Portside

Author's Note:  This article was first written by the author when he was a doctoral candidate in Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. This article integrates decades long first-hand labor movement experience with research undertaken for his dissertation on the postwar labor movement. It was first published in WorkingUSA (March-April, 1998) and subsequently as a chapter in The Transformation of U.S. Unions, Ray M. Tillman and Michael S. Cummings, Eds. (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999) and was revised in July 2025.

The Roots Of Labor’s Crisis 

It has been called the postwar labor-management accord, social compact or contract, industrial truce, accommodation, and detente. By whatever name, out of the years during and immediately following World War II emerged a system of labor relations markedly different from that preceding the war. The New Deal-era labor movement which had been engaged in sharp, seemingly intractable conflicts with the nation’s corporate giants, had been guided by solidarity, militant collective action, considerable membership initiative and authority, and a broad sense of class interest — earning it the characterization as “social movement” unionism. It included a significant number of workers who questioned the very assumptions on which capitalist production relations were founded and who had an alternative socialist vision for society.  

In the decades immediately following the war, a very different labor movement developed — one that placed a premium on stable and responsible relations with management, social respectability, insider political access, and pursuit of a middle class lifestyle. It accepted and even celebrated the achievements and constraints of modern industrial capitalist society. Its former adversaries in corporate America no longer sought organized labor’s destruction, and sought instead reliable (junior) partners in production for an expanding consumer economy. 

The terrain dramatically shifted again in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, yet the labor movement, until recently, has clung tenaciously to its past — not the militant idealistic past of the 1930s but the conservative past of the Cold War. As the economic, political, and social ground has shifted under the postwar labor movement, it suffered a persistent and continuing decline in its membership, power and influence. From its mid-’50s peak of over 35%, unions today represent less than 9.9% (in the private sector near 5.9%) of the labor force. Once heralded as leader of a broad progressive coalition, unions now are portrayed as merely a “special interest.” Rather than social movement unionism, what the postwar era produced was a contemporary version of business unionism or what is today more commonly referred to as the service model. Unless it stems the tide of this decline, organized labor risks being marginalized in a few labor market niches of the 21^st century economy. 

This article examines how elements of labor’s own organizational culture now act as impediments to its revival. The world that helped create that culture changed while organized labor for the most part did not. I discuss the roots of labor’s present crisis and assess the response of the new leadership of the AFL-CIO and its efforts to restore labor’s ranks and power. I find they fall short of what will be needed. The article describes what is needed — a deep-going process of internal transformation. It concludes with some recommendations about how unions accepted productivity bargaining, taking some responsibility for production efficiency, and for the orderly management of conflict through might proceed to transform themselves and rejuvenate their organizations, and thereby their prospects in the next century. 

* * * * * 

In general terms the postwar accord was a tripartite arrangement, characterized by management's willingness to live with the labor movement where it was already organized, while it continued to resist and avoid unions outside labor's well organized core sectors. Unions, for their part, accepted managerial prerogatives that conceded control over production, the labor process, and other strategic business decisions. They also increasingly elaborate multi step grievance procedures leading to compulsory arbitration. Both parties accepted (or tolerated) substantially greater government intrusion into what had been the private sphere of labor management relations.¹ Industrial relations, it was thought, had finally “matured.”  

The labor relations system of the 1950s assumed, and in many respects required, an expanding economy and U.S. global dominance in capitalist markets. Most of the labor movement willingly embraced capital's global aims and became collaborators with U.S. postwar hegemonic ambitions in the name of "fighting communism." They imposed a consensus in support of U.S. government and corporate global objectives through a purge of labor’s anti-capitalist Left and other dissenting voices.  

The Service Model Business Union Culture 

The postwar labor relations system helped generate a new culture in which collective bargaining and worker struggles became subject to greater legal scrutiny, regulatory control, and court precedent. Disputes were safely contained in a web of administrative procedure. The relationship between labor and capital moved from the no-holds-barred battlefield of workplace class conflict to the well-ordered administrative terrain of industrial relations and human resource management — the province of a growing army of labor relations professionals, lawyers, and administrative managers on both sides of the bargaining table. Union bureaucracies mushroomed as labor’s “middle-management” expanded. Union leaders and staff with increasing rarity returned to the ranks from which they had risen, while college graduates could actually contemplate a career in labor. Adherence to administrative and legal procedure and ability to maintain labor discipline became in time the measure of "responsible" union leadership. Union strategies were substantially determined by what lawyers advised was permissible and by what the temper of a Cold War order dictated was acceptable. 

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which originally (as the Wagner Act of 1935) had been written to encourage collective bargaining, was transformed by the postwar Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin Acts and the decisions of the NLRB and courts into a weapon of employers. The New Deal balance of power had shifted during and after the war substantially to capital’s favor.  

The years immediately following the war, however, appeared to affirm the wisdom of the accord. An expanding economy paid off with rising real incomes, greater job security, home ownership, consumer credit, and opportunities for college education which had been beyond the reach of most working people prior to the war. These economic improvements, however, were not accompanied by comparable advances inside the workplace. Speedup, job-stress, and alienation continued and even worsened as production systems were rationalized. Not everyone gained equally from the “deal,” either. Labor force segmentation created two divergent tracks, consigning a large (and growing) portion of women, rural workers, and African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American men to the most poorly paid, insecure, low-skilled dead-end jobs in sectors that had been largely by-passed by the labor movement during its period of expansion. Among workers, semi-skilled and skilled white male workers employed by large multinational firms benefitted most. But the lion’s share of the rewards of the postwar boom went to those who had always gained the most — employers and wealthy stockholders. When their “share” began to decline, the “deal” unraveled.

