AFL-CIO To Trim Staff

by Chris Bowers, Fri Apr 29, 2005 at 09:26:34 AM EDT

This could be a disturbing sing of things to come for the American left:AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney, who is facing challenges from some of the labor federation's largest member unions, yesterday acknowledged that the organization is financially squeezed and may have to lay off a quarter of its workforce.

Sweeney, who was first elected in 1995 as an insurgent who promised to increase the percentage of the workforce represented by unions, has presided over a decade of union decline. Signs of the AFL-CIO's precarious financial condition could make Sweeney more vulnerable to challenges to his leadership at the federation's July convention in Chicago.

Of course, the main problem behind both the layoffs and the challenge to Sweeney's leadership is that Sweeney has not delivered on his promise of increased union density:Kirkland er
1986: 16,975,000 union members; 17.5 percent of workforce unionized
1994: 16,740,000 union members; 15.5 percent of workforce unionized
Change, 1986-1994: 235,000 members lost, 2 percentage point decline in union density

Sweeney era
1996: 16,269,000 union members; 14.5 percent of workforce unionized
2004: 15,472,000 union members; 12.5 percent of workforce unionized
Change, 1996-2004: 797,000 members lost, 2 percentage point decline in union density

The Washington Post article linked above offers an even broader perspective: In the nearly 50 years since the AFL-CIO was created by a merger of two labor federations, union membership fell from about 33 percent of the workforce to 12.5 percent. The decline of organized labor has a ripple effect in the economy because union members usually receive higher pay and better benefits than unorganized workers in their industries. Labor's weakness has damaged the strength of its ally, the Democratic Party, and weakened the lobbying muscle of labor in Washington and in state capitals. Unions have historically been one of the main, if not the main, ideological conversion machine of the American left. It is thus no surprise that the long-term decline in union density has paralleled the post-1968 Democratic decline, especially among whites, and especially among men.

I have detailed in the past about how long-term demographic trends in another area of ideological conversion mechanisms, religion, are sharply moving in a direction that favors Democrats. However, if we lose the workplace, whatever gains we make in places of worship will be muted. This does not even mention the Republican Noise Machine's domination of our national media, or the growing conservative war against all levels and aspects of our education system. Organizing in all of these areas, education, media, religion and the workplace, are arguably more important than election organizing because these are the ideological mechanisms that largely determine how people will vote long before campaigns even begin. No matter what else we do, our continued defeats in the workplace signal that there is absolutely no guarantee that the pendulum of American politics will eventually swing back in our direction.

Tags: Labor (all tags)

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We've lost an ideological war over organized labor

I'm not sure how it happened exactly, but I feel like I know a decent number of left-leaning, democrat voting young people who exactly have neutral or even anti-union and organized labor beliefs. The most common being something along the lines of unions being "obsolete" relics of a different period of history or even worse that they are inefficient and corrupt.

I think the organized labor in this country has done a terrible job at combating this sort of "common-sense" style ignorance. As a simple example, try naming 4 major federated unions. Now 4 cell-phone companies. Or 4 car manufactures. Or 4 major clothing retailers. Or 4 oil companies. Or even better, 4 companies that you have no idea what they do, but that do spend enough money to make sure you know they exist. All of those are easy to do compared to the unions, right?

Where are the ad campaigns saying "AFL-CIO, making the American Way of Life better for 100 years"? Where are the campaigns telling people why they shouldn't shop at Walmart? Where are the ads encouraging us to shop at places that aren't exploitive towards their workers and explaining how the quality is better (and it ALWAYS is) as a result of that?

Lastly, where does labor stand on the environment? Do they push their companies to improve standards independent of current laws? I think there needs to be a modernizing of their own ideology on that front as well.

by Spartacus 2005-04-29 10:11AM | 0 recs

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Why Is This?

I'm no labor expert, but I can't seem to understand why the labor movement has such poor leadership? It seems that conservatives have been very good at challenging unionization on the legal front -- so where are the union lawyers? What are they doing?

Public perception of unions is bad. As has been pointed out in another comment, why aren't unions more focused on marketing themselves to the American public?

