|
|
 | | From: | Steven L. Robinson | | Subject: | [progchat_action] The Fight for Our Future | | Date: | Sat, 22 Jan 2005 22:00:31 -0500 |
|
|
 | January 21, 2005
The Fight for Our Future
By Christopher Hayes
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1887/
Here’s something to consider: It’s a concrete possibility we will wake up
one morning and there won’t be a single American labor union left. For 30
straight years, American organized labor has been hemorrhaging members,
power and influence. [Fifty years ago, 35 percent of workers belonged to
unions, today just 12 percent do (and only 9 percent in the private
sector).] There are already 22 states in which “right-to-work” rules
effectively outlaw collective bargaining; the National Labor Relations
Board, entrusted with the sacred duty of protecting the human right to
organize, has been turned into just another way station for GOP corporatist
hacks; and the American manufacturing sector, once the backbone of the
movement, has been eviscerated by globalization.
Faced with the possibility of permanent irrelevance, different factions of
the AFL-CIO have recently been engaged in a knock-down, drag-out fight over
what is to be done. Despite occasional coverage in the mainstream media,
this has drawn just a smattering of attention in liberal publications and
the blogosphere. But progressives everywhere need to realize that they have
a powerful stake in its outcome: Without the American labor movement there
is no American left, and the debate taking place right now could very well
determine if the movement survives.
So for those of you who’ve spent the last year following electoral politics
(and subsequently sitting shiva for the republic), what follows is a guide
to the key points of contention, the major players and what to expect in the
months to come.
So what’s all this hubbub about the AFL-CIO possibly breaking up?
Last summer Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International
Union (SEIU), the largest and fastest-growing union in the AFL-CIO,
threatened to leave the AFL-CIO unless the federation undertook drastic
structural reforms—by merging smaller unions to form larger ones and
strictly enforcing jurisdictional lines. The announcement caused a stir, not
the least because it happened during the heat of the presidential election,
when labor was supposed to be presenting a united front. After SEIU made its
announcement, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace
Workers (IAM) announced that it would leave the federation if Stern got his
way, so the AFL-CIO stands to lose either SEIU or the Machinists, or—if
things go badly enough—both.
Stern’s announcement seems like it came out of nowhere; had SEIU hinted
before that it was dissatisfied with the AFL-CIO?
Yes. The current dissension actually began back in 2003 when, as reported in
these pages by David Moberg, the heads of five unions (including Stern)
formed the New Unity Partnership (NUP) (see “Organize, Strategize,
Revitalize,” February 16, 2004). The NUP argued that the union movement was
dangerously close to extinction, and needed to make drastic changes. In a
strategy memo leaked to the press, the NUP envisioned a labor movement
radically altered in structure. As in the trade-union system in Europe, they
proposed that each union “be assigned a unique occupation and/or and
industry sector(s) to concentrate its growth efforts.” The NUP called for
the AFL-CIO to sharply focus its efforts on “strategic growth,” and called
on unions to devote 77 percent of their resources to recruiting new members.
How did the labor movement react to the NUP proposal?
While some hailed the NUP for its bold leadership, the proposal also
triggered a backlash. Labor leaders didn’t take too kindly to five union
presidents appointing themselves as labor’s saviors. Steelworkers President
Leo Gerard, who derided them as “five guys sitting around and talking,”
said, “They don’t represent the labor movement.”
In general, people had a hard time figuring out what exactly the five union
heads—Stern, Doug McCarron of the Carpenters, Bruce Raynor of the textile
workers (UNITE), John Wilhelm of the hotel workers (HERE) and Terrence O’
Sullivan of the Laborers—had in common. They weren’t all the biggest unions,
they weren’t in the same industry and they didn’t share the same politics:
While Stern ended up endorsing Howard Dean, McCarron gave his support to
Bush. Stern said they were all “radicals about growth,” but many saw it as
an alliance of convenience designed to unseat AFL-CIO President John Sweeney
and seize the reins of the federation.
But whatever unions thought about the merits of NUP’s proposal, it lit a
fire under a labor movement that desperately needed it, and set the terms
for much of the current debate about structural reform of the AFL-CIO.
What’s happening now?
In November, Sweeney sent a letter to all of the federation’s affiliates,
requesting they submit a list of issues they felt must be addressed, as well
as proposals for reform. So far, about a dozen unions have sent responses,
with many more on the way. Both SEIU and the AFL-CIO have posted these
proposals on their Web sites along with commentary from union members.
