AFL-CIO President John Sweeney (right) called the ILWU delegation up on stage during a recognition of unions that mobilized for the November 2004 election. (Left to right) International President Jim Spinosa, International Vice-President, Mainland Bob McEllrath, International Vice-President, Hawaii Wesley Furtado, International Secretary-Treasurer Willie Adams and Coast Committeeman Joe Wenzl. PHOTO BY: Jim Wes
By Steve Stallone
While the departure of a couple of major unions and the boycott of the AFL-CIO’s 50th anniversary convention by them and several others dominated the news coverage of the event, a number of other significant and far-reaching actions by the remaining delegates eluded the national media’s reporting.
Putting rumors of labor’s demise aside, the delegates remaining at the July 25-28 meeting in Chicago got busy. They passed a strongly worded anti-war resolution that puts the American labor movement on record as demanding the immediate end of the war and occupation in Iraq (see story page 5); launched a multi-million dollar national campaign against Wal-Mart, the poster boy of bad corporate behavior; resolved to focus resources and energy on building organizing, year-round political and legislative mobilizations and global worker organizing; and mandated diversity in labor’s national leadership.
Still, the disaffiliation of the SEIU and the Teamsters, and a week later the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), and the boycott by UFCW, UNITE-HERE and the United Farm Workers (UFW), hung like dense fog over the convention hall, dampening the celebration of the AFL-CIO’s 50th anniversary and obscuring the road ahead.
The AFL-CIO program
The AFL-CIO leadership presented the convention with an extensive and ambitious program to expand organizing and political action, seeing both as interdependent activities for building the labor movement. For the last five years the federation has been goading its member unions to devote 30 percent of their resources to organizing. (The ILWU made that its policy at its 2000 Convention.) And while several million workers have been organized over the years, the loss of union jobs due to downsizing, outsourcing and bankruptcies has resulted in fewer union members overall.
So the AFL-CIO Executive Com-mittee proposed, and the convention delegates adopted, a two-pronged strategy. The federation will help its member unions increase their capacity to organize, especially outside the National Labor Relations Board process that is stacked against workers. And it will rampup efforts to change public policy to restore the right to organize and bargain collectively that has been whittled down ever since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and accelerated under George W. Bush.
The federation will create a $22.5 million Strategic Organizing Fund. Two-thirds, or $15 million, will be returned as rebates to unions that meet organizing standards. The other $7.5 million will go to assisting strategic organizing campaigns important to the entire labor movement, providing expert technical support, campaign research and organizer training.
On the political front, the federation plans to move from focusing on biannual get-out-the-vote efforts to building year-round capacity for informing and mobilizing members on legislative and public policy issues. The program will focus on uprooting anti-worker politicians at all levels, turning back right-to-work-for-less and paycheck deception laws, and fighting attempts to destroy defined-benefit pensions and health care programs. New efforts will be made to recruit, train and elect union members to public office.
The federation will also step up its efforts to bring more diversity to union leadership at all levels. To accomplish this it will increase training and leadership development at the local levels, do more to recruit a diverse pool of young people into the Union Summer and other programs, and establish as policy that each union’s delegation to the AFL-CIO generally reflect the racial and gender makeup of its membership. The AFL-CIO also will work to include more racial and gender diversity on its Executive Council.
Watch out, Wal-Mart
No single corporation is doing more to destroy good jobs, drive down wages and living standards and generally exploit workers than Wal-Mart. Its poisonous tentacles reach throughout the global economy, forcibly imposing its "business model" like a rapidly multiplying cancer.
As the biggest employer in the U.S., Wal-Mart’s poverty wages and poor benefits force many of its 600,000 workers into public assistance and health care programs, costing U.S. taxpayers $2.5 billion a year. The company has been found guilty of child labor violations and exploiting immigrant labor, and is currently the defendant in a gender discrimination lawsuit affecting two million current and former female employees. Wal-Mart consistently fights unionization and has even closed a store after workers there voted to unionize.
Many unions have been impacted by Wal-Mart, but none as much as the UFCW, whose members in grocery and retail stores have long enjoyed decent wages and good benefits. Those are eroding quickly and will disappear soon if Wal-Mart isn’t stopped. Understanding this, the UFCW launched its "Wake up Wal-Mart" campaign to change the monster retailer by moving to build local community coalitions at every Wal-Mart location in the U.S. in concert with other unions and global union federations.
Even though the UFCW boycotted the convention as part of the Change to Win (CtW) coalition, the convention took up its resolution to have the AFL-CIO put its resources behind the action.
"Wal-Mart will see a campaign like never before," AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka said introducing the resolution.
The delegates voted unanimously for the resolution to join the campaign.
CAFTA loss
During the convention the U.S. House of Representatives took up the issue of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which would cover all Central American and Caribbean countries except Cuba. Like NAFTA and other free trade agreements, CAFTA will send good American jobs overseas, worsen the exploitation of Central American workers and increase the U.S. trade deficit. It will also be used as a threat to crush union organizing drives and to squeeze out union concessions in collectively bargained agreements. The Senate had already passed CAFTA June 30, so this was the last stand for one of labor’s top priorities.
