A Strategy for Labor
TYLER, GUS
MEMO TO JOHN SWEENEY A Strategy for LaborBYGUSTYER John J. Sweeney, the new President of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), is the first head of...
...But while history does often have a way of working its will even when insensitive individuals and senseless institutions block its path, it can always use some help from humans...
...But it does mean that John Sweeney and his new team have taken over the helm of the AFL-CIO at a moment when labor could revive America's collapsed liberal coalition...
...The full bitter fruits of his "contract" have not yet ripened, but the man and his mania for destroying the New Deal legacy have angered millions: senior citizens, educators, environmentalists, minorities, women, government employees, doctors, and mirabile dictu, normally conservative members of organizations like the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars...
...The antigovernment stance started to weaken after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...But getting this across will require concentrated political action...
...A proper agenda has to demand new standards for education, health care, the environment, child care, discrimination, housing, transportation, campaign finance, women's rights, and international peace and freedom...
...American labor, however, has never put together a continuing, effective community-based political network...
...Again during the same period, the ranks of service employees swelled from 63 million to 91 million, a leap of almost 44 per cent...
...Does that mean the potential now exists to create a Labor Party as a third force...
...His opponent at the Federation's October 23-26 convention, Thomas R. Donahue—who had assumed the top post on an interim basis after Lane Kirk-land resigned in August—also came from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU...
...A look at the relevant numbers best tells the story of what has been happening...
...The reason is not technological advancements...
...And it reveals much about the potential and problems of the American economy...
...But the process has had the significant side effect of forcing union leaders to expand their horizons...
...By following these guidelines, American labor would be advocating Smith's doctrine of free trade on a level playing field...
...Ours is the most top-heavy modern economy in the world, with the largest gap between the wealthy and the poor...
...It is a pyramid standing on its head, in danger of coming crashing down at the slightest tremor...
...This could take a go-it-alone nationalist tack, or could seek to enlist the Group of Seven and other nations in a scheme to lift international standards or could blend both approaches...
...That brings us to the issue of why manufacturing jobs have dropped off so dramatically...
...By seizing the opportunity, the AFL-CIO would advance its political role as representative of "the people," not just the dues-paying members of this or that union...
...There are many such mini-movements...
...When the AFL and the CIO merged in 1955, the mostly blue collar industrial unions were dominant...
...An airport isn't going anywhere...
...Willy nilly, he will have to think more conceptually, in terms of what is good for workers in general...
...it has weakened their ability to bargain when contracts come up for renewal...
...They were brought together by a shared disaster, embodied by Herbert Hoover...
...Services?teaching, firefighting, policing, selling panties, running subways, cleaning buildings—do not trade well...
...Mean-while, unions like the SEIU, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the American Federation of Government Employees, and the American Federation of Teachers began gaining ground at a rapidly increasing pace...
...When "some particular sort of industry is necessary for the defense of the country," he declared, it should be exempt from free trade arrangements...
...They are today about where the liberal non-movement was in 1929 before the Great Depression...
...In other words, there will be no mass market to keep our "market economy" afloat...
...The AFL did not get on the bandwagon until 1948, when its weakness was exposed by the passage of the Taft-Hartley Law over President Harry S. Truman's veto...
...Whatever the choice, Adam Smith, champion of laissez faire, has provided two basic guidelines in The Wealth of Nations...
...A little more than two decades later, as manufacturing declined in the United States, they started losing members, losing organizing campaigns, losing influence at the bargaining table, and losing political clout...
...Two forces currently in motion suggest a radical improvement of that situation could be achieved...
...That disaster seems to be in the making again, embodied this time by House Speaker Newt Gingrich...
...Sweeney and his colleagues have to complete the slow evolution of American unions from apolitical craft-minded "guilds" into a politically-minded move-mentof workingpeople...
...If their voices were joined in one coordinated chorus, their words would be heard loud and clear...
...when some tax is imposed at home...
...The question confronting the new AFL-CIO leadership, therefore, is: Should the Federation attempt to reverse the deindustrialization of America, or should it write off manufactures and confine itself to those components of the economy that must stay in place...
...Sweeney, who started his career in a manufacturing union—actually the Research Department of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union?knows all this...
...In the early years of the 20th century, the AFL was no less laissez-faire oriented than the country as a whole...
...Accordingly, he favored the navigation acts that protected the British merchant marine against competition...
...fell from 21 million to 18 million, or over 14 per cent...
...The real push for political action, though, first began in the early 1940s, and it came from the CIO...
...Our society remains economically, culturally, ethnically, racially, and geographically pluralist...
...All previous presidents of the AFL, and then the AFL-CIO, were from manufacturing, construction, mining, or maritime unions...
