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The Debate in
the AFL-CIO
by David Jones /
March 2005 issue of Socialist Action
The present decline of membership in U.S. unions
to 8.2 percent of those working for private employers is the low point of
the past century, a fact that has been cited frequently in the current
debate about reforming the structure of organized labor initiated by a
section of the AFL-CIO leadership.
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 U.S. union density?
U.S. unions at their historic peak only succeeded
in getting one-third of the working class enrolled and under collective
bargaining agreements. What kind of glass ceiling did the drive for union
organization that began in the mid-1930s hit at the end of World War II?
Why did the decline proceed continuously downward throughout the succeeding
decades? 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 U.S. 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 enrolled no significant part of the
industrial mass production work force, other than the Brewery Workers and
the United Mine Workers of America until the late 1930s. (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 Flint, Michigan.
The employers’ ferocious counteroffensive, most
notably the defeat in the "Little Steel" strike, with the brutal
Memorial Day massacre at Republic Steel in Chicago, largely stalemated the
CIO’s advance by 1937. After the
great labor battles of the 1930s, union density grew no further than 21
percent (an increase of 7 percent from 1933) by the end of the decade. As the Roosevelt administration ramped
up for 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 ’30s through direct and semi-revolutionary struggle.
This quantitative success and the enforced social
peace of the war era, defined by tripartite government-labor-employer
boards rather than class struggle, more than anything shaped the psychology
of the union bureaucracy 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 serve to demobilize the union ranks to this
day.
After the war, the employers and their government
dug in their heels against further expansion of unionism, riding out the
greatest strike wave in U.S. history in 1945-46, passing the anti-labor
Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, and witch-hunting radicals out of the
unions. From 1945 to 1953 union
density increased only by a further 2 percent—largely due to increased war
production as a result of the Korean War.
The idea of a "social contract" of
relative class peace emerging from a new post-war prosperity (which is the
general assumption) is misleading. The employers gave only what they were
forced to as a direct result of the wave of struggle from
1934-1937—peaking, of course, with the wave of sit-downs in 1937 following
Flint.
By 1938 the employers were already moving to
break the labor upsurge, and even beginning to experiment with fascism (a
good reference for this is the experience
of Teamsters Local 544 with the Silver Shirts in
Minneapolis in the late 1930s, as described by Farrell Dobbs in his book,
"Teamster Power.")
Roosevelt had also begun in 1938 to deploy the
FBI in internal security for the first time since 1924. FBI intervention
into Local 544 began in Minneapolis in 1938, with the FBI-created Committee
of 100. What this should attest to is the provisional and limited nature of
any union victories under capitalism, and the fact that the employers are
never reconciled in any but a temporary sense to concessions they are
forced to make.
The further expansion of union membership from
1939-1945 was the product of a trade-off of support for the imperialist
war, and a willingness by the employers 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.
Stagnation and decline
The decline in absolute numbers of union members
began in 1975, falling by about one-half from 24,000,000 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 Austin, Minn., the
high point of the 1980s resistance occurred, as a highly mobilized and
democratic struggle emerged and inspired millions. But the striking Local
P-9 packinghouse workers were ultimately unable to overcome an alliance of
the courts, government, military force, and betrayal by the international
union officialdom.
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.
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 unions to confront
these factors decisively in action.
Major unions seek changes
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU),
in a tacit coalition with other AFL-CIO reformers in the top ranks,
recently projected a goal of far-reaching transformation of the AFL-CIO
through its New Unity Program, saying, "American workers are at a crossroads."
SEIU urged that workers and supporters of the
goals of organized labor "join the debate on how to build new strength
and unity for working people," and it set out a 10-point program as a
basis for discussion. SEIU
President Andrew Stern is generally considered to be, as the head of the
largest union in the United States, its most powerfully equipped pusher for
changes in the AFL-CIO that might reverse labor’s decline in membership.
While Unitetowin’s website did not explicitly
take up any proposal for altering the composition of the AFL-CIO
leadership, it 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 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, was crucial in the
late 1990s to changing the AFL-CIO’s position on immigrant and even
undocumented workers from one of exclusion to 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 Executive Council, it is
nonetheless a genuine and significant change from an 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 inability to obtain contracts delivering better wages and
benefits.
The 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, who finance the federation through per
capita dues payments, have preferred Gompers’ 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 than the dues-paying
members. Historically this has been
expressed above all in its 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 to 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
New Unity Program’s 10 points 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."
• "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," citing the fact 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’ solutions. While the federation has recently abandoned the
third leg of Gompers’ 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 U.S. labor movement where the rank and file
can speak up and to each other.
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—i.e., establishing protectionism for the IAM’s employers—as
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, and not an 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 ’60s? Why not, for example, call for a labor-initiated march on
Washington in defense of Social Security?
Even the old Kirkland leadership managed to pull off an immense
demonstration in Washington in 1981 after the PATCO defeat.
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 bookkeepers 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
Washington, DC, where they attempt to mimic governmental bureaucracies that
are their conscious or unconscious models—are really the gravamen of the
present crisis.
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,
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 simpleminded syllogism that
"more members equals more money equals more members."
As ought to be evident, the power and creativity
that has driven the labor movement throughout the past century has come
from below, in mass mobilization and direct action. Inescapably, it has had
to be initiated and led by radicals and youth inspired by a vision of a new
society. This is the only vital source from which it can emerge again, 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 a
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.
This 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 in
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 socialist, union leader, and
participant in 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
periodically has to come to grips with the march of time and give way, not
always willing, 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 in their fifties and sixties themselves. 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."
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