It really comes down to leadership, and I for the life of me cannot understand why it is sooo bad. Except for Andy Stern, there is not one union leader who seems to have new ideas or even a strong plan on how to reduce the union slide.

Perhaps it is simply the insider, labor-establishment system that keeps power in the hands of an ineffective few.

I really don't know, but it seems labor is content to watch itself die.

by LiberalFromPA 2005-04-29 10:59AM | 0 recs

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Some good news

Big labor does have some big problems. But a coalition of progressive leaders, led by Andy Stern at the SEIU is making some agressive moves in the right direction.

I read this fantastic article, "The New Boss," by Matt Bai in the New York Times Magazine. I have been trying to find a way to work for Stern ever since.

The article is here:
http://lists.iww.org/pipermail/iww-news/2005-January/007840.html

The few SEIU people who I've talked to say that it's unlikely that the progressive block will be able to take over AFL-CIO leadership. They believe that the SEIU may indeed leave the AFL-CIO. In the not-very-long-run, I believe that this will have a positive effect on the labor movement and for progressive politics.

by AmericaCanDoBetter 2005-04-29 12:38PM | 0 recs

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Unions

Look, my parents are both strong unionists. However in my personal experience all the unions have ever done is fuck things up.

They screw over my parents when it comes to grievances and are too fucking jealous of their own power to combine forces to become stronger.

That's why while I support unionization of places like wall mart, sometimes they have proved to be more trouble than they are worth.

by MNPundit 2005-04-29 02:10PM | 0 recs

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Not my area of competence, but...

Was it the air controllers' strike during the Reagan era which did it? In the sense that there was a bombarding of the media with "unions are relics" propaganda from the Reagan administration and a growing feeling among working people who were or would be in unions that the government would counter unions at every step from then on? were killing unions and that there wasn't much anyone could do about it?

Or has the Democratic leadership been responsible (and the Dem voters a bunch of enablers) -- thanks to a feeling that we really owned Washington and that Reagan and others would fade away? that we really didn't need to do anything? that we didn't need to rethink the party's relationship with American working and the middle classes? that the DLC had it all figured out and we didn't need to worry?

by Bean 2005-04-29 03:23PM | 0 recs

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It's been a long process and a lot of things

A few unions, especially those in the service and public employee sectors (SEIU and AFSCME for example), as well as the Teamsters, have been growing.

Those are the exceptions to the rule and I think it's based more in the growth in their particular industries; historically many unions were based in manufacturing or in older blue collar industries such as automaking, railroads, steel, and textiles. All those industries have lost most of their unionized U.S. jobs, and the main culprit is globalization.

Some of the most radical leftie unions in fact were historically those representing miners and timber workers, who have suffered worst of all from globalization (while right wing liars have the nerve to falsely claim that it is "environmentalists" and not globalization that is to blame...)

There have been several individual acts of anti-union activity by Republicans which have added up to a lot of damage, including Reagan's destroying PATCO. Autos and steel started declining in the early 1980s because of increasing competition from other countries.

But the two single most destructive votes in Congress toward unions were the vote to approve NAFTA, and the vote to approve the GATT treaty, both in the mid 1990s. Sadly, we have many Democrats, from the pro-free-trade wing of the party, along with the pro-Chamber of Commerce wing of the Republicans, to blame for these passing. These Democrats cast a vote which did more long-term harm to future Democratic Party chances at the polls (due to destruction of union jobs, and the Democratic voting base that goes with union jobs) than anything else they could have done.

Somehow we need to fix the situation by reviving organized labor. Organizing the big box stores (e.g. Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Target) and restaurant chains (e.g. Dennys, Outback) seems like the most logical place to do it, since they employ so many people and since service industry jobs are jobs which by definition cannot just be moved overseas.

There's another way to fix the situation too and it involves abandoning globalization, going out of our way to buy union-made products, and challenging the members of our own party who voted for NAFTA and GATT and who continue to support "free" trade. Primary challenges would be nice.

by ACSR 2005-04-29 04:20PM | 0 recs

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to be fair

It is one man up against an army of Republican Pro-Business, let the worker rot in hell, types.