The “Deal” Unravels 

Beginning in the late 1960s this "social contract" started to break down as U.S. capital suffered declining rates of profit and productivity, faced newly revitalized more efficient foreign competitors, failed to modernize its own productive capacity, and began to experience saturated markets and global over-capacity. Workers grew more militant in the face of speed-up and various efforts to rationalize production leading to an increase in strikes and other disruptions. A new baby boom generation of workers in particular was thought to be afflicted with an epidemic of workplace alienation and discontent. The cost of acting as global hegemon grew as Americans turned from advisors to puppet regimes into full-blown combatants in a Southeast Asian hot-war manifestation of global Cold War tensions. The 1973 Mideast oil embargo sealed the fate of postwar arrangements. Profit margins turned South, and with them many of the key assumptions on which the postwar labor management accord depended crumbled. 

Employers took the offensive to restore their rate of profits and market share, generally at the workers' expense. 1973 marked the beginning of a nearly unbroken decline in the real standard of living of a majority of American workers. Inflation and the rising cost of maintaining the warfare/welfare state began to seriously undermine the effective purchasing power of American consumers as real wages declined, personal debt soared, and corporations and the wealthy successfully shifted the tax burden from themselves to workers. Workers in the most heavily organized industrial core of the economy were bludgeoned into concessions and two-tier contracts (protecting current members at the expense of future ones and further isolating them from the next generation of young workers), and lost more ground to plant closures, automation, and corporate restructuring. Union-busting became legitimate once again and spawned a growth industry of consultants and law firms (“goon squads with brief cases”) that specialized in union-avoidance and deunionization. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the wholesale discharge and replacement of air traffic controllers during the strike by PATCO in 1981, an offensive by capital against labor that had been building for almost a decade was given the official blessing of the government. Two of the three partners to the postwar tripartite understandings had abandoned the accord and turned on labor. The offensive escalated. Disbelieving and bewildered union leaders were wholly unprepared to respond and labor remained on the defensive throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Electronic technologies made possible technical rationalization — job-displacing and worker-controlling — without expanding the base of employment for most workers dislocated by those technologies. The electronics revolution gave capital a qualitatively greater capability for global expansion and flight. Many employers pursued the Sunbelt option, relocating jobs to bastions of the open shop that had been preserved by Taft-Hartley options for state “right-to-work” laws (which outlawed mandatory union membership requirements). This process was made easier by labor’s failure to mount credible organizing efforts in the South and Southwest (or for that matter almost anywhere outside the public sector). Other employers chose the foreign option of relocating operations to countries kept in a state of underdevelopment and subservience by local capitalists acting as fronts for multinational capital, authoritarian dictators, and armies supplied and trained by the U.S. and its allies (backstopped by the threat or reality of direct U.S. military intervention in the name of “fighting communism” or “defending democracy”).  

Redistribution of industrial capacity, along with demographic and other labor force shifts, had another important effect. As young workers left their homes for distant suburbs and greenfield jobs in other states, they left behind the cultural influence of the generation which had been responsible for labor’s New Deal and wartime resurgence. More often than not they found employment in places that were assiduously cultivating a union-free/union avoidance environment in new suburban industrial parks that served as compounds against occasional forays by unions chasing relocated facilities. Places like the Silicon Valley were held up as a paradigm of this new employment model, creating a symbiotic relationship between job-hungry communities and profit-hungry employers across the nation in a downward spiral of wage and standard-cutting that has been described as a “race to the bottom.”  

Recognizing a dramatically different environment, corporations sought to "reinvent" themselves while unions remained largely unchanged, embedded in an organizational culture based on an economy and labor-management-government relationship that no longer existed. The leadership of most unions remained in the hands of graying white men who remained wed to policies, practices, and a style of leadership that was out of touch with an increasingly diverse labor force that for the  most part had no experience with or exposure to unions. Union officials who saw the shift seemed powerless to respond effectively without putting their own interests at risk, because doing so would require a break with a system with which they and their organizations believed they had reached accommodation. Even those who might have been inclined to take such risks found themselves trapped by member expectations generated by a consumerist culture these officials had helped to encourage. Absent pressure from below demanding a radical departure, it was easier to conform, to deny reality, to batten down the hatches in the hope that the storm would blow over rather than to challenge the prevailing order. It took another quarter century for a crisis spawned by the new reality to provoke a change.² 

“More and Better” Is Not Enough 

This then is the context in which the new leadership of the AFL-CIO sought to break organized labor out of the tightening circle that capital and a succession of both Democratic and Republican administrations had drawn around it. The “New Voice” team of John Sweeney, Richard Trumka, and Linda Chavez-Thompson began to implement changes to enable organized labor to marshal resources and mobilize members, and to more aggressively execute labor’s strategies in pursuit of its traditional goals.  

In a letter to affiliates on January 15 of this year , President Sweeney wrote,

"The Federation has committed itself to speak for working people every day at every level of our world economy, as well as to transform the role of the union from an organization that focuses on a member's contract to one that gives workers a meaningful say in all the decisions that affect our working lives from capital investments, to the quality of our products and services, to how we organize our work."  

