CWA 1180 - News

Unions debate strategy and structure in the face of continuing decline
The question is, How can labor build enough power to take on today's powerful employers
January 2005

The American labor movement is in crisis. Each year, the percentage of U.S. workers that are union members—union density—slips further. Union density is now 12.9% overall, and an even more precarious 8.2% in the private sector. Jobs in industries that are traditional union strongholds, like manufacturing, are disappearing due to plant closings, outsourcing and other trends, while the growth areas of the economy are all in sectors with very low union density rates. Every year more and more jobs are non-union jobs, and because of that, fewer and fewer jobs have union wages, benefits and working conditions. For non-union workers, this means poor pay, inadequate or non-existent benefits and no workplace rights; for union workers, it means ever-increasing pressure from employers to drag their standards down to the non-union level.

PARTICIPATE IN THE DISCUSSION!

The debate about the future of the labor is too important to leave in only labor leaders' hands. It needs to be engaged by union members at every level of the labor movement.

1. Write a Sound Off response about what you think of this debate and the direction the labor movement should go in.

2. Visit the "Unite to Win" website, www.unitetowin.org, and post your thoughts.

3. Download a special pdf version of the feature article on the debate, President Cheliotes's column and the Sound Off question that you can share with co-workers.

The results of labor's decline are tangible and stark: Increased inequality; 28 millions workers living in poverty; 45 million Americans without health insurance, and millions more with inadequate coverage; the destruction of pension plans that once used to guarantee workers a retirement with dignity; unprecedented increases in corporate power; a shifting of the tax burden from corporations and the wealthy onto working people; ongoing assaults on public services. A young black man has a higher chance of going to jail in the U.S. than of going to college. The infant mortality rate in New York City is higher than that of Slovakia.

Individual unions and the AFL-CIO have been trying to reverse the slide in union density for years by organizing new workers. Many unions have increased the resources they devote to organizing and have developed new strategies to organize. And there have been tremendous successes. But because of the economic trends noted above, unions must organize over a half a million workers every year just to keep the density figures from slipping further. Organizing in such numbers, however, has proven impossible because the labor laws that govern private-sector organizing are virtually worthless. The law allows employers to intimidate and harass workers who want to form a union. Many employers also fire workers for organizing, which is illegal but which they get away with because it usually takes several years before the National Labor Relations Board gets around to reinstating the fired workers. Under conditions like these, it's impossible to organize enough workers to stem the tide of losses.

The dilemma created for unions by these adverse conditions has generated a debate within the labor movement about what strategies labor ought to pursue to overcome the obstacles. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the country's biggest union, helped start this debate with various versions of a strategy paper that was initially circulated informally and later published in New Labor Forum and Labor Notes, where it became part of a series of on-line articles debating the subject. Most recently, SEIU wrote a proposal, titled "Unite to Win," and created a website where its proposal and others are posted and debated (www.unitetowin.org). In December, hundreds of union leaders and activists gathered at a two-day conference in New York City to discuss these strategic questions. Several 1180 members, as well as officers and staff, attended the conference, which was sponsored by the Queens College Labor Resource Center.

In 2003, five unions created the New Unity Partnership (NUP), a group of unions with similar views on the problems and solutions to labor's crisis. They have said they want to act together to start addressing the problems rather than wait to build a broader consensus within the AFL-CIO, where there is much more diversity of opinion. The idea is that labor cannot afford to wait; we must act now. NUP has generated controversy, both because of the ideas it has put forth and because the NUP unions have threatened to leave the AFL-CIO. (The NUP unions are SEIU, UNITE, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees, the latter two now merged into UNITE HERE, the Laborers International Union of North America, and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. The Carpenters had already left the AFL-CIO prior to the formation of NUP.)

