The most acute problem faced by the labor movement in the wake of the disaffiliation of three of the AFL-CIO's largest unions -- the decimation of the local AFL-CIO bodies that run labor's electoral campaigns -- seems abruptly closer to solution this morning with a forthcoming announcement from AFL-CIO President John Sweeney that would permit the locals of the three departing unions to retain their membership in the local labor councils.
The announcement marks a change of course for Sweeney, who indicated at the federation's convention in late July that he'd oppose such a solution (though he also made clear he didn't know if he was speaking for his incoming executive council). “The [AFL-CIO] constitution is pretty clear on this [prohibiting locals of unions not affiliated at the national level from belonging to local labor councils], and we will enforce the constitution,” he said at a July 27 press conference.
Speaking to a convention of the federation's Building and Construction Trades Department in Boston on Tuesday, however, Sweeney announced that he'd ask the AFL-CIO's executive council to approve a new position, which would entail establishing “solidarity charters” through which such locals could maintain a special-status membership on the local bodies.
Sources familiar with the proposal said that locals of the three disaffiliated unions -- the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and the Teamsters -- could, if they wished, rejoin the councils if they paid the local bodies the same level of dues they paid before the split. Those locals that hadn't been paying dues on all their members (the dues are assessed at a flat rate per member) would have to pay dues on the average number of members that all locals pay in the particular council. This measure is particularly directed at the Teamsters, who in most cities pay dues at the local level on just a fraction of their total members.
Locals of the disaffiliated unions would also have to pay an additional 10-percent surcharge to the councils, on the theory that central labor councils derive material assistance from the national AFL-CIO, to which the three departed internationals no longer pay dues.
Locals affiliated with councils on this basis would have full voting rights in council decisions. And officers of the councils who are members of the disaffiliated unions -- and many are -- would be allowed to serve out the balance of their current term. If they wished to serve as council officers when their term expires, they'd have to join nationally affiliated unions.
These proposals have been sent to the members of the AFL-CIO executive council, who are expected to ratify them early next week.
The turnabout on Sweeney's part is designed to solve the most difficult and immediate problem created by the split. In many cities, the three departed unions provide a disproportionate share of the councils' members and operating income. In California, for instance, SEIU alone claims 600,000 members out of the state's roughly 2 million unionized workers. The three unions combined total roughly half the members of the L.A. County Federation of Labor (the most effective get-out-the-vote operation in the state, if not the nation), more than half in Orange County, and 70 percent in Sacramento County. In California and many other states as well, SEIU activists constitute the lion's share of labor's coordinated voter-mobilization campaigns. And with California voters facing a special election this November, in which one Grover Norquist-backed initiative (Proposition 75) would curtail the capacity of public-sector unions to devote significant resources to electoral campaigns, the prospect of crumbling labor councils, and campaigns with no access to SEIU's resources, had many labor leaders -- and leading Democrats -- terrified.
“There's been no slackening in the campaign against Prop 75,” one leading California unionist told me on Monday. “But if we don't come to a solution in the next couple of weeks, it could have significant ramifications -- none of them good -- for our campaign.”
Since the disaffiliations, some local labor council leaders had been holding private meetings to see if they could cobble together shadow organizations, to which locals from both sides of the divide could belong, and which could pay the labor council staffers whom the councils, with diminished budgets, could no longer support. Miguel Contreras, the far-sighted leader of the L.A. County Federation, who died suddenly this May, was talking about establishing a shadow council as long ago as last fall, when the prospect of the SEIU's disaffiliation first surfaced.
For their part, the presidents of the three departing unions, even as they were announcing their leave-takings, said that they encouraged their locals to maintain their involvement on the local councils. SEIU President Andy Stern told me that if it could be arranged, he'd want to keep working with the AFL-CIO's national political program as well.
But at the AFL-CIO's July convention, Sweeney poured cold water not just on the possibility of the locals' maintaining membership but on the shadow council idea as well. On July 28, the convention's final day, Sweeney sent a memo to the heads of the local labor councils and the state federations, reiterating the constitution's ban on the locals of disaffiliated unions belonging to the councils and participating in their political work. That was followed on August 5 by a follow-up memo from AFL-CIO General Counsel John Hiatt that reiterated the constitutional prohibitions on local membership.
Now, in the space of less than a week, that position has been reversed. “We heard a lot from SEIU, Teamster, and UFCW locals, telling us how much they wished to stay,” one federation staffer said. Sweeney also heard from a range of labor council leaders attesting to the difficulty, if not impossibility, of maintaining labor's political clout if the councils were not saved. As well, federation sources also say that leaders of three of the largest and most influential unions remaining inside the AFL-CIO -- Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; Ed McElroy, president of the American Federation of Teachers; and Larry Cohen, secretary-treasurer of the Communications Workers of America (who will become CWA president at that union's convention later this month) -- were involved in crafting the new proposals.
It's not yet clear how the SEIU, UFCW, and Teamsters -- both the national leaders and the locals -- will react to the proposals. If there is a sticking point, it would be the 10-percent surcharge. But by making the proposal, Sweeney has escaped the onus of breaking up labor's political operation, and transferred it to the dissident unions, should they deem the surcharge a deal-breaker.
But the sentiments I encountered Wednesday evening from labor leaders on both sides of the divide, as well as Central Council leaders, as word of the proposal began to spread, were chiefly ones of relief. After all the attacks the departing unions had leveled at what they termed the federation's overemphasis of its political program, in the end nobody wanted the actual existing political program to take a hit. Indeed, with this new arrangement in place, it's likely that when the coalition of dissident unions unveils its new organization in late September, it won't have much of a political program of its own. “If we can still work through the labor councils,” said one dissident union leader, “why do we need our own big-time political shop?”
Harold Meyerson is the Prospect's editor-at-large.
