Work in Progress: The State of the Unions Two Years after the AFL- CIO Split
Mcneill, Jim
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney recently took a strange trip. It was a short one, just a half-mile or so from the federation's sandstone fortress near the White House to a sleek, smoked-glass...
...Not only win elections...
...He'd spent the previous seven years as UFCW's second-in-command and served for more than three decades as an official of the union, a conglomeration of supermarket employees, meatpackers, and workers from various other industries...
...Nevertheless, Hansen was a reluctant warrior in the fight that cleaved the AFL-CIO...
...Change Agent Transitions of power in most unions follow the form of a papal succession...
...Back then, many feared a bitter war would break out between the two federations and that an already dwindling labor movement would disappear completely...
...Each union had to present its growth plan, listing specific staff, budgets, and strategies for its campaigns...
...It's an odd book: useful in some spots, giving a strong defense of SEIU's decision to leave the AFL-CIO...
...With it and the Solidarity Charters in place, labor's turnout effort "worked very well," according to Karen Ackerman, the AFL-CIO's political director...
...Mike Cavanaugh, director of the AFL-CIO office that oversees state feds and CLCs, remembers how at one of the last high-level federation meetings before the split "people were very bitterly divided on everything, except this one notion that we need a unified state and local labor movement...
...And in California, which has more union members than any other state, the two federations set aside their differences and worked together to defeat a set of antilabor initiatives on the November 2005 ballot...
...After walking the spirited picket lines early in the strike, Hansen thought the supermarkets would have to capitulate...
...And I think because of the phenomenal success he's had . . . people are not prepared to tell him when the emperor has no clothes...
...The local leaders, too, had been shaken by the Southern California strike, and they came prepared, he says, "to fix every ill in the world...
...And the old federation has done more than survive...
...But if that core industry rule is so sacrosanct, asks CWA organizing director Ed Sabol, then why does SEIU—founded as a janitors union—get to organize public employees...
...It was a devastating loss...
...I guess the advantage we had is that reporters weren't calling us in 1997 and saying, 'Well, what have you done?'" "There are a lot of key ingredients it takes to turn a union around, or to turn the labor movement around," he says...
...A small council convenes to choose the new leader, only the most orthodox candidates are considered, and at the end of the day a white male eminence ascends to the throne...
...CTW talks relentlessly about organizing new members, but it's the AFL-CIO that's left helping unions like the UAW and the Steelworkers take care of their retirees...
...In particular, he looks at statewide organizing agreements that SEIU has signed recently with nursing homes...
...Both agreed that far more aggressive organizing was needed...
...Through her, Hansen got to know Stern when he was SEIU's organizing director, and over the years they had many conversations about the work he was doing to reform and expand the service employees...
...She's the lefty in the family," he laughs...
...Andy needs to hire some court jesters," Brown says...
...The Undiscovered Country Despite all the criticism of SEIU, one brute fact remains: no organization in labor is putting anywhere near the resources into organizing that it is...
...That's disingenuous, really...
...And political action would be tied much more tightly to specific organizing and contract campaigns...
...The CTW unions believe that the AFL-CIO is more a loose confederation than a disciplined federation and that it lacks the authority needed to promote and coordinate organizing among affiliates...
...Regional grocery chains had given way to national ones, so they could weather a strike conducted in just one region, even one as big as Southern California...
...Change may be Andy Stern's mantra, but too often he assumes change is something labor must adapt to rather than shape...
...If the global economy's new rules make companies ever leaner and meaner, then maybe labor should fight to change the rules, not coddle the companies...
...In 2006, union membership in the United States fell to just 12 percent of the workforce, and private sector membership dropped to 7.4 percent...
...Some of the more controversial ideas in A Country That Works have ignited a spirited debate in SEIU itself...
...Yet, there in SEIU's glass-walled atrium, with beatific portraits of workers all around, the breakaway union's staff applauded warmly when Sweeney was introduced...
...For the CTW unions to say we're going to take our [money] and go do something else—we'll be partners with, not part of the AFL-CIO—well, excuse me, but I think that's irresponsible...
...And in every organizing campaign, there is one key rule: Don't get too far out in front of the workers...
