Debating Labor's Future
Editor’s Note: We continue this month our series on the debates going on around the labor movement over the fate of the AFL-CIO. We are committed to gathering a range of voices around this debate. Not all of the articles represent the viewpoint of Labor Notes. Please keep sending us your feedback, thoughts, responses, and hate mail.
Service Employees Union Pushes for More Strategic Focus, New AFL Leader
by Sal Rosselli
President, United Health Care Workers West/SEIU
For more than 20 years, there has been a growing recognition that the labor movement is in crisis. Over the past 12 months, even the most ardent defenders of the status quo have accepted that we are in trouble.
Ten years after the election of John Sweeney to lead the AFL-CIO, labor’s decline has continued to a level now below 1 in 12 private sector workers.
The Sweeney era has demonstrated that it is not enough to change the leadership of the AFL-CIO. More importantly, there should be structural change as well.
EMPHASIS ON ORGANIZING
Over the past few years, recognizing that gains will continue to be harder to achieve at the bargaining table as the number of workers represented by unions falls, SEIU implemented programs that mandated all of the 300 SEIU locals to devote at least 20 percent of their resources to new organizing. Members of dozens of local unions voted to merge or restructure to unite the strength of workers in each of our primary industries. We also instituted a series of reforms that have encouraged coordinated bargaining with common employers.
As a result of changes like these, more than 700,000 workers have joined SEIU in the past eight years. During that period, our local union (SEIU Local 250) alone grew from 33,000 workers to 100,000. Then, last year our members and our counterparts in SEIU Local 399 in southern California voted to form a united statewide health care workers union with 137,000 members—United Healthcare Workers West.
The best example of the strength derived from combining our two locals in an industry can be seen at Catholic Healthcare West (CHW), the largest hospital system in California. In 2000, our union represented 1,500 workers at three CHW hospitals.
After a five-year effort that required multiple strikes and a strategically focused campaign, we won a corporate-wide election agreement. Just this past year, we negotiated our first statewide master agreement with CHW, which covers 14,000 SEIU caregivers at 28 hospitals. The agreement includes employer-paid health insurance for employees and their families, a voice in how our hospitals are staffed, a defined-benefit pension plan, and a multi-million-dollar training and upgrade fund.
As the largest affiliate in the AFL-CIO, and a significant participant in numerous state labor federations and dozens of local central labor councils, we also analyzed the AFL-CIO’s strategies and how our resources were being used by the federation.
At our International convention in San Francisco in June 2004, we authorized our officers to put forward a set of proposals to produce fundamental change in the AFL-CIO. If that change were not possible, we authorized our officers to withdraw from the AFL-CIO to build something stronger.
After Bush’s reelection, SEIU put forward a ten-point program to reform the AFL-CIO called “Unite to Win.” The goals of many of our proposals are not controversial: taking on Wal-Mart; expanding the diversity of our unions’ leadership; real solutions to the health care crisis.
But two elements of our proposal generated particular controversy: 1) devoting more AFL-CIO and affiliate resources to organizing; and 2) clearly identifying lead unions in each industry with the focus, resources, and strategy to win—instead of letting unions divide workers’ strength and undercut each other through overlapping organizing across industries.
For weeks after we made our proposals public, there were few responses on their merits but a great deal of fanfare about SEIU’s “arrogance.” The pace of the debate changed dramatically when the Teamsters offered a response to the issues SEIU presented in Unite to Win. After the Teamster response, the floodgates opened.
ORGANIZING VS. POLITICS
At its March meeting, the AFL-CIO executive council split into two camps: those who advocated more resources for organizing and a shift to more industry-focused unions and those who opposed those changes and advocated instead for shifting resources to politics.
In a heated exchange, Sweeney, with the support of AFSCME President Gerald McEntee and Steelworkers President Leo Gerard, led defeat of a proposal supported by the Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers, UNITE-HERE, the Laborers, the United Auto Workers, and SEIU to increase spending on new organizing by $35 million per year, channeled to lead unions pursuing industry-based strategies.
In its place, Sweeney and his supporters passed a proposal to double spending on politics to $45 million per year, thereby decreasing the amount of money the AFL-CIO devotes to new organizing.
The two proposals depict fundamentally different approaches to how the labor movement begins to organize out of this mess. From our perspective, the key to rebuilding workers’ strength—both at the bargaining table and in politics—is strategically organizing more workers who are engaged and mobilized to fight for standards that improve their lives. Through that struggle, we will build a more powerful labor movement that will then have the ability to effect political change.