What was once just a debate about the pros and cons of the NUP platform has
now morphed into a tangled landscape of proposals, alliances and rivalries
(see below). The NUP has officially been disbanded because, Stern says, “We
all don’t agree on our proposals.” This all comes in the lead-up to the
AFL-CIO’s quadrennial convention, which will take place in Chicago in July.
There have been whispers for some time that someone from the NUP coalition
would challenge Sweeney for the presidency, but as of yet, no one has
declared his candidacy. (For a while, Wilhem, co-president of the recently
merged UNITE HERE, was rumored to be the guy, but he recently denied he’d
run.)
So what does SEIU want to see happen?
The agenda is spelled out most precisely in SEIU’s 10-point plan “Unite to
Win.” It features a number of suggestions that are fairly non-controversial:
The labor movement should launch a campaign to unionize Wal-Mart, it should
focus political energy on resuscitating enforcement of statutes that protect
the right to organize, and it must build strength in regions of the country
historically hostile to organized labor.
The signature proposal—inherited from the NUP, and also the most
controversial—is to drastically reduce the total number of unions (from the
current 58 to about 15) and to organize each of these new mega-unions around
a single industry or sector. It’s not a new idea. Once upon a time,
Teamsters drove trucks, United Auto Workers built cars and Steelworkers
worked with steel. Today Teamsters are truck drivers, but they’re also
bakers and industrial printers. Social workers in Chicago belong to the UAW
and the majority of the Steelworkers don’t work with steel. This creeping
“general unionism” is largely a result of the fact that as the unionized
workforce has shrunk and the legal protections have been eviscerated, unions
have sought to bolster their sagging numbers through mergers with other
unions outside their core sectors and organizing campaigns in far-flung
fields.
“Frankly, there is no rational process here,” says University of Illinois at
Chicago’s Bob Bruno, associate professor at the Institute of Labor and
Industrial Relations. “Everybody’s going after everyone. If you breathe and
you have a job, then we’ll organize you and that hasn’t proven to be a very
efficient way of doing things. It hasn’t built power and it certainly hasn’t
raised class consciousness.”
Stern and others think this diffusion of worker power across various
institutions, particularly within a given trade, makes it impossible to
leverage industry-wide power to properly fight today’s massive global
corporations. Stern points to the current labor crisis in the airline
industry where unions representing pilots, flight attendants and machinists
are often pitted against each other to “vote in contradiction to interests
of the other workers to cut pensions.” Stern notes that “under the current
system there’s no way for workers to fight back together unless the
institutions they belong to are willing to band together.”
In addition to competition during contract negotiations, unions are also
competing to organize the same pools of workers, particularly in the
fast-growing healthcare sector, where more than 30 unions are active. SEIU
notes, “In 13 of the 15 major sectors of the economy there are at least four
significant unions, and in nine of those sectors there are at least six
unions.”
SEIU itself has reorganized, replacing metropolitan locals with members from
disparate trades with regional locals composed of members from a single
industry. The union has had success leveraging this collective power within
an industry to reach a kind of density “tipping point,” after which they’re
able to secure representation for a large number of workers. And, as they
never fail to point out, with 800,000 new members in the past eight years,
SEIU is the nation’s fastest-growing union, so they must be doing something
right.
That sounds like it makes sense. Why is it so controversial?
Well for one thing, fewer unions mean fewer union presidents, and leaders
aren’t about to merge themselves out of a job. More substantively, it’s
unclear just who gets to decide which unions merge. The idea of arranged
marriages isn’t very popular. American Federation of Teachers President
Edward J. McElroy put it this way in an interview with Business Week:
“Making decisions about mergers is a democratic process that deals with
members of unions. For any organization, the AFL-CIO or individual unions,
to point a finger and say, ‘This union or that should merge,’ strikes me as
totally antidemocratic. Those are the kinds of decisions individual workers
should make. To say to those people, ‘This union is not functioning the way
we think it should be,’ that isn’t right.”
You’ll notice that McElroy used the phrase “antidemocratic,” which, if you
start reading the literature of SEIU critics, is one of the most common
complaints. Those who have taken up the mantle of “union democracy” argue
that SEIU’s approach, both in its own practices and in what it’s proposing,
is top-down, technocratic and fundamentally inimical to the values of
bottom-up representation that the labor movement should embody. They
ridicule Stern for wanting to mirror the structures of the very corporations
the movement is fighting (which Stern himself says is one of his aims),
where directives are issued by executives and passed down the hierarchy to
those at the bottom.
At a conference at Queens College last year, Gregory Junemann, President of
the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers
(IFPTE), a small, specialized union that would cease to exist under SEIU’s
proposal, offered this thinly veiled critique of SEIU and its agenda: “My
members are not chess pieces to be maneuvered, nor marionettes waiting to be
mobilized. These are real people, and it’s their union.”
