CHICAGO -- The AFL-CIO has, as I write, completed just the first day of its four-day convention, but the drama of the event has already run its course. The split -- foreseeable but not easily explicable -- has happened. The rest is footnotes, some of them terribly grim.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Teamsters have left, noisily -- indeed, at the most heavily covered press conference anyone in the labor press corps could recall. Teamsters President Jim Hoffa, speaking without notes, was energized and articulate beyond all expectation, as if the thought of building a new institution, perhaps even some successor to the CIO with which his father long had battled, touched some long-suppressed labor-leader gene. It was Hoffa, more than SEIU President Andy Stern, who began to flesh out the new alliance that his union and Stern's, and several more, are soon to form. Apparently, at least in these early planning stages, the alliance will have organizers and researchers of its own, beyond those of its affiliates, to push unions into industries and regions where existing unions currently have nothing -- the old CIO organizing model, come back to life.
That's the plus side of the day's events -- and an entirely hypothetical side it will remain for some time. Current expectations are that the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which under the leadership of President Joe Hanson has pursued closer ties with the Teamsters so that a debacle like last year's failed California supermarket strike will never befall the union again, will soon disaffiliate, too. The decision to leave the AFL-CIO seems to be harder for UNITE HERE (the clothing and hotel workers' union) and the Laborers, each of which depends on the kindness of other unions to magnify its own strength. But a powerful current has burst forth that seems to be sweeping America's unions into one or the other camp. As more resources and staff are poured into the new alliance, and as the rage that the union leaders remaining in the AFL-CIO feel toward the defectors continues to grow, the more difficult it will be for unions to straddle the line between the AFL-CIO and what may soon become its rival.
The bitterness is understandable. Union leaders who sided with AFL-CIO President John Sweeney insist that the two sides were often close to reaching accords on the issues that the dissident unions first raised. American Federation of Teachers President Ed McElroy told me that he thought a settlement was in reach as late as Saturday -- the day before the four dissident unions declared they'd not be attending the convention. The Sweeney unions, for instance, agreed to create the Industry Coordinating Councils, or ICCs -- new bodies that would be given the power to coordinate organizing and bargaining in particular sectors -- for which the dissidents had called, though the ICCs fell short of possessing the power that the dissidents had demanded for them.
The failed negotiations left the Sweeney people convinced that at least some of the dissident unions -- the SEIU in particular -- never wanted a settlement at all, that the talks were never anything more than an attempt to install one of their number as AFL-CIO president, or, that failing, a prelude to a split. “This wasn't really about the constitution or even the money,” says one source close to both sides. “It was about Sweeney -- and if he couldn't be replaced, the unions were going to leave.”
Their defection plunges the AFL-CIO into a multifaceted crisis. Programs that haven't already been eliminated -- and the international-affairs department, the nation's most effective proponent of global social democracy, is already gone -- will be cut even more. The Wal-Mart organizing campaign, a joint project of the federation and two of the dissident unions, has been knocked into a confused limbo. The federation's political program -- the linchpin of progressive politics in America -- is threatened by the split, particularly at the local level, where the coordinated get-out-the-vote programs of the central labor councils may be sundered. Before the split, for instance, an SEIU volunteer could knock on the door of any AFL-CIO member in attempt to get him or her to the polls. Now, that may no longer be permissible -- and because a few unions, such as the SEIU and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), provide most of the election-time activists, that means fewer doors are going to be knocked on.
And all this has come about -- why, exactly? Over the past half-year, as the tensions have risen, I've come to envy my predecessors in the labor press corps of 1935. Now there was a clear and easily explained split. The unions of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), consisting chiefly of white Protestant and Irish skilled tradesmen, had no interest in organizing the millions of unskilled factory workers, many of them of eastern and southern European stock. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) arose to address that need.
No such neat dividing line separates the two groups of unions today. Their political philosophies are largely identical. Their ranks include both stellar unions and stumblebums. For all their talk of organizing, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee pointed out at a Sweeney rally on Sunday, most of the dissident unions had seen their numbers decline in recent years.
For all that, the rallies that the two sides held on Sunday illustrated, however imperfectly, some of the differences between the two groups. The Sweeney rally, which dragged on for two hours, had speaking roles for virtually every union president in Sweeney's camp. In an odd way, it refracted a critique that Stern and others had made of Sweeney's tenure: that it sacrifices effectiveness for inclusion, that every fershluggener union gets its say. Two hours later, at the event at which the dissident unions announced that they would not be attending the convention, the only presentations came from the coalition's two officials, the SEIU's Anna Burger and UNITE HERE's Edgar Romney, who delivered a rock 'em, sock 'em call to arms.
“This is a more working-class crowd,” one union consultant observed at the Sweeney rally. It's true that a quiet class tension is an undercurrent in the dispute. Stern and UNITE HERE leaders Bruce Raynor and John Wilhelm are Ivy Leaguers who made conscious choices to go into labor as a means of advancing social-justice causes as the '60s wound down. They're widely viewed by adversaries as well as supporters as some of the movement's most brilliant strategists and leaders. Having chosen a calling in labor, their critics say, they suffer a “powerful impatience,” in the words of AFSCME senior staffer Paul Booth, at their inability to reverse labor's overall decline, whatever their successes at their individual unions.
The resentment at these leaders and their impatience is particularly strong among a number of heads of manufacturing unions -- the Steelworkers' Leo Gerard and the Machinists' Tom Buffenbarger prominent among them -- who feel beset by globalization, deregulation, and the overall decline of American manufacturing. One thing the dissidents have in common is that they do represent workers in industries that are still organizable (tourism, health care, building services, transportation, retail), which makes their impatience at labor's stagnation all the more galling to some of the leaders of unions in outsourceable sectors. Clearly, no love is lost here: At Sunday's Sweeney event, Gerard lumped the dissident coalition with such anti-labor groups as the National Right-to-Work Committee.
Should two separate federations eventually emerge along these lines -- with the new one composed chiefly of unions in organizable sectors, while the AFL-CIO becomes disproportionately home to unions wedded to the nation's dwindling manufacturing base -- the AFL-CIO's troubles will have only just begun. Of the pro-Sweeney unions, only three (AFSCME, the Teachers, and the Communications Workers) look to have the potential and capacity for sustained growth.
For now, the damage caused by the diminution of the AFL-CIO will soon be plain to see. (How much damage actually occurs depends largely on whether the unions still manage to work together on politics.) If the dissident unions do put together a new CIO-like structure, there's the potential for an upside, too -- though the legal and political environment today is radically more anti-labor than it was in the years of the CIO's triumphs.
Nine years ago, when Stern won the presidency of the SEIU, he mentioned to me some of the ambitious organizing drives he was getting under way, acknowledging that not all of them would succeed. “You've got to row before you can steer,” he said. No one questions Stern's rowing abilities; many question his steering. We'll see where he, and American labor, end up.
Harold Meyerson is the Prospect's editor-at-large.
