ON THE FACE OF IT, the implosion of the AFL-CIO at its annual convention–its two largest member-unions have just quit, and others threaten to follow–is no big deal. When it was formed, in 1955, by the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (which had rancorously split 20 years earlier), more than a third of American workers were union members. Twenty years later, that figure was down to one in five, and today it is less than 13percent.
In terms of political influence, those numbers can be deceptive. A little more than a quarter of American voters live in a household where someone belongs to a union, up from 19 percent a dozen years ago, and those dues-paying members have furnished the Democratic party with hundreds of millions of dollars in recent decades. But the numbers can be deceptive in other ways as well. Since the 1960s, union growth has been largely confined to public employees, who now comprise nearly half the population of the AFL-CIO. Take those figures away, and a mere 8 percent of workers in the private sector–less than one in ten–belong to a union.
How this happened, and what it tells us about the changing patterns of employment in the American economy, is a subject unto itself. But the fact that the diminishing ranks of American labor are now divided among themselves is part of the story. The truth is that organized labor is a spent force in American life, and its leadership cannot agree about what it should do, or what needs to be done.
To be sure, there is an instructive irony in all this. The current leader of the AFL-CIO, 71-year-old John Sweeney, came to power a decade ago when he led a rebellion against the federation’s longtime president, Lane Kirkland. At the time, the complaint against Kirkland was that he had grown complacent in office–the federation is comfortably headquartered in a giant building two blocks from the White House–and the insurgents proclaimed that the answer to labor’s diminishing ranks was obvious: to “organize.”
Sweeney seemed a throwback to the glory days of sit-down strikes, class warfare, and radical rhetoric: As president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), he had, among other things, commanded a “Justice for Janitors” campaign in Washington, D.C., that specialized in confrontational tactics and causing massive traffic jams along commuter routes. But somehow labor’s renaissance never occurred. Every other year or so the media discover a new generation of undergraduates, fed up with decadence and materialism on campus, who plan to become labor organizers when they graduate. Perhaps the kids were diverted into investment banking; in any event, campaigns to organize workers in the past decade, particularly in the private sector, have been notably unsuccessful.
That was Strike One against Sweeney. Strike Two has been his dogged campaign to tie the fortunes of organized labor to the Democratic party; in particular, to transfer truckloads of (compulsory) dues and (voluntary) PAC contributions to the Democratic party, to MoveOn.org and its allies, and to individual candidates in campaigns to reclaim the White House, the state houses, and both houses of Congress from Republicans. And with what results? The Democrats are further removed from power in Washington, as well as state capitals, and the AFL-CIO is perceived as little more than a source of cash for the Democratic National Committee, a kind of blue-collar George Soros. Sweeney’s strategic blunders have not just irritated the 43 percent of union households that voted for George W. Bush last year, but have stirred dissent in official ranks.
Sweeney’s principal critic, Andrew Stern, the 54-year-old president of the SEIU, is a most unlikely labor leader: A product of New York’s upper-middle class, and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, this onetime Ivy League radical has spent most of his career as a union bureaucrat and political operator. Like Sweeney in 1995, he insists that the AFL-CIO needs to concentrate its energies on organizing and broadening its ranks; unlike Sweeney, however, he seems to regard labor’s marriage to the Democrats as a mixed blessing, at best, and legislative lobbying as a waste of time so long as Republicans control Congress.
Moreover, he does not appear to regard the Republican party, and George W. Bush, as sworn enemies of the American worker: On certain workplace issues, and in understanding the challenges of a global economy, Stern seems less dogmatic than Sweeney, less devoted to the European model of industrial relations, and prepared to work with the Bush administration, and congressional Republicans, when it suits his purposes. On outsourcing, for example, he has moved beyond the standard criticism of corporations to advocate “income-replacement and retraining programs that are suitable for skilled high-tech workers who need to constantly reinvent themselves.”
So the SEIU, along with the Teamsters, walked away from the AFL-CIO on its golden anniversary to form a new federation–called the Change to Win Coalition–which may soon be joined by the Laborers’ International Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and UNITE/HERE, the old textile and hotel workers unions. This is, by any measure, a disaster for the AFL-CIO: The Teamsters and the SEIU are its largest unions, and the federation stands to lose a third of its membership. It is bad news for Democrats as well, for while the party has developed new sources of income through the Internet and 527s, a fractured labor movement means less money and less organizational assistance in election years. It is also a fair guess that the Bush White House, in the name of compassionate conservatism, will be searching for common ground with the dissidents.
Which may alter the face of organized labor, or not. John Sweeney remains in full control of a battered AFL-CIO, and Andy Stern has allied himself with two partners–the Teamsters and Laborers–best known for their historic corruption. It is possible that the Change to Win Coalition will thrive, and that competing federations may successfully coexist. It is equally possible that the long, historic decline of organized labor is irreversible, and that the 19th-century model for labor-management relations goes the way of the livery stable and the manual typewriter.
Philip Terzian is Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard.
