few of them have challenged the institutional constraints imposed by labor law, union structure, bureaucratic deadwood, and organizational inertia. While some New Voice leaders have been associated with progressive or reform forces in their unions, others have fought oppositions who have advocated the very changes that New Voice now promotes. Some have silenced rank‑and‑file initiatives and even broken strikes of their own members. Few have projected an alternative vision for the labor movement, let alone for society.
Nonetheless, even bureaucrats, faced with extinction, have been known to change. Many of the union leaders who initiated the CIO L. Lewis in particular-had been politically conservative and heavy handed with their own members. But they came to recognize that the labor movement-and their own organizations in particular-could only be saved by unleashing a rank-and-file initiative that they could not always count on controlling. Those who now lead the AFL-CIO likewise must encourage dramatic change or see their own organizations plunge toward extinction. They might prefer to have change limited to a militant business unionism which combines top-down control with more vigorous organizing and a greater willingness to strike. Nevertheless, any substantial revitalization of the labor movement will require a move toward social movement unionism, in which grassroots activism supplants the rigid, bureaucratic character all too typical of American trade unions.
TRANSCENDING THE SHELL
Much will depend on the interaction of those at the top of the AFL-CIO and those at the grassroots; The new leadership has promised to set up a slew of task forces, institutes, centers, and committees to implement the New Voice program. These can provide information, resources, networking, and leadership that will be invaluable to local activists. Whether all these institutions will actually be formed remains to be seen, but they will accomplish little unless they encourage those on the ground to empower themselves. Progressives at higher levels, in particular those in the new institutions initiated by New Voice, need to work with, support, and protect local activists.
Some of the most important recent initiatives of labor movement activists-building local coalitions, conducting their own international outreach, organizing solidarity operations, and supporting rank-and-file insurgencies-have been independent of and at times even opposed to top labor leadership. Activists may well be tempted to abandon such independence for more conventional activities within the framework of a more accepting AFL-CIO mainstream. And the labor mainstream may try, from the best of motives, to internalize such efforts. (A top AFL-CIO official has already told local jobs with justice activists that, with New Voice’s ascendancy, they should start directing more of their efforts into regular union channels. One labor leader recently said that the only coalition we need is the AFL-CIO itself.)
The unfortunate result could be official coalitions dominated by the unions with only paper participation by allies; international linkages limited to top union officials; union solidarity that mobilizes more staff than rank-and-file; and isolation of progressives from the struggle for grassroots democracy within the labor movement. It could also turn progressives into disciplinary agents within the labor movement and leave them no base if conservative forces regain control at the top.
In an earlier era, trade unions were regarded as only one element of a wider labor movement. Tomorrow’s “new labor movement,” likewise, should be seen less as a reformed AFL-CIO than as a broader constellation of allied forces and institutions. Both AFL-CIO leaders and local activists should promote institutions allied with, but outside, the shell of the AFL-CIO: occupational safety and health groups, labor education programs such as the Highlander Center, labor history associations, labor arts programs, producer and consumer cooperatives, vehicles for community investment, jobs with justice, political coalitions, issue coalitions, local labor centers, and the like. Such initiatives “outside the shell” are the key to putting the “new” in the “new labor movement” and to opening the way for future organizing.
PART 11: THE FUTURE OF THE REFORM AGENDA
The New Voice campaign issued an election platform with a broad evaluation of the crisis facing American workers and dozens of specific proposals for generating a new labor movement to meet it. Taken as a whole, the New Voice platform represents a serious, comprehensive, and well-thought-out response to the AFL-CIO’s present predicament, incorporating a great many of the ideas proposed by reformers over the past few years.
While this program may prove, like so many electoral platforms, to be lust a set of attractive promises that will be largely ignored once its proponents are installed in office, it provides both a valuable starting point for a discussion of what changes the labor movement needs and a set of commitments to which the new AFL-CIO leadership can be held accountable. Part 11 of this article asks: Are the proposals themselves adequate? How can this ambitious program actually be implemented? How adequate and appropriate are the initial steps to implement it? And how should labor activists, progressives, and rank-and-file leaders relate to those efforts? This article addresses in turn each of the seven sections of the New Voice program:
-Organize at a pace and scale that is unprecedented
-Build a new and progressive political movement of working people
-Construct a labor movement that can change workers’ lives
-Create a strong new progressive voice in American life
-Renew and refocus our commitment to labor around the world
-Lead a democratic movement that speaks for all American workers
-Institutionalize the process of change
ORGANIZE AT A PACE AND SCALE THAT IS UNPRECEDENTED
The New Voice program states that “the most critical challenge facing unions today is organizing.” While previous AFL-CIO strategy concentrated on political efforts to ease organizing by changing labor law, the New Voice platform argued, “We must first organize despite the law if we are ever to organize with the law.” It proposes to increase the AFL-CIO organizing budget by $20 million. It would create an AFL-CIO
Organizing Department with an Office of Strategic Planning to facilitate multiunion organizing and explore experimental organizing approaches. The AFL-CIO Organizing Institute would be expanded to train and deploy 1000 new organizers over the next two years.
Organizing has often been offered as a panacea for what ails the labor movement, but the realities are sobering. One study in 1990 by Gary Chaison and Dileep Dhavale estimates that to maintain present memberships unions would have to spend $300 million dollars on organizing. The difficulty of conventional organizing-professional organizers handing out union cards and petitioning for NLRB elections-has led many labor activists and progressives-including those associated with the AFL-CIO’s Organizing Institute-to advocate more radical approaches.
New Voice rhetoric redefines organizing as a movement for human rights, not lust a vehicle for economic bargaining. It envisions a strategy that moves beyond workplace-by-workplace organizing to the creation of a mass movement. In his acceptance speech Sweeney proclaimed, “If anyone denies American workers their constitutional right to freedom of association, we will use old-fashioned mass demonstrations, as well as sophisticated corporate campaigns to make worker rights the civil rights issue of the 1990s.”
Organizing strategy would include “training and motivating rankand-file workers to organize the unorganized;” supporting “local coalltion-building efforts with community, religious, civil rights and other organizations;” creating a network of “local organizing centers” and community-based Worker Rights Boards. Sweeney, during a 1995 speech to the National Press Club, also emphasized the value of new forms of “community unionism,” such as the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project, and experiments with “associational unionism.” “Workers in many cases feel more comfortable forming an association that addresses sexual harassment, pay equity, promotional activities” instead of, or prior to, traditional collective bargaining.
