The AFL-CIO, as most people by now have heard, is traveling a
good deal lighter these days. Two of its largest unions, the
Teamsters (1.4 million members) and the Service Employees
International Union (1.8 million workers), in absentia, had
announced on the first day of the labor federation’s 50th
anniversary convention in Chicago during July 25-28 their intention
to exit. By the end of the week, the 1.4 million-member United Food
and Commercial Workers (UFCW) also had departed.
This represents some serious bleeding. These unions had combined
for about 35 percent of the 13 million workers belonging to AFL-CIO
affiliates.
The differences in this family feud don’t have much to do with
politics. The breakaway faction, known as the Change to Win
Coalition, has no more use for “right-wing Republicans” than do the
loyalists. SEIU President Andrew Stern, for example, is a ferocious
opponent of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA),
recently passed by the House by a razor-thin 217-215 margin. He’s
acknowledged spending at least $65 million to elect Democrats
during the 2004 election cycle.
The AFL-CIO and Change to Win share similar goals. They just
have different ideas about how to attain them. And the “how” part
is distinctly related to money.
When the Teamsters and the SEIU left the AFL-CIO, they took
$18.1 million of the AFL-CIO’s $96 million in annual dues-based
revenues with them. The attrition of the UFCW and the likely
attrition of the 450,000-member UNITE HERE (a merger last year of
textile, hotel and restaurant workers) will reduce operating cash
further. If the 800,000-member Laborers depart — a distinct
possibility — things could get downright ugly at AFL-CIO
headquarters in Washington. Already, the federation has had to lay
off more than 100 employees.
Dissenters think the AFL-CIO has been acting too much as an
adjunct of the Democratic Party and too little as an organizer of
workers. Unless labor finds a way to reverse its declining share of
U.S. workers, they argue, its political activism may be doomed to
irrelevancy.
The numbers would appear to support this concern. The proportion
of all non-farm workers belonging to unions stood at 24 percent in
1973, but fell to 20 percent in 1983 and further to 12.5 percent in
2004. In the private sector, membership stood at a mere 8 percent
in 2004, compared to 35 percent in 1955, the year of the AFL-CIO
merger. A recent Zogby poll has revealed that only 16 percent of
non-member workers would definitely join a union.
In the long run, the AFL-CIO’s schism may be just the ticket to
raise those percentages. This organization, remember, owes its very
existence to an earlier schism. In 1935, a group of unions, led by
Mine Workers President John L. Lewis, formed a dissident faction
within the American Federation of Labor. The unions in this new
Congress of Industrial Organizations not returning to the fold were
expelled a few years later. The CIO, free to pursue its preferred
strategy of direct confrontation, changed the course of labor
history. Using the sit-down strike, they organized large numbers of
workers in the rubber, steel, auto and other mass-production
industries. The AFL-CIO merger effectively consolidated the CIO’s
gains.
The rupture this past late July already has AFL-CIO President
John Sweeney, who’d headed the SEIU before taking over federation
leadership a decade ago, talking like a dissenter. “We will begin
building the new power we need by approving a huge shift of AFL-CIO
resources into organizing so we can ratchet up strategic campaigns
aimed at the likes of Wal-Mart, Comcast, Clear Channel, and
Toyota,” he told the convention.
Like members of a dysfunctional family, the AFL-CIO and Change
to Win in due time may reconcile. Money is a trump card, and every
union knows that membership means money for lobbying and political
donations as well as for organizing. Through federally granted
monopoly privileges, organized labor is assured of plenty of dues
revenues to support its fights. And if the mood in Chicago was any
indication of things to come, fights are what the unions are
counting on.
Carl F. Horowitz is director of the Organized Labor
Accountability Project at the Falls Church, Virginia-based National
Legal and Policy Center.
