AFL-CIO Convention To Enact Labor Movement Revamp
Tuesday, July 30, 2013(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)
Leaders of the AFL-CIO will ask delegates at its convention, scheduled
Sept. 8-11 in Los Angeles, to enact a massive revamp of the labor movement, the
federation’s Executive Council learned on July 24. The revamp is a result of
hundreds of forums and discussions unions have hosted for months, discussing
reasons to revitalize the movement and how to restore worker power. What
convention delegates must do is figure out the nuts and bolts of the
reconstruction, in small-group sessions in Los Angeles. The revamp dialogue drew
4,700 people to forums hosted by state feds, unions and central labor councils,
along with 75,000 AFL-CIO Convention 2013 page views and almost 3 million
Facebook and Twitter posts, “shares” and “retweets.” AFL-CIO
President Richard Trumka presented the preliminary results to the
council.
“It was ‘Let a thousand flowers
bloom,’” Peg Seminario, the fed’s Occupational Safety and Health Director,
told reporters about the results of the listening sessions. The revamp is
needed, Trumka says, because the labor movement faces a huge crisis, as
private-sector union density is at its lowest point since the 1920s. That
lessens labor’s influence and hurts workers, union and non-union, nationwide,
by removing a counterweight to corporate greed. Only 7% of private sector
workers are unionized, and public-sector unions, whose growth helped lessen the
slide in overall U.S. union density – now around 12% -- have also seen
membership declines since the Great Recession hit. “The labor movement is
organized around the workforce that was, not is. With the growth of the
service sector, the self-employed and contingent workers, the labor movement
needs to change,” Seminario says.
All that led the
AFL-CIO into discussing whether the federation should transform itself into a
voice for workers, organized and unorganized, with an eye towards eventually
organizing and bargaining for the newer members. The big goal everyone put first
was to that labor should elevate one issue, quality jobs, to the top of its list
and keep it there, an interim report to the council says. And respondents said
labor should not abandon or downgrade the key way to achieve that goal,
collective bargaining, but supplement it with other avenues to good jobs and
other goals. And that labor can’t do it alone and with its present
structure.
The quality jobs goal ties in with another
theme respondents want: Pushing an “agenda of shared prosperity and of holding
corporations accountable” for their actions. That includes reinstituting
progressive tax rates, a financial transactions tax and “a massive jobs
program” the report explains. “This was about organizing and broadening the
labor movement, increasing political power and involvement and also about how to
deal with a global economy,” Seminario said. “We need to look at new
initiatives to enable more people to become part of the labor
movement.”
What the delegates must decide is how to
get there, she admitted. “Participants were nearly universal in calling for
more organizing, even as they collectively suggested many things that
‘organizing’ might mean,” the report says. “Perhaps the most
widely held opinion is that we need a more open conception of what it means to
be part of the labor movement” including “organizations for workers that are
outside the tortured paradigm of the National Labor Relations Act.” Seminario
said respondents frequently cited Working America, the AFL-CIO’s group for
people who won’t or can’t join unions, as an example of how to add
members.
The report also recommends labor reach out
more to community allies, religious groups, women, people of color and the
lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender community.
That communication
must be a two-way street, Seminario said. “We have to be more aggressive
and affirmative” in both joining together with those groups and in agreeing on
and campaigning for a joint agenda and each other’s causes, she
added.
Participants also reiterated – strongly –
that labor should make it clear it is not tied to the Democratic Party, and vice
versa. They said labor’s political operations should emphasize issues,
such as higher wages, a living wage, the rights of public workers and shared
prosperity, and not politicians.
But they
split on the nuts and bolts. A minority argued for stronger ties to the
Democrats, while holding Dems accountable for votes on workers issues. The
majority split over whether labor’s political operation should concentrate on
“competitive races we can affect” or undertake a 50-state strategy, with
more emphasis on the heavily non-union, and growing, South. There was no
discussion about Republicans in the report.
Political
structure is also a problem, the report says. Much of labor’s political
campaign apparatus is channeled through state federations and local central
labor councils and “many are not well resourced and staffed for increased
activity.”
- By Mark Gruenberg, Press Associates, Inc.
(PAI)