Labor’s Prodigal Son Returns
Labor’s prodigal son came back to the fold last week, when the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) rejoined the AFL-CIO 20 years after it had up and left. In 2005, its departure had caused quite a stir. Then as now, SEIU had roughly two million members, and when its then-president Andy Stern announced that his union, along with six others, was leaving labor’s longtime federation to form a new not-quite-federation named Change to Win, it reduced the AFL-CIO’s aggregate membership from a little over 13 million to a little over 9 million, palpably diminishing the political heft of the labor movement’s foremost lobbyist and election-time voter mobilization operation.
By reaffiliating, the Service Employees are boosting the Federation’s joint membership to more than 14 million. It’s also tilting that combined membership a bit, both demographically and politically. SEIU is a highly diverse union, whose members include hundreds of thousands of home health care workers, hospital support staffers, and janitors—groups that are disproportionately female, immigrant, and racially diverse. At a time when the working-class vote has been trending toward Trump, SEIU’s members are probably among the least likely to be moving in that direction. They stand in political counterpoint to more male-dominated working-class unions like the Teamsters (who are not in the AFL-CIO) and the building trades (who are). They will likely stiffen the Federation’s spine, to whatever degree it needs stiffening, in opposing the mass deportations that Trump has promised.
In rejoining, SEIU finds itself inside the fold with another million-plus-member union of service-sector employees who are also disproportionately people of color: the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). There’s an even stronger synergy between those unions: AFSCME is the largest union of public employees (not counting teachers) in the eastern United States, while SEIU is the largest in western states (California in particular, where it claims 700,000 members). By rejoining the Federation, SEIU has upped the odds (which I still think are rather low) of the two unions combining. Of course, combining in itself doesn’t enable the union movement to do what it needs most: grow.
In truth, though, both SEIU and AFSCME, along with the two massive teachers unions—the National Education Association (NEA), which is outside the Federation, and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which is inside—have been working together for years, sometimes almost as a de facto semi-federation of their own. Half a decade ago, I moderated a public discussion among the presidents of those four unions, introduced by a film their unions had produced in which the presidents actually completed each other’s sentences. What the presidents highlighted in their discussion was the joint work their unions were undertaking, particularly in voter mobilization, which ran alongside the Federation’s own efforts. Their combined memberships totaled between eight and nine million—almost comparable to the AFL-CIO’s—so they could justly claim to be performing a hefty share of labor’s political work. Their efforts weren’t counterposed to the Federation’s; AFSCME President Lee Saunders was (and still is) the longtime chairman of the AFL-CIO’s political action committee. But it was also clear that the presidents believed they could better coordinate election-time activity by having the two largest unions that didn’t belong to the Fed (the NEA and SEIU) work in tandem with the two largest unions that did (the AFT and AFSCME).
Now that SEIU has rejoined, it’s the NEA that’s the main outlier; with a little over three million members, it’s the nation’s largest union. During the past four decades, there have been times when the NEA (which disproportionately represents more suburban and rural school districts) has considered joining the Federation and merging with the AFT (which disproportionately represents more urban school districts). But the NEA has consistently rejected that option, to which the AFT has been more open.
WHAT EXPLAINS THE DEFECTIONS OF 2005, which SEIU led? After all, SEIU had been at the very center of the AFL-CIO. At the time, the Federation’s president was SEIU’s former president, John Sweeney. Remarkably, Sweeney had won the Federation’s presidency in a 1995 election against Tom Donahue, who not only came out of SEIU but out of the same local as Sweeney (New York’s doormen and building maintenance workers). As for Andy Stern, who led the march out of the AFL-CIO, he had been SEIU’s organizing director when Sweeney was the union’s president, succeeding to the presidency itself when Sweeney decamped for the Federation.
Stern’s election as SEIU president had been part of a new trend in American labor. Usually, when a union’s top slot came open, it was filled by some senior vice president, and Stern had to defeat one such senior VP in order to become SEIU’s leader. Stern wasn’t alone, however. During the 1990s, at least two other major unions had seen their top organizers, rather than their ranking bureaucrats, assume union presidencies: John Wilhelm at HERE (the union of hotel workers), and Bruce Raynor at the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers. The three were all a generation younger than the Sweeney-Donohue generation, and their victories reflected not only a triumph for relative youth (or, more precisely, early middle age) but also for labor’s newly rediscovered emphasis on organizing. Raynor had overseen some remarkable organizing victories in the clothing and textile mills of the deeply anti-union South; Stern had presided over the unionization of immigrant janitors in big-city downtowns; and Wilhelm had masterminded the unionization of Las Vegas’s mega-hotels.
Sweeney, too, had based his campaign to take over the AFL-CIO, following its 40-year ossification under George Meany and Lane Kirkland, on his record as a master organizer. At a time when most American unions were scarcely spending anything on organizing, Sweeney’s SEIU during the 1980s and ’90s had spent a third of its budget on organizing, and had nearly doubled in size (some of which, to be sure, had come from affiliating other, small unions). The membership numbers of other unions during that time had either stagnated or shrunk.
At a time when the working-class vote has been trending toward Trump, SEIU’s members are probably among the least likely to be moving in that direction.
