t should
have been the time for a celebration of the golden
anniversary of a calculated mariage de raison that
had endured in spite of sometimes serious disagreements.
Instead, the couple created in 1955 by the fusion of the
American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (the AFL-CIO) has experienced a separation
that will certainly lead to a bitter divorce. Two of the
largest of the federated unions refused to participate in
the quadrennial convention that took place from July 25 to
July 28 in Chicago; and the departure of others will surely
follow in the immediate future. Superficially, since the
leader of the dissidents, Andrew Stern (54 years old) had
been the protégé of the president of the AFL-CIO, John
Sweeney (71 years old); the rupture has all the ingredients
of an Oedipal drama. In an interview with the New York
Times (July 29 2005), Sweeney—who had come to power ten
years ago in a coup in which Andrew Stern was a crucial
player—claimed that his opponents wanted to “force his
retirement” and to “dictate” the person who would succeed
him. But, obviously, the causes of the divorce are found at
a deeper level.
At the time of the marriage, in 1955,
nearly a third of American workers were members of unions,
whereas by 1985 only 19% remained enrolled, and last year
their number had dropped to 12.5 % (of whom barely 8% were
in the private sector). The AFL-CIO nonetheless has some 13
million members, whose national dues (of $7.23 per person)
support an organization that federates 57 unions (of
different sizes), and is capable of mobilizing its
supporters for important political fights (for example, 24%
of John Kerry’s voters in 2004 came from union households).
The national headquarters in Washington forms an impressive
lobby whose weight is felt in a variety of debates that
concern working families. But it’s precisely this
orientation that has become a problem, counter the critics
of the AFL-CIO, who have united under the slogan “Change to
Win.” Mobilizations around particular issues and influence
brought to bear in the halls of power no longer suffice;
trade unions have to begin once again to enroll new members
and to expand their reach beyond the declining industries to
organize in the neglected sectors of the economy. At the
moment, however, only five affiliated unions devote more
than 30% of their resources to organizing, whereas the
dissidents have demanded that all member unions spend at
least 50% of their funds on recruitment projects.
The first impact of the split will be
to weaken the AFL-CIO, which will lose 4 million members and
roughly 25 million dollars in dues payments each year. (If
more unions leave, as predicted, the losses will be
higher.) The departing unions criticize the present
leadership for devoting too many resources to the quest for
political influence while neglecting the principle duty of
the trade unionist: to recruit and unite workers so that
they can defend themselves. One source of the problem is
obviously the fact that traditional industries are
disappearing, moving production abroad with the result that
the existing unions have no reason to spend their money in
searching for new members; their obligation, it seems
rightly to them, is to protect their existing adherents and
prior gains. Those sectors of the economy that are growing,
such as the services, health and public employees, remain
largely untapped. This distinction between an old and a new
economy explains the optimism of Andrew Stern, the head of
the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) whose
membership has grown from 700,000 to 1,8 million during the
past decade.
“Was it necessary to cut all ties?” is
the question asked by the allies of John Sweeney. They
wonder whether it would not have been better to seek a
compromise—which indeed, they had proposed. They were
willing to increase the resources devoted to organizational
work—though not quite as much as the dissidents wanted, but
still to a reasonable degree. More important, their
counter-argument continues, the crucial point to recognize
is that the true hindrance to developing further the power
of trade unions comes from anti-union laws voted by Congress
(such as, for example, the obligation to certify a union as
representing the workers of a given firm, and the definition
of what counts as bargaining in good faith by businesses
that don’t hesitate to employ union-busting practices). It
is in Washington, they argue, that we will be able to change
things, and that’s why we devote so much of our resources to
lobbying, as well as legislative and electoral projects.
