Socialist Action /March 2001
Why Labor Won't Organize a Million Workers
a Year
By CHARLES WALKER
For a long time, American labor's big brass seemed self-satisfied with
the size of the organized labor movement. Some time before AFL-CIO President
George Meany retired, he smugly snorted that "frankly, I used to worry
about the membership, about the size of the membership. But quite a few
years ago, I just stopped worrying about it, because to me it doesn't make
any difference. ... The organized fellow is the fellow that counts."
Meany apparently meant that the labor movement had organized enough workers
to get its job done.
Before Meany turned over his post to his personal assistant, Lane Kirkland,
and certainly up to 1995 when Kirkland was routed from office by John J.
Sweeney, most union tops probably not only didn't much care about the remaining
unorganized workers, they also didn't seem to care that unions were losing
more members each decade than they were organizing.
When Sweeney took over the AFL-CIO, he promised that organizing the unorganized
would be a major concern, and organized labor would set its sights on recruiting
a million new members a year. While labor bureaucrats wouldn't mind higher
dues collections, the likeliest reason for the new emphasis on organizing
was to shore up the unions' position within the Democratic Party.
Even before the "New Democrats" such as Bill Clinton and Al
Gore came to prominence, organized labor's effectiveness as a pressure group
within the Democratic Party was waning. For example, after the Democratic-dominated
Congress in 1977 defeated labor's bill to merely raise the minimum wage,
the AFL-CIO complained that "if any more evidence were needed that
the 2-1 Democratic majority in the U.S. House is pure illusion, it was provided
by the recent votes on minimum wage."
A year later UAW chieftain Doug Fraser rhetorically wondered, "Why,
with the Democrats in control of more than two-thirds in the Congress and
in the executive branch [President Carter], has so little progress been
made toward adoption of the Democratic platform the party worked so hard
to adopt."
After five years, Sweeney and Co. have yet to reach their goal of a million
new members a year. In 1999, the AFL-CIO managed a net gain of 240,000 members;
but last year there was a net loss of 200,000 members-even though there
was a slight increase in the number of unionized public employees to 7.1
million. But the union membership in private industry fell to 9.1 million.
The New York Times reported that "leaders of the labor federation
said much of the drop stemmed from the loss of 160,000 manufacturing jobs
in 2000." All in all, at just 13.5 percent of the labor force, organized
labor has reached its lowest point in 60 years, just before employment in
war industries provided a second wave of membership growth, following the
earlier wave during the rise of industrial unionism.
Sweeney rightly blames anti-labor laws for blocking unions' attempts
to win new members. Sweeney also rightly blames many unions for failing
to plow resources into organizing. Indeed, a review of union documents filed
with the Labor Department shows that many local unions spend next to nothing
on organizing.
But Sweeney fails to draw lessons from labor's Depression Era organizing,
when the laws on the whole were certainly no less lenient and the organizing
bucks no less harder to come by.
In those tough days, with mass unemployment from coast to coast, it took
guts for workers to join unions, let alone put down their tools to strike
their bosses. But workers did and in unprecedented numbers, because the
new industrial unions were fighting unions that workers could rely on to
stand up for them, and the tougher the unions were the larger and the stronger
they became.
Of course, this isn't the Great Depression, when workers' militancy was
so high that some workers turned to self-organization, if the local indifferent
labor fakers failed to provide them with leadership. But that doesn't mean
that today's workers aren't attracted to a fighting union that knows how
to win.
The best evidence for that is the number of unions that unorganized workers
sought out in the wake of the Teamsters 1997 strike led by Ron Carey against
United Parcel Service. The mainstream press couldn't ignore the rising interest
in unions, and daily carried reports that unions all over the country were
being asked by unorganized workers to sign them up.
Unfortunately, the AFL-CIO tops didn't seize that golden opportunity
to rally all workers in defense of their right to join unions and thereby
promote their working and living conditions.
The union officials made a grave error, but not because of an oversight.
They turned their backs on the workers inspired by the UPS strike, as they
turned their backs on the strike's key leader, Ron Carey, who was ousted
from the Teamsters union by federal agents following the unprecedented strike
against UPS.
They turned their backs because a fighting union movement is the last
thing the bosses want and that includes the bosses in the Democratic Party
that Sweeney and Richard Trumka, the federation's second-in-command, seek
out for so-called labor-management alliances and programs, just as Meany
and Kirkland did.
In short, that means that as long as Sweeney and Company refuse to declare
labor's political independence from the bosses' parties and the false friends
of labor, any hopes for a return to a growing, stronger labor under their
leadership will remain just that-vain hopes.
Socialist Action /March 2001 |