John Sweeney, RIP

John Sweeney, who ran an upstart campaign in 1995 to take over the AFL-CIO presidency and revive the labor movement, has died. Sweeney in the end was never the transformative figure some had hoped. But that’s not really his fault. He was the head of SEIU when that was one of the only unions putting real money into organizing. He directly challenged other unions to do so as well, started the Organizing Institute, and did a lot to move the labor movement out of the AFL-CIA days and spent more time caring about organizing workers than fighting communism.

Harold Meyerson is one of the people best equipped to write a long remembrance of Sweeney so let’s quote a bit of it.

He worked to boost the power of local AFL-CIO labor councils, and it was in those bodies that leaders like Los Angeles’s Miguel Contreras, working with the national organization, revitalized unions’ political clout, mobilized voters of color and immigrant communities, and used that power to make urban America an incubator for progressive economic policies. Sweeney’s tenure also coincided with the rise of women and people of color to more labor leadership positions, particularly at the state and local levels. Part of that, surely, was simply due to the changing demographics of the unionized urban workforce, but part of that was also due to labor’s shifting stance during Sweeney’s tenure on a host of social questions. It was at the AFL-CIO’s 1999 convention, over which Sweeney presided, that the Federation reversed its historic opposition to immigration and became a staunch supporter of legalizing undocumented workers. Sweeney had always been a Pope Francis Catholic avant la lettre, and his strong belief that America had to welcome immigrants, as it once had welcomed his own Irish immigrant parents, was an integral part of both his civic and religious sensibility.

That was just one of the crucial course changes to which Sweeney steered labor. In the 1930s, millions of young American radicals and progressives had centered their activism in the surging union movement. After decades of the Meany and Kirkland regimes repelling such activists, Sweeney initiated projects designed to re-involve the young and the restless. He had the Federation sponsor a conference at Columbia University to renew ties between labor and the academy; he initiated a Union Summer program for college students; he junked the Cold War mythologies and embraced causes like gender equity at which his predecessors had recoiled. Viewed from the vantage point of 25 years after he assumed the Federation presidency, it’s clear he made the changes that paved the way for young Americans, in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, the Occupy movement, and Bernie Sanders’s campaigns, to feel more positively about unions than any generation in decades.

Sweeney wasn’t able to grow the labor movement once he left SEIU, and none of his contemporaries has been notably successful at that task, either. That generational failure is a key reason why so many American workers have despaired of seeing progress in their lifetimes and turned instead to meaner creeds.

But what Sweeney did accomplish was to bring his embattled movement into alignment with the rest of progressive America, so that if the nation does manage to turn the corner toward a more equitable version of itself, the workers’ cause will not be left behind other progressive advances, as it has been since the 1970s. That there’s this element of contingency to his legacy doesn’t diminish the work that he did. If we are to win a brighter future, John Sweeney will have helped get us there.

RIP.