The resolution on CAFTA prepared for the delegates’ consideration, besides listing its sins and pledging the labor movement’s energies to fight it on all fronts, also committed the AFL-CIO to "hold elected officials and candidates from both parties accountable for their position on flawed trade deals such as CAFTA."
In his keynote address AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, when speaking of political officials, declared, "The ones who betray us will no longer be with us, regardless of party."
So when two days later the House voted 217-215 to pass CAFTA, the outrage and anger in the convention hall was palpable, particularly towards the 15 Democrats who voted for it (10 Democratic Senators had voted for it previously), and at the House Democratic leadership that failed to deliver the crucial votes.
A list of the 15 House Democrats was quickly assembled, copied and distributed throughout the hall. The only one from ILWU jurisdiction was Rep. Norm Dicks of Washington state.
Disaffiliation and its effects
The unions disaffiliating from the AFL-CIO—the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters (IBT), and a week later the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)—and the unions that sided with them, boycotting the convention but not disaffiliating—UNITE-HERE, the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA), and the United Farm Workers (UFW)—joined under the moniker the "Change to Win" coalition (CtW). At a press conference the day before the convention was to begin they announced they were all boycotting it. (LIUNA President Terry O’Sullivan said his delegation was going to attend since he hadn’t had time to talk with his members and change course, but that he supported the CtW program.) Because current AFL-CIO President John Sweeney had the votes for his program and reelection, they said, they didn’t see the point of attending and debating. They also proclaimed that none of them would serve in an elected capacity in the AFL-CIO.
SEIU President and CtW leader Andy Stern called their differences with the AFL-CIO "so fundamental" they could not change course.
"The AFL-CIO has adopted the language of reform, but not the substance," Anna Burger, the CtW chair and Secretary-Treasurer of the SEIU, said of the federation’s program. "The CtW has a bold plan for change."
All the leaders of the CtW unions restated their contention that the fundamental principle behind their actions was that they wanted to put more money and resources into organizing. The AFL-CIO was putting too much into political campaigns, like John Kerry’s run for president, and reaped no results, they said. The next day CtW held another press conference to formally announce that the SEIU and the Teamsters were disaffiliating from the AFL-CIO. The other unions stayed in (with the UFCW disaffiliating the following week), but proclaimed their allegiance to the CtW program.
The AFL-CIO countered saying they had in fact made many compromises and adopted much of the CtW program, including putting more money and resources into organizing and giving rebates to unions that did more, and cutting back on the federation’s staff and programs. They argued against pitting organizing work against political activity, contending that changes in labor laws and policies were needed to make organizing less cumbersome and that organizing was needed to have enough strength to win electoral victories and legislative victories. The two are interdependent and interactive, they said. Emphasizing one over the other was a chicken and egg problem.
But the CtW’s bottom line in negotiations seemed to be the ouster of incumbent president Sweeney. They didn’t have the votes to win and Sweeney wouldn’t agree to stepping down at the insistence of a minority of the delegates.
Reporters at the press conferences had trouble nailing the differences between the CtW and the AFL-CIO in ways their editors could understand and that added drama to the big national news story they were sent to Chicago to cover. They kept asking CtW to explain it again. Percentages of funds put into organizing versus political action seemed more like splitting hairs than positions to split the labor movement over. The scene at the CtW press conference announcing the disaffiliation at the SEIU’s Chicago local’s office seemed all the more surreal with a poster hanging on the wall behind Stern’s podium reading: "Unite to Win."
Leadership responds
to discontent
Many of the unions remaining in the AFL-CIO responded to the disaffiliations by demanding strict enforcement of the federation’s Constitution: non-members are not allowed participation in AFL-CIO state federations, central labor councils (CLCs), trade departments and other affiliated groups. The hundreds of state federation and CLC delegates let their discontent show.
The disaffiliated unions make up 40, 50 or 60 percent of the membership of many of these central bodies that coordinate local union political activity on the ground. The dues loss alone from kicking them out would kill these organizations. But more than that—the members of the CtW unions were often the officers and activists of the central bodies, not to mention long-time brothers and sisters bound by years of solidarity actions. State and local activists could not accept that the decisions of a few uncompromising national leaders could wipe out what they had built over decades.
The AFL-CIO Executive Council responded with a dues increase to help alleviate the central bodies’ financial loss. But that did not satisfy the central bodies’ money needs or ease their other concerns. The Executive Council then proposed that all central bodies submit reports to the council on the impacts of the disaffiliations by September and the council would then propose new ways to deal with that.
But by August the pressure from below had the AFL-CIO proposing an inventive way to get around its own Constitution and allow the CtW local unions to participate in central bodies. The AFL-CIO would grant "Solidarity Charters" to the locals, giving them special membership. But the proposal was drafted in a way that the CtW leadership was able to find things in the fine print to object to. They demanded the locals continue to participate in the CLCs and state federations on the same terms they had in the past.
Both sides are finding some resistance from their local officers and rank and filers to the splits and acrimony at the top levels of the movement, and the dust has yet to settle. Much will depend on what happens at the Change to Win coalition’s founding convention scheduled for late September in St. Louis.
