“New Unity” or Six Feet Under? Where Is the AFL-CIO Going?
The Leadership Debate and the Underlying Issues
by David Jones
A version of this article appears in the March 2005 edition of Socialist Action newspaper. For a one-year subscription, send $8 to Socialist Action,
The present decline of membership in
Union membership rose to 35 percent in the early 1950s, the highest in
the century. These contrasting proportions are often taken as self-evident
proof that labor has fallen on hard times. But this should be the beginning of
the discussion, not the end. Why should 35 percent be implicitly accepted as
the gold standard for
Only by answering these questions can we fully grasp the interplay of
social, economic, and political forces that determine the relationships between
classes and the organizations they create to defend their interests.
How the Trade Unions Grew
The trade union movement of the first three and a
half decades of the 20th century was essentially a voluntary association, with
no dues check-off or legally mandated collective bargaining and representation.
It was also overwhelmingly made up of white male private-sector workers, and until
the late 1930s it enrolled no significant part of the industrial mass
production work force, other than the Brewery Workers and the United Mine
Workers of America.
(Often unrecorded in estimates of early 20th-century trade union
membership is the “rebel” Industrial Workers of the World, which presented
itself as a militant, politically-minded alternative to the official brand of
“pure and simple” trade unionism.)
By the onset of World War I, the labor movement reached about the same
percentage levels of union density as today, and a wartime government policy
allowed it to grow to nearly 20 percent by 1919. After bottoming out in the
depth of the Depression, it rose again as a result of the great battles and
mobilizations of the latter part of the decade, culminating in the
semi-revolutionary 1936–37 sit-down strike at General Motors in
The employers’ ferocious counteroffensive, most notably the defeat in
the “Little Steel” strike, with the brutal Memorial Day massacre at Republic
Steel in Chicago (in May–June 1937, largely stalemated the CIO’s advance. At
the end of the decade, even after the great labor battles of 1934–37, union
density had risen no further than 21% (an increase of 7 percent from 1933).
As the Roosevelt administration ramped up war production, beginning in
1940, a government policy of encouraging union membership in the expanding war
industries, similar to that of World War I, increased union density through
1945 up to almost 34 percent—an increase of 11 percent. That was nearly one and
one-half times the gains made in the 1930s through direct and
semi-revolutionary struggle.
This quantitative success and the enforced social peace of the World
War II era—defined by tripartite government-labor-employer boards, no-strike
pledges, etc., taking the place of the class struggles of 1934–37—more than
anything shaped the psychology of the union bureaucracy and still does, down to
the present day.
Furthermore, the inability of the CIO—and the unwillingness of its
central leadership—to utilize the stupendous labor upsurge of the 1930s to build
an independent working-class party as an alternative to reliance on Roosevelt
and the Democratic Party New Deal, left the union movement politically disarmed
against the corporate and government attacks that multiplied at the close of
the war. The AFL-CIO bureaucracy’s alliance with the Democrats has served to
demobilize the union ranks to this day.
After World War II, the employers and their government dug in their
heels against further expansion of unionism, riding out the greatest strike
wave in
The idea that a “social contract” of relative class peace emerged with
the post–World War II prosperity (which is the general assumption) is
misleading. The employers gave only what they were forced to give as a direct
result of the wave of struggles from 1934 to 1937, peaking, of course, with the
wave of sit-downs in 1937 following
By 1938 the employers were already moving to break the labor upsurge,
and even beginning to experiment with fascism. (A good example of this was the
experience of Teamsters Local 544 with the Silver Shirts in
The further expansion of union membership from 1939 to 1945 was a
product of a trade-off. In return for the labor bureaucracy’s support for the
imperialist war the employers’ government allowed the unions to exist and grow.
The employers were also willing to utilize the newly created union bureaucracy
as policemen enforcing labor peace in war industry and transportation through
the well-known devices of “maintenance of membership,” no-strike pledges, etc.
(For a detailed account of these wartime arrangements, see Art Preis, Labor’s Giant
Step: Twenty Years of the CIO, a history of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations, or CIO. As most readers of this magazine probably know, the CIO
was founded in 1935 as a split-off from the American Federation of Labor, or
AFL, and in 1955 merged again with the AFL to form today’s AFL-CIO.)
