Workplace Blog

AFL-CIO hopes to mend fences with dissenters

Mon Aug 22, 2005 5:29 PM ET

By Alonso Soto

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The United States’ largest union federation is struggling to cope with last month’s revolt by 4.6 million members and is willing to mend fences with the dissenters, the head of the AFL-CIO said on Monday.

“We have put aside our anger and disappointment and we are doing everything in our power to get back together,” said John Sweeney, president of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations in a telephone interview with Reuters.

“This not the time to be divided,” he said.

The Service Employees International Union and International Brotherhood of Teamsters withdrew from the AFL-CIO at its convention last month, siphoning away millions of members and their dues from the 13-million-member federation. Shortly after the convention, they were joined by the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

The dissenters complained about declining union membership, too much money spent on political campaigning, and a lack of resources devoted to organizing workers.
The departure of its three largest member unions took a heavy financial toll on the AFL-CIO, which has to cope with the loss of more than $20 million in annual membership dues, Sweeney said. The federation’s budget is some $125 million.

“We have had a reduction in staff and we have had to tighten our belts in some of the different programs,” Sweeney said, adding union leaders will meet in two weeks’ time to discuss how to deal with the financial loss.

UFCW CONCILIATORY

The head of the 1.4-million-member United Food and Commercial Workers union was conciliatory, saying reunification with the AFL-CIO was a possibility.

“I hope that some day we can come back,” union president Joe Hansen said at a news conference. “I think the only way that this can happen is for the two sides to continue to talk — and I think that will happen. But I don’t think it will be immediate.”

Sweeney was in Chicago to attend a gathering of the Union Network International, international union leaders who mostly represent service industry workers.

The stated goal of the Union Network International’s (UNI) annual convention is to pursue a global strategy against multinational companies like Wal-Mart . UNI has 900 affiliated unions representing 15.5 million members.

Among those attending are SEIU president Andy Stern, who led the split from the AFL-CIO, and Hansen, who is president of the five-year-old UNI.

Sweeney said he will leave the convention after an address on Monday.

“We will be working together at the UNI conference,” Sweeney said, referring to himself and the dissenting unions. “Every single union, whether in the AFL-CIO or outside, should be heavily focused on organizing.”

A month ago, AFL-CIO delegates voted to double spending on organizing new members to $22.5 million and push affiliate unions to allocate 30 percent of their annual budgets to such efforts.

© Reuters 2005.

Zogby has released a new poll:

Disorganized Labor

Released: August 10, 2005

Disorganized Labor
As Seen in The Wall Street Journal

For the first time since 1938, the labor movement actually seems in danger
of becoming politically irrelevant. Or at least that is the spin that
commentators have offered. I’m not so certain.

The AFL-CIO is effectively committed to the Democratic Party. So are the
Teamsters and the SEIU and the other members of the nascent Change to Win
Coalition. Teamsters President James P. Hoffa even addressed the 2004
Democratic National Convention. These groups will continue to support the
Democrats, to donate to the Democrats, and to mobilize resources on Election
Day for the Democrats. Unionized voters will continue to be at least twice
as likely to join the Democrats as the Republicans. And the Democrats will,
in turn, continue to largely listen to organized labor.

But Labor’s problem is not politics. Labor’s problem is Labor. Labor faces a
crisis in confidence among non-union workers. A poll I recently conducted on
behalf of the Public Service Research Foundation found that a 56% majority
of workers who are not organized wouldn’t vote to organize — while just 35%
would consider doing so. And for America’s organized labor movement, that’s
a significant problem.

The origins of Labor’s problems may be in the fact that people just don’t
identify themselves with the goals of their union. We can still picture an
era when “Union Yes” bumper stickers were everywhere, and only “scabs”
crossed picket lines. Today, that sentiment has cooled.
Two summers ago, I asked voters whether the AFL-CIO spoke for them when they
went to the polls. The answers produced a real surprise: Among unionized
likely voters, just 27% said the AFL-CIO spoke for them all or most of the
time. This was lower than the 32% of unionized voters who said the NRA spoke
for them! In fact, nearly as many unionized workers (23%) said the
Republicans spoke for them as said the AFL-CIO, while a higher percentage —
35% — believed that the Democrats spoke for them.

