ST. LOUIS -- I have seen the future, and who knows? It may just work.
America's second labor federation had its founding convention here on Tuesday, and it has definitely not created itself in the image of the AFL-CIO. The Change To Win Federation (CTW), as the new kid on the block calls itself, exists solely to foster organizing. The legislative, international-affairs, and political departments for which the AFL-CIO has been justly famed -- none of that stuff for the CTW folks.
Essentially, the new federation will be a strategic organizing center, staffed by researchers who can ferret out the financial vulnerabilities of targeted employers and by organizers who can figure out how best to build support for campaigns. This is the labor equivalent of Donald Rumsfeld's new, mobile army that won't depend on those endless supply columns. And it's being entrusted to strategists with track records a lot more impressive than Rumsfeld's (not to damn with faint praise).
The Change to Win Federation is nothing more or less than an organizing strategist and coordinator for organizable sectors of the workforce. That, after all, is what the otherwise disparate collection of unions that formed the CTW on Tuesday have in common. “There's this universe,” said Tom Woodruff, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) vice president who will now head up the coalition's organizing center, “of 50 million American workers whose jobs can't be offshored or digitized,” and these are the workers whom the CTW unions either represent (5.4 million of them) or seek to represent (the other 44.6 million). They're in retail, health-care, hotel, restaurant, construction, transportation, janitorial, and security work, “and our success or failure,” Woodruff continued, “will determine whether there's a middle class in America.”
(Indeed, the old labor anthem that best defines the CTW unions' members and, the unions hope, members-to-be, is “We Shall Not Be Moved.”)
The seven member unions of the CTW will fund the new federation to the tune of $16 million in its first year, and there's a constitutional mandate that at least 75 percent of the resources go to the organizing center. That $16 million comes from dues payments these unions are no longer making to the AFL-CIO, and each has pledged that the remainder of their unpaid AFL-CIO dues will go to their own organizing efforts.
For the Laborers, the one major union that still belongs to both the AFL-CIO and the CTW, the impossibility of paying dues to two federations has compelled a choice. “It's no longer a question of ‘if' we leave the AFL-CIO, just ‘when,'” said Laborers President Terry O'Sullivan, who a number of labor leaders believed might one day succeed John Sweeney as AFL-CIO president. With the Laborers outside the AFL-CIO, the federation is down to roughly 8.5 million members, while the CTW claims 5.4 million.
Besides helping member unions plan organizing drives and joint campaigns, the CTW's organizing center will stage and coordinate campaigns of its own that are too large in scale for any one union to undertake. In that, it is somewhat modeled on the old Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which organized the auto, steel, and industrial workers in the 1930s. And just as the CIO drew its staff from the leading unions of its day -- chiefly, the Mineworkers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers -- so the new federation will draw much of its staff from the SEIU and UNITE HERE, the two stellar organizing unions that belong to the CTW. “Our top strategic affairs people are going over to Woodruff,” said UNITE HERE General President Bruce Raynor, both wryly and wistfully. “It's a loss for us but a gain for labor.”
Woodruff has long contended that no organizing campaign with any chance of success can begin with a public proclamation of its target, so for that reason among others, no specific new campaigns were announced on Tuesday. The CTW's governing council -- the presidents of the seven member unions, plus the CTW's newly elected chair (SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger) and secretary-treasurer (UNITE HERE Vice President Edgar Romney) -- will begin formal consideration of organizing targets when it meets on November 1. Certain retail chains are under consideration, but no one believes that the CTW -- or, indeed, the entire labor movement -- is ready yet to take on Wal-Mart in an all-out organizing campaign.
Ironically, the CTW's resolve not to become a full-service federation with a political operation of its own is somewhat dependent on the AFL-CIO. “We have no intention of setting up a shadow government” to the senior federation, says Greg Tarpinian, the longtime New York labor activist, consultant, and consigliere to Teamsters President James P. Hoffa, who on Tuesday was designated as the CTW's executive director. But the CTW unions have made clear that they want their locals to stay affiliated with the AFL-CIO's state federations and municipal labor councils, the bodies that actually carry out labor's political campaigns. While many, and probably most, state federations and councils clearly want them to stay affiliated, the national AFL-CIO has threatened to throw them out unless they pay a surcharge atop their local dues. Burger and Sweeney have discussed the issue, but the impasse has not been resolved.
The new CTW constitution establishes state and local CTW councils, but on Tuesday, Raynor said that these would be set up “only if we're unable to figure out a way to work within the state federations and the central labor councils.”
Leaders of the CTW unions this week made clear that that the sooner the AFL-CIO accepts the existence of two separate federations, the better. The Laborers' O'Sullivan struck a somewhat conciliatory tone, saying, “I would hope we can find particular centers of activity where we leave our bullshit at the door.” SEIU President Andy Stern, the chief architect of the new federation, was in a more gauntlet-throwing mode. “The AFL-CIO will never exist as the sole federation in America again,” he said at a Tuesday press conference.
But the CTW's founding convention didn't concern itself much at all with the AFL-CIO. It was visions of mass organizing campaigns that danced in the delegates' heads. A large number of workers (disproportionately Hispanic) recounted recent successes born of solidarity; the convention began with representatives of the 8,000 newly unionized janitors from Houston attesting to the help that the Teamsters had given them in winning their campaign -- and victories such as the one in Houston, the CTW's leaders sought to make clear, were just the beginning, “We can't run small campaigns anymore,” Woodruff told cheering delegates later that afternoon. “We have to figure out how to organize whole nationwide companies and whole sectors and whole markets.”
A whole nation -- which has already lost a whole chunk of its middle class -- awaits the outcome.
P.S. -- The convention marked a resounding defeat for the quixotic crusade of journalist Harold Meyerson to persuade CTW leaders to change the name of their organization. Writing in the Prospect and other publications, Meyerson had called the name Change to Win “bumper-stickerish” and “clunky.” In the end, CTW leaders did alter the name from the Change to Win Coalition to the Change to Win Federation, which Meyerson did not regard as serious movement toward his position. The fix was plainly in when Stern began his speech to convention delegates by shouting, “Change to!” and the delegates responded, “Win!” For Stern, the name had become some goddamn mantra. Meyerson contended that history would vindicate his position, assuming -- which he conceded was not likely at all -- that it even knew about it.
Harold Meyerson is the Prospect's editor-at-large.