Discontent among American workers is at a historic high. If the labor movement can make itself a vehicle for expressing that discontent, people will clamor to join unions or will simply go ahead and organize themselves. But at present most do not identify joining a union as the solution to their problems. No organizing technique is likely to be effective if people see the labor movement as an undemocratic, toothless bureaucracy representing interests that are different from their own. Ultimately, success in organizing new members will depend on success in transforming the labor movement itself.
BUILD A NEW AND PROGRESSIVE POLITICAL MOVEMENT OF WORKING PEOPLE
The New Voice program emphasizes that “our politics must start in the neighborhoods where our members live and vote.” It calls for a National Labor Political Training Center to train labor activists and political candidates and a Labor Center for Economic and Public Policy to develop policy and support legislative efforts. A new media strategy would establish a media workshop, studio facilities, marketing and distribution teams, and a strategic center. A Campaign 96 Fund would expand money devoted to politics.
Central Labor Councils (CLCs)-currently seen as the stepchildren of the labor movement-would be revitalized to serve as “the front line of labor’s political efforts.” (Chavez-Thompson noted, “The AFL-CIO has left the state federations and the central labor councils up the creek and they didn’t even lend them a paddle.”) They would organize members on a multi-union basis in neighborhoods to “re-energize our base and build bridges with individuals and organizations who share our views.” CLCs would be connected to the national AFLCIO by a new Advisory Committee of CLC leaders and by assigning Executive Council members to act as liaisons to groups of councils.
An apparent contradiction in this program has to do with the relation to the Democratic Party and its candidates. Sweeney has said that labor needs to “stop wasting our money on candidates who turn their backs on workers after they are elected.” But in spite of its dubious record, he has indicated a continuation of the traditional AFL-CIO knee-jerk support for the Democratic Party. On NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press” he said, “President Clinton has done a great job as president and deserves our support.” In his acceptance speech at the AFL-CIO convention he said, “We will re-elect a president and elect a Democratic Congress committed to the people who ‘work hard and play by the rules.”‘ Sweeney’s strategy seems to be to assert more influence by involving the labor movement more intensively with the Democratic candidates.
Such a strategy cannot deal effectively with “candidates who turn their backs on workers after they are elected”-a problem evident on issues ranging from NAFTA to labor law reform. Nor is it likely to “build a progressive political movement.” Local labor activists have developed more promising strategies. In many states they have established coalitions with other progressive groups that have in effect created their own progressive political machines from the ground up. They have recruited activists from their own ranks, trained them, put resources behind them, and managed their campaigns. This has created- a base from which they could challenge Democratic machines in primaries or, when necessary, run independent candidates. If the AFL-CIO wants to build a progressive political movement and hold those it elects accountable, it should direct major support toward such efforts and encourage its local affiliates to participate in them.
Considerable sentiment has also developed in the labor movement for a labor-oriented third party, perhaps modeled on the Canadian New Democrats. Whether or not a third party is ultimately the best political strategy, labor can only benefit from the development of a party with a pro-labor platform. The AFL-CIO should welcome the participation of labor activists in groups like Labor Party Advocates and the New Party, and should support independent and third party candidates where Democratic and Republican candidates are unacceptable.
CONSTRUCT A LABOR MOVEMENT THAT CAN CHANGE WORKERS’ LIVES
The New Voice platform declares that “the Federation must be the fulcrum of a vibrant social movement, not simply a Federation of constituent organizations.” The proposed vehicle for this is a Center for Strategic Campaigns that would coordinate national contract campaigns and establish a national network of resources inside and outside the labor movement for bargaining and organizing campaigns. A strategy campaign fund would provide grants to unions in difficult contract fights. A strike support team of top leaders and staff from international unions would be deployed early to help local leaders with long-running strikes.
Breaking with the past, New Voice leadership is trying to identify the AFL-CIO with militant labor struggles and stress solidarity. New Voice candidates joined picket lines around the country (provoking their opponents to do the same). They honored strikers and locked out workerslike Staley hunger striker Dan Lane-at the convention. Richard Trumka has been assigned responsibility for coordinating the emerging initiatives around strategic campaigns.
The new AFL-CIO leadership has planned a series of campaigns to build momentum for its efforts through 1996. In a December 1995 address to the National Press Club, Sweeney outlined the AFL-CIO’s plan for the first year. In the spring it will hold hearings on falling living standards in communities across the country. “We will ask working men and women what is happening to their jobs, their paychecks, and their family budgets.” “Union Summer” started in June, with a 1000 college students and young workers organizing voter registration and living wage campaigns. “Union Fall”‑to “organize and mobilize Working Americans around the fundamental issue of raising wages and increasing incomes”-will start in September.
However, some elements of what the labor movement can do to “change workers ‘lives” are missing. For example, little attention is given to issues such as shorter hours, rights for contingent workers, resistance to lean production, and other problems of daily work life. Similarly, “capital strategies,” which promote employee ownership and community economic development, are not included in the New Voice vision.
CREATE A STRONG NEW PROGRESSIVE VOICE IN AMERICAN LIFE
The New Voice program calls for an overhaul of the AFL-CIO’s public communications and public affairs work to “redefine America’s (and many of our own members’) perceptions of us.” The AFL-CIO should provide “a forceful new voice for working families on national issues.” The vehicle would be a revamped Labor Institute for Public Affairs, transformed from “an institutional support organization” into a “pro-active strategic operation” aimed at “creating a pro-worker and pro-union public environment.”
Sweeney has begun an effort to redirect the national political debate by trying to make low wages amid high profits a national political issue. “In every speech I give from the Press Club to the picket lines, I try to make this simple point America needs a raise.”
Labor’s problems with the public-and with its own members-go far beyond “communications,” however. As a recent study conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the AFL-CIO observed. Members generally have little or no ideological orientation that would link economics, government, and politics So while they know that these are hard economic times for working people, few can articulate any explanation for what has gone wrong, who is responsible, or what should I be done about it.” The Hart study concludes, “Labor’s longer-term strategic mission is to develop an ideological framework among the membership that helps them to make sense of the Brave New Economy they confront in ways that lead to progressive political conclusions. We need to tell a compelling story about the economy, corporate irresponsibility, and the conservative policies that have helped shift even more bargaining power toward capital over labor.”
The war of ideas has been crucial to the Right’s current dominance. The labor movement needs to provide a distinctive labor interpretation of what has happened to working people, why, and what to do about it. “America needs a raise” may be a good initial slogan, but it provides no answer to the ideas of the Christian Right, Pat Buchanan, the free market Right, New Democrats, corporate globalists, and establishment liberals. Labor needs to explain that the suffering of working Americans is being created by global corporations who are playing workers and communities off each other, and that the solution to our deteriorating conditions of life and environment lies in a new solidarity of working people.