...In the early eighties, Hansen had met and eventually married Bonnie Ladin, a leader with SEIU District 925, a local that did pioneering work organizing white-collar women...
...The upstart federation made some bold promises when it bolted the AFLCIO...
...When unions start veering into other sectors, they lose focus and trample on other unions' turf...
...Basically, the center serves as CTW's brain trust for growth...
...Sabol may be critical of CTW, but he doesn't dismiss all its recommendations...
...But Hansen, who recently spent eighteen months on a congressional commission studying the health care crisis, believes "Andy is trying to do the right thing to drive universal health care...
...Meanwhile, the old federation and its depleted staff continue doing much of labor's plodding but necessary work...
...And if society is drifting toward a war of all against all, then maybe labor should work that much harder to inspire America with its collective vision...
...In December, the presidents and organizing directors of the CTW unions met for two days to present their 2007 growth plans, a process mandated in the federation's by-laws...
...Being impatient with where the labor movement is," that's a good thing, says Brown...
...In the agreements, which SEIU has used to organize tens of thousands of workers, the union pledges to use its political muscle to win more public funding for the nursing homes...
...The real pressure is on CTW to justify the breakup...
...We're making dramatic changes," Sabol says...
...Woodruff, who began as SEIU's organizing director in 1996 and added nearly a million new members over the next decade, has assembled a team of some of the most talented organizers and researchers in labor...
...Even in 2005, when the rhetoric was most heated, the two sides continued working together on projects to strengthen the AFLCIO's state federations and central labor councils (CLCs), which do community outreach and electoral work...
...The world isn't that neat and clean...
...To meet its CTW growth targets, the UFCW has hired more than seventy new organizers since Hansen became president, and he intends to hire many more...
...But Woodruff is confident that the process is well underway at the CTW's affiliates...
...76 DISSENT / Spring 2007...
...But Andy wakes up in the morning and he has a new idea and a new direction...
...As the UFCW was going through its soulsearching process, SEIU's Andy Stern was driving the reform debate in the AFL-CIO...
...For five months the strike dragged on, and even though the stores lost more than $1.5 billion in sales, they never caved...
...Tom doesn't pull any punches," Hansen says...
...It's that massive commitment to organizing that gives SEIU the right to lead CTW's audacious challenge to the AFL-CIO...
...Bargaining, especially with national employers, would be more carefully coordinated...
...Wake-Up Wal-Mart's Blank issued a statement wondering "how anyone, in good conscience, would give Wal-Mart a stage to make empty statements that will not give health care to one more uninsured WalMart worker...
...Jim McNIEILL, a writer in Washington, D.C., worked for the Service Employees International Union from 1999 to 2001 and has since consulted for it and other unions...
...In a phone interview from his Connecticut home, Brown says, "workers' rights language hardly exists" in one statewide agreement...
...It has pressured locals to merge, and gigantic locals have been created, including a health care behemoth that spans the Eastern seaboard...
...Oddly, a recent setback in the UFCW's Wal-Mart campaign was inflicted by a CTW ally—was inflicted, in fact, by SEIU president Andy Stern, who's been busily lining up corporate allies in a quest to reform American health care...
...In theory, the two groups weren't all that far apart during the debate that preceded the split at the July 2005 AFL-CIO convention...
...So far, more than 75 percent of CTW locals have rejoined the local labor bodies...
...Selective Solidarity Before the 2006 elections, the two federations also created a joint political committee to coordinate their electoral work...
...By contrast, roughly 700,000 were public employees and long-term health care workers—and the vast majority of those long-term care workers were publicly employed home-care aides...
...Labor hasn't seen anything like it since John L. Lewis emptied the Mineworkers' treasury into the CIO's coffers and launched its historic work...
...Because the ports campaign is still lining up supporters, Woodruff is reluctant to discuss details—"the last way to organize workers is by press conference," he says—but the center could be on the verge of notching its first major victory...
...And the UFCW has gotten much more serious in its corporate campaign against Wal-Mart, hiring former Howard Dean staffer Paul Blank to create its Wake-Up Wal-Mart pressure group...