But after ten years with Sweeney at labor’s helm, the movement had continued to shrink. Stern, Wilhelm, and Raynor were frustrated at the failure to grow, and believed that some of the unions less zealous about growth than theirs—including some of the building trades—were holding labor back. For a time, it appeared that Wilhelm might challenge Sweeney for the AFL-CIO presidency, but he never seemed to have enough votes to pull that off. So their unions, along with four others representing carpenters, laborers, farmworkers, and supermarket employees, left to form Change to Win. Rather than diminish the labor movement’s political clout at the state and local level, most of those unions’ locals remained affiliated with their respective state and local AFL-CIOs. The change, if change there were to be, would come in organizing.
But it didn’t.
In 2009, I covered for the Prospect what was supposed to be Change to Win’s signature organizing campaign: that of the roughly 100,000 workers who toiled in the warehouses of Southern California’s Inland Empire, to which trucks brought the cargoes that had arrived at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach for resorting and loading onto other trucks that carried the goods to Walmarts across the United States. Then as now, Walmart was the nation’s largest private-sector employer, and it was thought that by organizing key links in its supply chain, labor could gain the leverage required to organize its stores.
But the same problems that vexed all organizing campaigns also derailed this one, which was run by Change to Win and chiefly backed by the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which each sought to unionize distinct categories of Walmart employees. To begin, the warehouse industry was fissured in every which way, which made unionizing them a Sisyphean task. Walmart wasn’t the workers’ employer, nor was the logistics company with which Walmart had contracted this part of its supply chain, nor were the individual warehouses with which the logistics company had subcontracted, nor were the individual warehouses, which had sub-subcontracted with many of the roughly 270 temporary employment agencies in the area, which were the warehouse workers’ nominal employers. I interviewed a number of workers who’d worked at the same job in the same warehouse for years, even as the identity of their nominal employer had shifted dozens of times.
Moreover, the organizers had deployed in anticipation of that year’s Democratic trifecta in Washington, including the new Obama administration, enacting a labor law reform bill that imposed actual penalties on employers who illegally fired pro-union workers to deter unionization campaigns, and maybe even compelled Walmart to acknowledge it was really the warehouse workers’ employer, too. Variations of those bills had passed the House and almost cleared the Senate’s 60-vote hurdle in the opening years of the Carter and Clinton administrations, but never quite made it to those presidents’ desks. It never quite made it to Obama’s, either, and was similarly to be doomed during the Biden presidency as well.
Some of the Change to Win labor leaders had occasionally insisted not only that the broad movement wasn’t giving sufficient emphasis to organizing, but also that it was giving too much attention to politics at organizing’s expense. But the failure to amend labor law so that workers could organize without fear of being fired doomed the organizing campaigns of the Change to Win generation as it had those of the Meany-Kirkland era, though in Meany and Kirkland’s time, labor largely didn’t even try to grow its private-sector membership.
In time, some of the seven unions that had left the AFL-CIO in 2005 quit Change to Win and rejoined the Federation (the Laborers, the hotel workers, the farmworkers, UFCW), while another also left Change to Win but didn’t reaffiliate with the AFL-CIO (the Carpenters). What remained of the Clothing and Textile Workers became part of SEIU, so today, they’re back in the Fed, too.
HISTORIANS HAVE NO DIFFICULTY EXPLAINING why the AFL split in 1935, when the Mine Workers, the Clothing Workers, and a few other smaller unions left to form the CIO. The renegades left because they believed, correctly, that labor could organize entire factories, indeed, entire mega-manufacturing corporations like General Motors and U.S. Steel, that were the commanding heights of the national economy, through plant-wide and industry-wide organizing. The AFL, by contrast, insisted its members stick with organizing by distinct trades: the carpenters here, the welders there, and so on. The unions that stuck with the AFL were composed chiefly of skilled trade workers, disproportionately of native birth (which by then meant chiefly white Protestant and Irish Catholic stock), while the workers who soon flooded into the CIO were both more diverse and held jobs (such as those on assembly lines) that were thought to demand fewer skills. The gap between the AFL and the CIO was easily understood.
But what was the Change to Win split all about? It was rooted in the belief that labor needed to organize or it would die, but that was also at the core of the Sweeney ascendency, for which the activists who went on to found Change to Win had assiduously worked in 1995. When that ascendancy failed to arrest labor’s descent, the younger generation of organizers (and Wilhelm, Raynor, and Stern were all children of the ’60s) split with their elders, even though the Sweeney regime at the AFL-CIO was itself filled with children of the ’60s—and some of the spirit of the ’60s—too.
Labor’s problem was, and labor’s problem remains, that labor law has been so degraded by business and conservative interests that employers can still fire workers at the slightest sign that they may be thinking about going union, and despite the illegality of such firings, there’s no effective penalty for this form of lawbreaking. That problem has only been highlighted in recent years by the organizing successes of such professional workers as university teaching assistants, museum docents, think-tank researchers, hospital physicians, and orchestra musicians—that is, by workers whom employers can’t fire because they’re not easily replaced. Organizing workers who can be replaced is still deterrable by their bosses firing them, which is why organizing victories among such workers are still very infrequent, and why the percentage of unionized American workers is still at record lows.
Change to Win couldn’t change that, and despite the occasional heroic victory by the UAW here, or the Teamsters or the Communications Workers there, neither, really, could anybody else. American unions are at record-high levels of popularity today, particularly among the young, but the law is set against them, and American business and its elected agents are determined to keep it that way.
So, welcome back, SEIU. Like all your peers, you’ve got a lot of work—political as well as organizing—to do.
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Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.