You must be living under a rock if you're progressive and don't know there's a serious debate underway about the future of organized labor. Here, labor analyst Tasini goes beyond the big personalities in the debate and focuses on the issues at stake for the American worker. Tasini will be blogging daily from the AFL-CIO meeting in Las Vegas.
Jonathan Tasini is president of the Economic Future Group and writes his "Working In America" columns for TomPaine.com on an occasional basis.
Perhaps it’s fitting that the AFL-CIO Executive Council , at which the roiling debate over the future of labor will be played out, is being held in the land of fantasy: Las Vegas. Don’t get me wrong: the fact that there even is a debate—and a sharp one at that—is a great thing. But, count me as one who doubts that the current debate will lead to the changes needed. These rules will help you understand what is happening in Sin City this week and how to tell whether anything really will change.
Rule #1: As Deep Throat counseled, follow the money. Several unions are pushing a proposal to rebate up to 50 percent of the dues paid to the AFL-CIO back to unions that put the money into organizing. Other than weakening the AFL-CIO (and you can believe that’s good or bad), this may not actually result in many new union members. Virtually every union could organize more effectively today (though whether they can be successful is another issue involving strategy and the corporate warfare against workers who try to unionize). Why they don’t is a deeper question that a rebate won’t answer. More than a decade ago, the AFL-CIO set up an organizing fund that was supposed to support campaigns launched by individual unions; to tap into the fund, unions were supposed to meet certain criteria. The fund ended up doling out money to anyone mouthing the word “organizing” with no criteria for accountability. Nothing in the current proposals for rebates sets any kind of real standards by which unions will be judged to have invested the rebated money into organizing.
Rule #2: To quote Don Corleone, this is business, not personal. When the Service Employees kicked this whole debate off last year, critics skewered the SEIU proposals by claiming they were being driven by arrogance and ego. I was shocked—shocked!—to read that leaders of big organizations might be arrogant and have big egos. Mark me down as one person who isn’t interested in selfless, wallflower leaders—they are likely ineffective or lying about their real motives. While all the other “progressive” labor leaders said nothing as the ship was sinking, SEIU provoked a debate—and people should be kissing their behinds, not bickering over style. If you read personal attacks, assume that people don’t like the substance.
Rule #3: Size does matter. SEIU ticked a lot of people off by suggesting the AFL-CIO be empowered to force mergers among unions. The critics used a lot of convenient terms such as “democracy” but the truth is people don’t want to give up their positions of power, even if that would be good for the movement. That there are too many ineffective unions, set up for an economy that doesn’t exist anymore, has been obvious for sometime. (I wrote about this in The Edifice Complex 10 years ago, a revised version of which will be out in May). Here's one suggestion that might make labor leaders accept mergers: Create a labor House of Lords for those union leaders left without organizations to run, a kind of advisory body with prestige but no power (throw in a small salary and health care coverage to sweeten the deal). In any case, it’s unlikely the merger ideas will go very far.
Rules #4: Size doesn’t matter. Mergers are not going to solve labor’s problem. In fact, they could do the opposite: Unions that merge may all of a sudden feel fat and happy with more members and more money.
Rule #5: It doesn’t matter who is at the head if the culture stays the same. Forget the question of whether John Sweeney should step down or be challenged (he says he’s running). Having a new AFL-CIO president will only matter if there is a credible strategy and plan with real accountability—not a culture that favors the least-common denominator (meaning, every decision ends up tasting like vanilla to keep everyone happy) and an environment where people turn a blind eye to incompetence or laziness.
Rule #6: More of a failed program is not a strategy. John Sweeney has announced that labor will spend more money on politics, after almost 30 years of questionable results. Hello? Unions have attempted to reverse declining power in the workplace by playing in a political arena that is happy to take labor money but not really change the rules of the game when it comes to workers' right to organize . I think we should take a break at the federal level of politics and build power at the workplace and community. Shifting money earmarked for the coffers of politicians to projects like the Apollo Alliance (which is pushing for a multi-billion dollar investment in good-paying jobs in sustainable energy projects) is a sounder strategy likely to gain labor more clout in the long haul.
Rule #7: It’s about China. Until labor has a meaningful plan to deal with the global movement of capital and an economic system driven solely by wages, the rest of the debate is a waste of time. If labor can’t figure out China, it will end up being a movement representing only people who work in industries that can’t pick up and move. Admittedly, this is not an easy task. It’s not easy to figure out how to get a British or German union to put its political capital on the line for Americans and vice versa; across borders, unions have different cultures and bargaining histories. To its credit, SEIU is investing a fair amount of time and money into trying to create some skeleton of a global labor movement. If you don’t hear a plan for a real global strategy, we’re doomed.
Rule #8: Strategy matters. Here’s a shocker: I’m uneasy about calls to weaken the AFL-CIO. Not because I think the Federation does such a great job (though there are some wonderful people at the AFL-CIO). Labor needs a strong center, whether it’s the AFL-CIO or something else, to enforce a labor-wide organizing strategy. With an economy driven by powerful multinationals and a pervasive anti-union culture, individual unions have no prayer operating alone. Join me and cringe when you hear left-wing academics, union “democracy” types or labor activists trumpet a strategy based on union “culture” and the spontaneous upsurge of the rank-and-file; most of these pontificators have never organized a single worker. There has to be a strong vision and strategy articulated by someone.
I hope I leave Vegas inspired and hopeful (and, at least, with a few dollars left in my pocket)—and I’ll be blogging from there daily at Working Life to let you know if you should feel optimistic, too. Either way, we can be at least hopeful that, thanks to unions like UNITE-HERE, the Teamsters and SEIU, there is a serious debate underway that has the potential to chart a new path for labor.