...Organizing, which had been weak and haphazard—as likely to target hospital workers as grocery clerks—would be refocused on the union's core supermarket and meatpacking industries...
...Ironically, one of the unions with the most luck organizing in the private sector is the Communications Workers of America (CWA), an AFL-CIO affiliate whose leaders can get positively apoplectic talking about the CTW growth model...
...Mostly, that's how things have gone in labor since the split...
...And how can SEIU target relatively easy-to-organize government workers and then tell CWA to tangle with viciously anti-union telecom companies...
...This bright-white cube farm is CTW's Strategic Organizing Center, "the guts of Change to Win," according to Tom Woodruff, the center's director...
...Although Change to Win's critics have chided it as "Meet to Win" for such affairs, Hansen says the December gathering was far more intensive than anything he'd participated in at the AFL-CIO...
...Soon after the split, the AFL-CIO established a Solidarity Charter program that allowed CTW locals to remain in state feds and CLCs...
...in return, the nursing homes allow SEIU to organize their workers...
...No Holds Barred As for CTW, Hansen says that, "it's not like anything else I've ever been involved in...
...Brown isn't opposed in principle to such partnerships, but he writes that "the most successful cooperative efforts are the payoff for years of struggle, strikes and other conflicts with employers...
...Andy should be impatient...
...Even though there are differences in federations, we're still one labor movement," he says...
...Of the more than 900,000 workers SEIU organized over the last decade, only 87,000 came from its famed Justice for Janitors campaign...
...And he believes, probably more strongly than most in the AFLCIO, that some structural change is needed within unions...
...In the fall of 2003 sixty thousand UFCW members struck or were locked out at Southern California's major supermarkets, which were 72 DISSENT / Spring 2007 demanding deep cuts in pay and health benefits...
...Just before Hansen took office, though, his faith in the union's old ways had been shaken...
...By contrast, SEIU, the driving force behind CTW, is still in its most creative and productive phase...
...You can't accuse CTW of wasting its money on bricks and mortar...
...Those stores were dead," he remembers thinking...
...They're the biggest player in the medical [equipment] industry...
...But the union hadn't considered how the industry had evolved...
...The added staff and resources have allowed the UFCW to intensify its organizing efforts at Smithfield Packing Company's Tar Heel, N.C., plant, the bigDISSENT / Spring 2007 73 gest hog-processing facility in the world, with more than six thousand workers...
...Their mission is to design campaigns that can organize the fifty million workers in the industries of CTW's seven unions...
...But while CTW hopes to succeed on the scale of eBay, some say it's performing more like the infamous ePets...
...The headquarters is dominated by a bustling loft space with the look and feel of a Silicon Alley start-up...
...But the two biggest combatants, SEIU and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the AFL-CIO's largest affiliate, soon signed a peace pact, pledging not to steal away one another's members...
...The presentation wasn't a wish list," Hansen says...
...But he's troubled by the kind of change that CTW unions—especially SEIU—are pursuing...
...By 1968, the UAW was a union past its prime...
...To Stern's credit, he encouraged Brown to circulate it and the critique has been flying around SEIU's intranet ever since...
...Hansen doesn't claim the union is ready to organize the world's largest retailer anytime soon, but Wake-Up Wal-Mart—along with Wal-Mart Watch, an SEIU-backed group—has done impressive work softening up the image of the Bentonville giant...
...After the split, a few skirmishes broke out...
...Neither side has ever shown much interest in launching the kind of trench warfare that broke out in the thirties between the old AFL and CIO...
...But their biggest source of revenue comes from finance...
...They've got NBC...
...In a matter of months, labor's cold war had moved from an era of brinksmanship to détente...
...In the future, don't be surprised if Hansen emerges as a figure who finds a way to knit the AFL-CIO and CTW back together...
...If he thinks that you're trying to skate around something, he calls you on it...
...bizarre in others, gushing over the harebrained futurism of Alvin and Heidi Toffler...
...When he talked with his CTW allies before the split, "I told them . . . I was going to do everything I could to stay in the AFL-CIO...
...He seemed an unlikely agent of change...
...With a unified labor movement...
...To Sabol, the core industries concept is a misleadingly simple solution to a far more complex problem...
