A leaked internal budget for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, shows that it devotes more than three times as much to political advocacy as it does to organizing and recruiting new members. The imbalance comes despite a membership decline for the federation and the labor movement in general.
The AFL-CIO’s 2018–2019 budget, acquired by Splinter, lists the total amount allocated to organizing about $5 million. In the same year, the federation allocated about $40.6 million to “political, electoral and issue mobilization.”
The vast majority of those political funds have traditionally been spent to benefit Democrats and liberal causes. In recent years, the AFL-CIO has moved more toward independent expenditures rather than directly supporting candidates or parties, making the beneficiaries harder to track. The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reports that in 2016 the AFL-CIO poured more than $17 million into “527” issue advocacy groups, so called because of the IRS label used for them.
An AFL-CIO spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
The emphasis on political spending over organizing comes despite the steady erosion in membership for the AFL-CIO over the years. The federation listed its total membership at just under 14 million in 2005, according to Labor Department filings. That slipped to 12.4 million as of last year. The overall labor movement is 10.5% of the workforce, down from 12.4% a decade ago.
The budget priorities also fly in the face of the Supreme Court’s Janus decision last year, which said public sector workers cannot be forced as condition of employment to join or financially support unions, a ruling expected to making retaining those members harder for public sector unions. The number of states with “right-to-work” laws, which apply similar rules to private sector workers, now stands at 27, up by four from 2012. The AFL-CIO’s budget, citing Janus and other factors, projects “a loss of a total of 698,771 union members by the end of the fiscal year.” This will cost the federation $3.5 million in revenue.
It also likely doesn’t reflect the wishes of much of the AFL-CIO’s rank and file. “In the last election, President Trump got 3 percentage points more of our members than Mitt Romney did. Unfortunately, Hillary [Clinton] got 10% of our members less than Barack Obama did. They either didn’t vote or they voted for a third-party candidate,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told reporters in 2017. The federation polls its members’ voting but rarely releases the data. Most public exit polls don’t ask voters if they are union members.
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