Charles Dharapak/AP Photo
Labor leader John Sweeney, seen here in September 2009, died yesterday at the age of 86.
By the time he became president of the AFL-CIO in 1995, John Sweeney looked a good deal like the Park Avenue doormen—Irish and portly—who’d joined New York’s Building Service union when Sweeney was growing up in a very working-class neighborhood in the Bronx. In his twenties, Sweeney went to work for those doormen and the janitors who maintained buildings across Manhattan, negotiating contracts for their union, which he eventually came to lead. He first took over at the local level, heading Local 32BJ. By 1980, he was in charge of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), to which 32BJ belonged.
Sweeney always looked like a classic old-time labor leader, but if ever an appearance deceived, it was his. In his years at the helm of SEIU, and then as president of the AFL-CIO from 1995 to 2009, Sweeney proved to be one of American labor’s most progressive leaders—a change agent in disguise. Like Joe Biden, he appeared to personify an ancien régime marked by hyphenated descriptors: old-school center-left working-class Irish American Catholicism. But he managed to reconcile that heritage with distinctly more progressive traditions and initiatives.
At a time when his fellow union presidents were spending on average about 3 percent of their unions’ budgets on organizing, Sweeney was spending 30 percent at SEIU. During his tenure, SEIU membership grew from 625,000 to a little more than one million, even as the rest of the union movement continued to hemorrhage members. Much of that growth came from SEIU’s absorption of smaller unions, but a good deal came from organizing. The most celebrated organizing campaign of Sweeney’s tenure was the Justice for Janitors campaign, an effort notable for the janitors taking their case to the public through extensive street demonstrations, and for the strategic smarts that led the campaign (and its brilliant organizer, Steve Lerner) to target not the cleaning companies that nominally employed the janitors, but the owners and anchor tenants of the downtown skyscrapers the janitors cleaned.
SEIU under Sweeney was the exception to the movement’s rule. Under the leadership of George Meany and his successor Lane Kirkland, the AFL-CIO, to which SEIU and the vast majority of American unions belonged at the time, had calcified into a backward-looking bureaucracy devoted as much if not more to its anti-communist foreign operations as to the advancement of American workers. With labor’s decline in numbers and clout, its political home, the Democratic Party, had moved to the right on economics. The early years of Bill Clinton’s presidency saw the passage of NAFTA, the defeat of Clinton’s health care plan, the failure of labor law reform to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate, and the Republican takeover of the House for the first time in 20 years in the 1994 election. Labor had worked on all these issues and failed to prevail on any of them. By early 1995, a revolt was brewing against Kirkland among the heads of the more progressive unions. With good reason.
When the AFL and the CIO merged in 1955 and George Meany became the organization’s president, he made sure to stifle the efforts of the country’s most visionary union leader, the Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther, to devote union resources to organizing. Under Meany, the AFL-CIO and most American unions became vociferous supporters of the Vietnam War, and viewed not just those who opposed the war but all the new social-movement activists (women, gays, environmentalists) with contempt. Kirkland, who’d long been Meany’s number two, succeeded him in 1979, but maintained Meany’s standoffish posture toward social liberals, and doubled down on Cold War campaigns, backing the Reagan administration’s support for right-wing Central American forces and investing heavily in political movements in Eastern Europe. (When Clinton held his first meeting as president with labor leaders in 1993, Kirkland spent nearly the entire meeting laying out his agenda for … Poland.) Even before the House fell to Newt Gingrich’s Republicans in the 1994 midterms, leaders like Sweeney had had it with the inertia and ineffectiveness of the Kirkland regime.
The campaign to oust him was no sure thing. The American Federation of Labor had been founded in 1886, and 109 years later, in 1995, the Federation and its successor organization (the AFL-CIO) had had only four presidents: Samuel Gompers, William Green, Meany, and Kirkland. (There was a fifth who served for one year in the middle of Gompers’s term, but he wasn’t there long enough to settle in, much less change anything.) During those 109 years, the United States had had 20 presidents. The Catholic Church had had seven popes. But America’s leading labor federation? Just four. The presidents of American unions, and particularly the presidents of the AFL-CIO, didn’t leave until they were damned good and ready.
For one thing, union presidents were highly reluctant to back the ouster of the Federation’s president, as it might give members of their own unions the mistaken impression that they could be ousted, too. Nonetheless, the presidents’ rage at Kirkland overcame their reluctance to go to war with him. They needed a candidate, and it was easy to see why they settled on Sweeney. He seemed to be their peer; a traditional labor leader, a good schmoozer, someone who knew how to cut a deal. And as someone who’d revived organizing and even sanctioned occasional demonstrative and disruptive organizing, he also appealed to labor’s younger, more militant activists.
Sweeney proved to be one of American labor’s most progressive leaders—a change agent in disguise.
With the AFL-CIO’s convention coming up in October 1995, Kirkland, who could see he was going to lose, resigned in August. The pro-Kirkland unions, however, didn’t move into Sweeney’s camp; instead, they backed the Federation’s number-two officer, Tom Donahue.