Stern says the rank and file has voted for every strategic move SEIU has
pursued, but critics point out that members at locals in San Francisco and
Rhode Island started decertification drives after controversial mergers
backed by the International were pushed through.
In a response to a reference to “union democracy,” Stern posted the
following to the SEIU’s blog:
Workers want their lives to be changed. They want strength and a voice, not
some purist, intellectual, historical, mythical democracy. Workers can win
when they are united, and leaders who stand in the way of change screaming
“democracy” are failing to understand how workers exercise the limited power
they have in a country where only 8.2 percent of the private sector are in
unions.
It’s rhetoric like this that pisses a lot of people off. Gerald McEntee,
president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees (afscme), who has a legendary beef with Stern, says “Andy put his
foot in his mouth [when he spoke about AFL-CIO reform during the Democratic
National Convention last summer], and I thought it was a disgrace.” Stern
generally tends to inspire strong feelings among both supporters and
critics. A typical anti-Stern tract on the web is titled “Why the SEIU’s
Andy Stern is Full of Shit.”
So what do the unions who disagree with Stern say should be done?
It varies. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) recommends setting up
voluntary coalition bodies that can serve the purpose of industry-wide
organizing while avoiding forced mergers. The Machinists say the AFL-CIO
should start its own TV network to get labor’s message out, and create a
centralized database of health claims to drive down costs. The
Communications Workers of America (CWA) focuses its platform on making
unions more responsive to their current members, increasing training for
shop stewards and increasing strike capacity by providing more funds to pay
striking workers (something the Steelworkers also endorse).
CWA organizer and writer Steve Early, who has probably been one of Stern’s
most vocal critics, maintains that only by reinvigorating participation and
militancy at the local level can the movement grow. In other words, where
Stern argues that rapid growth is a necessary precondition for meaningful
union democracy, Early argues that meaningful union democracy is a necessary
precondition for rapid growth.
afscme, on the other hand, takes the position that becoming more politically
effective is the key to reviving the movement. “Whether you do mergers or
not, whether you reassert jurisdictional lines or not, whether you have 15
or 50 members of the Executive Committee, those things are important,” says
Paul Booth, an assistant to the union’s president, Gerald McEntee. “But they
don’t make as much of a difference as winning or losing in politics makes.”
afscme wants the AFL-CIO to focus its efforts on the one thing it’s been
undeniably successful at: political mobilization of its members. Under
Sweeney, labor has increased turnout of union household voters in each of
the last three presidential elections.
What’s clear is that while NUP and SEIU have successfully initiated and
framed the debate, one that even critics such as Booth call “healthy,
stimulating, appropriate and welcome,” they no longer own it.
What happens next?
In mid-February and early March, the AFL-CIO Executive Council will discuss
the various proposals. In the spring, they are expected to issue
recommendations, which will likely be voted on at the convention in July.
What’s going to happen at the convention is anybody’s guess. Sweeney says he
’s “looking at the issues that are common in a number of these reports as
potential areas where we could start early to build a consensus.” (In a
15-minute interview, Sweeney, who has the unenviable job of refereeing the
impending fracas, used the word “consensus” almost a dozen times.) There are
some basic agreements. The parts of the AFL-CIO constitution that are
designed to enforce jurisdiction and stop unions from poaching each other’s
workers are totally dysfunctional, and it is generally agreed that the
AFL-CIO needs to focus its mission and play fewer roles better.
The threat of an SEIU exodus still hangs over the convention, but while many
fret about the impact of a split in the house of labor, or a
high-visibility, rancorous battle at the convention, the real danger is too
much consensus and complacency at the cost of change. For all the enmity
that the NUP and Stern have inspired, were it not for them, there would
likely be no concentrated discussion about the future of the movement.
Sweeney, to his credit, has lowered the temperature and quieted talk of an
insurgency by moving the debate inside the AFL-CIO’s tent. But while
everyone pats themselves on the back for “having the debate” and builds
alliances for floor votes, the original sense of urgency is slowly being
lost, replaced by quibbles about the fine points of AFL-CIO bureaucracy. “It
’s converted from a debate about substance to a debate about something like
the per capita tax,” says Cornell labor professor Rick Hurd.
The worst possible outcome is one that seems increasingly likely:
watered-down reform, palatable to all the parties involved. That might be
the only way to keep the AFL-CIO together, but keeping the AFL-CIO together
is not the point. Revitalizing the labor movement is.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Yahoo! Groups Links
a.. To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/progchat_action/
b.. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
progchat_action-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
c.. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
|
|
|