Stagnation and Decline
The decline in absolute numbers of union members began in 1975, falling
by about one-half from 24 million to today’s 15 million or so. The onset of
this trend (1975) is pretty close to what is generally agreed upon as the end
of the post–World War II U.S. economic expansion, undermined by renewed
competition from a rebuilt Europe and Japan.
This was the
beginning of a concerted effort to drive back the gains of labor registered
over the preceding four decades. In 1979 the United Autoworkers Union took a
crucial and, up to then, unprecedented step backwards by agreeing to exclude
the “bankrupt” Chrysler Corporation from joint bargaining in auto. The
following year, the Reagan administration destroyed the Professional Air
Traffic Controllers union (PATCO).
The UAW’s concession, granted by one of the largest and most
influential unions to the nation’s largest manufacturing industry, unleashed a
centrifugal trend leading to a general unraveling of industry-wide bargaining
and contracts through the succeeding decades. And throughout the 1980s,
episodic and mostly spontaneous plant gate confrontations failed to stem the
first massive utilization of strikebreakers in decades, as aggressive employers
broke from the collective bargaining pattern of several decades and took their
lead from the PATCO defeat.
At the George
A. Hormel Co. in
All this took
place in the face of general stagnation, passivity, and complacency in the
upper ranks of organized labor, typified by the moribund regime of Lane
Kirkland, AFL-CIO president from 1979 to 1995. As the hemorrhaging of
membership continued unabated into the 1990s, a section of the AFL-CIO
Executive Council supported the candidacy of John Sweeney, president of the
Service Employees International Union (SEIU), for AFL-CIO president. Sweeney
defeated the old regime’s favorite son in a virtually unprecedented election
contest.
The Sweeney
program projected new and aggressive organizing to reverse the downward trend
in membership. Since then, hundreds of new organizers, predominantly social
activists from the campuses, have been recruited to the staffs of numerous
unions as well as the Federation (that is, the AFL-CIO national staff).
Nonetheless,
union membership has continued to drop uninterruptedly throughout the Clinton
and Bush administrations. The newly energized organizing efforts have been
checkmated by employer intransigence, the sabotage of the National Labor
Relations Board, and the adamant refusal of the union bureaucracy to mobilize
the union membership to confront these factors decisively in action.
Major Unions Seek Changes
The Service
Employees International Union (SEIU), in a tacit coalition with other top-rank
AFL-CIO reformers, recently projected a goal of far-reaching transformation of
the AFL-CIO through its so-called New Unity Partnership (founded in the summer
of 2003, but recently dissolved, in January 2005, after the current AFL-CIO
debate began to unfold).
The SEIU
leadership asserts that “American workers are at a crossroads.” It urges workers
and supporters of the goals of organized labor to “join the debate on how to
build new strength and unity for working people.” It set out a 10-point program
as a basis for discussion, and created a special web site for this discussion:
www.unitetowin.org.
SEIU President
Andrew Stern, as the head of the largest AFL-CIO union in the
While SEIU’s unitetowin web site did
not explicitly take up any proposal for altering the composition of the AFL-CIO
leadership, it is generally believed that Stern intends to support John
Wilhelm, president of the hospitality division of UNITE-HERE as the Federation’s
next president.
UNITE-HERE is the product of the recent merger between the Hotel
Employees Restaurant Employees (HERE) and UNITE, which was at the time of the
merger the last remaining independent clothing and textile workers union. UNITE’s President Bruce Raynor
was made president of the merged union, while Wilhelm, who brought a
considerably larger membership to the merger, has presumably been reserved for
a run for AFL-CIO president at the next convention.
Wilhelm, as HERE president, played a crucial role in the late 1990s in
changing the AFL-CIO’s position on immigrant workers, and even undocumented
workers, from one of exclusion to one of solidarity.
While this
change, driven by the insistence of HERE and SEIU, which operate in industries
with huge numbers of immigrant workers, can hardly be taken as an epiphanic conversion to international working-class
solidarity on the part of the AFL-CIO Executive Council, it is nonetheless a
genuine and significant change from a historically reactionary position—the one
really fundamental alteration in the Federation’s program, since it grudgingly
and gradually accepted the legitimacy of industrial unionism after the great
upsurge of the 1930s.
Raynor, Stern, and Wilhelm all
attended Ivy League colleges, proceeding from activity in the 1960s New Left to
union staff, and were eventually elected to leadership positions in their
respective unions. While all three had reputations as reformers and advocates
of new organizing, none, as far as is known, were associated with rank-and-file
labor reform movements advocating greater union democracy and militant action.
