They Came, They Met, They Went Home…
AFL-CIO Execs Stand Pat at
by David Jones
A version of this
article will appear in the April issue of Socialist
Action newspaper. For a year’s subscription to Socialist Action, send $8 to 298
The much-anticipated meeting of the AFL-CIO
executive committee in Las Vegas, Nevada, in early March declined by a nearly
2-to-1 margin (a vote of 14 to 8) to adopt changes in structure and financing
urgently pressed by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President
Andrew Stern.
As is well known, SEIU, in concert with
UNITE/HERE (a recent merger of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees
union with the major clothing and textile workers union),
had proposed revamping AFL-CIO financing by rebating half of the per capita
dues payments made to the AFL-CIO for unions which were certified as committing
the preponderance of their resources to organizing. This, it was projected,
would cut the present AFL-CIO budget in half, from $170 million to $88 million,
and presumptively make an equivalent amount available for new organizing.
The reform coalition also included the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers
union (UFCW), and the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA),
all big unions that have experienced recent growth. Nonetheless, the coalition
failed to prevail at the executive committee meeting, outvoted by other
affiliates in a setback for the reformers.
Even among the coalition of five there were
differences. A proposal advanced by Teamsters President James Hoffa would have
encouraged, but not forced union mergers, while Stern stuck to his demand for
mandatory mergers that would cut the number of national unions from 58 to about
20.
What actually passed was a recommendation,
initiated by President John Sweeney, to commit half the per capita payments to
“politics and legislation,” rather than organizing. These matters will be
considered again at upcoming executive meetings of the federation in May and
June, and then at the annual federation convention this fall. Although at first
glance, the controversy might be taken as simply a sordid squabble over money,
the emerging institutional failure of organized labor, under which lies a
steady reduction in members and influence—both political and economic—is not
going to go away, and it appears that the critics are not going to shut up.
Depending on how the various components of the union bureaucracy are situated,
this can be taken either as a continuing and urgent necessity to address an
ultimately unpostponable crisis, or, perhaps, just an annoying and unnecessary
diversion from, as Stern characterizes it, “what is safe, familiar and
failing.”
Stern relates that, “At the recent AFL-CIO
Executive Council meeting in Las Vegas, one of the other union leaders
complained to me in exasperation: “You keep running around bringing up this ‘worker’
sh-t.”
This off-the-cuff interjection conveys an
unmistakable note of sincerity on the part of Stern’s interlocutor, for whom,
like many of his (presumably but not necessarily “his”) colleagues, the union
business is a very good business indeed, if not disturbed by foolish notions of
change. This perception, which has probably been around since the first walking
delegate transformed himself into a full-time paid
“business agent,” does, as Stern no doubt intended, neatly capture the
insufferable arrogance and complacency of the stand-pat union bureaucracy.
Stern and his colleagues, while undeniably part
of the union bureaucracy, are nonetheless motivated by an abiding sense of
urgency about the future of the movement to which they have committed all of
their adult lives. Their actions and continuing agitation, mild as they are,
should not be dismissed out of hand as mere self-serving office-seeking and
organizational aggrandizement, although it is not hard to detect elements of
both in their general approach and mostly administrative proposals for change.
As socialist leader James P. Cannon wrote in
1929, “[The] progressives are weathercocks, who reflect certain winds
blowing in the labor movement…These events are not accidental. They reflect in
the first place the unmistakable growth of discontent of wide sections of the
workers and their impulse to struggle against the present state of affairs.”
It is clear that the leaders of the AFL-CIO
opposition have been emboldened to see some possibility of growth in the future
by the success of their respective organizations in recruiting new members in
significant numbers. It is also significant that these unions, including less
prominent coalition members like the Laborers, are finding a large part of
their successes at organizing among immigrant workers.
The SEIU-sponsored web site “unitetowin.org,”
initiated earlier in the year as an interactive forum for discussion of the
reform proposals, continues to carry on the discussion on change, encouraged by
Stern, who urges: “Bring up the subject at local meetings and propose a
resolution supporting the key principles of change to unify workers’ strength
in each industry. Ask your AFL-CIO central labor council to schedule a
discussion and invite leaders of unions that have led the debate.”
This kind of direct appeal for action on the
part of the rank and file by a major union leader, limited as it is, would
certainly have been considered for most of the history of the federation (and
no doubt in many quarters still) to be unwarranted interference and subversion,
not to say lèse majesté. Regardless of the narrowness of the challenges
to the AFL-CIO’s status quo which are formulated at present by the dissident
elements of the bureaucracy, they give greater credibility to the prospect of
change, and even of wider participation by the members of the unions in
formulating new programmatic demands.
Shortly after the incumbent AFL-CIO president,
John Sweeney, was elected in 1995 as a candidate for change, he was given five
minutes to address the August 1996 Democratic Party convention.
“What do working families want?” Sweeney asked. “They
don’t want to run the Congress or the White House or the political parties”
(emphasis added—DJ). This was an explicit pledge of subordination to the
bipartisan political system run by the employers. (Sweeney didn’t even complain
about getting only five minutes to address the convention of a political party
that receives a major portion of its money and votes from the unions in the
AFL-CIO.) Such subordination is at the root of inability of the all wings of
the labor leadership, including Stern and his allies, to effectively retard, to
say nothing of rolling back, the tide of capitalist change driving down the
wages, entitlements, level of organization, and conditions of life for the
great mass of the working class in this country.
While at this point, neither of the two
leadership factions in the AFL-CIO mention, not to say advocate, the
possibility of a perspective of independent labor political action—in fact, a
co-equal part of the proposal by the SEIU and others for change is to pour even
more money into support of the Democrats—it is always just beneath the surface,
as Sweeney’s reassurances in 1996 attest.
The first question reporters put to the leaders
of the newly merged AFL-CIO federation fifty years ago was whether they intended
to utilize their new combination to organize a labor party. Needless to say,
both Meany and Reuther vehemently denied any such intention and the past
half-century testifies to their sincerity.
Stern’s reiteration of the possibility of
disaffiliating with the AFL-CIO if his reforms are rejected is still a pregnant
possibility. While a disaffiliation at the federation’s convention this fall,
if it occurs, will more likely resemble the fleeting alliance of the
Reuther-led United Autoworkers Union and the Teamsters outside the AFL-CIO in
the late 1960s, rather than the dramatic and historic split led by John L Lewis
in the 1930s, the pressing need for change will continue to register and find
its expression in new initiatives from the top.
Whether the process of continuing pressure for
change at the top can intersect reciprocally with dissatisfied
elements of the organized or unorganized working class to produce some real
movement is of course ultimately the question of questions. Those who sincerely
want fundamental change in the direction and program of organized labor ought
to seek to introduce new, or better, ideas into the debate, notwithstanding its
limits. And surely the present and future participants deserve a larger and
more democratic arena of discussion than an interactive website. One hundred
years ago uncompromising and militant advocates of labor and working class
action called a “Continental Congress” of labor and created the Industrial
Workers of the World, whose achievements and struggles echo down to the present
day. In the new world of globalization, the idea seems even more relevant and
compelling.