We all need to support Union companies, that will allow them to hire more workers.

by goplies 2005-04-29 04:23PM | 0 recs

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Pull Out of NAFTA

Okay, so why don't Dems advocate abandoning the North American Free Trade Agreement as a position? Dems like Carter and Clinton led the way on reducing regulation and free trade and frankly I don't think it worked. A treaty is something that a nation enters into and it can be something that a nation gets out of if it realizes that it isn't serving its interests. We need to adopt populist positions on economic issues to counter the GOP populist positions on social issues.

by mrgavel 2005-04-29 05:42PM | 0 recs

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This breaks my heart

I agree with some of the hurts and cures here.
The FDR killers the last 8 years are happy
with glee, and they feel they are right on track
when they see news like this, especially Karl
Rove.

Unions have been stretched and given alot the
the last two election cycles and they had too
because of the FDR killers.

For them to make a comeback they still need to
stay together and pull together under progressive
leadership. Emphasis contracts and benefits and
spend more than 10 percent on organizing.

Now they do need help in changing the labor laws
Union elections are no where near a fair playing
field. Karl Rove types earn their stripes breaking unions and then go on to national politics, corporations spend millions on outside
consultants who do nefarious things and put out
propaganda.

I think if Al Gore would have won the labor
laws could have been tweaked and John Kerry as
well but these close elections came up short
and now the Bush administration is going to
harass labor under labor secretary Chow.

The CWA Communication Workers of America in my
view is the best and most progressive union out
there other unions could learn from them.

If you study union elections and its almost
impossible climb to win, you would agree with me
50 percent plus 1 is not exactly what it is
portrayed.

by Aslanspal 2005-04-29 11:07PM | 0 recs

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Troubles for Labor

I think it has something to do with a generational frame of reference. Our parents and grandparents were shaped by the Great Depression and the New Deal. They remembered what it was like to go hungry, or if they did not, they knew a lot of people who did. They remembered how things got better after the long labor struggle for recognition after the UAW sit-down strikes with Walter Reuther, and the coal miner's related struggle.

Today's young people, largeley any economic pain, precisely because of the sacrifices of their parents and grandparents in the union movement, have been imbibing a generation or more of a celebrity-worshipping, wealth idoltray which started with Reagan's presidency, continued with the phony Clinton's using the presidency as a wealth-making machine, and now has moved into George W. Bush's leadership of the wealthy's class-warfare on the lower and middle classes. The mass media, with its Donald Trump obsession, its greed-driven "Survivor" and "Fear Factor" and other related shows, has had a horrible effect on American values, particularly the young.

Exit polls show that the 30-49 year old age cohort is the most Republican.

Union leadership itself is to blame for their focus on protecting their own small turf instead of working together for the broad good of the whole labor movement.

Our parents and grandparents had VALUES. They believed in caring for their fellow man. They believed in sticking up for the little guy and sticking together in shared sacrifice, be it in WWII or the great "Battle of the Rouge" when they were attacked by union-busting goods of Henry Ford's security forces. Those values were defended by a great man, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who came from the upper-class but fought for those less fortunate.

Until today's young people are presented with a significant degree of economic pain, don't look for a change in the values set needed for the advancement of the labor movement. In the 1930's and 1940's we had the Catholic Church focusing on the rights of workers and economic injustice, at least in the USA, because of the largely Catholic urban immigrant population that was largley blue-collar and marginal on the economic divide.

That has made a huge difference, for now we have a discredited Catholic Church focusing on lawsuits from the priest abuse scandal and abortion and homosexuality.

The sexual revolution of the 1960's, whether or not you believe it is a good thing or not, confronted the Church to challenge traditional teachings. Whereas in the past the union movement was made up of a huge percentage of Catholics and other church goers, today the Church has entered in many areas a strategic alliance with reactinary Republican forces because of Democrats embrace of abortion and homosexuality.

This is why for the Democrats to rebound, and be able to help labor rebound, I believe the Democrats must end their embrace of Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America and abortion in general. As a gay man, this hurts me, but a smart political move would be to either distance themselves from the gay movement altogether, or, a more compassionate but also better political stance would be to emphasize non-discrimination in employment and benefits and housing, civil rights, for gay people, but out of a social justice issue, not a sexual freedom framework. For believe it or not, a significant majority of the American people, including most Democrats, instinctively still believe in traditional values and marriage.