Nonetheless,
they are now emerging as the primary advocates of reshaping the Federation, and
its affiliated unions, in order to address the unions’ crisis of declining
membership, reduced political influence, and ability to obtain contracts
delivering better wages and benefits.
The Union Bureaucracy, a
Social Caste
The most
recent concerted attempt to reinvent the AFL-CIO was in 1995, when Sweeney
successfully ran against 72-year old Lane Kirkland. The bureaucracy that has
ruled the Federation for over 100 years has generally appeared to select its
central executive through principles akin to apostolic succession. Since its
creation it has had only five presidents, while even the English monarchy has
had six incumbents on the throne, and 21 presidents have occupied the White
House.
Samuel Gompers, the founder and first president of the AFL, was
also the last chief executive whom the bureaucracy acknowledged as a preeminent
leader of labor. The constituent “international” unions, which finance the
federation through per capita dues payments, have preferred Gompers’s
successors to be mediocre placeholders. So the contested election in 1995 and
the continuing tensions expressed in the new proposals for change signify a
real and unabating crisis of confidence and
perspective among the union chiefs and their associates.
The union
bureaucracy is far more than a simple aggregation of elected leaders and staff
of greater or lesser ability, commitment, integrity, and vision. Key to
understanding its inner dynamics is recognition that the union bureaucracy is a
distinct social caste, generally with superior wages, tenure, and conditions of
life, compared to those of the dues-paying members. Historically this
privileged status has been expressed above all in the bureaucracy’s
identification of the basic function of the unions with its own perpetuation
and self-preservation.
The
bureaucracy’s innate self-interests emerge and are continuously refined by its
increasing independence from the union ranks and its close interaction with the
employers. Massive and independent action by the rank and file, which is the
key ingredient for change, inevitably carries with it the additional
possibility of regime change within the unions and the displacement of elected
and unelected officeholders from their posts.
The SEIU New Unity Program
It is evident
that people like Stern, Wilhelm, and Raynor express a
sense of urgency concerning the deep crisis in organized labor deriving from
their personal political commitment to social change and a lifetime engagement
in the labor movement. Their setting out of programmatic proposals for change
before a wide audience, and in advance of and independent of any declared candidates
for higher office in the Federation, can only be
viewed as positive and virtually unprecedented.
Nonetheless,
it is hard to derive much from the ten points of the New Unity program other
than general statements on the order of:
·
“Good jobs
are the foundation of strong and healthy families and communities”
·
“Using
political action to create opportunities for more workers to unite with us and
then using that new strength to change workers’ lives through legislation and
bargaining is a proven and essential strategy.”
·
“The AFL-CIO
and its affiliated unions and allies should unite behind an all-out strategy to
win access to quality health care.”
Where it does
advance specific proposals, they are essentially administrative in character,
and involve not much more than a reallocation of resources and authority within
the federation.
• The
AFL-CIO should establish a center to support “Winning good jobs” and should
allocate all of its $25 million annual royalties from Union Plus credit card
purchases.
·
“Far more
resources and focus must be dedicated to organizing.”
·
“The AFL-CIO
Executive Council should have the authority to recognize up to three lead
national unions that have the membership, resources, focus and strategy to win
in a defined industry, craft or employer…”
·
“The AFL-CIO
should have the authority to require
coordinated bargaining and to merge or revoke
union charters, transfer responsibilities to unions for whom that industry
or union is their primary area of strength and prevent any merger that would
further divide worker’s strength.” (My emphasis—DJ)
·
“The AFL-CIO
should return to those (lead) unions half of what they pay now in AFL-CIO
dues...reallocating at least $2 billion over the next five years for uniting
more workers.”
Another proposal,
endorsed by 12 city/county-based central body presidents, supports combining
central bodies in 75 metropolitan areas into “regional labor federations.” The
NUP pointed out that of more than 500 central bodies chartered by the AFL-CIO
only 44 have full-time staff or officers.
The intent
here is to assemble “appropriate resources” and “good staff” to “build an
effective local political program focused on electing labor candidates.” There
is no indication that “electing labor candidates” is intended to mean anything
more than the usual vote-hustling for labor-endorsed candidates of the two old
parties.
An Intra-Bureaucratic Struggle
All these
proposals, and even others not discussed here, are bereft of any new ideas, and
not fundamentally addressed to the rank-and-file members, though their
launching on their respective interactive websites certainly blows a few new
winds throughout organized labor.