This represents a substantial departure from views expressed by Sweeney’s predecessors. Within Federation headquarters Sweeney established task forces on "organizational culture" which are looking at problems that heretofore had been discussed only by radicals, dissidents, and an occasional academic.  

The new leadership moved aggressively to retool, streamline, reorient and mobilize the unions to meet the challenges they confront and to revitalize and rebuild labor’s ranks. Its clarion call is mobilization for action. It shifted resources to promote and support organizing; it restructured its international relations work to expand solidarity across borders in order to deal more effectively with transnational capital; it shifted its political action priorities to focus more on issues and to improve labor’s capacity to target, educate and turn out its own voters.³ 

The Federation took a step toward greater gender, racial and ethnic diversity by electing Linda Chavez Thompson to the newly created post of Executive Vice President, and by adding more women and people of color to its General Executive Council. A newly created Women’s Department was part of the new leadership’s effort to reach out to constituencies that represent the fastest growing segments of the labor force. Its director, Karen Nussbaum, brought to the post experience as head of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor under Secretary Robert Reich and her pioneering work as founder of 9 to 5. Plans were laid to bring this program to every corner of the labor movement.  

Repairing a rupture between labor and academia that continued after the Vietnam War, the Sweeney administration participated in a series of teach-ins around the country about the labor movement, beginning with Columbia University in 1996. This turn of affairs began with an open letter from 41 scholars, authors, and educators published in November, 1995, calling for renewing the labor-academic relationship. Labor-friendly scholars numbering in the hundreds subsequently established new connections to the Federation and its affiliates, sparking new research, joint actions, and support for labor’s economic, political, and social agenda.⁴ The Federation’s newly appointed Director of Education Bill Fletcher engaged the labor education community in developing basic economics education for union members to help them understand the systemic forces outside the workplace that affect their jobs and lives.  

The new leadership encouraged member participation in organizing, and greatly expanded the Organizing Institute (OI) to recruit and train a new generation of union organizers. Richard Bensinger, who had been most responsible for the efforts of the OI, was appointed to head a new Organizing Department with a 1997 budget of $30 million. It proposed multi-union strategic campaigns that target whole industries, occupations, and labor markets, and launched such drives in the hospitality industry of Las Vegas, among strawberry industry workers in California and poultry workers in the South. While not abandoning traditional government-conducted elections entirely, unions were encouraged to also utilize other strategies for securing employer recognition. Bensinger described the NLRB procedure as “a sham process,”... one of the best-kept dirty secrets in the country....”⁵ A Department of Corporate Affairs was established to research corporate vulnerabilities, coordinate corporate campaigns, leverage union stockholdings and pension investments, and to take battles with recalcitrant corporations to capital markets.  

Under the leadership of Marilyn Schneiderman, the Federation’s Field Services Department was reconstituted as the Department of Field Mobilization in support of its new strategic goals. A taskforce of central labor council leaders working with Federation officials developed a “Union Cities” program to harness these heretofore largely inactive bodies to the organizing objectives. The Departments of Corporate Affairs, Field Mobilization, Public Affairs, and the Industrial Union Department coordinated with the Organizing Department to support non-NLRB strategies for winning union recognition and first contracts.  

The AFL-CIO assumed a high profile role in the 1996 elections, spending $35 million directly on an issues-based voter education and mobilization campaign that targeted strategically selected Congressional opponents of labor’s legislative agenda under the direction of Steve Rosenthal. These political operations were supported by a newly reorganized public relations effort designed to raise organized labor’s public image and influence. A report by the Center for Responsive Politics indicates that in all, unions spent at least $119 million during the 1996 election cycle, half of which went to campaign contributions. All but a small portion of these funds were spent directly or indirectly to benefit Democrats, and despite the considerable expenditure of resources, labor did not succeed in its objective of taking back control of Congress. Nonetheless, the Federation proclaimed the results as a victory for their workers’ agenda. ⁶ 

One of the less well analyzed changes made by the new leadership involved labor’s Cold War international operations. Sweeney recruited Barbara Shailor from the headquarters of the Machinists Union to head up a newly consolidated AFL-CIO International Affairs Department. She promptly disbanded separate programs aimed at Latin America, Asia and Africa that were widely regarded as conduits for the U.S. intelligence operatives. Government funding for these programs had already been dramatically cut after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Sweeney promised to end further reliance on government funding. In place of the Federation’s earlier Cold War ideological test for relations with foreign labor movements, the new leadership stated its readiness to cooperate with any labor organization willing to confront their common adversaries — transnational corporations. Reaching past the government-dominated labor federation (CTM) in Mexico, which had previously been the only officially recognized labor grouping, the AFL-CIO and its affiliates established ongoing cross-border working relations with independent unions like the Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT) in an effort to organize the booming maquiladora factories that now dominate Mexican border towns from Texas to California.⁷ This new attention to international solidarity has already begun to pay off. During the UPS strike, a Teamster emissary dispatched to Europe was able to secure solidarity commitments from unions representing UPS employees across the continent, raising the specter of even wider disruptions if the strike was not settled.⁸ 

Together these changes represented a substantial course correction for the AFL-CIO, particularly given that they all occurred during John Sweeney’s first two-year term. While important first steps, however, those reforms represented a “more and better” approach rather than a fundamental restructuring of labor’s key institutions.  