...It's an effort to organize the estimated 60,000 truckers at the nation's ports, and it applies innovative strategies that SEIU and UNITE HERE, the union of textile and hotel employees, have used in their organizing campaigns...
...In early February, after giving just one day's notice to the UFCW, Stern appeared at a press conference with Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott where they agreed on a set of health care reform principles...
...Ideally, more than one...
...The difference is . . . it's not like I came up with a brilliant plan and therefore this is what we're going to do tomorrow...
...There are hardly any offices at all...
...The success of that program came in '98 and '99 and beyond," Woodruff says...
...Walk through CTW's simple glass doors and you won't find any plush executive offices...
...Some AFL-CIO staffers say CTW is practicing a kind of selective solidarity...
...These dismal numbers make one wonder whether either side has a solution to labor's crisis...
...DISSENT / Spring 2007 75 Stern recently published a book, A Country That Works, outlining his ideas for "getting America back on track...
...Both sides acknowledged that the movement, in decline for decades, faced a grave crisis...
...He believed Sweeney wanted to implement serious reforms, but in the end Hansen didn't "think the structure would let John get it done...
...However, Meyerson's analogy isn't quite accurate...
...When he took office in mid-2004, Hansen immediately established the Committee on the Future, a group of UFCW's local and international leaders who conducted a top-to-bottom review of the union...
...Mere survival has to be seen as an achievement for the AFL-CIO, which had to cut a quarter of its 420-person staff in 2005...
...If there's some way to get back to one federation, I will try to do that...
...Though the group's ultimate goals were a bit more modest, its February 2005 final report called for stringent reforms...
...But this relative peace hasn't stopped labor's slide...
...If Stern is CTW's lead organizer (and he is, despite the fact that SEIU secretarytreasurer Anna Burger is its chair), then Stern's dalliance with Wal-Mart's Lee Scott could be read as one sign that he's rushing too far too fast...
...At that point, the members lose complete control of the union," Sabol charges...
...SEIU argues that unions must centralize their operations to match up with employers that have been doing so for years...
...Hansen's levelheaded response to Stern's appearance shows just how unorthodox a labor leader he is...
...In the past, the UFCW had been one of the AFLCIO's more stodgy affiliates—it had sided against Sweeney in 1995 when he'd been the insurgent challenging the federation's old guard—so many assumed Hansen's union would again resist change...
...The members are going to drive it...
...As a labor movement, I don't think we can just walk away from them," the AFL-CIO's Cavanaugh says...
...As they see it, labor's key problem isn't the internal structure of the movement, but the external impediment of labor laws that make it incredibly difficult to organize in the private sector...
...We feel that's the way you win...
...In Sabol's experience, having workers in CWA from a mix of sectors has been beneficial to organizing...
...Even SEIU, CTW's growth machine, has had scant success in the private sector...
...One of CTW's key claims is that mass organizing can only occur if unions focus on their core industry or sector...
...Dominated by insiders, it's the kind of process that can leave an institution oblivious to change in the outside world...
...To test whether Woodruff's confidence is warranted, we'll scrutinize one of CTW's biggest unions, the one that began walking the road to reform most recently, and see how far it's progressed...
...It's a tedious internal process...
...It's made important progress in the fight to improve the country's terrible labor laws, and several AFL-CIO unions are doing some solid organizing...
...And after each presentation, Woodruff of the Strategic Organizing Center led a no-holds-barred discussion of its strengths and weaknesses...
...Has CTW got a realistic plan to revive America's unions or is it squandering precious resources on a miracle cure...
...In a movement dismissed as old and tired, CTW has produced a vision as ambitious as any dot-com prospectus...
...As of early 2007, none of the center's campaigns had achieved any organizing breakthroughs...
...Finally, the union, with its strike fund depleted, agreed to a two-tier contract that preserved decent pay and benefits for current employees but left new hires in the dust...
...Though still potent politically and at the bargaining table, the autoworkers had done their most aggressive organizing thirty years earlier...
...It was a short one, just a half-mile or so from the federation's sandstone fortress near the White House to a sleek, smoked-glass office building that America's fastest growing union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), was dedicating as its new headquarters...