At the heart of the debate are two things: first, SEIU and NUP's argument that the structure of the labor movement is an impediment to our ability to grow, and second, the restructuring proposals that flow from that analysis. There are three related points that NUP supporters make. First, unions ought to be reorganized along industry lines. At present, workers in the same industry are often divided into multiple unions and thereby have their strength divided when they deal with employers. Second, unions ought to consolidate and merge into fewer but bigger unions. Most union members are in the 15 largest unions (CWA is eighth largest with 700,000 members); there are another 50 unions that make up 22.4% of labor's ranks. "Size matters," as SEIU Vice President Gerry Hudson put at the December conference, because it takes enormous resources to be able to take on big multinational companies. "Our unions need to get bigger and stronger to tackle major corporations," said UNITE HERE General President Bruce Raynor. Third, national unions (often called "internationals" in union jargon) and the AFL-CIO should have more centralized authority and power. As with the issue of size, the reason for this is to increase strength through coordination and consolidation in order to be able to take on big employers. SEIU's "Unite to Win" program calls for AFL-CIO authority to "require coordinated bargaining and to merge or revoke union charters, transfer responsibilities to unions for whom that industry or craft is their primary area of strength, and prevent any merger that would further divide workers' strength."

The NUP and SEIU's proposal have come under sharp criticism from some other unions and labor intellectuals. The most frequently cited concern is that the proposal runs roughshod over union members and makes leaders less accountable to their members. Unions are democratic institutions (if imperfectly so) and top-down restructuring through forced mergers and member-swapping deprives them of a genuine voice in their own organizations. (The issues of accountability/democratic control and centralization/consolidation are actually separate. It is possible to have centralized and coordinated structures that are democratic if representatives at every level are elected, if they truly represent the mandates of their members and if they report back discussions and decisions made at higher levels. In practice, though, centralization has gone hand-in-hand with declining member control; mergers have been formally voted on, but without real opportunity for discussion or alternatives.)

The SEIU proposal's inattention to the role of members goes deeper, though, than questions of process. "The inner life of the union is what sustains us," CWA Executive Vice President Larry Cohen told participants at the December conference. Cohen talked about the crucial role of shop stewards in the life of the union, about the union's foundation in real workplaces with real people who work together and together are the union. "Far too little of that is talked about," he said, "and far too much about structure." If what the NUP is proposing is, as the title of one article describing the ideas put it, "a new architecture for the house of labor," then the problem with that new architecture is that it includes no plans for the foundation of the house: the women and men who make up the ranks of the labor movement. And a house without a strong foundation cannot withstand the battering of the elements.

Larry Cohen has emerged as the most visible and vocal counter-voice to the SEIU proposal. At the conference, he handed out a 10-point proposal of his own (also available at www.unitetowin.org). He drew attention to the considerable overlap between the proposals, the shared premises and analysis, as well as differences. For instance, he addressed the emphasis in the SEIU proposal on organizing on industry lines by saying that the rate of union density by industry was an incomplete way to gauge real strength. There are four factors that help determine strength: density within an industry, yes, but also density within an employer (especially important when dealing with huge multinational companies, many of which cover more than one industry; for example, General Electric, which makes weapons systems for the Pentagon as well as light bulbs and also owns NBC Television), density in a local or regional labor market, and density within an occupation. Cohen's proposal called on the AFL-CIO to create and fund a guaranteed national strike benefit. Without the right to strike, labor loses the ability to effectively pressure employers, and the right to strike is severely compromised without the ability to strike, and that includes the ability to survive a strike economically.

Rather than union density, Cohen's emphasis is on fighting for collective bargaining and organizing rights. These are overlapping and not contradictory goals, but where the CWA leader draws a sharp distinction is on the proposed means of achieving the goals. "If anybody in this room thinks we're going to change collective bargaining rights based on the way we structure rather than on the way we mobilize," he said at the conference, "they are kidding themselves." Mobilization—the ability to mount a real fight, to bring thousands and hundreds of thousands of people into action, to mount serious, coordinated challenges to power from below—all that depends on the "inner life" of the union, on the foundation on which the house of labor is built.

Debate in the labor movement has continued since the December conference. Cohen's proposal is on the "Unite to Win" website, as is a proposal from the Teamsters emphasizing reform of the AFL-CIO. Many other voices have joined in the debate. For this debate to be meaningful and for it ultimately to produce changes that will matter, though, it has to happen at every level of the labor movement. Rank-and-file members of 1180 and other local unions need to be a part of the discussion as much as Larry Cohen or Bruce Raynor.

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