Protectionism
and electing labor’s “friends” were Gompers’s
solutions. While the federation has recently abandoned the third leg of Gompers’s stool, blocking new immigration, obtaining new
members through the administrative solution of hiring even more idealistic and
low-paid organizers off the campuses has not been notably successful in the 10
years since the Sweeney administration began to implement this perspective.
The
acceleration of the present trend of consolidation of local unions into
suffocating district and state structures, and the amalgamation of city-based
central bodies into staff-driven regional apparatuses is eliminating many of
the few remaining places in the bureaucratized
When the
union bureaucrats accuse each other of putting forward top-down, administrative
proposals for change, it must be conceded that they are all correct. It is not
hard to see within this an intra-bureaucratic struggle over declining union
resources.
Bill Lucy,
head of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, says, “They want bigger unions.
They want power players, big unions in charge. The end result is a diminution
of community power.”
Lucy, who is
secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal
Employees (AFSCME), also a big union, sees the diminishing of the weight of
city central bodies as reducing the influence of African Americans, who make up
30 percent of organized labor in urban centers.
The SEIU
proposal is scornfully rejected by International Association of Machinists
(IAM) President Tom Buffenbarger, who says unions
need to spend more money on public relations and media, emulating, he suggests,
the politician-centered pressure campaigns the National Rifle Association
employs with apparent success. He calls SEIU’s Stern
a “small peacock” trying to “corporatize the labor
movement.”
Buffenbarger, whose union is
still prosperous enough to fly him around the country in its own Lear jet,
proposes an end to free trade—that is, establishing protectionism for the IAM’s employers. That’s his solution to labor’s shrinking
manufacturing base, a reactionary utopia that allows union officers to campaign
for reelection while wrapping themselves in the Yankee flag and appealing to
national and racial chauvinism.
In the end,
the dispute, whatever its exact form, will be settled by a per capita vote for
president at the next convention of the Federation, and whoever ends up in
charge will get to try out their particular administrative solution, which, it
can be confidently predicted, will not solve anything.
The question
of organizing is fundamentally a political, not administrative question.
Undoubtedly politically sophisticated leaders like Stern, Wilhelm, Raynor, and others know this. Nonetheless, after decades in
the coils of the union bureaucracy, they are ultimately incapable of coming up
with anything other than administrative proposals larded with perhaps
well-meaning, but vague and general New Left rhetoric. Absent, including from
the leaders nurtured in the New Left, is even a
suggestion of political mass mobilization of the Federation’s membership for
immediate goals. Didn’t they learn anything in the 1960s? Why not, for example,
call for a labor-initiated march on
‘The Practical Side’
As the
American socialist leader James P Cannon said so aptly 65 years ago, the union
bureaucrat “may not know much about the historical, philosophical, and
theoretical aspects of the ‘capitalist system,’ but he has a damn good hunch
about the practical side of the question. What he lacks in knowledge of the law
of value and the automatic regulation of prices, he makes up in mother wit and
good old-fashioned horse sense; he figures a system which makes it possible for
a man to simply lean back on his haunches and bellow at regular intervals that
‘all is well’ and then find an annual check of $20,000 (in 1940—D.J.) in his
hand—that is a first-class system no matter what you call it.”
Power from Below
Why, one
might ask, if additional resources are needed to revitalize organized labor
through new organizing, can’t they be reallocated from the budgets and human
resources of the swollen union apparatuses? The old AFL unions for the most
part got by on far less. As one participant recalled, “...old fashioned unions
operated from...dumps, with roll-top desks and maybe high bookkeeper’s
stools—when the more ambitious rented a floor or two in an office building or
owned an unpretentious building far from big-business structures it didn’t
presume to ape.”
To ask the
question is to answer it. The Xanadus and marble
palaces the present-day union bureaucracies dwell in, mostly in
The present “crisis” is really a bureaucratic crisis. It does not take
a lot of insight to perceive that fundamentally all the “solutions” are directed
to and driven by the diminishing resources available to maintaining the
apparatuses in full employment, with generous salaries and perquisites. Even if
they wanted to, Stern, Raynor, and Wilhelm cannot
separate themselves from the tentacles of the bureaucracies that nurtured their
careers.
None of the
AFL-CIO makeover proposals offers or even seeks an explanation for what factors
have driven the varying levels of union membership over the past century. It is
essentially left as self-evident that bigger resources produce more members.