Potholes In The Road To Change 

On the other hand, the fundamental way in which the AFL-CIO and its affiliates participated in politics continued to focus on raising and making financial contributions to candidates and party organizations, voter registration, voter education, and election day mobilizations. It endorsed candidates, most of whom lacked any enduring commitment to or organic relationship with the labor movement. Other than apportioning more funds to one than another, these activities have a familiar ring. Labor’s fundamental relationship to the political process remained unchanged — one of dependency rather than independence. 

Their approach to collective bargaining and resolution of workplace grievances also altered little. Some unions claimed to have replaced the postwar service model with an “organizing” model. They made modest progress in mobilizing their members, which may create more but not qualitatively different activity. Too often this limited conception of the organizing model has meant little more than that stewards now do things that had once been done by business agents so that business agents can do more of what staff organizers do. But the roles of union representative, whether filled by a business agent or steward, remains guided by an image of union rep as social worker, litigator, advocate, and sometimes gladiator on behalf of relatively passive members. There was little substantive change in the nature of member participation in the bargaining process, in the resolution of their own problems, or their "ownership" of decisions, activities, goals and objectives of their unions. This limited approach grafts a patina of activism onto what remains unionism as a consumer good.

Despite its laudable efforts, the New Voice (and most union officials) continued to embrace a concept of unionism that rests on an assumption of mutual interests between workers and employers that masks or ignores the imbalance of power between them. In the much heralded partnership between the giant healthcare provider Kaiser and its AFL-CIO unions crafted by John Sweeney, management promised advance discussion of strategic business decisions and employer neutrality in efforts to organize the remaining unorganized Kaiser workers. Yet the agreement placed beyond discussion all of the cost-cutting measures (facilities closures and job cuts) Kaiser had already announced. And, of course, prior consultation is not the same as mutual consent. In those cases where management and the union disagree, Kaiser retained the right to act as it sees fit. The compact was announced at the same time that Kaiser nurses were engaged in a struggle to get the corporation to discuss quality of care issues and to beat back wage cuts and other management concession demands, which, if successful, would come to haunt the corporation’s other workers and unions.  

In Detroit, newspaper workers were engaged in an ongoing two-year battle with media conglomerates Gannett and Knight-Ridder which were intent on turning the clock back on collective bargaining. They demonstrated their resolve to impose regressive contract demands, breaking the unions if necessary. The final outcome had implications far beyond Detroit. Yet national leaders of the affected unions and the AFL-CIO failed to develop a coordinated multi-union campaign that could have made those battles the responsibility of the entire labor movement.  

Strike strategy remained the province of leaders of the affected unions, not the AFL-CIO. The national unions failed to expand the scope or scale of struggle commensurate with the industry-wide implications of the strike. They were unwilling to defy court injunctions in order to bring production of the struck papers to a halt through mass picketing or other direct actions. Instead they abided by court-dictated picketing restrictions and relied on a consumer boycott, occasional symbolic civil disobedience, and unfair labor practice charges at the National Labor Relations Board — a strategy that left Gannet and Knight-Ridder free to operate, subsidizing their continued resistance (and considerable losses) with profits from their other lucrative ventures (such as USA Today).  

The AFL-CIO General Executive Council only agreed to mobilize a national demonstration after the unions involved had ordered their members to make an unconditional offer to return to work. The demonstration was too little, too late to demonstrably affect the outcome. The inadequacy of banking on a Federal Court injunction sought by the NLRB to restore strikers to their jobs was revealed when the courts turned down the request, leaving locked out workers to languish as the matter worked its way through what years of appeals. Even if successful, union members would return to work under terms dictated by the newspapers — without contracts, with no union security provisions, without the right to arbitrate grievances, and without any of the other protections their contracts had afforded.   Neither the Federation nor the striking unions said how they intend to recover their contracts and restore union conditions. 

In this instance, as in the strikes at Caterpillar and Staley in Decatur, Illinois, organized labor dealt with strike support as if engagements with transnational corporations were little more than high profile local skirmishes. Labor’s response lacked the focus, energy, and urgency these struggles deserved, and reflected general unwillingness to fully mobilize union members and resources nationally to meet the strategic challenges these strikes represented. To do so would require that unions be prepared to put their assets and relationships within the political arena at risk. If union officials refuse to step beyond the constraints imposed by existing labor laws (as the Miners did at Pittston), if they do not develop well coordinated national solidarity actions that bring to bear the energy of the entire labor movement, unions will continue to find themselves outflanked by large corporate employers.  

Yet the structure of the AFL-CIO limits what independent initiatives can be taken by its leadership. The Federation remains a creature of its affiliates, who collectively define the limits of joint action and thus the outer bounds within which leadership is able to exercise leadership and moral authority. The New Voice leadership was constrained by the unwillingness of these national unions to act. Even if it had the will (debated by some), it did not possess the power or authority to override the decisions of its affiliates concerning collective bargaining and strike strategy. (A hint of the power of such joint action was evident during the 1997 national UPS strike when Sweeney was able to announce a pledge by the other affiliates to put up whatever funds were needed for strike aid for as long as necessary to win that battle.) 

This raises the issues of both ideological resolve and institutional constraints within the Federation — matters which the Sweeney leadership was either unable or unwilling to address. In this respect, the absence of a well organized Left and democratic rank-and-file movements within unions that press for new strategic initiatives and greater rank and file involvement leaves a vacuum of “leadership from below.” As a consequence, leadership from above tends to remain locked in established patterns of institutional relations within the Federation administration, among members of its General Executive Council, and between its affiliates. Those venues remain slower to change; they are further removed from the crisis confronting union members. The capacity of the labor movement to match its rhetoric with resolve and its willingness and ability to organize concerted coordinated national (and international) responses to corporate challenges tested whether the New Voice leadership could have achieved a qualitative turn in the trajectory of labor decline. 

