U of M MAPL 5111 - The Arithmetic of Decline and Some Proposals for Renewal

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The Arithmetic of Decline and Some Proposals for Renewal By Peter Olney New Labor Forum -- Spring/Summer 2002 In 1999 the New Voice leadership of the AFL-CIO and its affiliates announced an organizing goal of one million members per year. In both 2000 and 2001, it has failed to attain that ambitious goal. Some will smugly eulogize the New Voice organizing program. Defenders of the program will lodge its failures with the vast majority of the union affiliates who have failed to appropriate the needed staff, money, training, and resources to organize the unorganized. Sadly the lines of debate are drawn and caricatured between “capacity builders” and “movement builders.” Capacity builders scream for more resources as the solution. Movement builders cry out for a more democratic and bottom-up movement that places less emphasis on numbers and more stock in the quality of our organizations. While both perspectives have merit, they incorrectly assess the real capacity of the AFL-CIO to generate massive new organizing. Capacity builders exaggerate the ability of the federation to force the affiliate unions to organize. Movement builders do not grasp that any movement is built on specific program and structure, not idealized dreams. This paper argues for an action program that builds on the existing strength and competency of the trade unions to birth a broad movement that enhances the existing affiliates and creates new worker forms when necessary to build organizational density and worker power. The Organizing Ledger The high-water mark of union power measured by density (union membership as a proportion of the workforce) was 1955 when the AFL and the CIO merged. Unions represented 35 percent of the private sector workforce. When John Sweeney was elected president of the AFL-CIO in November of 1995 the labor movement represented 14.9 percent of the overall workforce and 10.4 percent of the private sector. Sweeney and his slate swept to power on a pledge to reinvigorate the trade unions through “changing to organize” and through a new aggressive political program. Six years out and the organizing results are in. Despite the fact that the AFL-CIO has shamed, coaxed, and cajoled its affiliates to focus resources on organizing, overallfederation membership has dropped 68,000 in the last five years. The percentage of the workforce represented by the labor movement (the AFL-CIO and independents) has declined from 14.9 percent in 1995, the last year of Lane Kirkland’s stewardship of the AFL-CIO, to 13.5 percent in 2001. (1) As much as many on the Left may wish to critique the limited numerical accomplishments and the ultimate quality of the organizing, this kind of broad-based discussion, debate, and focus on organizing did not exist prior to John Sweeney’s ascension to the presidency of the AFL-CIO. Fifty-eight of the sixty-six affiliated unions of the AFL-CIO now have organizing directors. Even the Horseshoers Union has an organizing director and it’s not Roy Rogers! Prior to the New Voice it would have been inconceivable to have a serious discussion about hiring rank-and-file organizers with most of AFL-CIO affiliates. Now even a traditional building trades union like the Ironworkers had a national organizing program adopted at its convention in August 2001. Numbers Don’t Lie But . . Ironically, many of the perceived failures of the New Voice, particularly in the area of organizing the unorganized, are a result of the emphasis on numbers. To the extent that accountability is furthered by the focus on numbers this is an advance over empty platitudes. Union density is a tricky concept. Density numbers are subject to obvious cyclical and structural changes. The business cycle that results in sharp drops in employment can negate the net numerical effect of powerful organizing. The same is true for dramatic structural changes in the economy. While density remains one measure of union power it is not all determining. Witness the power of the French labor movement to engage in powerful strikes and job actions on a national level with a density level of only 9.1 percent in 1995. (2) Obviously qualitative questions of strategic sectors, class consciousness, and history of struggle play a vital role in measuring the power of a labor movement. The much heralded strategic initiatives of the initial years of the New Voice have, for the most part, flopped. Large-scale sectoral or geographic initiatives like the strawberry workers in California or the Building Trades Organizing Project (BTOP) in Las Vegas or Seattle Union Now (SUN) have come to ruin. However, the biggest hole in the organizing program has been the inability to launch serious initiatives in the manufacturing and logistics (transport and storage) sectors, two of the most strategic sectors of the economy that are crucial to labor’s overall power and place in society. Some glaring examples of this hole: The much publicized and much needed “heavy metal” merger of the Autoworkers, Machinists, and Steelworkers was wrecked on the rocks of personal power politics.(3) The Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project (LAMAP) was a multiunion industrial organizing project focused on the largely Latino immigrant workforce in Los Angeles County. After initial interest in the waning days of the Kirkland era, the affiliates failed to fully embrace the program and itdied in early 1998. The Teamster’s Overnite national trucking organizing campaign, even with a half million dollars in assistance from the AFL-CIO, has failed. The Teamsters and East and West coast longshore unions have not to date mounted a serious drive to organize the 40,000 short haul truckers who are the key link along the distribution chain between the ports and warehousing.(4) Much of the recent growth in density has occurred among service sector workers, especially in health care. This growth is important because it builds unions among women and people of color who now represent a majority of the ranks of organized labor, and because health care in particular is the fastest growing sector of the economy. Yet a labor movement that wants to challenge the employers must be present in the means of production and distribution. To its credit the AFL-CIO has carried out internal debate over maintaining “core jurisdictions” in an attempt to keep manufacturing unions focused


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U of M MAPL 5111 - The Arithmetic of Decline and Some Proposals for Renewal

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