That is bad news for organized labor. However, the fact that I posed a
similar question in 1999 and found that 46% of unionized voters believed the
AFL-CIO and other unions spoke for them is even more telling. When that lack
of union identity is coupled with a labor force where 39% of workers believe
that while unions once were necessary, their time has passed, it becomes
obvious that Labor has lost the hearts and minds of the work force. And when
union members stop believing that organized labor speaks for them, the
results are declining membership and influence, and an almost inevitable
schism among member unions.

The decision by the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union
to bolt the AFL-CIO — and for the other members of the Change to Win
Coalition to boycott last week’s AFL-CIO convention — reads like an epitaph
after a decade of John Sweeney’s leadership of organized labor. Of course,
this is not the first time that organized labor has split. Lane Kirkland
spent the ’80s bringing the United Automobile Workers, Teamsters, and United
Mine Workers back into the fold after infighting. And the decision by the
Congress of Industrial Organizations to break away from the American
Federation of Labor in 1938 was a pivotal moment in the evolution of the
American Labor movement.
But Labor now stands on different ground. With less than 8% of private
sector workers unionized, individual identities are much less shaped by
union membership. And with a recent Zogby International poll of public
sector union members suggesting that 24% consider themselves conservative
ideologically, and with 49% owning either stocks or a 401(k) plan, the needs
of unionized workers have shifted.

Although Mr. Sweeney’s decade as president of the AFL-CIO has not brought
growth or consensus to organized labor, recent events could ultimately
strengthen it. The Change to Win Coalition’s stated goals offer some new
ideas, re-addressing bad employers and the need to redirect resources to
grow organized labor. Our poll of workers found that while 70% say their
company cares about them as individuals, 26% do not believe that. And with
one in every four workers believing his employer doesn’t care about him, the
ground is fertile for Labor’s main goal — reaching out to workers who have
not chosen to organize. Labor must stay politically relevant; but unions
must go back to what they were once very good at: They must convince people
that organized labor has workers’ interests at heart.
(8/10/2005)

On the future of trade unionism by Dick Howard

It should have been the time for a celebration of the golden anniversary of a calculated mariage de raison that had endured in spite of sometimes serious disagreements. Instead, the couple created in 1955 by the fusion of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (the AFL-CIO) has experienced a separation that will certainly lead to a bitter divorce. Two of the largest of the federated unions refused to participate in the quadrennial convention that took place from July 25 to July 28 in Chicago; and the departure of others will surely follow in the immediate future. Superficially, since the leader of the dissidents, Andrew Stern (54 years old) had been the prot

On the AFL-CIO Split by Stanley Aronowitz

In some respects it was fitting that four important affiliates declared their withdrawal from the AFL-CIO in the days running up to the 50th anniversary convention in July 2005. A merger which was conceived in a unity that signified complacency was dissolved. The problem now is what can workers expect from the fissure? Will the defectors form a new federation? How can they fulfill their promise to launch a massive organizing drive in the current reactionary political environment? And can an alliance which embraces quite disparate forces help revive the somnambulism that has afflicted labor’s ranks for more than two decades? Are those who split the kind of leaders that are capable of calling on the rank and file to mount resistance to the ongoing corporate offensive against wages and working conditions? And why should we expect this alliance to make a radical departure from the unimaginative program, and political subservience to the Democratic Party that has marked the decade long record of the Sweeney administration? To gain perspective on these questions we might find it useful to revisit the moment of the AFL-CIO merger. Such a look might clarify why Organized Labor has suffered such devastating defeats since the late 1970s and why, despite the growth of the Service Employees (SEIU), whose president is the main antagonist in the conflict, the rest of the unions, including those that defected with him, are suffering the same stagnation and decline as most others.

In his essay The AFL-CIO and the Iraq War, published by Rebelion.org he argues the Iraq War resolution approved at the AFL-CIO’s latest convention, apart from an ambiguous phrase thrown in to pacify a few dissidents, remained true to its history of supporting imperial wars and tyranny while continuing to lose members and loyalties in the US for its efforts.

[James Petras has worked with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement for the last eleven years in addition to his work with the unemployed workers’ movement in Argentina. He is coauthor, with Henry Veltmeyer, of Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century (Zed Books, 2001), which won the 2002 Kenny Prize in Marxist & Labour/Left Studies. He is also author of a collection of short stories, Andando por el mundo (Altamira Publishing Group, 2001).]The AFL-CIO and the Iraq war
James Petras
Rebeli