The AFL-CIO is on the verge of splintering. Five of the most dynamic unions are threatening to leave the labor federation over differences of how much money to spend on new organizing, and how to turn jurisdictional rivalries into effective coalitions. All this is compounded by rivalries of personality, political style, and turf.
The timing could hardly be worse. The earnings of ordinary workers are lagging inflation. Jobs up and down the career ladder are insecure, as are health and pension benefits. The workplace future, except for a fortunate elite, seems to be outsourcing, downsizing, and Wal-Mart. Other, broader policies championed by organized labor that could help ordinary working families, such as good child care, paid family leave, higher minimum wages, secure health and pension benefits, are off the legislative menu in part because of labor's political decline.
Polls show that nearly half of America's workers want a union -- as the 1935 Wagner Act allows them to choose. But in all but rare cases of extraordinary courage and persistence, that right has been mooted for private-sector workers, who face ferocious resistance by America's corporations and the Bush administration. Rather than permit free collective-bargaining elections, most corporations just harass and fire pro-union workers and treat small penalties as costs of doing business.
Against this background, the unionized share of private-sector employment has dwindled to 8 percent of the workforce, or pre-New Deal levels. Not surprisingly, this decline has given rise to great frustration, and infighting.
When AFL-CIO president John Sweeney was elected in 1995, in the federation's first contested election, he was welcomed by advocates of more militant unionism. Sweeney had been president of the Service Employees International Union, one of the most dynamic unions, and one of the few gaining members by organizing low-wage workers. Under Sweeney, the AFL-CIO increased organizing efforts and reversed labor's long-standing hostility to immigrants, seeing them as a new workforce to be enlisted. Some impressive campaigns, such as the SEIU's Justice for Janitors and the hotel union's stunning success in organizing Las Vegas resorts, seemed to represent a resurgence. But with the deepening decline of industrial America and the growing resistance of corporate management, organized labor's share of the workforce continued to drop.
Now, in a reprise of 1995, Sweeney is in the unaccustomed role of the old guard. His own protégé and successor at the SEIU, Andy Stern, in drama worthy of Oedipus, is challenging Sweeney's leadership. Stern and his ally Bruce Raynor, who heads the merged textile and hotel union, UNITE-HERE, joined by three other unions together representing nearly 40 percent of American trade unionists, want Sweeney, now 71, to retire. But Sweeney will stand for re-election next month at the AFL-CIO's 50th anniversary convention in Chicago.
The insurgents don't quite have the votes to defeat Sweeney. Instead, in April they made several demands, most importantly that the AFL-CIO cut its staff by half and devote 75 percent of its budget to organizing. When that resolution was narrowly defeated, Sweeney in early May offered to meet them halfway, firing nearly a third of the headquarters staff and proposing $22.5 million for organizing.
But the insurgents' movement had taken on a life of its own, and the demands for Sweeney to step down intensified. Last week, five unions announced a new coalition called Change to Win. They are not leaving the AFL-CIO -- for now. And some are talking of a Tony Blair style bargain, in which Sweeney wins re-election and then steps down in favor of one of the younger militants acceptable to both camps. That could be the widely respected John Wilhelm, who heads the hotel and restaurant division of UNITE-HERE.
Looking beyond personalities, labor faces these strains for deep structural reasons. Mirroring the economy, labor is divided into service-sector unions like SEIU, public-employee unions whose fate depends on electing political allies to office, and industrial unions hemorrhaging members because of the decline of large, integrated industries. A decade ago, the UAW had 460,000 workers at General Motors. When GM's latest downsizing is completed, they will have just 75,000.
Stern, Raynor, and the other insurgents are absolutely right that labor must organize or die. Wal-Mart, with its meager wages and dismal benefits, stands in mockery of everything that organized labor represents. But it will take the power of a united labor movement to make any headway against Wal-Mart and other low-wage employers. Somehow, the union movement needs to muster the solidarity and will to organize more workers without destroying itself in the process.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. This column originally appeared in the Boston Globe.
