What is the Purpose of the Labor Movement?

Lane Windham, long-time union staffer and now historian, looks back on 30 years since John Sweeney took over the AFL-CIO with promises of change. That change did happen to some extent, but it did nothing to stop the continued decline of the labor movement. So Windham asks if the point of unions is to build union power or to build power for workers more broadly. Here’s one part, perhaps the key:

Perhaps, then, the Sweeney administration’s greatest miss was that it never bypassed the broken system and opened up new paths to build worker power within capitalism’s latest transmutations. It is imaginable, after all, to have a union movement with low collective bargaining density, but higher worker engagement. A movement can also raise wages and win expansive benefits, outside the traditional collective bargaining paradigm. Bargaining for the Common Good, for example, reimagines bargaining to include both workplace and community issues. At a time when many workers may be reluctant to organize because they remain unsure whether a union can really do anything for them, this community-based model has helped teachers, janitors, retail workers, and more gain more leverage over the issues most relevant to them and their communities, like housing and education.

Another model that bypasses the broken system is the Fight for $15, SEIU’s successful campaign that helped millions of workers win higher wages, inspired dozens of states to raise their minimum wage, and helped put as much as $150 billion in workers’ pockets since 2012. Sweeney campaigned on the slogan that America needs a raise, but the person who delivered that raise  was Mary Kay Henry, former SEIU President and Sweeney mentee. Most importantly, workers won this victory outside the traditional paths to growth that were the locus of most of the AFL-CIO’s organizing  efforts. This suggests that labor could not actually get a raise for America using the current structures, but instead needed to build new ones.

Sweeney called for such new models in the beginning of his tenure. “As unions expand into new sectors of the workforce—from low-wage, largely immigrant workers to high-tech professionals—they’ll find new ways to build organizations that meet their needs,” he predicted in his book, America Needs a Raise. “For those of us already in the labor movement, our obligation is to help them organize themselves—and also to offer some models of organization which they can choose among and, no doubt, improve upon.”

The AFL-CIO’s most ambitious effort to explore new organizational structures is Working America, an associate membership organization founded by the Sweeney administration in 2003 that anyone can join for free. Its largest impact has been political. Working America relies heavily on thousands of canvassers who have doorstep conversations with voters in key battleground states, with a particular focus on the white working class. By 2008, Working America could claim one in ten Minnesota voters as members, for example, and also worked on state- and city-level  minimum-wage campaigns. On balance, however, Working America has developed as mostly a political mobilization group. And it is just one lonely piece in what ought to be a complex jigsaw puzzle of new labor structures within the federation’s orbit. The union movement knew as early as the 1980s that it needed to develop associational membership models, which would allow people not covered by a collective bargaining agreement to join unions. Most unions balked at the idea of pouring resources into working people who would not end up paying full union dues, though a few unions like Communication Workers of America, American Federation of Teachers, and Actor’s Equity have experimented with associate or open membership models. Sweeney, as well as his successors at the AFL-CIO, have shied away from challenging unions to develop such alternative models, preferring instead to put the focus and resources on Working America.

Perhaps, the AFL-CIO’s reversal on immigration policy in 2000 was one of the most important contributions of the Sweeney administration to a new kind of organizing, even though it was outside the purview of the organizing department. For decades, the official policy of the labor movement on immigration was some version of what one Houston-area building and construction trades leader asserted in the early 1980s: “If they’re illegal, then they shouldn’t be in our union, and we shouldn’t be bothering with them.”24 Under Sweeney, the AFL-CIO Executive Council made an abrupt turn on immigration, calling instead for a legal path to citizenship for millions of undocumented workers, and repeal of the law that criminalized hiring them. The impact was enormous.

Even though this immigration reversal did not usher in millions of workers into collective bargaining agreements, it set a new tone and expectation around how the U.S. labor movement was oriented toward millions of immigrants in America’s workplaces and put the weight of the federation behind a national policy shift. This new understanding helped give much-needed space and momentum for the burgeoning worker center movement that developed in the early 2000s, and is now strung together through national networks like the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), National Domestic Workers Association (NDWA), Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), and more. Immigrant workers make up a significant proportion of these groups’ memberships. Though some unions initially regarded these groups as competitors, partnerships have grown as unions have banded together with worker centers to organize workers who were previously outside unions’ radars. The AFL-CIO has brought the National Taxi Workers Alliance (NTWA) onto its Executive Council and supported a special fund that experiments with new forms of membership representation and organizing.

The problem with all of this is pretty basic though–it all costs money. Unions do exist to serve their members. That’s the reason they exist. They don’t exist for your revolution. They don’t exist to organize the entirety of the working class. They don’t even exist to promote social policy that helps all, not primarily. They exist to promote the interests of their members. That sometimes overlaps with larger policy issues, but not always. Organizing costs a lot of money. Think of the legal fees alone. Campaigns for the minimum wage are tremendously expensive and help all workers, but don’t pay off for the union members doing the investments. So how can you go to your members and tell them that we are going to spend millions of dollars on workers that won’t be part of this union? I don’t know what to do about that and I don’t t think Windham does either. It’s the conundrum of the labor movement.