If we stop confronting the Church, in both its Catholic and powerfullly ascendate Pentecostal and Evangelican connotations, on these sexual issues, we could gain powerful allies in the fight for economic and social justice.

Although the leadership of the Religious Right is as unChristian and hypocritical as you can get, millions of their deluded followers are good and decent people who will become our allies again once the Democratic Party returns to what it once was, the party of the poor and the working people, and the party of family values. In a sense it is going back to before the 60's liberals since power in 1972 and threw out Mayor Daley's delegates in preference to McGovern's.

But in going back in time, we will return to the time when the Democratic Party was the majority party-the party of the Catholics, the white Southerners, the working families, and the party to whom Catholic priests steered the immigrant faithful to. A time when if you were an evangelical white Baptist Southerner, you were a Democrat.

by MichiganDemocrat 2005-04-30 10:58AM | 0 recs

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Re: Troubles for Labor

The loss of union political power is tied to the increasingly Republican trend of non-Hispanic American Catholics. The middle age, unionized, Catholic Democrat of thirty years ago is now the retired, Knights of Columbus member, Catholic Republican. He may not like that American jobs are going overseas, but in his book, that beats "killing babies". (Sadly, Democrats have too often failed to point out that the first inevitably leads to the second, but I digress.)

As I mentioned in an earlier post in a different thread, the conservative narrative ties different, unrelated issues to conservative politics. The RWNM is as full of diatribes against liberal Catholics, mainline Protestants, and other religious liberals as well as those on the political left. (Hate Catholic-lite? Vote Republican!) Does it make sense? Of course not. Does it work? You bet!

Unfortunately, many of the Democratic political leaders are oblivious to this or are playing it the wrong way, by taking the liberal side of the religious dispute. (A 2000 year old religion is going to be conservative.) Remember, Republicans return to the culture war because it wins them votes. Their records show they don't care about the issues, but they want the votes.

This shows a desparate need to reframe the debate. You may not like abortion, but overturning Roe probably wouldn't help (for starters, how would you enforce it?) The Democrats should reframe the debate from debating the ethics of abortion (which they are increasingly losing in the public eye) to debating the best way to deal with the problem of women who are pregnant and don't feel like they can take care of a baby.

Likewise, people will tolerate a lot more than they will endorse. Many people believe homosexuality is wrong, because of what the Bible says and what the Catholic Church teaches. (I'm not saying you should or should not agree with them, but that people do.) However, many people also believe that throwing gay people in jail, like they used to do, is stupid. You can see this in the fact that "civil unions" keep gaining support, even as "gay marriage" remains unpopular. Many people will accept legal tolerance of homosexuality provided there is no percieved moral endorsement of it.

If our platform is to keep religious issues and politics separate, then we must do exactly that. A political party or movement should not be taking sides in religious disputes any more than we would not want religious dictates determining our laws. This is the American way, and has worked quite well for over 200 years.

by wayward 2005-04-30 11:55AM | 0 recs

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Unions aren't perfect....

Unions aren't perfect by any means, especially for younger workers. The seniority system most unions use to determine promotion and job security are a large part of what is leading to their demise. By the nature of how they are run, unions do the least for the youngest workers, who they need the most to join and keep the unions going.

However, without unions, no one is standing up for workers.

by wayward 2005-04-30 11:23AM | 0 recs

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Historically the Unions have played a role

in what was once essentially,
what the republican party is now, today.

The GOP went over the heads of the
union leadership and cut deals with
a kabala of CEOs and business tycoons
- they are not beholden to the organizing
forces, contribution power and
general pull of the unions.

The SEIU / AFSCME/ IUPAC Dean endorsements
last year did end up backing a losing
horse.

And the fight against the Wal-Martization of
America is over as well.

So the Unions are bleeding. No surprise.
I don't think its indicative of anything
happening in a party whose focus is
truly set upon reformation of government,
esp. when the monetary and demographic
pull needed to get the job done
can now come straight from the net.

by turnerbroadcasting 2005-05-01 10:00AM | 0 recs

by markcqq 2005-07-20 02:05AM | 0 recs