Fate of the Union

By Frank Joyce, AlterNet. Posted February 22, 2005.

The news keeps getting worse for unions. According to the federal government, organized labor fell to 12.5 percent of the workforce in 2004, down from 12.9 percent in 2003. The percentage of private-sector workers in unions went from 8.2 percent to 7.9 percent. That's the lowest level since the early 1900's.

A dramatic and telling example of union shrinkage took place just last month. It didn't make the national news, but 50,000 workers lost their contracts and their bargaining rights when the newly-elected Republican governors of Indiana and Missouri took office and promptly reversed executive orders by previous governors that gave state workers collective bargaining rights.

All indications are that these kinds of assaults will increase. After Nov. 2, 2004, influential Republican strategist Grover Norquist proclaimed a broad campaign to further decimate organized labor as a high priority.

Labor's precipitous decline and its failure to assure victory for John Kerry have intensified debate within the "House of Labor" and its formal coordinating body, the AFL-CIO. On Jan. 10, a special meeting of the AFL-CIO executive committee reportedly agreed on a series of measures to restructure the organization in the direction of proposals made by Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, (SEIU). Formal approval for the changes will likely come at the March 1 meeting of the AFL-CIO Executive Council and, if necessary, at the AFL-CIO convention this summer.

Stern has been an increasingly outspoken advocate of the need for change. Notably, SEIU is one of the few unions to claim net membership growth in recent years. And growth is what it set out to achieve a few years ago by undertaking a major internal restructuring and reallocation of resources to organizing. Based on what Stern sees as SEIU's own success and its power as the largest union in the AFL-CIO, he has been advocating a similar restructuring and consolidation of the labor federation as a way to begin reversing the decline of union membership and influence. To that end, SEIU has proposed a "unite to win" plan.

How Did We Get Here?

Over the last four decades, two "weather" patterns have converged to create the proverbial perfect storm for labor.

The first is intensified employer opposition. The widespread perception is that unions are dying. The reality is that unions are being murdered. Years before the 1980 high-profile defeat of PATCO (the air traffic controllers union) by then-President Ronald Reagan, employers and their ideological allies were adopting an aggressive effort to deunionize the United States.

Just how employers wage a typical union-busting campaign was recently described in a long-overdue expose in The New York Times titled, "How Do You Drive Out a Union? South Carolina Factory Provides A Textbook Case," on Dec. 14, 2004. It's enlightening and worthwhile reading.

Union-busting is increasingly a large and lucrative crusade. It brings together managers, highly paid anti-union lawyers, "human relations" experts and communications specialists to pound into submission workers who even might support unionization. The deunionization jihad also works incessantly and effectively to discredit any and all unions in the minds of the general public. As if that weren't enough, the global mobility of capital has evolved to create exactly the right environment to make good on employer threats to eliminate union work, especially in the private sector.

And so the once viable, if not downright mighty, have fallen. The United Auto Workers (UAW) has less than one-third the members it had at its peak. Its penetration among the core membership in vehicle assembly is lower every single day than it was the day before. There is no longer a Rubber Workers union. It was absorbed by the also shrunken steelworkers union (USWA) after a ruinous strike left the Rubber Workers union battered and broke. The list goes on.

The response of unions to the assault by the union-busters has been slow, unimaginative and essentially ineffective. Self-inflicted wounds — corruption scandals, parochialism of all sorts, ill-advised strikes, self-serving, top-down leadership and more — don't help either.

Is A Big Change Right Around the Corner?

So, does the widely reported "ferment" in the AFL-CIO mean that necessary changes are now on the way and labor's fortunes will begin to reverse? In a word: No.

For starters, the "reform" proposals under consideration don't really address the problem of how to overcome employer opposition in any fundamental way. Even more important, they ignore or underestimate the other "global warming" trends that are melting the trade union organizations of the 20th century at such a rapid pace.

Yes, as the reformers say, the world has changed much and the AFL-CIO has changed little. But that is only a symptom. Generally speaking, the unions that make up the Federation haven't changed very much either because they have not recognized or acknowledged just how much the economic, political and social conditions of today differ from those that gave birth to the unions. The world has gone digital and the unions are selling film products.

Frank Joyce is a journalist and labor communications consultant. He is writing a book on reinventing unions.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »