Can Unions Seize the Post-9-11 Moment?

Early in December, officials at the AFL-CIO convention in Las Vegas reluctantly acknowledged that their numbers had slipped yet again -- this time to just 13.5 percent of the nation's workforce. The announcement came at a time when more than 500 union hard hats were at ground zero in New York digging out from destruction, just as they have been doing around the clock since Sept. 11.

Those were the two starkly different images of labor that emerged this year: one of increasing irrelevance, the other of crucial importance.

Immediately after the planes hit, construction workers around the city dropped their tools and raced to the scene, arriving hard on the heels of their fellow unionists, the firefighters, cops, and emergency service workers. In the days following the attack, hundreds more trades workers, organized in work details by their respective unions, marched to the site to lend a hand, many of them remaining for weeks. Unions representing maintenance workers, restaurant employees, and civil servants also quickly went to work, lending comfort and aid to the families of their murdered members and shoring up those made jobless by the catastrophe.

But unions themselves barely trumpeted their own role at the Trade Center. In fact, a week after the attack, construction unions ran full-page newspaper ads pleading with members to return to work; so many were volunteering at the disaster site that every big construction job in the city had shut down.

If the terrorist attack reaffirmed a dormant patriotism in many, as well as a new faith in the capabilities of government and its public servants, it also underscored the critical role unions play in the social fabric.

"Union members proved convincingly they had the training, the skill, and the will to get a tough job done," says Jeff Grabelsky of the AFL-CIO's Building Trades Department. "I really don't know what would have happened if the attack had taken place in a non-union market; the response of construction workers has everything to do with the fact that they are union members."

And yet the story of how unions distinguished themselves under fire remains largely untold. Instead, the dominant labor story of the post-Sept. 11 era was the predictable one: that the number of Americans enrolled in unions had slipped yet again, following the same inexorable pattern of earlier years.

The added twist to this year's statistic was that it was a drop from the 14.9 percent of workers who were in unions in 1995, when AFL-CIO president John Sweeney was first elected, vowing to organize the unorganized. And there is more slippage to come, labor officials caution, thanks to massive layoffs in the post-terror-attack economic downturn.

Sweeney, re-elected to a new term at the helm of the 13 million-member organization, beseeched his 66 member unions to undertake renewed organizing drives in an effort to stanch the losses. Individual unions should devote at least 30 percent of their budgets to organizing efforts, according to a resolution proposed and passed by the convention. Their goal, Sweeney urged, should be to boost their memberships by at least 10 percent.

"Let's be clear, we are talking about massive change in the way we do business," Service Employees International Union president Andrew Stern, a strong Sweeney backer who co-chairs the organizing committee of the AFL-CIO executive committee, told the convention.

For all their eloquence, the unionists still appear largely to be whistling in the wind. Passing resolutions is easy, but getting most unions to take on the grueling and often frustrating work of organizing remains elusive. Labor analysts estimate fewer than a dozen unions have actually committed the resources Sweeney has asked for, and fewer still have registered large gains.