CQ Roll Call via AP Images
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney speaks during a health care reform rally at the labor union headquarters in Washington, August 31, 2009.
This article is part of our series The Alt-Labor Chronicles: America’s Worker Centers.
Ai-jen Poo, co-founder of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, was facing a quandary: She was making little headway getting the New York state legislature to enact a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. It was 2008, and the bill of rights—which called for overtime pay, one day off a week, and protections against sexual harassment—was having problems getting traction in Albany. So Poo decided to try a Hail Mary.
Why not invite AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, she thought, to Albany to help lobby? “I had read somewhere that his mother was a domestic worker, and at that time, the AFL-CIO was beginning to do outreach to understand non-union worker organizations.” Poo contacted Sweeney’s office in Washington. “We were thinking it would be a long shot,” she says. “Much to my surprise, he said yes.”
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He arrived in Albany late one May morning. “He put on our bright yellow T-shirt that said, ‘Domestic Workers Deserve a Bill of Rights, Dignity, Respect and Recognition,’” Poo says. “He put it over his nice sports jacket. He wore that yellow T-shirt all day. He ate our crappy sandwiches, the ones in our premade lunch boxes. Then he walked the halls with domestic workers and visited legislators and spoke at our rally.”
John Sweeney, who stepped down from the AFL-CIO presidency in 2009, died on February 1 of this year at age 86. He was widely praised for his leadership in battling for union members and fighting to reverse the union movement’s decline. But it was little recognized that Sweeney, the nation’s top union leader, often went out of his way to help non-union workers. They included some of the nation’s most vulnerable workers, often immigrants, like the nannies and housekeepers in the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Sweeney’s parents were immigrants from Ireland, his father a New York bus driver, his mother, as Poo says, a domestic worker.
“President Sweeney felt a particular responsibility to those workers most exploited, most vulnerable, and historically most ignored or worse by organized labor,” Jon Hiatt, who was the AFL-CIO’s general counsel under Sweeney, wrote in a tribute. “In my opinion, this was his most important legacy.”
Bhairavi Desai, founder of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, said that when her 21,000-member group held its first national meeting with taxi drivers from across the country, she needed a leadoff speaker. She thought, why not try for the top guy in labor? Again, Sweeney said yes.
“John Sweeney came up from D.C.—he was our keynote speaker,” Desai said. “You could see the genuineness of his solidarity with immigrant workers.”
On a Sunday afternoon, the meeting was held at City University’s Murphy Labor Center on West 43rd Street. “He came with a lot of excitement and energy,” Desai said. “He gave a speech and then sat around with workers and talked to us individually.” He listened carefully, she said, in no way lording it over those workers.
Ana Avendaño, who was the AFL-CIO’s associate general counsel, remembers when Sweeney decided to expand the labor federation’s focus beyond unions. It was 2005, and in an ugly feud, the SEIU, Teamsters, the hotel workers, and the United Food and Commercial Workers had all just quit the AFL-CIO. Sweeney recognized that those breakaway unions were the ones doing the most to unionize and fight for immigrant workers.
Avendaño recollects the meeting in the AFL-CIO president’s office. “President Sweeney told me he wanted to make sure that the federation was going to continue to speak for all workers. He said that just because the unions that had the longest immigrant history have left the federation, that doesn’t mean the federation has abandoned those workers.”
With those words, Sweeney began the chain of events that led to years of cooperation between a multitude of unions and worker centers across the U.S. Sweeney encouraged Avendaño and Hiatt to develop partnerships with some worker centers. Around that time, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) was eager to have labor unions help it persuade Congress to kill legislation that would have closed day labor centers nationwide and established e-verification procedures that would have prevented most day laborers from working.
With Sweeney’s full support, Avendaño and Hiatt forged a partnership with NDLON, the labor federation’s first partnership with a worker center. In announcing that partnership in 2006, Sweeney said: “Day laborers in the United States often face the harshest forms of workplace problems, and this exploitation hurts us all because when standards are dragged down for some workers, they are dragged down for all workers. The work being done by worker centers, and NDLON in particular, is some of the most important work in the labor movement today.”
John Sweeney began the chain of events that led to years of cooperation between a multitude of unions and worker centers across the U.S.
That partnership opened the door to dozens of union–worker center partnerships in subsequent years. Pablo Alvarado, NDLON’s executive director, speaks of Sweeney with respect and fondness. “He was a very humble man who led from the heart as much as from the brain,” Alvarado said. “He never led from the ego.”
Alvarado recalls Sweeney’s various meetings with day laborers. “He always asked about people’s families,” Alvarado says. “He connected with every person, whether a rank-and-file union member or a worker at a worker center. He understood that the rights of workers don’t end at the U.S.-Mexico border. That is exactly what moved him to push this partnership.”
“If it hadn’t been for John Sweeney,” Alvarado continues, “this partnership never would have happened. John Sweeney really cared about the little guy, about every worker. Not just the union member, but the people on the sidewalk.”
As for Ai-jen Poo’s fight for a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, it wasn’t enacted in the year Sweeney visited Albany, despite the powerful speech he gave there. In it, he harkened back to his mother’s work as a domestic worker in the 1930s and 1940s.
“Then as now, domestic workers were mostly women, isolated in the homes where they worked, not covered by most major worker protections, vulnerable to minimum wage and overtime violations,” Sweeney said. “Then as now, domestic workers were legally excluded from the right to collectively bargain. Then as now, domestic work was at best a form of genteel slavery, in many cases not so genteel at all.”
Poo said Sweeney’s visit made many lawmakers pay attention and gave her effort important momentum that enabled the bill of rights to be enacted two years later, making New York the first state with a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.
Years later, Poo choked up in recalling Sweeney’s visit. “I want to cry telling that story. It meant so much.”
This series was made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation.