Then it needs to develop a program to address the real problems of working Americans, including local, national, and transnational strategies for countering the effects of globalization; providing jobs and economic security for all; establishing basic democratic rights and a high quality of life in the workplace; giving individuals and families greater control over the time of their lives; reversing the drive toward inequality; and protecting the natural and social environment on which our life and our economy depend. Ultimately, this adds up to an alternative vision of society and the place of workers within it.
Developing an alternative vision of this kind is not something that can or should emerge from a committee or a handful of leaders. But organizational leaders can foster an environment that nurtures such a vision. Toward that end the AFL-CIO should create an equivalent of the Organizing Institute dedicated to popular education for its members and allied groups. It should promote and distribute a wide range of existing models and materials and fund development of new ones. Its goal should not be indoctrination but rather informed debate on the future of work and society. In parallel, activists should create and the AFL-CIO Should support the development of an independent labor education movement like that which exists in England and many other countries. This movement would include university and college-based programs like the Labor Studies and Labor Extension Programs at the University of Massachusetts where rank-and-file activists from different unions and different backgrounds can come together, and independent centers like the Highlander Center in Tennessee and the Labor Institute in New Jersey.
RENEW AND REFOCUS OUR COMMITMENT TO LABOR AROUND THE WORLD
The New Voice program appears at first to support the cold-war-oriented international policy that has been such a dominant feature of the AFL‑CIO since its inception. It states, “we are proud of our accomplishments over the years, culminating in the defeat of apartheid in South Africa and the role of Solidamose in leading Poland to democracy.” (While many American trade unions provided valuable support to the freedom struggle in South Africa, the AFL-CIO’s most notable contribution was its long-running refusal to work with the principal black trade union center, COSATU, because of its alleged Communist ties.)
The program proposes, however, to redirect the AFL-CIO’s international work. “In today’s global economy we need to see our international efforts much more in terms of the self‑interests of American workers.” While this formulation may seem to indicate a nationalist or protectionist direction, the contemplated shift seems rather to be from “helping” downtrodden workers abroad to mutual aid for mutual benefit. “We recognize that we need the support of the international free trade union movement because global employers exploit workers wherever quick profits are to be made-and because so many of our American employers are corporations that are controlled abroad.”
New Voice proposes to create a Transnational Corporate Monitoring Project perhaps as part of the Center for Strategic Campaigns) which would serve as a central resource for information on global, corporate, and labor organizations; support all efforts to achieve international solidarity on behalf of American workers; and monitor international institutions and treaties like the World Bank, the IMF, GATT, and NAFTA. Such a project could serve as a vehicle for reorienting the AFL-CIO vis-a-vis the global economy, but there are several problems. One problem has to do with how the AFL-CIO will approach the global economy, In a labor version of economic nationalism, Sweeney told the AFL-CIO Convention, “the problem is American companies that export jobs instead of products.” If the AFL-CIO embraces an economic nationalism that promotes the interests of American workers at the expense of those elsewhere, it is hardly likely to find enthusiastic support when American workers need international solidarity. Instead, it needs to develop a global strategy based on raising the labor, social, and environmental standards of workers all over the world. As Richard Trumka put it, we need “an America which doesn’t compete around the globe by driving our wages down, when we should be forcing our competitors to pull theirs up.”
Another problem has to do with the heritage of the AFL-CIO’s international work. During the cold war the AFL-CIO international operation was virtually an arm of U.S. foreign policy, often lending support to dictatorial regimes around the world. Business Week described the AFL-CIO’s global operations, such as its International Affairs Department (IAD) in Washington and its American Institute for Free Labor Development in Latin America, as “labor’s own version of the Central Intelligence Agency-a trade union network existing in all parts of the world.” The AFL-CIO demanded that trade unionists shun all contact with unions tainted by communism; in practice, it often demanded that its affiliates shun even non-aligned unions. The principal funding for AFL-CIO activities overseas is the U.S. government. This is particularly ironic, since the AFL-CIO defines “free” labor unions with which it will cooperate as those that are not subject to government influence or control. The past role of the LAD and the regional institutes in such countries as South Africa, Brazil, Russia, and Chile forms a serious block to solidarity with the very labor groups with which U.S. workers need to cooperate.
A clean break with this dubious past would require abolition of the IAD and the regional institutes. Short of that, the AFLCIO could decline all government money for international programs, or accept it only for programs initiated by unions in the host country. At the least, it should insist on total transparency in all its international programs. And it should end the double-talk in which “free” trade unions are defined as those that conform to the policies of the U.S. government, and many militant, self-directing worker organizations are shunned as Communist-tainted.
Some national union leaders, as well as many if not most of the activists who supported New Voice, reject the AFL-CIO’s cold war heritage. Even if they won’t or can’t abolish the IAD there they (perhaps operating out of the proposed Transnational Corporate Monitoring Project) can do. For instance, they can pick some good fights that symbolize the common interests of workers in different countries and the value of international labor solidarity. When these fights require cooperation with labor organizations the AFL-CIO has previously shunned they should insist that cooperation is necessary and right. They can use these fights to educate union leaders and members on how workers should deal with the global economy. In these efforts they should utilize the experience of groups like the National Labor Committee in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America and the International Labor Rights Research and Education Fund.
The New Voice program notes that “we also have much to learn from unions abroad.” The New Voice leadership should encourage tours to learn from unions in Canada (health care, labor law, and international labor cooperation), France (resisting government cuts), Germany (shorter hours and lob training), Brazil (alliances of labor with the poor and unemployed), South Africa (transforming racist institutions), and others If the AFL-CIO won’t do it, progressive unions should give some highly visible invitations to some previously “shunned” unions, and let the chips fall where they may. The Transnational Corporate Monitoring Project should take as one of its most important tasks to make it possible for workers anywhere to link up with those in the same industry, company, or occupation anywhere in the world.
LEAD A DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT THAT SPEAKS FOR ALL AMERICAN WORKERS
The prevailing image of organized labor is a bureaucracy that primarily represents the special interests of its officials and a privileged sector of the workforce. The New Voice platform proposes to “create a labor movement that speaks for and looks like today’s workforce.” This involves a redefinition of the role of the labor movement, a new emphasis on racial, ethnic, and gender inclusion, and reforms of organizational structure.
Representing all workers. New Voice leaders are trying to position the. AFL-CIO as an advocate for all working people, not just the agent of those in unions. The New Voice program states, “The labor movement must speak forcefully on behalf of all working people.” Sweeney proclaimed, “To the more than 13 million workers we represent, and to millions more who are not represented, our commitment is firm and clear.