Rebuilding Labor Requires More Than Good Reforms

However important and welcome, neither individually nor in combination were the changes announced sufficient to bring about real organizational transformation or to significantly rebuild union ranks and power. To achieve such transformation (as distinct from merely ‘more and better’), to realize the objectives defined by President Sweeney, organized labor will have to change the relationship between members and their unions. An example may help illustrate the point.  

Merely to maintain union density (the proportion of the work force that is organized) at its 1995 level (14.9%), the labor movement needed to enroll about 400,000 new members. In 1996, union density dropped to 14.5% because the workforce grew by 3 million but union membership remained at about 16.3 million. To raise the 1995 density one percentage point would have required about 1.5 million new members. Even with a more aggressive organizing program, shifting resources, and greater attention, organized labor was unable to even maintain its relative proportion.  

In the joint United Farmworker/Teamster campaign to organize the Watsonville, California strawberry industry of 15,000 workers, it was reported that the two unions and the AFL-CIO together fielded approximately one full time staff person (organizer, field supervisor, or support, research, and PR staff) for every 250 to 300 workers. If on average each cost about $50,000 (approximately $100,800 in 2025 dollars) annually (a modest estimate of salary, benefits, taxes, expenses), the personnel costs for this one campaign alone for one year come to $2.5 to $3 million. If that cost were extrapolated nationally, to merely maintain union density relying on staff organizers would require between $67 million and $80 million ($135 and $161 million in 2025 dollars). Raising the density by one point would cost between $250 and $300 million ($503.9 and $604.6 million in 2025 dollars) for a single year’s effort.⁹  

In an interview with labor journalist David Bacon, Richard Bensinger acknowledged, “...e will never have nearly enough professional organizers to organize the number of workers we need to. And if you look at history, that's not how the labor movement organized in the first place. We need more staff, and unions need to hire more organizers. But I think unless the fight is owned by the membership, and unless union leaders give ownership to the membership, it won't succeed.”¹⁰ 

The data and several studies bear him out. Relying on the traditional NLRB-supervised representation election process, in 1996 unions won just 47.7% of their elections (down from 48.2% in 1995). The NLRB election win-rate in manufacturing was only 37.5%; in services, 59.6%; in construction, 55.4%; in retail, 51.5% and wholesaling, only 30.8%; and in transport, communications, and utilities, 47.3%. These victories produced a total of just 69,111 potential new union members. Why only potential members? Because unions only succeed in gaining first contracts in about half the units they organize via the NLRB process, and in most unions, newly organized workers don't start to pay dues until they ratify their first contract. To make matters worse, in 1996 there were also 485 decertification elections (where unions lose the right to represent workers). Unions won only 30.7% of those elections, resulting in the loss of a large majority of the 25,011 affected by them. So the gain in actual new members for the entire labor movement for all of 1996 through the NLRB process was likely little more than the number lost to decertifications. When additional losses resulting from business failures, permanent layoffs, plant closures, quits, firings, retirement and death are factored in, there is no mystery why total union membership remained essentially flat despite modest increases in organizing effort.¹¹  

Two different academic studies of union organizing outcomes confirm what these numbers suggest. Traditional approaches will never be sufficient to rebuild the labor movement. Kate Bronfenbrenner at Cornell University looked at various union tactics used in NLRB elections and found that more than any other influences (employer tactics, bargaining unit demographics, organizer background, organizing climate), union strategies can make the most difference in the outcome. She determined that a “rank-and-file intensive” strategy could increase union win rates by from 12 to 26%. In a separate study, Jack Fiorito, Paul Jarley, and John Thomas Delany found that organizing effectiveness is enhanced by innovative organizing efforts, representational specialization, and internal union democracy, but is reduced by excessively centralized national union control.¹² 

Quite clearly, rebuilding the labor movement cannot be achieved just by hiring and training more staff (yet that is where much of the effort continued to be expended). But beyond the costs involved there is a more important issue. If it could be done with more staff, the result would be staff-dependent unions. Thus, a ‘more and better’ approach simply replicates service model unionism on a larger scale. An argument could be made that there might need to be a front-end investment of staff to kick-start a process of union building that over time would become less staff dependent as it picks up momentum, reaches local critical mass, and results in sufficient union power to overcome resistance among any remaining group of non-union employers. Even granting this argument, it does not speak to what kind of unions result. It does not address the quality of each new member’s relationship to the union, to coworkers, or to members of other unions. One lesson astute organizers learn is that newly organized unions more frequently than not develop a culture that reflects the character of the struggle conducted to win recognition and a contract from the employer and the role played by the workers themselves during that effort. If the objective is participatory, solidaristic, community-minded, class conscious unions, that objective cannot be reached with the tools and strategies of “more and better” of the kind of unionism we now have. 

Transformation: A Deep-Going Process of Cultural Change

Deeper changes will be needed — changes not only in the style but in the substance of how unions operate, and how their members relate to the ways unions function. It will require changes in how union leaders, staff, and members understand the nature of the challenges they confront, how they understand and engage with the environment in which they function, and how they view their respective roles in the life of the union. This requires a reassessment of programs and strategies to be sure, but also of the mission and values that guide them. These are changes that must occur in the “culture” of the labor movement, not merely in its leadership, allocation of resources, strategies, or tactics. 