The ahistorical
context of the discussion leaves out the actual social and political
dynamics of the process and reduces it to a simple-minded syllogism that “more
members = more money = more members.”
As ought to
be evident, the power and creativity that have driven the labor movement
throughout the past century have come from below, in mass mobilization and
direct action. Inescapably, such mobilization and action must be initiated and
led by radicals and youth inspired by a vision of a new society. This is the
only vital source from which revitalized unions can emerge—as a new global
economy both undermines historic gains and
simultaneously creates a broader material basis for a new international labor
movement.
For a rank-and-file
rebellion to assume coherent and effective form, it will be necessary for it to
crystallize around a class-struggle trade-union program that is based on the
fundamental recognition that gains for the workers can only come through the
independent actions of the workers themselves—and in an all-out struggle
against the employers and their government.
For the
concepts of class struggle and class independence to once again penetrate the
conscious thinking of masses of workers, and for them to become a lever to move
millions into struggle, they must link up the immediate and urgent needs of the
workers with clear proposals for what can be done—proposals that make sense to
workers at their present level of understanding. This general programmatic conception
can be centered on four basic ideas—solidarity, class independence, union
democracy, and proletarian methods of struggle.
These ideas
can be defined more concretely:
·
Solidarity: “All workers must unite in action for the common good.” This can be
expressed, naturally, in many forms. One crucial front is industrial
solidarity, expressed through industry-wide pattern agreements that prevent
employers from playing one group off against another. The employers from the
1980s onward have struck devastating blows against almost every industrial
master agreement. Multi-tier wage agreements are another form of breaking down
industrial solidarity. Going beyond union contracts, even the projection of the
possibility and desirability of an independent labor party based on the unions
would dramatically express a renewed solidarity of organized labor with all
workers
·
Class
independence: The workers should
rely on themselves and their own power and place no confidence in anyone
else—politicians, “good employers,” sympathetic cops, judges, lawyers,
investors, and so on. The workers themselves, and nobody else, should have and
assert the right to make all decisions affecting themselves.
·
Union
democracy: All decisions should be made
through free and open discussion and the vote of all concerned and those
decisions should be decisive and binding. The rank and file should be fully
informed of all matters affecting their interests.
·
Proletarian methods
of struggle: Only the massive, direct, and independent
intervention of the rank and file, not shrinking from confrontation with the
forces of “law and order,” can win decisive victories. Allies should be sought
out from the working class as a whole, employed and unemployed alike.
Anyone with
some familiarity with the working class knows that these concepts express how
workers feel when their rights and needs are being challenged. Concrete
and realistic proposals based on these considerations and sensitive to the
moods and perceptions of the workers in a situation of general ferment can
overcome bureaucratic obstacles and hesitations and be translated into mass
action. It ought to be obvious that these concepts are intertwined with each
other and form a coherent whole.
As Farrell
Dobbs, a central leader of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes,
wrote in 1966, “There can be no solution short of building a leadership based
on class-struggle concepts, a leadership that emerges from a left wing
dedicated to the basic perspective of rank and file control over all union
affairs. Through such close ties between leadership and membership the full
power of the working class can be mobilized. In action the workers will
demonstrate their courage, resourcefulness, ingenuity—their capacity to change
everything for the better.”
The gerontocracy
that runs the AFL-CIO has to come to grips periodically with the march of time
and give way, not always willingly, to those who have “waited their turn.”
Stern, Wilhelm, and Raynor, and most of the other top
dogs in the Federation, far from being young Turks, are themselves in their
fifties and sixties. After serving decades in the bureaucracy, it is now “their
turn.”
But their
ideas for change, pallid echoes of their youth, are
not going to “change everything for the better,” or even very much at all.
Nonetheless,
it is plain that organized labor in this country is going through a change—one
that reaches far below the superficial maneuvering of the labor tops—and that
things cannot stay the same. New immigration is recomposing the working class,
and the unions, in a way that is fundamental and unprecedented in almost a
century. Globalization continues to create a new international working class
objectively united and interlinked as never before.
Those who
understand the capacity of the workers to build a new world, free of scarcity
and violence and based on human solidarity, must rededicate themselves to
“educate, agitate, and organize,” with resolute confidence that “in action the
workers will demonstrate their courage, resourcefulness, ingenuity—their capacity
to change everything for the better.”