Labor Debates How To Rebuild Its House
[From Tikkun Magazine. Subscription information available at www.tikkun.org]
By Steve Early
After an ideological rift that persisted throughout labor's greatest 20th century growth spurt, the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the once radical Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) finally merged in 1955. This marriage of two previously hostile labor federations curtailed further conflict between craft and industrial unions, but it produced an unhealthy kind of "labor peace." To keep that peace, the union movement tended to avoid introspection, internal debate, and any public airing of political differences. Meanwhile, management resistance to collective bargaining continued to grow while the percent of workers joining unions slipped into a long and slow decline. From a high point in the early 1950's, when unions represented 35 percent of all workers, today only 12 percent of all workers (and just 8 percent in the private sector) are union members.
In 1995, labor's facade of unity began to crack. John Sweeney, now president of the AFL-CIO, had the audacity to challenge his predecessor, Tom Donahue, an heir to the cold war labor leadership of Lane Kirkland and George Meany. Sweeney's subsequent election was the first such upset victory in one hundred years. During the battle between him and Donahue, there was an equally rare outbreak of programmatic discussion and disagreement about union tactics and strategy. Even though their competing campaigns were rooted in rival AFL-CIO executive council factions, the very existence of an election contest helped legitimate dissent and debate at lower levels of the labor movement. For the first time in living memory, the federation's national convention—the one that chose Sweeney, the reformer, over Donahue, the incumbent—was actually worth attending.
In recent months, Sweeney's failure to arrest labor's decline, has triggered another round of "criticism/self-criticism"—even more participatory than the last. As TIKKUN went to press, this contentious process had yet to generate opposition candidates for top positions up for election at the AFL-CIO's "golden anniversary" convention in July—although they could still emerge. So far, the challenge to Sweeney has come from a non-electoral bloc of dissident unions—the New Unity Partnership (NUP)—which first unveiled its criticisms of the status quo in a Sept. 15, 2003 Business Week article, entitled "Breaking Ranks With The AFL-CIO."
After last fall's demoralizing defeat of labor-backed Democrat John Kerry, NUP's biggest affiliate—the 1.6 million member Service Employees International Union—upped the ante by issuing a more urgent ultimatum to the AFL-CIO—either change (our way) quickly or we're leaving! This headline-grabbing move by SEIU president Andy Stern soon backfired. His closest allies, Bruce Raynor and John Wilhelm, leaders of the recently merged garment worker and hotel and restaurant employees unions (UNITE-HERE), decided to dissolve the controversial NUP while continuing to agitate together for changes in AFL-CIO programs and structure. Recently, the anti-Sweeney forces have picked up new support from more conservative unions like the United Food and Commercial Workers and James Hoffa's Teamsters.
The gist of SEIU's complaint about the current labor movement is that there are too many small unions. Stern argues that they lack the size, political clout and bargaining strength to deal with corporate giants like Walmart and its many imitators in other industries. According to Stern, even bigger AFL-CIO affiliates lack sufficient "industry focus," with several different ones often representing workers at the same firm. He contends that union members won't be able to go on the offensive again—as they did in the 1930s—until the AFL-CIO's 58 unions consolidate themselves into fifteen or twenty much larger entities, each focused on a particular industry, with more resources and less overlapping jurisdiction. As the AFL-CIO's largest and fastest-growing organization, SEIU offers itself up as a model for membership expansion, modernization, and bureaucratic consolidation, complete with a new breed of "senior managers" and college-educated field staffers recruited, in large numbers, from outside it's own ranks.
Since Stern took over as SEIU president from Sweeney in 1996, more than forty of its local affiliates—about 14 percent of the total—have been put under trusteeship as part of the union's own "New Strength, Unity" program. (Trusteeships are a form of headquarter's control in which elected local officers are replaced temporarily by national union appointees.) SEIU health care, building services, and public sector members have been re-organized into separate entities—often huge statewide or multi-state "locals" with as many as 130,000 or 240,000 members. Smaller-scale local bodies—no matter how democratic or activist they may be—have become an anachronism "in an era of corporate mergers," Stern argues. They only "made sense years ago;" today, a truly "local union structure does more to handicap workers than it does to help."
To be effective, SEIU contends, organized labor must mirror the market scope and mimic the corporate structure of business. To woo employers into collective bargaining relationships, unions must demonstrate they can "add value" to an enterprise—for example, by securing greater public financing for hospital chains, helping HMOs fend off patient lawsuits, or lobbying with management against a nursing home residents' "bill of rights." To boost their legislative influence, unions should also be ready, like SEIU, to deploy tens of millions of dollars, an army of paid staffers, and many member volunteers to aid political causes like the Dean and Kerry campaigns or Americans Coming Together (ACT). When necessary to gain "organizing rights" or access to key decision-makers, Republicans like N.Y. Gov. George Pataki or House Speaker Denny Hastert should also be endorsed or funded, and strategic investments should be made in the Republican Governor's Conference, which aids GOP gubernatorial candidates.