In contrast, the Sweeney/McEntee/ Gerard approach ties the labor movement to the fortunes of the Democratic Party. With a Democrat-controlled White House and Congress, they claim, labor law reform will be possible, which will then make organizing easier. According to this view, new organizing campaigns are futile while Republicans control the machinery of government, particularly the National Labor Relations Board.
Reportedly, Gerard from the Steelworkers actually said he plans to apologize to his local unions for having spent resources on new organizing. How a diminished labor movement will expand political power without organizing new workers is left unanswered.
SHOULD WE STAY OR SHOULD WE GO?
There has been a great deal of speculation about whether SEIU will remain in the AFL-CIO. That is a decision that will take place only after discussion within all our local unions, but from the perspective of our local it is hard to imagine why we would stay unless several basic changes are made.
First, there would have to be major new investment in organizing by the AFL-CIO and its affiliates.
Second, AFL-CIO rules and practices regarding jurisdiction, mergers, dues rebates, and other issues would have to be reformed to clearly establish unions with an industry focus. To give one example, Articles XX and XXI of the AFL-CIO constitution should be revised to give priority in organizing to those unions in an industry that already have a proven track record of representing that industry’s workers.
Currently, jurisdiction is decided by which union hits the ground first, with virtually no consideration given for bargaining standards, union density, capacity to succeed, or other factors that may be greater indicators of the capacity and political will to win on the ground.
Third, the AFL-CIO needs a new leader. Although we didn’t start out in this position, Sweeney’s handling of this important debate has demonstrated that he is not the person to lead labor into its next phase. It is just common sense that a new industry-based strategy and structure could only be led by someone who fought for—and not against—that change.
Some of Sweeney’s supporters have reacted to the debate by further dividing workers’ strength. Despite his avowed reluctance to spend union resources until there has been a shift in political climate, AFSCME President McEntee sent hundreds of his paid union staff in an attempt to undermine a ten-year campaign by 49,000 child care workers in Illinois to win the right to join SEIU.
More than 20,000 workers had signed cards for SEIU, yet several weeks before the election AFSCME entered the scene, badmouthing SEIU and hoping to get a piece of the action. SEIU won that election by a 6-1 margin.
It is important to note that even if SEIU decides to withdraw from the AFL-CIO, that would not be the end of our relationship with other union partners. Like many organizations, we have a number of collaborative relationships through coalitions and other venues in which organizations that share a set of common principles work together.
Do we as leaders have the courage to make decisions based upon what is best for workers in this country, rather than what is best for us as individuals? The future of American workers may depend on the answer to that question.
National Education Association
Can Big Unions Be Good Unions?
by Ellen David Friedman and Sam Pizzigati
We now have, within the United States, fewer unions on the national scene than we’ve had in generations. Some reformers believe we need fewer still. To counter concentrated capital, the argument goes, we need to consolidate labor industry by industry until we end up with, in every sector, one big union.
In the United States today, we have exactly one union with such a national, sector-wide presence: the 2.7 million-member National Education Association. (The American Federation of Teachers also, of course, represents teachers and other education employees, but the AFT presence is concentrated in certain metro areas and one large state, New York.) Could NEA’s experience have lessons for the rest of labor?
In this rather obvious question, our labor movement doesn’t seem particularly interested. Many labor activists don’t even think of NEA as a real “union.” Within right-wing circles, by contrast, you won’t find any confusion about NEA’s identity. NEA has emerged, over the past 20 years, as the right’s top labor target, especially in “red states,” where NEA affiliates regularly frustrate conservative ideologues on issues from taxes to teaching evolution in the classroom.
But NEA has survived this right-wing offensive. Indeed, NEA membership has jumped, by over 1.1 million, since 1983. What explains this success? NEA, we believe, has built a union environment that is at once decentralized, democratic, and diverse.
These three D’s matter. Let’s take them one by one.
DECENTRALIZATION
NEA, originally founded in 1857, entered the 20th century as essentially a big tent for everyone—from university presidents to union-friendly activist teachers—who cared about public schools. But real clout within NEA sat with the state affiliates. Each operated as an autonomous entity.
Other unions in the United States, to be sure, have also begun as collections of autonomous state or local units. But no union today has evolved, across the entire nation, not just two levels of autonomy but three. These three levels—local, state, and national—sit at the heart of decentralization, NEA-style.
Each NEA level sets its own dues rate. Each determines its own agenda. Yet the three levels remain linked by culture, practice, and shared resources.
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Until the early 1970s, educators could join an NEA affiliate without joining the national association. “Unification” came only after grassroots teacher members saw a need for it. Unification, they believed, would help overcome conservative state leaders resisting the move to collective bargaining.