...By the 1990s, the men and women once considered unorganizable white collar wimps had become the equivalent of their industrial counterparts in the New Deal era: labor's "marching millions...
...In a sense, history will be repeating itself, as the old nag tends to do...
...The other is the GOP takeover of Congress in the 1994 midterm election...
...The hope is that at the polls on Election Day members will do the right thing...
...The social dynamics of the country today, temporarily hidden by the smog over Washington, are likely to be the real source of the campaign for a born-again democracy...
...As elections approach, individual unions often throw together local get-out-the-vote drives, but these are primarily workplace exhortations...
...A multinational corporation can always threaten to move its workplace overseas if a union presses too hard...
...Parochial preoccupation with a single craft is dissolving into a wider concern about the proper role of a very numerous class...
...With other progressive individuals and institutions, it could rally numerous "minorities" and fashion a viable majority within the country's two-parry system...
...Certainly there is no lack of the latter...
...This broadening perspective of labor's leaders, especially as it filters down to the rank and file, should make it much easier to bring workers together in their communities to serve, in effect, as permanent precinct-based political cadres...
...The availability of this weapon has not only made it difficult, sometimes impossible, for unions to organize in the manufacturing sector...
...He undoubtedly also knows the country is moving faster than is generally realized toward the very same condition it experienced in 1929...
...During the same period, the total number of jobs in the country rose from 89 million to 115 million, or about 30 per cent...
...Labor is in an especially strong position to spearhead a multifaceted liberal coalition because in the final analysis, the aspirations of these groups cannot be realized unless the economy is revivified...
...To be sure, a new progressive movement will not spring up simply because Sweeney may want it to...
...The many mergers have of course been primarily motivated by the need for more muscle in coping with the proliferation of corporate conglomerates...
...The Mayor of Boston cannot deal with his municipal unions if he plunks his city hall down in Calcutta...
...At present they speak feebly, because they are dispersed, dispirited and diverse in their main concerns...
...In the short run, focusing on the non-relocatable might prove rewarding...
...Once finished, the goods are exported to the United States for sale at markups that yield obscenely fat profits...
...Samuel Gompers, President of the Federation, opposed a national minimum wage on the grounds that if the government were given the powerto set a minimum wage, it could use that power to set a maximum wage...
...Between 1979 and 1994, employment in manufacturing in the U.S...
...One is the merger movement among unions...
...Mark Twain is credited with saying it is difficult to imagine a viable society that lives by everyone taking in everyone else's washing...
...It is, rather, that American corporations have been wielding a Gus Tyler, a frequent NL contributor, is Assistant President of the ILGWV...
...In 1932, at the depths of the Depression, the AFL refused to back a national unemployment insurance program...
...Organizing and bargaining will not, in themselves, fundamentally alter a trade policy that has long favored multinational corporations and their shareholders over everybody else...
...Third, if high-wage manufacturing disappears there will be no new mass high-wage sector to replace it...
...In that case, it seems reasonable that an equal tax should be imposed upon the like produce of [foreign manufacturers...
...A department store in, say, Toledo cannot cater to residents there if it moves to Bangkok...
...That is not to imply the program of such an alliance can, or should be restricted to reindustrialization, the minimum wage, a ban on striker replacement, and job safety, all of which are essential concerns of unions...
...In the long run, it is likely to be self-defeating...
...And it can count on help from Newt...
...Sooner or later?sooner" with foresight, "later," with hindsight —I think Americans will recognize that reindustrialization is imperative for three compelling reasons: First, without an industrial base of its own, the United States cannot be a world power ready for any contingency...
...A restaurant in Wilmington can't send its kitchen to Singapore...
...The historic leadership shift reflects the slow but steady change in composition that organized labor has been undergoing...
...will not only be dependent on other countries for manufactured products, it will have nothing to give in exchange...
...When, with FDR's election, they finally coalesced in a "lib-lab" alliance in the Democratic Party, it was not out of commitment to a common ideology...
...For example, the head of the soon to emerge union that will embrace steel, auto and rubber workers, as well as machinists, will no longer be able to limit his interest to merely one of those industries and its employees...
...MEMO TO JOHN SWEENEY A Strategy for LaborBYGUSTYER John J. Sweeney, the new President of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), is the first head of this country's labor movement ever elected from the service sector...
...Sweeney surely knows, too, that a vigorous campaign must be launched to revitalize American industry and right the pyramid...
...Manufacturing has been the backbone of the American economy in the 20th century...
...Applying his logic in the United States today would result in the "protection" of much American manufacture...
...Second, without industry, the U.S...
...new weapon—namely the relocation of production to Third World countries, where they can get cheap, child or slave labor...
...His second exception maintained that "it would be generally advantageous to lay some burden upon foreign for the encouragement of domestic industry...
Vol. 78 • December 1995 • No. 9