When you struggle for justice, you will pot struggle alone.” Linda Chavez-Thompson said the labor movement needs to be the voice of those who need us, such as the unemployed, the underemployed, the young, the old, the poor, and children. “We need to be the hopes and dreams for those who can’t speak for themselves.”
This change of emphasis is essential for creating a new labor movement, but it needs to be implemented concretely. For example, campaigns for higher minimum wages, rights for contingent workers, and laws requiring just-cause for firing would address core problems of workers who are not organized. AFL-CIO support for Worker Advocacy Resource Centers and organizations of the unemployed would show commitment to advocating for all working people, not just current union members.
Inclusion. The New Voice leadership has begun to change the scandalous domination of the AFL-CIO by old white men. It created a new position of executive vice-president and ran Linda Chavez-Thompson, a Latina woman, for the seat; she will have primary responsibility for outreach to women and minorities, probably starting with a series of regional conferences. New Voice reserved 10 seats on the Executive Council for women and people of color and negotiated a new Executive Council with 6 women, 9 African Americans, I Latino, and Asian-American. It proposed establishment of an advisory Young Workers’ Task Force. The AFL-CIO has taken steps in the right direction, but there’s a long way to go to reach full and equal I representation ion. Prior to the October convention, black union leaders noted that they were not consulted in selecting either candidate. Louis Uchitelle, in a July 15, 1995, article in the New York Times, states that according to William Burrus, executive vice president of the American Postal Workers Union and a leader of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, “Decisions were made without including us. Now, after the fact, they are reaching out to hear our views.” The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists drew up I I demands calling for more minorities and women as delegates, Executive Council members, and staffers. While both tickets agreed in principle to most of the black unionists’ demands, the issue of tokenism remained.
As cited by Martha Gruelle in an October 1995 Labor Notes article, William Burrus states, “You can’t hold them accountable until they’re forced to recognize the political strength of groups like women, African Americans, and Latinos.” The look of the Executive Council won’t change “as long as they have the power to anoint with a hand on the shoulder who they want.”
The question of Inclusion also involves the ways issues are framed. William Lucy, president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, notes that the AFL-CIO opposed NAFTA primarily on the grounds that Americans would lose jobs as companies shifted operations to Mexico. According to Lucy, what should also have been stressed was a civil rights issue: the diversion of investment from urban communities where blacks might have gained employment. Burrus also notes, in the Uchitelle article, that “With a black viewpoint included, the campaign against NAFTA might have been a lot deeper and broader.”
Organizational Reform. The New Voice program proposes to “expand the involvement of our grassroots leaders” and calls for “the top leadership of the Federation” to be “in constant touch with its grassroots leadership,” It proposes quarterly Executive Council meetings with written agendas circulated in advance and summaries of Council action sent to affiliates; an annual budget; annual General Board Meetings of all AFL-CIO unions and of all State Federation Presidents; an annual conference for all central labor council leaders; and sets an age limit of 70 for top officers.
By the very act of contesting the election, New Voice has challenged the one-party, party-line norms that have governed the labor movement since the era of Sam Compers. Sweeney, quoted in the October 28,1995 issue of People’s Weekly World, told delegates to the AFL-CIO convention that the secret to protecting the labor movement lies in part in “opening the AFL-CIO to debate. When we do that, the solidarity and unity that are at the core of our movement are tempered and trued and made stronger.” Like Pope John XXIII, he has recognized the need to “throw open the windows of the church.”
But the New Voice program barely begins to grapple with the depth of the problems created by the lack of democracy in the AFL-CIO, let alone in the labor movement as a whole. For the previous 16 years, the AFL-CIO Executive Council was composed of 33 mostly white male international union presidents who were reelected every two years as a group by voice vote without opposition or debate. They met in closed sessions and kept any disagreements secret; Council minutes remained closed even to scholars for thirty years! The new Executive Council was also selected via a back-room negotiation between the two tickets and elected with virtually no opportunity for discussion or alternative nominations. Many national unions function with a similar level of democracy.
This real lack of democracy contributes mightily to negative public and member perception of the labor movement. The Hart study noted that many union members often liken the union to “another boss.” “Too many members see unions as bureaucratic institutions which have lost sight of the average member’s interests.”
Sweeney has said that the whole governance and structure of the AFL-CIO needs to be reviewed to “find ways to operate more effectively.” But the reforms proposed by New Voice so far are grossly inadequate to address this in reality.
Unions at every level need to be run more by rank-and-file workers and less by full-time officials; to guarantee freedom of speech and association without the threat of reprisal; to provide direct election of top union officials by all union members; and to ensure rank-and-file negotiation and ratification of contracts. New AFL-CIO structures should support rank-and-file empowerment, not re-centralization of authority.
While democratic reform will require a grassroots struggle union-by-union, the AFL-CIO can make a significant contribution. It should use the precedent of its first contested presidential election to advocate a new norm of democratic pluralism, rather than single-party rule, for all levels of the labor movement. It should insist that oppositions and insurgencies be regarded as legitimate elements of the labor movement and pursue genuine neutrality toward them. It should welcome those who have been “shunned” because of past support for oppositions and insurgencies back into the fold. Its emerging ethical practices code should require that affiliates provide the basic human rights and democratic practices that we demand of governments throughout the world.
Now, as in the past, conflicts between national union leaders and their own rank-and-file are likely to pose difficult problems for the AFL-CIO leadership. What will the New Voice leaders do when rank-and-file workers reject contracts but are ordered back to work by national union officials? When appointed trustees replace the elected leaders of local unions? Or when workers strike despite the opposition of their union leaders? While it may not be the AFL-CIO’s role as a federation to pick sides in such situations, at the least the new leadership should ensure that the AFL-CIO will not function as a de facto strikebreaker. Labor activists who believe in union democracy should continue to support the right of rank-and-file workers to act on their own behalf, whatever national unions or the AFL-CIO may do.
INSTITUTIONALIZE THE PROCESS OF CHANGE
The New Voice platform emphasizes the need “to provide for a process of continual growth and change.” To that end it proposes a “Committee 2000” of top union officials to conduct a Strategic Planning Process and submit a report to the 1997 AFL-CIO Convention. While such a Strategic Planning Process is doubtless a good idea, the proposed form suggests that the process of change will be tightly controlled by those at the top of the labor hierarchy, when what is required most of all for a new labor movement is relaxation of that top-down control to make room for a continuing process of initiatives from below. In shaping the future, the new AFL-CIO leadership needs to pay far more attention to John Sweeney’s campaign rhetoric: “We mean more than just changing the leadership of our labor federation at the top. We mean building a strong new movement from the ground up.”