And that’s exactly what happened. Unification enabled NEA to create a vast network of local staff dedicated to building strong locals that bargained and advocated for members. Today, over 30 years later, these locals run their own shows. Even the smallest of them control their own bargaining and contract enforcement.
This local autonomy helps build member involvement. In tiny Vermont, with about 125 affiliates, over 800 members annually serve as local officers, on bargaining teams, or as “building reps.” Over the course of several years, many hundreds more will cycle into active participation.
NEA, of course, does have weak affiliates. Autonomy, after all, includes the autonomy to stumble. But NEA’s whole, overall, has become more than the sum of its parts.
DEMOCRACY
A democracy requires a democratic culture, a welcome mat for open debate. Within NEA, this sort of culture has roots that go back to NEA’s earliest days as a big-tent debating society.
But democracy also requires limits on leadership’s capacity to rig how debates turn out. The contemporary NEA has such limits in place. These limits didn’t just magically appear. They grew out of struggle—by classroom teachers.
NEA first started actively enrolling teachers as members after the 1916 founding of the American Federation of Teachers. NEA membership, less than 9,000 in 1917, would soar to over 200,000 by World War II.
NEA staff grew in those years, too, and top staffers would become NEA’s most important figures. Executive secretaries would typically serve for decades, balancing on a tightrope stretched between the often conflicting interests of school administrators and school teachers.
Militant grassroots teachers ended this balancing act. In the 1960s, NEA activists used footholds in local and state affiliates to win control of the association at the national level. And they then wrote a new constitution to lock this triumph in place.
The old constitution had limited the association’s elected officers to one-year terms, a cap that left staff in effective control. Grassroots activists erased this one-year limit but kept term limits, as a principle, intact. National elected leaders would eventually be able to serve two three-year terms.
In NEA today, elected leaders and staff operate in two distinct spheres. Elected leaders set all policy priorities and hire “executive directors” to manage staff. Elected leaders do not directly manage staff, and staff do not meddle in the association’s electoral politics. Those who do can be fired. Staffers, within NEA, can never become elected leaders themselves.
These two factors—term limits and a clear separation between governance and staff—set NEA apart in the modern union world. Inside NEA, no one holds perpetual personal power, one key reason why NEA has largely avoided the corruption scandals that have stained far too many other unions.
Ultimate power within NEA rests with the over 9,000 delegates elected to attend NEA’s annual Representative Assembly. Over a four-day span every July, these delegates—teachers, cafeteria workers, custodians, professors—determine positions, direct expenditures, and elect officers. Similar assemblies, throughout the year, set the course for state and local affiliates.
Not every affiliate always keeps governance and staff roles totally distinct, or embraces term limits. But the vast majority do, enough to sustain a culture that nurtures a real democracy.
DIVERSITY
Scan the floor at NEA’s annual Representative Assembly, and you’ll see more than democracy. You’ll see diversity. NEA requires every state “RA” delegation to reflect the ethnic diversity of the state.
NEA’s governance documents mandate diversity. Minorities, for instance, must make up at least 20 percent of the 150-plus-member NEA board of directors. If normal elections do not generate a board that meets this threshold, then delegates to the annual RA, voting in elections open only to minority candidates, choose enough new board members to reach the diversity standard.
Diversity standards even affect the association’s presidency. Should NEA go 11 years without a minority as president, the NEA constitution directs the association to “take such steps as may be legally permissible to elect a member of an ethnic-minority group.”
Over recent decades, NEA has added into this mix class-based guarantees that reflect the association’s growing ranks of blue- and pink-collar school support staff workers.
NEA policy has certainly not “fixed” all race, class, and gender tensions within the union. Women, to cite just one example, make up over two-thirds of the association’s membership. Yet the last three presidents have been men.
Still, NEA may do diversity as well as any national membership group, and that makes a difference. At root, all labor solidarity grows from personal relationships. NEA’s commitment to diversity is broadening these relationships, often well beyond the “comfort zones” that working men and women bring with them when they become NEA members.
DECENCY BREEDS DENSITY
We think the NEA experience demonstrates that a single union can establish a national sector-wide presence. But NEA has another lesson to offer. A sector-wide union can only thrive if built on a decentralized, democratic, and diverse base.
Decency, in short, breeds density.
Ellen David Friedman has organized school support workers for Vermont-NEA for the last 20 years. She’s a leader of the Vermont Workers Center and the Vermont Progressive Party. Sam Pizzigati spent 20 years directing NEA’s national publishing. He currently edits Too Much, an online weekly on inequality.