In the mainstream media, this pragmatic, corporatist, and seemingly quite effective model has been favorably counter-posed to depictions of troglodyte "labor bosses" from declining unions. The most outspoken of these—Machinists' president Thomas Buffenbarger—has, in the NewYork Times Sunday Magazine, mocked the media-savvy Stern for "setting up a blog" and wanting "his own TV show" like Donald Trump. In an interview with reporter Matt Bai for the magazine's admiring Jan. 30 cover story on Stern, what Buffenbarger most disliked about his SEIU colleague "is that he looked and sounded so much like management." Other old guard figures have expressed similar disdain for Stern, Wilhelm, and Raynor based on their being Ivy League graduates. "If change is needed in our sector of the movement, then the unions of the building trades are best qualified to undertake those changes," complained AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades leader Ed Sullivan in a recent letter to Sweeney. "We neither need nor want advice from self-appointed labor 'gurus' who couldn't tell a spud wrench from a paintbrush."
Such blue-collar bluster isn't very productive—and distracts from the fact that there are substantive disagreements about whether union renewal should be based on the SEIU model. The real question is not whether change is needed, but whether that change should come primarily from the bottom-up or top-down. Stern clearly believes in the latter, and his approach is heavily influenced by the theory and practice of business management. Many rank-and-file critics of the union status quo—like those associated with the Detroit newsletter, Labor Notes—have, in contrast, argued that "putting movement back in the labor movement" requires greater grassroots activism. As Labor Notes authors Jane Slaughter and Dan LaBotz note in their new edited compendium, A Troublemaker's Handbook: How To Fight Back Where You Work and Win, the best-laid plans of headquarters officials will fail to reverse labor's decline if there's not a corresponding transformation of union functioning—on the job and in local communities:
Some union leaders know the stakes, and some of them are thinking big, with a strategy for organizing and a long-term approach. Where these leaders sometime fall down is on the question of how to build enough power to carry out their ambitious plans. . . . Too often, they see workers as a supporting cast, with the union's officials and staffers as the real power players and stars. Yet, if a union doesn't offer potential recruits an organization actually based on workers' power, that wins good contracts, and belongs to the members, where's the incentive to join?
In its many stories of job safety and health struggles, anti-discrimination campaigns, strikes to protect medical benefits, and efforts to defend immigrant rights, Troublemaker's also suggests that unions should be more than just a vehicle for contract bargaining, grievance handling, new member recruitment, and political activity. The Teamsters, meat packers, farm workers, flight attendants, nurses, public employees, and factory hands profiled in the book succeeded in making their workplace organizations stronger because they "built daily relationships of mutual trust, cooperation, and common courage"—one-on-one with their co-workers.
As University of Kentucky Professor Paul Jarley observed recently in Labor Studies Journal, this "task of creating or recreating union communities in workplaces is enormous"—even when the "institutional inertia" of many unions doesn't stand in the way. "Suburbanization, labor mobility, and job turn-over have made strangers of many workers, "Jarley writes. "Telecommuting, contingent employment, and the physical setting of some workplaces (e.g., call centers) have further isolated them" in ways that didn't exist "when the industrial union movement took root in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Drawing on both his academic research and experience as a white-collar union leader at U-Mass Amherst, sociologist Dan Clawson, author of The Next Upsurge, argues that unions must have both an issue-oriented and people-centered approach that emphasizes long-term relationship building:
In my union, our largest meetings and highest degree of participation have come when something important is at stake, when the union is taking a stand on an issue that matters in people's lives. It's important to have food, and drink, and a chance for people to spend time with old friends and meet new ones, but it's also important that the union is addressing an issue that people care about, and showing at least the potential to make a difference.
In Solidarity Forever, the crucial last chorus is that "we can bring to birth a new world." Unless we offer workers a vision of new birth, and provide a credible means to make a difference, they have little reason to seek out union networks instead of some of the many other networks available to them.
Among the new competing workplace networks available are faith-based ones like those profiled in The New York Times Sunday Magazine just three months before its cover story on the "charismatic" Andy Stern. In a piece entitled, "With God At Our Desks," writer Russell Shorto described the rise of Christian evangelism, plus other forms of religious expression, in increasingly well-organized and management-sanctioned workplace "affinity groups." A similar report in The Boston Globe on February 1 revealed that more "like-minded employees" are "bringing faith to work" in both white-collar and blue-collar settings. These groups are often organized under the cover of "diversity" programs created by management in high-tech corporations like Intel, which has long discouraged employees from developing a "shared interest" in unionization.