From this point of view, their self-defense turns into a
counter critique: the competition that will grow from your
splitting to go your own way, they tell the dissidents, will
weaken us both;
each of us will be tempted to poach on the territory of the
other while the allies of capital will sit back and apply
the age-old principal of divide et imperium. And so,
at the conclusion of his interview with the Times,
John Sweeney mocks his critics as spoiled children who, when
they saw that they could not win, picked up their marbles
and went home. In spite of their claims to principled
opposition, their behavior represented, he concludes,
nothing but a quest for power.
In order to understand the split that
is occurring, we need to return to the origins of the
cold-blooded mariage de raison
of 1955. At the time, the trade unions representing the
professional sectors of the economy had been long united in
the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which sought to
increase the well-being of its members while excluding
explicitly any broader project of social change. That
vision of “pure and simple trade unionism” had overcome the
opposition from various socialist movements—until the Great
Depression of the 1930’s, which gave rise to new radical
demands. The Keynesian politics of the New Deal proposed
new rules that sought to encourage the development of the
union movement. The Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO) was born in this context. It sought to organize
unskilled workers in such industries as automobile, steel
and coal, which the AFL had neglected. The success of the
CIO was greater than anyone had hoped, and the great
sit-down strikes of 1936 at General Motors remained a model,
and a threat. But these successes could not be repeated;
neither history nor capitalism stands still. At the end of
the war, a new tendency began to be felt. In spite of
president Truman’s veto, the republican Congress passed the
Taft-Hartley law that took back many of the advantages won
by labor during the New Deal. In the meanwhile, the
anti-communism of the Cold War led to purges among the more
militant unionists. It was in this context that the
mariage de raison between the AFL and the CIO—between
whom no love was lost—took place: each needed the other in
order to preserve its influence.
The supporters of “Change to Win” base
their hopes on the analogy between their project, which
seeks to organize the neglected (or new) strata at the
bottom of society and the early success of the CIO. They
suggest that the new activism that they incarnate will
revivify a union movement that has remained—like the old
AFL–– the captive of its past and a hostage to its members
who want to preserve their prior gains and the social
relations they guaranteed. This analogy can be pushed
further. Since the majority of workers in the service
sectors are ethnic minorities, the new unionism will have to
follow the model of the early CIO in denouncing the implicit
racism of those who put their narrow self-interest above the
collective well being of a democratic society in which
social divisions must not become quasi-hereditary, passed on
from one union family to another. The same historical
comparison suggests the need to create cross-union alliances
to fight against such contemporary heirs to the old
industrial giants as Walmart or Federal Express—just as the
CIO mobilized social and political movements to fight
General Motors or U.S. Steel. Up until now, those giants
had taken advantage of the fact that the AFL-CIO is a loose
federation whose president does not have the power to act
against destructive inter-union competition. The divisions
that result prevent coordinated action: 57 unions under one
rickety umbrella make conflict inevitable, as the AFL-CIO
itself recognized by proposing the need for consolidations
(although it is unable to wield sufficient power to put its
wishes into practice). This is another ground for the
split, argue the dissidents, who want to create a more
tightly run ship.
The analogies drawn by the dissidents
are interesting, but the America of the new twenty-first
century is not that of the New Deal. Indeed, in a sense,
the worm was already in the fruit of the success of the
CIO. The successful organization of the industrial giants
led inevitably to the integration of the unions as
increasing numbers of blacks moved north after the war.
Racial tensions followed. These were exacerbated by the
support given to the civil rights movement by the leading
progressive edge of the CIO, the powerful United Auto
Workers led by Walter Ruether and his progressive allies.
At the same time, the Vietnam War brought about an
increasing alienation between political liberalism rooted in
the CIO and the anti-communist trade unionists of the AFL,
whose socially conservative members found it difficult to
understand the morals of a new generation. With the advent
of the inflation (or “stagflation”) in the outgoing 1970s,
the election of Ronald Reagan comes as no surprise. But his
first act, at the beginning of 1981, the firing of the
striking air traffic controllers and dissolution of their
union, was a sign of the times to come. This aggressive
element of republican politics, interrupted for a moment by
the 1992 election of Bill Clinton—who had to confront a
republican Congress after 1994—has been accentuated by
George W. Bush. If all history is a history of class
struggles, capital seems to have won the battle in the
United States.