The organizational strategy outlined in the New Voice program is essentially to build a new AFL-CIO staff structure that largely by-passes’ the existing officers and departments. This responds to the need to Address a new set of tasks, to avoid entanglement in structures that are poorly adapted to those tasks, and to circumvent the bureaucratic deadwood. While perhaps wise, this strategy risks building not a new labor movement but rather a new bureaucracy in the shell of the old. In the October 1995 issue of Labor Notes, labor writer Suzanne Gordon wrote of the New Voice program:
“For every union problem, there’s a new Washington solution institute, a task force, a monitoring project, a clearinghouse, a policy center, a training center, a center for strategic campaigns, a new organizing department (with an office of strategic planning), a strategic planning process (“Committee 2000″), two or three campaign funds, a labor council advisory committee, and a ‘strike support team of top people’ from various union staffs…. This platform proclaims that ‘we must institutionalize the process of change.’ They will certainly do that if, on top of the AFL-CIO’s many existing departments, they establish all these new institutions in and around 815 16th Street, NW.”
If the new AFL-CIO leaders count on their new committees, task forces, institutes, and centers to create a new labor movement, they will fall. Only if they are able to nurture a new movement culture that values and promotes rank-and-file initiative do they have a chance to succeed. What they can and should do (and what the New Voice program at its best proposes) is encourage and provide resources for a wide range of such initiatives.
After the devastating defeat of the Pullman strike in 1894, Eugene Victor Debs opened the pages of the union’s magazine not only to the union’s members but also to the widest possible range of those throughout the country who had proposed new approaches to the labor question. Such an open discussion-updated for the age of electronic communication-provides a more inspiring model of how to “Institutionalize the process of change” within the labor movement than a committee of top union officials attempting to chart the future for the entire labor movement.
CONCLUSION
Throughout its history, the labor movement’s low points have also been its turning points. The same could be true now. But to meet the needs of working people today, the labor movement needs to change at least as radically as the transnational corporations have changed. What needs changing goes far beyond the AFL-CIO as a national union center; the entire definition of the labor movement as a means for particular groups of workers to bargain with particular employers within the framework of a national economy is as outmoded as the vertically-integrated national corporation. Its focus on collective bargaining, its definitions of bargaining units, its divisions among unions, its notions of seniority, its limited repertoire of tactics, its narrow conception of workers’ needs and interests, its faith in the beneficence of economic growth, and its embeddedness within a national frameworkall require drastic change.
In today’s globalizing economy the needs of working people and the goals of the labor movement can only be met through a worldwide coalition of labor and other movements to impose human and ecological interests on transnational corporations and other out-of-control istitution and forces. Within such a coalition, the labor movement can represent the specific needs of workers in the workplace-and their organization at work as part of tile movement as a whole. In some ways, such a labor movement will more resemble that of the 19th century Knights of Labor than the model we have inherited from Gompers and Meany. Can the emergence of new leadership in the AFL-CIO contribute to such a change, or will it instead help contain the forces of change within the existing shell?
Some shelled animals outgrow their original shells but continue to prosper by adding on new, larger, and differently-shaped chambers; some leave their outgrown shells behind; some die when their shells no longer allow them room to grow. If the AFL-CIO can change enough to let a “new labor movement” emerge, or even If a revitalized labor movement eventually has to escape from its confines, the current attempt to build a new labor movement within the shell of the old will have played a constructive role. But if the AFL-CIO tries to confine the regeneration of the labor movement within its own shell, it risks killing the very forces that might give it a new life.
JOHN SWEENEY RESPONDS
“New Labor Movement in the Shell of the Old?” by Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello is just the kind of thoughtful critique the “New Voices” of the American labor movement need if we are to make the transition from campaign rhetoric to meaningful change. During the campaign last summer and fall, I ended virtually every speech with my personal commitment to such reviews and critiques by saying, “And my idea of a perfect labor movement is one which constantly re-exammes itself and corrects its own imperfections.”
For the past six months, Rich Trumka, Linda Chavez-Thompson and I have been spearheading lust such a re-examination of the AFL-CIO, even as we advance the organizing and political action programs we’ve made a first priority in this most critical of years for organized labor. Last fall, we appointed task forces with representatives from 50 International Unions to examine the major departments and programs of the AFL-CIO. Those task forces made their reports early this year and we’ve been proceeding at breakneck speed to implement their recommendations.
In their article Messrs. Brecher and Costello rightly recognize the amazing performance of the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute over the past few years; we recognized it by appointing Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers’ Richard Bensinger, the driving force behind the Organizing Institute, as director of the first AFL-CIO Organizing Department. They rightly recognize the enormous importance and contribution of the reformed Teamsters union; we recognized it by hiring the Teamsters’ Marilyn Schneiderman as our Field Mobilization Director and we’ve charged her with completely renovating and rejuvenating what had been called our “Field Services Department.” The authors rightly recognize the importance of greater involvement of women in the labor movement; we recognized it by naming Karen Nussbaum, the founder of 9 to 5, National Association of Working Women, and the former director of the Women’s Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor, as director of Women’s Programs at the AFL-CIO. Brecher and Costello rightly recognize the need for regaining our political clout so we don’t have to suffer defeats like the Workplace Fairness Bill and NAFTA; we recognized it by making Steve Rosenthal, a Communications activist by way of the Clinton Campaign, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and the Department of Labor, as our political director.
Admittedly, we have a long way to go before we succeed in transforming the AFL-CIO from “a Washington-based institution concerned primarily with refining policy positions” into a “worker-based movement against greed, multi-national corporations, race-baiting, and laborbaiting politicians,” but we are ahead of where I thought we’d be at this point-far enough ahead that I feel comfortable taking issue with the presumption of failure that is laced through the Brecher-Costello analysis Yes, our organization needs and is getting a thorough overhaul, but don’t over-rate the “fabled rigidity.” There’s dormant energy and potential aplenty just waiting for leadership.
And shame on us If we don’t take advantage of a rare opportunity created by the over-reaching of profit-hungry corporations and opportumstic conservatives in the United States Congress. Ironically, the consequences of losing our power has made the case for the labor movement in ways not possible in many years.