Less conservative faith-based groups are able to act as community supporters of workplace organizing, bargaining, and even strikes—through national networks like Jobs With Justice (JWJ) or Interfaith Worker Justice. In Boston, JWJ's 40-member coalition of labor and community organizations includes Catholic priests, influenced by liberation theology. They have actively supported recent nursing home organizing by Brazilian, Haitian, and Latino workers who belong to their parishes. JWJ is also enlisting lay ministers from small, immigrant-based evangelical Protestant churches—who may be immigrants themselves or have members of their congregations with job-related problems.
The AFL-CIO union most engaged with JWJ for the last 18 years is the Communications Workers of America— a leading advocate of both community-labor coalition building and union revitalization rooted in actual workplaces. CWA is a "general union" that attempts to unite workers in a wide range of occupations and industries—including telecom, manufacturing, the airlines, newspapers and electronic media, printing and publishing, higher education, health care, and the public sector. At their best, CWA councils or locals that have diversified in smaller cities—like Buffalo or Poughkeepsie, N.Y.—now function as the "one big union" in town. They promote mutual aid and solidarity among workers from many different bargaining units and backgrounds—helping to transcend some of the parochialism of both craft and single-industry organizations, plus separate private and public sector groupings.
At a Queens College conference debate about the future of labor last December, CWA Executive Vice-President Larry Cohen issued a singular (if still secular) call for unions to examine what really makes them tick—arguing that "the inner life of the union is what sustains us." In the face of "a collective bargaining crisis, driven by the worst management repression of workplace rights in any democracy, active members are the best and only hope for reversing this," Cohen said. "If anybody thinks we're going to defend workers' rights based on the way we structure, rather than on the way we mobilize, they are kidding themselves."
While supporting voluntary union consolidation—of the sort which has added several hundred thousand members to CWA nationally—Cohen sees the real issue as "how mergers can change union workplaces, lead to more active shop stewards, and greater membership involvement." As CWA's executive board pointed out in January, "Unions work best when they are organized from the workplace up, not the top down. Strengthening the role of stewards and workplace mobilizers is critical for effective collective bargaining, organizing, and political action. Without effective stewards, there is little likelihood we will be successful in any of these areas. . . . Leadership, at all levels, must reflect the diversity of union members, including younger workers. New leaders should be developed and promoted from within our own membership. "
CWA's bottom-up strategy has been best explained and defended by some of its leading local activists. Based in Newark, N.J., Hetty Rosenstein points out that her Local 1037 "has grown from 4,800 members to 7,700—and most of that is attributable to organizing by shop stewards." Most Local 1037 members are employed as social workers for the state—and at private, non-profit agencies acting as contractors for New Jersey's Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS) and other departments. In 1037, Rosenstein says, "we mirror the employer's structure" by having the local's 300 stewards act as "a union counterpart to management" at dozens of DYFS worksites in thirteen northern N.J. counties.
If you visit any of these offices, not every worker may be able to identify correctly the name and number of their local. Nor will they all know Rosenstein's name, even though she is a leading critic of privatization and received much local press coverage while responding to the state's most recent foster child abuse scandal with a successful campaign for caseload caps, hiring of more social workers, better training and support for them, and better service delivery for DYFS clients. But 1037 members are almost certain to know who their steward is. That's because the local has invested heavily in recruiting, training, and nurturing the people who are comprise its workplace infrastructure. "A good steward is essential," explains Rosenstein. "The union must exist where workers spend eight or nine hours a day, not in a union office many miles away."
In 1037, stewards sign up all new hires, assist members with personnel (and personal) problems, distribute information about contract and legislative issues, represent their co-workers in meetings with management, encourage the wearing of union buttons and T-shirts—every Thursday, many members wear red to work, CWA's color—and recruit door-to-door canvassers for political campaigns. "Just eighteen months ago, the state was trying to dismantle DYFS," Rosenstein recalls. "Its original 'reform' plan called for contracting out most of our work to non-union private vendors. But, because almost every DYFS office has active stewards and members—real worksite leadership—we were able to turn this around in the legislature and within the department."
"Would that have happened in a mega-local? Rosenstein asks. "I don't think so. The leadership of that kind of local wouldn't have had the time or the inclination to care that much about a couple of thousand social workers. And, even if they cared, they couldn't possibly know the work well enough to bargain about the kind of details covered in our agreement with the state on caseload caps and new hiring. Content matters—and our local is small enough to focus on what concerns our members and their clients the most."
Like many other union reformers, Rosenstein sees Andy Stern's vision of forced consolidation of local and national unions as counter-productive—a shortcut favored by those who think there's "not enough time left or talent out there to develop grassroots leaders." What labor needs, instead, she believes, is "thousands of new shop stewards." When united by a clear, multi-faceted strategy, these and other active members can link up with their counter-parts in many different workplaces and local unions—at home and abroad—in successful efforts to "reshape public policy and defeat even the largest corporations."
(Steve is a Boston-based representative of the Communications Workers of America who writes frequently about labor issues.)