Finding Workplace Power
Position in the Workplace Can Trump Size, Density
by Chris Kutalik
The recent AFL-CIO debates have generated much smoke and thunder. What’s lacking is a short- to medium-term strategy that gets at how workers and unions can tap the strength they find on the job.
Unions and workers have always had the power to stop the wheels of industry. But with traditional “all-out” strikes on the decline in the United States, the labor movement has had to find new ways to exercise this power.
One of these places can be found in what the business press calls “the logistics revolution”—the expanding system of docks, railways, trucking barns, intermodal yards, warehouses, distribution centers, dispatch offices, and other workplaces that keep massive amounts of goods flowing into retail outlets.
Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer and employer, pushed its way into market dominance in large part due to its mastering of this revolution, according to a paper by Tom Reifer, a researcher specializing in logistics. Making use of technologies that track goods all the way from the factory to the point of sale (including the world’s largest privately-owned satellite communications network), Wal-Mart has refined its “just-in-time” distribution much as manufacturers have refined lean or “just-in-time” production. Suppliers and competing retailers have been forced to adopt, in part or in whole, similar systems.
But while these supply chains are becoming hyper-efficient, they are also increasingly exposed to potential disruption.
CHOKEPOINTS = POWER
“There is power and leverage to be had in this sector,” observed Edna Bonachich, professor of sociology at UC Riverside, in comments about the rail and trucking industries (Labor Notes April 2004). “The corporations have created extended supply chains and depend on timely delivery. Inventory has been cut to the bone, so that any blockage in the system can cause them major problems.”
And more and more goods are coming into this country—mostly from Pacific Rim countries like China. Textile imports from China alone, for instance, increased more than 63 percent in 2004, according to a U.S. Commerce Department report. And this trade is flowing into more concentrated points.
By 2002, 80 percent of all Asian cargo (over 50 percent of total imports) was coming into the United States through container ships unloading in West Coast ports. The great bulk of this West Coast traffic is further being concentrated in one giant port, Los Angeles/Long Beach.
Traveling through congested ports and rail lines, this system has become increasingly over-stretched and fragile, placing more potential power in the hands of workers.
SIZE NOT THE ISSUE
For instance, a two-hour walk-out by a mere 100 train dispatchers in Fort Worth, Texas on March 2 snarled traffic up and down the 32,000 miles of track—all the way up to Seattle—operated by BNSF Railways, one of the nation’s largest rail carriers.
BNSF had tried to unilaterally implement changes in paid leave and comp time in its contract with the dispatchers’ union, the American Train Dispatchers Association. Instead of rolling over, workers at the Network Operations Center walked and BNSF trains stopped all over the country.
According to company reports, close to 50 percent of rail traffic was stopped in the Pacific Northwest—thousands of miles from the Texas-based dispatch center. Similarly, commuter trains operated by the railroad in Chicago, Seattle, and Tacoma, Washington were shut down, stranding passengers throughout all three cities.
This kind of disruption is not limited to the rails, as Hawaiian members of the Inland Boatmen’s Union showed in 2004. Following a fight over pension, health care, and staffing levels in contract negotiations, fewer than 70 tugboat operators launched a three-day strike that shut down virtually all shipping to the import-dependent islands.
With many companies forced to send freight by air, management quickly folded and signed a four-year contract.
High diesel prices last spring pushed port truck drivers across the country into action. These mostly immigrant short-haul drivers typically either lease or own a single truck. Often called troqueros, as many of them are Latino, they have borderline-poverty incomes after all costs are deducted.
Despite legal hurdles that have stifled union drives in the past, these drivers have been able to translate often informal and sporadic organization—held together by word-of-mouth, CB, and informal meetings—into actions that big shippers have to pay attention to.
In May 2004, California’s Los Angeles/Long Beach and Oakland ports, along with the Stockton, California rail/truck intermodal yard, were closed for short periods because of troqueros’ pickets. A second round of uncoordinated walk-outs that summer disrupted ports and intermodal yards along the East Coast and in the Midwest, including Miami, Charleston, New Orleans, Hampton Roads, Norfolk, Houston, and Detroit.
As diesel fuel prices creep back up to the $2.50 per gallon range, some are expecting more actions. Reports from Truckers Unite, a port driver advocacy group, tell of walkouts by 20-50 drivers at sites in the Los Angeles area in mid-April. Striking troqueros at Road Transport reportedly won pay increases of 5-10 percent on April 12.
Much has been made about union size in the recent AFL-CIO debates. But the ease of workplace disruption in logistics—and possibly other unexplored points in the economy—amplifies the strength of smaller groups of workers. Union strategists need to be discussing not only what will make the labor movement larger, but what is a workable strategy for using the strength already in hand.