In this perspective, deeper changes in labor’s organizational culture are required in every facet of the life of unions: 

• in collective bargaining — in the nature of demands made upon management, in what is considered a “legitimate” subject for negotiation, in the scope of managerial prerogatives; in what is an “appropriate” role for unions and union members in their workplaces, and in the strategies pursued to induce employers to accept these new definitions; 
• in its approach to resolving grievances and labor disputes — in the role played by members as active participants in resolving problems and labor’s willingness to look outside legal strictures for solutions that cannot be found within them; 
• in labor’s relationship to the unorganized — in its definition and advocacy of its own interests, in its approach to organizing and gaining recognition and contracts, in the role played by union members, by community allies, and by the unorganized themselves in the process of building unions; 
• in how unions participate in politics (both electoral and legislative) — in their relationship to the political process, political parties and politicians, in their role as political actors, in their capacity as stakeholders in their communities and in society at large; 
• in labor’s connection to communities — in the nature of alliances and working relationships with forces outside the labor movement, in its view of reciprocal obligations and interdependence with other constituencies, including women, people of color, immigrants, gays and lesbians, youth and elderly, the poor, chronically unemployed and underemployed, contingent workers, migrant and undocumented workers, precarious workers, and others; 
• in the way labor defines and articulates its vision and values, and in how it communicates those values and deepens and expands their acceptance both within and outside the labor movement; 
• in the ways unions function — in the substance of the relationship between union officers, staff, and members, in the process by which strategic decisions are made and the manner in which they are implemented.

Such changes cannot take place without involving the union’s rank-and-file in meaningful conversations in which they examine their present circumstances and discuss what they are prepared to do to change them. At its heart there will have to be a dramatic increase in the level and nature of member participation in every aspect of the life of the union in ways that give union members greater effective "ownership" of their unions and responsibility for charting their course. The common “two-step” dance in which union leaders complain about member apathy and members ask, “What’s the union going to do for me?” (as if it were something external to themselves) will have to end. Attitudes, expectations, perceptions, beliefs, values, and feelings about how the union should conduct its business, and even what role the union should play in the workplace and in society, need to be questioned, reevaluated, and transformed as part of a process of deep-going change. 

Another Path to Renewal 

There is an alternative. Its seeds can be found in President Sweeney’s statement on transformation quoted above. Both Bill Fletcher in the AFL-CIO Education Department and Richard Bensinger in the Organizing Department points to it. The labor movement can only be rebuilt with a more critically conscious engaged rank-and-file who see their unions as the most effective, perhaps the only instrument for realizing their hopes and dreams for themselves, their families, their communities and society. This requires that union members become engaged with their unions as co-creators of their own destiny. And that requires that unions be able to project a vision of what society might be like if its governing principles were economic and social justice, concern for humanity and community over property, and sustainable economic development that is not achieved at the disadvantage or by the exploitation of others who inhabit the planet.  

We need to build a labor movement that recognizes, articulates, and practices values that are fundamentally different from those of the market, namely values of solidarity, equality, inclusivity, community, and democracy. It would embrace the economics of sustainable development which serves the entire community rather than only those fortunate enough to hold union jobs, while protecting the environment, addressing the threats of climate change and global warming, and changing humanity’s relationship to the natural world from one of exploitation to one of living in harmony with it in mutually sustainable ways of living. 

It would develop an analysis, program, and strategies predicated on the priority of labor over capital and community over markets. It would practice international solidarity based on the recognition of mutual interdependence of working people across borders, and it would pursue a kind of politics that seeks to make such solidarity the core of American foreign policy rather than one driven by the needs and hegemonic aims of transnational capital. Such values give life to our aspirations for a society that is more just, equitable, democratic, and humane. A program based on these values would lead to a labor movement with strong ties to communities and to the various struggles against oppression of others — one that treats struggles for gender, racial, ethnic, and other forms of equality and justice as central. It would pursue both electoral and non-electoral politics of mass action independent of either major party to directly assert the interests of workers and the poor through organizations democratically controlled by them.  

One may arrive at these values through class analysis, political commitments, religious faith, or a belief in the fundamentals of democratic citizenship. However one arrives at them, an internally democratic labor movement will have to articulate a vision that radically departs from the "me first," status-driven, acquisitive, consumerist ethos which is the hallmark of our market-obsessed system and which favors the enrichment of the few to the disadvantage of the many.  

Transformation Begins With A Union-wide Conversation 

The path to that form of unionism starts with a process of discussion within the AFL-CIO, its affiliates, and the broader labor movement,  in every labor council and state federation, in every local union and bargaining unit group that is willing to organize such a discussion. It is a discussion that begins with simple questions:  

What do you think you and your family need and deserve as a member of this society and this community, as a worker in this workplace or occupation, and as a member of this union? 

How do you think the union could best play a role in achieving those goals?  What are you willing to contribute to making that happen? 

The measure of the success of this effort will be the actions generated from the deliberations of an engaged membership guided by basic human values of democratic involvement, social and economic justice, equality, solidarity, fairness, inclusivity, and community that characterize the labor movement at its best, not just the level of militancy or radicalism it generates. 