Donahue found himself in a difficult position. Out of loyalty to Kirkland, he’d refused to join the revolt, but he harbored probably as many progressive ideas and instincts as Sweeney. The forces behind him, however, were largely the unions that didn’t really want to change, or make common cause with the social liberals, or hire young radicals and have them lead workers into the streets. To all this was added a note of tragic irony: Donahue and Sweeney, both Irish Catholic boys from the Bronx, had been close for 30 years, and it was Donahue who’d recruited Sweeney to come to work for 32BJ. The campaign would rupture a long friendship.
When Sweeney prevailed at the Federation’s October convention, progressive unions that had been on the outs at the Federation for decades and union activists and intellectuals who had been criticizing the AFL-CIO for years were suddenly at the center of the new labor movement. Sweeney hired Barbara Shailor to revamp the Federation’s foreign-policy operation, which under Kirkland had maintained a Cold War posture and employed Cold War operatives, even though the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Under Shailor, the AFL-CIO backed workers’ movements across the world, some of them radical. Sweeney hired Richard Bensinger to greatly enlarge the Organizing Institute, which trained new generations of organizers. He hired Steve Rosenthal to renew labor’s political programs, which became far more effective than they’d been, embracing all manner of progressive causes and allies that the AFL-CIO had previously viewed warily or shunned outright.
But none of this was enough, for one important reason. Labor still had to grow if it was to represent American workers as successfully as it had in the decades following World War II, and despite Sweeney’s efforts, it continued to shrink. Employers still maintained their pathological hatred of unions, and violated with impunity the laws that had been written to give workers the right to organize. Labor had failed to strengthen those laws or their enforcement, and couldn’t overcome the barriers to organizing. In 2005, exasperated by this failure, a number of younger union presidents broke away to form a rival alliance, Change to Win. The ringleaders included John Wilhelm at HERE (the hotel workers), Bruce Raynor at the clothing and textile workers (UNITE), and Andy Stern, who’d succeeded Sweeney as president of SEIU; each of them had served as their union’s organizing director before becoming president. Their belief was that freed from the factors still constraining the AFL-CIO, such as the presence and power of the more conservative building trades unions, their new union alliance could build a more militant and effective force.
They were mistaken. Change to Win didn’t change labor very much and proved no more effective at winning new members than the AFL-CIO had been. The laws were the thing, not the posture of leadership, or recalcitrant Federation members.
Today, just two of the unions that had joined to form Change to Win—the Teamsters and SEIU —remain outside the Federation. Due to those defections, however, the Federation from whose presidency Sweeney stepped down in 2009 was roughly three million members smaller than it had been when he’d taken the helm. For a range of reasons, many of the most interesting developments in labor during his tenure took place at the state and local level. As it wasn’t until Sweeney’s final six months as president that the Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House, statutory gains such as living-wage ordinances and rights for domestic workers were enacted not in Washington but in statehouses and city halls.
His strong belief that America had to welcome immigrants was an integral part of both his civic and religious sensibility.
In a sense though, Sweeney could claim some credit for that. He worked to boost the power of local AFL-CIO labor councils, and it was in those bodies that leaders like Los Angeles’s Miguel Contreras, working with the national organization, revitalized unions’ political clout, mobilized voters of color and immigrant communities, and used that power to make urban America an incubator for progressive economic policies. Sweeney’s tenure also coincided with the rise of women and people of color to more labor leadership positions, particularly at the state and local levels. Part of that, surely, was simply due to the changing demographics of the unionized urban workforce, but part of that was also due to labor’s shifting stance during Sweeney’s tenure on a host of social questions. It was at the AFL-CIO’s 1999 convention, over which Sweeney presided, that the Federation reversed its historic opposition to immigration and became a staunch supporter of legalizing undocumented workers. Sweeney had always been a Pope Francis Catholic avant la lettre, and his strong belief that America had to welcome immigrants, as it once had welcomed his own Irish immigrant parents, was an integral part of both his civic and religious sensibility.
That was just one of the crucial course changes to which Sweeney steered labor. In the 1930s, millions of young American radicals and progressives had centered their activism in the surging union movement. After decades of the Meany and Kirkland regimes repelling such activists, Sweeney initiated projects designed to re-involve the young and the restless. He had the Federation sponsor a conference at Columbia University to renew ties between labor and the academy; he initiated a Union Summer program for college students; he junked the Cold War mythologies and embraced causes like gender equity at which his predecessors had recoiled. Viewed from the vantage point of 25 years after he assumed the Federation presidency, it’s clear he made the changes that paved the way for young Americans, in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, the Occupy movement, and Bernie Sanders’s campaigns, to feel more positively about unions than any generation in decades.
Sweeney wasn’t able to grow the labor movement once he left SEIU, and none of his contemporaries has been notably successful at that task, either. That generational failure is a key reason why so many American workers have despaired of seeing progress in their lifetimes and turned instead to meaner creeds.
But what Sweeney did accomplish was to bring his embattled movement into alignment with the rest of progressive America, so that if the nation does manage to turn the corner toward a more equitable version of itself, the workers’ cause will not be left behind other progressive advances, as it has been since the 1970s. That there’s this element of contingency to his legacy doesn’t diminish the work that he did. If we are to win a brighter future, John Sweeney will have helped get us there.