As Brecher and Costello note, we need lots of new friends and allies if we are to jump-start the labor movement. So this spring we began reaching out systematically to possible coalition partners by hosting important planning sessions at our headquarters. The first was a meeting of women’s organizations that included the presidents of the National Organization for Women, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, and the hundred-organization-member Council of Presidents. Another was a three-day meeting of more than 75 organizations working on local, state, and federal living-wage initiatives, organizations including ACORN, Citizen Action, several civil rights organizations, and church groups. And we hosted a planning meeting of progressive academics and Journalists who are organizing a fall conference with us. The point is not that these gatherings are taking place, but that they are now commonplace.
In late March, our affiliated unions put our money where our mouth is by voting in special convention to assess themselves a total of $25 million to finance an unprecedented political education, voter registration, and get-out-the-vote effort amongst our members and the general public-a decision that has made us the target of a vicious disinformation and smear campaign on the part of right-wing political organizations. At the same time, we defied convention and made an early endorsement for the re-election of President Clinton and Vice President Gore.
In response to comments in “A New Labor Movement in the Shell of the Old” about the proper political role of the AFL-CIO, I think these two actions demonstrate where we are coming from. First, none of the $25 million-or an additional $10 million coming out of our regular operating funds‑will go to the DNC. In fact, we’ve given less than $ 10,000 to the DNC this year because of our concern with their policies and practices. Second, the endorsement of Clinton and Gore should not be read as an endorsement of the DNC or of Democratic Party candidates in general. We endorsed the president and the vice president because their performance on behalf of working Americans over the past four years merits it (70 percent of our 13.1 million members agree) and because we cannot waste one moment in mounting a campaign to recapture the machinery of our government and reclaim our country there were and are no other candidates willing to make commitments like President Clinton has made and any hesitation on our part would have reflected a death-wish.
As Brecher and Costello report, there is a budding movement within the labor movement to establish a Labor Party as a third-force in American politics. I’ve had experience with lust such an effort while I was a labor leader in New York: It ended disastrously by splintering the progressive vote and, while I’m personally dissatisfied with the Democratic Party, I’m a bit chary about the chances -for a Labor Party. I would be the last person, however, to discourage the dedicated brothers and sisters who are organizing the Labor Party movement from taking their best shot and I hope the progress they are making sends a clear signal to a Democratic Party that has moved away from working families just as surely as it has moved away from the old, the young, the disabled, and the poor. In the 1950s, the progressive forces in the labor movement, led by Walter Reuther, waged all‑out war against the notion of a Labor Party. That was then and this is now, and the Democratic Party should realize that the current effort is being led by the very forces that once ‘disdained the notion.
During May and June, we are living up to our commitment to make the wage and wealth gap the top item on the national political agenda by holding “America Needs a Raise” town hall meetings in 25 cities. The reception by the media (which has generally been fantastic since we began our campaign last June) has been gratifying and has helped propel us into increased interest in our “Union Summer” program. We started out to recruit and involve 1,000 young workers and students in organizing and political education efforts around the country; as of this writing, we’ve received more than 2,500 applications from these Generation Xer’s who are supposed to be against everything we believe in, and we are scrambling to expand the program.
We’re going to build on this success with a “Union Fall” during which we regain control of the national agenda. We’ve already trained and deployed 800 aggressive new political organizers, with more to come, and our goal is to establish core groups of at least 100 union activists in every congressional district in the country. Our strategy is to use grassroots action to elect men and women at every level of government who will represent the needs of working Americans-and then hold those men and women accountable.
Will these candidates be Democrats, Republicans, or something else? Frankly, we don’t care-as long as they are willing to make the commitments and live up to them. Right now, we hope to regain control of the House of Representatives by the only practical means available, and that’s by electing a Democratic majority. But, as everyone now realizes, our new approach to politics has already split the conservative and moderate wings of the Republican party and we look forward to a day when we can once again support politicians like Nelson Rockefeller, Mark Hatfield, and Jacob Javits.
Finally, Brecher and Costello are on the mark when it comes to organizing. They are quite right to note that even the $20 million the AFL-CIO intends to devote to organizing over the next two years is a pittance-even though it would represent, after that period, fully one-third of our total budget. Their estimate of $300 million a year Just to hold our membership even is probably right on the money. That’s why it’s important to understand what we are trying to do at the national level-and that is to set an example and be a catalyst for a rebirth of organizing at the local level. To paraphrase an old euphemism, money can’t buy you more members… but it is impossible to organize without it, and the majority of the money in the labor movement lies with local unions. In my old union, for instance, our local unions receive an average of $21 per member per month in dues. They, in turn, pay $5.80 of that amount to their International union, which, in turn, pays $.43 per member per month to the AFL-CIO. What we’re trying to do with the $.43 we get is set an example for our affiliates and their local unions to follow: if every local and every International union spent one-third of its dues dollar on organizing we’d have more than enough money to reorganize the American workforce, with change left over to dominate the political arena.
We’re making progress, faster than some people think. I’ve told my staff and I’ve told my members, “I’m going to put myself way out front then I want you to push me.” It’s great to have Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello adding their shoulders to the wagon.
RON CAREY RESPONDS
“A New Labor Movement in the Shell of the Old?” hits the nail on the head when it says that any hope of reviving the labor movement depends on change at the I grassroots, not just in Washington, D.C. In the past five years, we in the Teamsters union have been facing the same challenge that now confronts the AFL-CIO: how to turn the labor bureaucracy into a labor movement again. The reforms we are making-while far from complete-confirm Brecher and Costello’s argument that rankand-file involvement and new community coalitions are key to rebuilding labor’s strength.
Much of the discussion about change at the AFL-CIO has focused on how much money is spent on organizing or political action. Will it be $ 10 million or $20 million? Will it be one-fifth of the budget or one third?
Certainly, the Teamster experience suggests that a shift in AFL-CIO budget priorities is an important first step toward broader reform. Since the first top Teamsters leaders directly elected by the membership took office in 1992, we have shifted about 60 staff positions from bureaucratic functions to organizing and campaigns that fight for good jobs, wages, pensions, and health care. We’ve cut millions of dollars in extra salaries and pensions for officials and used the savings to fight for better contracts, and the results have proven the benefits of this approach. But the change the labor movement needs is more fundamental than a redistribution of money. Recognizing that we will never have enough money to match employers, we must change the way we do our work. Our strength will always be in our numbers. We have to organize and use that power.
Throughout their article, Brecher and Costello rightly emphasize the need for a new “culture which values and promotes rank-and-file initiative.” One way to promote this initiative is through the pages of the union press. In the Teamster’s magazine that goes to all 1.4 million Teamster families and 400,000 retirees, we eliminated the President’s Column on the inside front cover and replaced it with two pages of letters to the editor, including letters of criticism and dissent.