From this perspective, a “less militant” course of action involving greater numbers from the rank and file who have developed its objectives and tactics out of their own discussions is more desirable than one called for by gallant leaders who conceive the plan themselves and whose members say, “We’ll do whatever you think is best.” The reason is simple: an engaged rank-and-file capable of evaluating an action they themselves have conceived, guided by the values noted here, can change course — can become more militant based on their own assessment of what it will take to achieve their objectives if a less militant course proves insufficient to secure a satisfactory response.  

A membership that is accustomed to responding to whatever comes out of union headquarters, supported by a small group of devoted union activists, remains consumers of unionism rather than its co-creators. Such members may support what is proposed. Some will participate. Most will usually remain spectators who wait to see what results from the course of action chosen. If they like the results, they will applaud and re-elect the incumbent leadership; however, their relationship with that leadership and the union will remain unchanged. But — and this is key — the labor movement can not realize what President Sweeney called for without transforming the relationship between members and their leaders, and between members and their union. It is the ultimate source of any union’s power, and that power can only be fully realized if members are willing to engage deliberately, participate consciously, and assume responsibility for the fate of their own organization. They must become active in creating their own future. 

Transformation Is Not A “Quick Fix” 

This is not a “quick fix” remedy for what ails the labor movement. Organizing this kind of discussion at every level of the labor movement, in each union body, among members in their workplaces and homes will take time and effort and must be seen as a process. The measure of the success of this process will be determined by the nature of the discussions taking place, by the extent to which they penetrate every crevice of the labor movement and reach down deeply to engage every member. Who is involved? What questions are asked? What core values are expressed within the discussion? How many members participate in actions that arise out of those discussions? What is the quality of their reflection and evaluation after the action is taken? What conclusions do they draw that help them to determine what action should follow? Does that subsequent action actively involve an even larger number of members? The answers to these and many other questions will determine the success of this effort. 

• Labor leaders who support this direction should promote this form of transformation and encourage and support it wherever they can, communicating that support through both customary union channels and by utilizing other vehicles (Internet postings, interviews with the media, articles in magazines, etc.). 
• Union activists and others who embrace this approach should support and become involved in efforts to implement it. For many union officials and union activists this will require learning some new skills — learning to listen rather than instruct, to interact with rather than direct, to engage in dialog rather than polemics, to draw into discussion those who are accustomed to silent observation of what others have to say, by not permitting those who always speak to dominate discussion. This path to transformation will require greater attention to involving and engaging members than mobilizing and “motivating” them does. It will require a conversation about core values that are at the heart of what the labor movement stands for, and how those values differ from the values promoted by the culture of the marketplace. 
• “Horizontal” means of communication should be developed to link experiences across jurisdictions and geographic boundaries. Conferences, workshops, retreats, ad hoc meetings, training sessions, and other means should be employed that strengthen, deepen, and extend transformative tendencies within the labor movement. “Open” technologies, such as Internet chat groups, discussion lists, electronic bulletin boards and E-mail systems should be made available to as many members as is feasible. Toward that end, unions should do much more to make available to their members these technologies and the training to use them. However, a caution is in order: this change can not be achieved by tweets, tik-tok videos and Facebook or other social media postings. Relying on technology to engage members will never substitute for or achieve directly person-to-person and in-person group communication.

Clearly, to implement this process of renewal there must be “space” for open discussion, a space that tolerates dissent but seeks consensus, one that can accept criticism yet builds unity, and one in which mistakes can be openly discussed without the need to assign blame. There must be a willingness to reflect honestly on the past, and to be open to innovation and experimentation for the future. Expanding the democratic realm in the labor movement is key to winning greater democracy in the workplace, in the economy, and in society. A labor movement that recognizes and articulates these values must seek to embody them in its internal operation.  

Energy For Change — A Bottom-Up Process 

Steps taken by the new leadership toward reform, toward transformation based on the embrace of these values, should be applauded and supported. Failure to act in this way should be analyzed and criticized. The role of those who aspire to a transformed labor movement is to work at its base, recognizing that the necessary condition for transformation is an active participatory membership committed to democratic values and steeped in democratic practice. No matter what happens at "the top," such a labor movement can only be built local by local, workplace by workplace.  

To achieve these goals we need local unions, the fundamental building block of the labor movement, in which leaders and members are engaged in renewing, revitalizing and restructuring their organizations to encourage the kind of discussion imagined in this article and make it a central feature of everything else the union does. This process of transformative discussion will permeate union debate, planning, education, training, and actions in an atmosphere that engenders thoughtful evaluation, reflection, and celebration.

NOTES:

1. For a more thorough discussion of the postwar labor-management accord, see the essays collected by Bruce Nissen (ed.) in U.S. Labor Relations 1945-1989: Accommodation and Conflict (New York: Garland Publishing 1990). While it by no means was the first expression of the postwar changes summarized here, the 1948 contract settlement between General Motors and the United Auto Workers, described as “the Treaty of Detroit” (Fortune, Vol. 42, No. 1, July, 1950, pp. 53-55), is widely regarded as marking the turn from confrontational and adversarial class war labor relations to a more cooperative postwar regime. That settlement established the precedent of multi-year agreements, annual cost-of-living adjustments and productivity-factored wage adjustments, union cooperation to improve efficiency and productivity, and generous fringe benefits. (John Howell Harris, The Right to Manage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), pp. 150-51. 