The wager of “Change to Win” is
enormous. Its bet is all or nothing. The media have
stressed mostly the negative consequences for the Democratic
Party, at both the national level and in state and local
politics, where unions bring with them an important
contribution of activists and money. From this point of
view, John Sweeney and his supporters seem to have the
better argument when they insist that change has to make use
of the existing political channels. And they are not
wrong: the members appointed to the National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB) that was created by the New Deal to
level the playing field between capital and labor can
challenge union gains by interpreting laws favorably to
business. But the critics are not wrong either. They
stress that the attempts to play on the political terrain
have been marked by a series of defeats, and that it is
useless to continue to ram one’s head against the same brick
wall while repeating the mantra that a just cause will
always, ultimately, triumph. They add that such repeated
failures will, in the long run, discourage eventual allies
who could emerge from sectors of society that have been
hitherto ignored. If the traditional political path is
closed (at least for the time being), then a new vision is
needed in order to revivify those whose (justified)
discontent does not, by itself, constitute a strategy. If
the economy is no longer what it used to be, and if the
chasm between the rich and the poor has deepened, then
perhaps one should take advantage of the fact that the
out-sourcing of mass production industries does not affect
the service sectors that tend to escape from the threatening
effects of globalization. This poses the question whether
victories on this economic terrain could find a political
translation? Could the dissidents be the carriers of a new
perspective that has not yet found an adequate political
formulation?
It is impossible to predict who will
prove to be right, much less who will win. But it should be
noted that the opposition between these two perspectives
repeats a well-known dilemma present throughout the history
of the Left. Beyond the opposition between reform and
revolution, what is at stake is the alternative between a
transformation that comes from the top down—by means of the
state—and another vision that emerges from below—through the
self-organization of workers. But that historical dichotomy
was challenged by the emancipatory movements of Eastern and
Central Europe that led to the rediscovery of the power of
the forgotten democratic civil society. Americans, who
think that they incarnate democracy, never reflected on how
communism fell. But the new movement could force a
reflection. Whereas the CIO organized workers of mass
industries who worked in the same place and who became
conscious of their unity because the union was recognized as
representing them in negotiations, employees in janitorial
services, salespeople at Walmart, health care workers and so
on work in separated job-sites and come together only when
they make an effort to participate in the work of the union.
As a result, the kind of solidarity that arises in the
service sector differs from the unity that is created by a
trade union that represents workers in mass industries. The
latter type of unity comes from the top-down, passively,
whereas the new solidarity emerges from a sort of
“horizontal” sharing of experiences among individuals who
are at first more isolated from one another. Could one
imagine that, in this case, the result of a new
trade-unionist advance would be a reflection on the
(discouraging) state of the American political and social
relations similar to the one that resulted from the
emergence of the CIO? It would be clear that, in the last
resort, trade unionism is not a corporatism that works for
the sole good of its members. Since its birth, it
incarnates the idea that power must not be concentrated in a
single place outside of society. Society, in its plurality,
has always the right to challenge those who think they can
monopolize its interests. Reflections such as these, that
are implicit in the challenge posed by the supporters of
“Change to Win” could lead trade unionists and their allies
to recognize that their role is not limited to realizing a
utilitarian logic of self-interest that, in the end, is
hardly different from the one practiced by capitalism. If
it does, American democracy will benefit from it.
Notes
This essay is a translation, by the author, of a weekly
“Chroniques de la démocratie américain” that will cover the
year from the November 2004 election to November 2005
forthcoming from éditions Buchet-Chastel, Paris in early
2006.
Dick Howard is Professor of Philosophy at SUNY
Stony Brook and the author of The Specter of Democracy (Columbia
University Press.)