...There are other reasons to worry that he's putting too much distance between himself and his union comrades...
...Though Stern insisted he wasn't giving a blanket pardon to Wal-Mart, the UFCW was flummoxed...
...Woodruff compares CTW's progress now to the first year or two after Andy Stern took over as SEIU president in 1996 and intensified its focus on organizing...
...THE BOOK' S primary message is that America's unions must move beyond old adversarial relationships with employers and establish partnerships that help both succeed in an increasingly competitive global economy...
...The CTW unions won't be able to escape 74 DISSENT / Spring 2007 labor's crisis by leaving the AFL-CIO, say the old federation's defenders...
...It's essentially a duescollection deal...
...But ultimately, CTW is an organizing project like any other...
...Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, an astute observer of labor, described CTW in a January 30 column as a failure that "can't really be said to have done anything...
...And yet, she says, "from our point of view unity is always better...
...At an early meeting of the committee in Chicago, Hansen was surprised by the hunger for reform...
...Formal ties may have been broken, but relations between the two sides have been surprisingly civil...
...As its two-year anniversary approaches, it's not unreasonable to ask whether progress is being made...
...Though he didn't speak at the ceremony, Sweeney stayed for the reception and chatted with old friends in the crowd...
...That's the way you win a national health care plan, that's the way you win fair trade agreements, that's the way you win . . . secure pensions...
...Hansen takes a slightly longer view of Stern's stage dive with Scott...
...The young federation's DISSENT / Spring 2007 71 headquarters occupy half a floor of a nondescript low rise on Washington's L Street...
...During the union's ongoing AT&T Wireless campaign—which has organized seventeen thousand workers—leaders from CWA's local of Mississippi state workers were instrumental in helping employees at a call center in Jackson join the union...
...He agrees that labor needs to spend more money on growth—CWA just boosted its budget for organizing and contract campaigns by twentyfive million dollars a year...
...Increasingly, Brown fears, SEIU seeks the payoff without the struggle...
...With its tiny office, the upstart federation doesn't pretend to serve the needs of the overall labor movement...
...And Woodruff's team has crafted a campaign that today's Teamsters are eagerly putting into practice...
...so How SHOULD we gauge the performance of the two federations since the split...
...But in the end, the CTW unions—and especially SEIU, which has poured more than a billion dollars into organizing since 1996—doubted that the AFL-CIO loyalists were serious about spending the money and making the changes necessary to recruit millions of new members...
...For Hansen, the strike "really convinced me that something had to change...
...It shows signs of life that are worth exploring...
...With that logic, "they're going to have the members and we're going to have the war," Sabol says...
...But, he argues, "that's a very foggy path right now, and it can't be what the AFL-CIO is now...
...The UAW of the sixties didn't have new organizing strategies to share with the Teamsters, which probably wouldn't have known what to do with them anyway...
...Again, Brown isn't necessarily opposed to such agreements, but he believes that some are betraying workers' interests...
...He admits thinking that Stern's move was "not particularly good, and that's an understatement...
...But Hansen had reason to be more receptive to Stern's new ideas...
...Meyerson compared CTW to the Alliance for Labor Action, a quixotic mini-federation that the UAW formed with the Teamsters in 1968 and dissolved a few years later having nothing to show for it...
...Jerome P. Brown, the recently retired president of SEIU's health care local in New England, wrote a passionate critique of the book late last year...
...When Joe Hansen rose to the presidency of the United Food and Commercial Workers in 2004, he arrived as the consummate insider...
...Our union is very, very democratic...
...He points to General Electric, one of CWA's major employers: "When you say the name, you think manufacturing...
...Brown concedes that rapid growth may come through such deals, but he says, "The real question at the end of the day there is, have you organized a union...
...The union's long-term budget— not a piece of PR fluff, but an internal planning document—shows that SEIU intends to spend an average of $250 million a year on organizing between 2009 and 2012...
...What made Sweeney's appearance at the January dedication so strange was that SEIU—the union he led in the eighties and nineties—had stormed out of the AFL-CIO less than two years earlier and established the rival Change to Win (CTW) federation with six other unions...
Vol. 54 • April 2007 • No. 2