2. In 1982, the AFL-CIO Executive Council created an internal Committee on the Future of Work to study the deteriorating circumstances of workers and their unions. The committee issued two reports in 1983 and 1985. The first, “The Future of Work,” pointed solely to changes that had occurred in the workplace and society; it made a series of brief public policy recommendations which organized labor had no capacity to effectuate. The second, “The Changing Situation of Workers and their Unions,” took note of the need for changes within unions; it made recommendations for various forms of programmatic, institutional, and structural changes. Some were implemented, but none challenged the fundamental assumptions, prevailing organizational culture, or distribution of power within the labor movement. It took another decade of continued decline before a revolt within the Executive Council forced Lane Kirkland into retirement and brought John Sweeney and his colleagues to power. 

3. Many of these changes are reported by David Moberg in “The Resurgence of American Unions: Small Steps, Long Journey,” WorkingUSA, May-June, 1997, pp. 20-31. For a more critical view, see Jane Slaughter, “The New AFL-CIO’s First-Year Report Card, Sweeney: Pass, Fail or Incomplete? ,” Against the Current 67, Vol. XII, No. 1, March/April 1997, pp. 7-10. Michael Yates offers a more contextual analysis in “Does the Labor Movement Have a Future?,” Monthly Review, Vol. 48, February, 1997, pp. 1-18. 

4. See Thomas J. Sugrue, “The Long Road Ahead,” and Priscilla Murolo, “What Kind of Alliance?,” both in Radical Historian Newsletter, No. 75, December, 1996; and Herman Benson, “That Labor-Intellectual Alliance,” in Union Democracy Review, January, 1997. 

5. Interview with Daniel Levine, editor of Disgruntled, an Internet “e-zine,” posted 7/9/97; http://www.disgruntled.com.  

6. Ruth Marcus, “Labor Spent $119 Million for ‘96 Politics, Study Says,” Washington Post, September 10, 1997, p. A19. Jane Slaughter, “The New AFL-CIO’s First-Year Report Card,” cited in Note 3. 

7. Abby Scher, “Coming in from the Cold in the Struggle for Solidarity,” Dollars & Sense, No. 213, September/October, 1997, pp. 24-28. These changes notwithstanding, the Federation has yet to issue a public accounting for its lengthy collaboration with the intelligence community, or to apologize for its interference in the internal affairs of labor movements around the world in support of U.S. Cold War objectives. In the name of anti-communism, its collusion with death squads and dictators led to the death, disappearance, and imprisonment of untold thousands of union activists and democratic activists. 

8. “European Transport Unions To Discuss UPS; Strike Possible,” AP-Dow Jones News Service, Dow Jones Newswires, August 15, 1997 (posted to the Wall St. Journal Website). Teamster representatives were invited to address the World Council of UPS Trade Unions and the London-based International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), which has affiliates throughout Europe. An anonymous August 18, 1997, AFP wire service story reported that the World Council of UPS Trade Unions includes organizations in Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden. 

9. Union density data through 1995 are reported in Barry T. Hirsch and David A. Macpherson, Union Membership and Earnings Data Book: Compilations from the Current Population Survey (1996 Edition), Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Affairs (1997); 1996 data are reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on its Website (www.stats.bls.gov:80/newsrels.htm and www.stats.bls.gov/news.release/, January 31, 1997). Estimates of new membership required to maintain densities and associated costs of organizing personnel required are from calculations by the author.  

The Bureau of National Affairs Daily Labor Report (September 22, 1997, p. AA-1) reports that AFL-CIO biennial convention records show that overall membership has continued to decline despite the efforts of the new leadership. The 1997 total was 102,000 lower than it was when Sweeney was first elected in 1995. Nineteen unions reported increased membership; 22 showed no change; 29 reported declines. (A smaller percentage of the nonagricultural private sector workforce was organized than in the Depression years, 1930-33, before the Wagner Act was adopted.) 

10. “The Promise of a Raise is Not Enough,” Dollars & Sense, September/October, 1997, P. 22. 

11. NLRB election data from Economics Notes, July-August, 1997; decertification data from Harry Kelber, Labor Talk, posted to the Internet on 7/20/97. Accurate data on the number of new members brought in outside the NLRB process are not available. However, since government-supervised procedures remain the primary method by which unions organize, it is safe to assume that new members gained by non-traditional means have not altered the net membership figures, which had not risen. 

12. Bronfenbrenner, “The Role of Union Strategies in NLRB Certification Elections”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 50, No. 2, January 1997, pp. 195-212; Fiorito, Jarley, and Delany, “National Union Effectiveness in Organizing: Measures and Influences”, Industrial Relations Research Review, Vol. 48, No. 4, July, 1995, pp. 613-635. 

© 1997, 2025 by Michael Eisenscher. All rights reserved.  

E-Mail: meisenscher@gmail.com

Michael Eisenscher is a six decade veteran of labor, civil rights, peace, environmental and other social justice struggles. He has been a union activist, organizer and labor educator. He served as national coordinator of US Labor Against the war from its founding until he retired at the end of 2015.  He was a delegate to the Alameda Labor Council from Peralta Federation of Teachers, and co-founder of its Climate & Environmental Justice Caucus. His articles have appeared in a number of journals and labor anthologies.  He is presently active in Labor for Democracy, the National Labor Network for Ceasefire, Labor Rise Climate Jobs Action Group. He also founded and is publisher of SolidarityINFOService, a social justice meme and headline news service.

Thanks to the author for submitting this to Portside.