As Brecher and Costello note, “The prevailing image of organized labor is a bureaucracy that primarily represents the special interests of its officials and a privileged sector of the workforce.” One way the Teamsters are combating that image is through our new Human Rights Commission, which conducts special conferences and produces materials to encourage more women and minorities to take an active part in the union, Its theme is “A Strong Union Involves Everyone,” reflecting the need to include groups who have been left out in the past-without suggesting to white male workers that they are now going to be considered less important.
Rank-and-file involvement also needs to be the focus of labor education. The Teamsters began a new program that has trained local education coordinators at more than 150 local unions. Our goal is to build ongoing local education programs that provide members with the skills, confidence, and information that they need to become activists on the job, in the union, and in their community.
To encourage workers to become more active in the labor movement, unions have to be able to show that getting involved gets results, and in this day and age that means a greater effort to build community support. The new AFL-CIO should forge stronger relationships with other citizens’ organizations, and encourage central labor councils and local unions to build ties with the community. In dozens of fights with employers over wages, health care, pensions, and working conditions, Teamster members and their families now go beyond just walking around with picket signs and actually reach out to the community.
Members in New England worked with Church Women United to stop a fishpacking company from forcing older workers out of their jobs. At Disney World, the local union worked with groups such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and the NAACP to stop the Dolphin Hotel from discriminating against workers based on their native language.
Grassroots involvement and building coalitions will also be crucial in revitalizing labor’s political action programs, where our primary focus must not be on promoting particular candidates but on pressuring all politicians to serve working people. Even though we lost the battle over NAFTA, many of the tactics the Teamsters and other unions employed should be expanded in future campaigns. For example, we worked closely with the independent Mexican labor federation, the Authentic Workers Front (Frente Autentico de Trabajo, or FAT), to bring speakers to work sites, shopping centers, county fairs, and other public places. We also organized joint events with environmentalists, local fair trade and Jobs with Justice coalitions, and other community groups. More recently, we’ve used grassroots coalition protests to temporarily delay a part of NAFTA that would allow corporations to hire truck drivers from Mexico-who are paid as little as $7 per day‑to transport freight throughout the U.S.
Worker involvement is also key to turning the AFL-CIO’s organizing program around. While the Teamsters union now has five times as many organizers as the union had under its past leadership, it was our shift to a “worker-to-worker” organizing approach that enabled us to reverse 16 years of membership decline. We have trained thousands of members to be volunteer organizers and meet unorganized workers at coffee shops, in their neighborhoods, or other places in the community. No one has more credibility in explaining how the union works to an unorganized worker than a rank-and-file member.
Using this method, we are succeeding where past officials failed in organizing workers at Overnite, the largest non-union company in the part of the freight hauling industry where thousands of Teamsters work. We have already won elections in 17 cities, and the National Labor Relations Board is seeking an order requiring Overnite to bargain with us in 17 additional locations.
Beyond organizing, the labor movement must also emphasize membership involvement in dealing with the issue of labor-management “cooperation” programs, a major problem that is not addressed in “A New Labor Movement in the Shell of the Old?” In the past few years, the AFL-CIO actively touted new “partnerships” with management, but that view did not represent a consensus within the labor movement-because there isn’t one.
At the Teamsters, we’re dealing with the issue right now at our largest employer, United Parcel Service, where we represent 170,000 workers. UPS initiated a “Team Concept” program last year-quietly, local by local, without negotiating with the international union. At first, the promise of “partnership” and “empowerment” was appealing to many members, and the union faced a difficult challenge in educating its membership about the potential dangers of the program. But this challenge has actually turned out to be an opportunity to rebuild the union at the shop floor level.
We’re conducting workshops for stewards and other interested members about the differing goals of workers and management and the importance of building union strength to fight for workers’ interest. We’re distributing information about how, in the name of Team Concept, management is choosing junior rank-and-filers to supervise more senior workers, members are being given confidential personnel information about other workers, and new job duties have been added without negotiations over workloads and compensation. We’ve provided to every UPS steward a video-called “Actions Speak Louder Than Words” -that shows what Team Concept means in practice and asks why a company that claims to be interested in “teamwork” is systematically violating workers’ rights.
As a result of our training, UPS workers in some locations are refusing to take part in Team Concept and are raising tough questions in “team” meetings where the program is already in place. But our message is not “Just Say No” to cooperation with management. We’re actively organizing members to demand that the company “cooperate” by abiding by contract provisions on seniority, subcontracting, and health and safety, and dropping its attacks in Congress on OSHA and other worker rights. Our workplace campaign calls for teamwork based on collective bargaining with all its safeguards, including the right of our members to determine what to negotiate and to enforce agreed upon rights.
Developing an effective response to divide-and-conquer Team Concept programs requires an active, open debate within the labor movement. The election of new officers for the AFL-CIO should help open the door to that debate‑just as it has provoked new discussion about the way unions deal with politicians, organize new workers, and build links with others in the community. It’s up to all of us to take advantage of the new possibilities for change‑and to develop new programs and approaches that are based on workers’ involvement at the grassroots.
JANE SLAUGHTER RESPONDS
It was refreshing to read an article about the “new AFL-CIO” that remembered that the labor movement will have to change from the bottom up. Too many ignoramuses in the mainstream press acted as if John L. Lewis had risen from the dead last October-and as if John L. were all we needed.
The way the New Voice slate chose to run their campaign was remarkable. They went out to the rank-and-file, even though rank-and-file AFL-CIO members had no votes in the election and no influence on how their international union presidents would vote. Since the election, a new spirit of openness from the top has made many activists feel that more is possible, that expression of difference is permissible. We can all be glad that John Sweeney, Linda Chavez-Thompson, and Rich Trumka were elected.
But Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello are right to remind us to keep the focus on ordinary workers, both inside and outside existing unions. Their insistence that the “labor movement” must be much broader than collective bargaining institutions-a hodge-podge of movements and organizations of workers and their families-is right on the mark.
Mostly, they’re correctly circumspect about what the Sweeney team can accomplish from on high-even if “they” want to. They know that protocol is the ruling energy in intra-Fed dealings; the AFL-CIO cannot tell an affiliate union what to do, and Sweeney is unlikely to try. After breaking decades of encrusted protocol by running for the top job, Sweeney is apt to be careful about offending union presidents now. Word is that he was willing to keep his promise to do something for the locked-out Staley workers, but their International leaders said no thanks; apparently they just wanted the Staley struggle over with, and Sweeney did not ride in on a white charger.
We would be wise not to put too much hope, therefore, in the New Voice’s “strike support team of top leaders and staff from international unions deployed early to help local leaders with long-running strikes.” Here in Detroit, where six newspaper unions have been on strike since July 1995, the AFL-CIO has sent in what seems like dozens of support staff. But the local union presidents continue to make the most important decision: the strike has not moved off center since they chose to honor an injunction against mass picketing last fall.
Brecher and Costello write that it may not be proper for the national Fed to pick sides in disputes between local unions and internationals, such as occurred over the Hormel strike in 1986. In a healthy labor movement, it would be proper-national leaders would lead. The AFL-CIO president would help the embattled workers and challenge an International that was undermining members’ struggles. The most we can hope for, today, though, is neutrality. More likely, dissidents and reformers in one union will continue to be treated like pariahs by the Fed and by officials of other unions.
Perhaps inadvertently, the New Voice program revealed the degree to which the AFL-CIO Executive Council “had” functioned as an old boys’club, when it proposed quarterly Executive Council meetings with written agendas circulated in advance. Apparently written agendas weren’t necessary for the Florida gatherings OCAW President Bob Wages calls “the annual beached whale event.” Sure, let’s have written agendas, but Brecher and Costello are right that the New Voice program barely begins to grapple with the “undemocracy” of the AFL-CIO.
Political action? The New Voice program is more of the same, only it promises to try harder. Wages again: the AFL-CIO Executive Council’s perspective is that “if Clinton doesn’t win it’ll be the end of life as we know it.” This is the same Clinton who bought votes to push through NAFTA, who did nothing on the anti-scab bill, and who pushed a health care reform that indulged the insurance companies. Even if he’s committed to the Democrats for 1996, now would be the perfect time for Sweeney, capitalizing on his image as a reformer and militant, to say that the AFL-CIO will begin exploring the third party option as of january 1997, Which stance is more likely to win concessions from candidate Clinton-“labor is with you no matter what,” or “we’re looking for our own voice?”
It must be added that Sweeney’s neutrality on the organizing done by Labor Party Advocates has helped that organization considerably’ Local central labor councils have been able to endorse LPA without fear of the wrath from on high which would have been likely under his predecessor Lane Kirkland, and even mainstream unions-the American Federation of Government Employees and the Mine Workers-have felt free to endorse.
Amidst the welter of New Voice proposals, the sincere commitment to organize new members stands out. Brecher and Costello are right not to focus on the how’s of organizing; no campaign, they say, no matter how expensive or well-meant, is likely to succeed if the union movement doesn’t become something you’d want to join.
Which brings me to the crucial piece that both the New Voice and Brecher/Costello leave out: the workplace. If American workers are to organize, they will not be roused solely by fear of losing their jobs. More and more, workers are afraid of their jobs. It’s hard to believe that the workplace is becoming more unhealthy and more tense as the dirty industrial lobs die and the computers take over-but it’s true.
For the last 15 years, a wave of worker participation programs has swept the workplace. These programs began in the auto industry with Quality of Work Life, moved on to Employee Involvement, and by 1990 Total Quality Management was everywhere. In 1994 the AFL-CIO finally took notice and issued a report from its Committee on the Evolution of Work (of which Sweeney and Trumka were members). The report assures us that unions can benefit from these employer programs: “An increasing number of employers… have been open to joining with unions… to create partnerships to transform the work system.”
The Fed went on to list five principles and four guidelines for a successful program, noting that employers who smash organizing drives in plant A while promising jointness in plant B “lack a full commitment to partnership.” Guideline #1 is “mutual recognition and respect.” Under this guideline alone, “partnership” should be dismissed as fantasy. The number of employers who pass the “respect” test could probably be counted on the fingers of a worker who has lost a hand in a workplace injury.
What makes the “partnership” rhetoric so insidious is that it acts as a cover for the introduction of “management-by-stress” or “lean production” techniques. These methods include elimination of job descriptions (“flexibility”), de-skilling (“multi-skilling”), speed-up (“continuous improvement”), and stealing workers’ job knowledge (“worker participation”). In the auto industry, for example, the result is that the rate of workplace injuries multiplied five‑fold from 1980 to 1992. The blue collar workforce at the Big Three has shrunk by a third.
An important facet of this degradation of work is the question of work time. “Flexibility” means, in the words of Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, that ,relatively few people actually work for the high-value enterprise in the traditional sense of having steady jobs with fixed incomes.” Part-timers and temps are preferred; and the “remaining full-timers” shoulder as much overtime as they can bear. Often they don’t even get premium pay, as “Alternative Work Schedules” become widespread. The Staley workers, for example, were resisting 12-hour days/threeon-three-off.
These changes on the job could and should make the workplace once again a locus of struggle. I’m reminded of the anonymous factory worker of the 1930s: “I ain’t got no kick on wages; I just don’t like to be drove.” But the New Voice “platform” did not say word one about workplace conditions. Similarly, this spring, Sweeney’s union, the SEIU, debated a report from its Committee on the Future. The report is significant because it’s the closest thing we have to Sweeney’s plan for American labor. That document barely mentioned the workplace. When it did, it was to “greatly expand SEIU support for union-led workplace participation programs.” Since his election, Sweeney has spoken before a number of employer groups, reassuring them that the labor movement seeks cooperation.
Finally, it’s instructive to look at SEIU for a sense of how Sweeney sees rank-and-file participation and control. SEIU is one of the most staff-run and staff-dominated unions, even at the local level. Not only does the union hire most of its staff from outside-people who’ve never worked as a janitor or in a nursing home-those staffers may then run for local office and become elected officials. Many “locals” are huge, statewide amalgamations where members “haven’t a prayer” of influencing the professional officials’ priorities.
Thus the question arises: If the new federation does succeed in organizing thousands of new members, what is it organizing them into? I think of what happened to the Los Angeles janitors of SEIU Local 399, many of them immigrants. Salvadoran cleaners used civil disobedience to disrupt business as usual in Century City’s luxury office buildings, even invading the bars frequented by the resident executives and lawyers during happy hour. They won a contract. But then they were dumped into a 25,000‑member citywide local run very much in the old style.
In 1995 they and others organized a dissident slate called the Multi racial Alliance to run in the local’s first contested election ever. When they won and the local went through predictable upheaval, the Inter national threw the local into trusteeship. “The rank and filers had violated the understanding that their organizing was to stop when they became members,” wrote Martha Gruelle in Labor Notes.
The New Voice program was right to emphasize organizing the unorganized. Workers need unions-but not just as bargainers and door-knockers for candidates. There’s a connection between exercising control of your local union and building a union that lives and breathes in the workplace. If the “new AFL-CIO” is to fulfill its promises, it needs a commitment to building “workplace” power.