The real fight
behind the AFL-CIO split
Farce and Greek Tragedy
By Leo Troy
Professor of Economics, Emeritus
Rutgers University
Union
dissidents and the media have been saying that the
split in the AFL-CIO is a result of the Federation’s failure
to organize the unorganized and halt the long decline of
unions’ market share in the private sector economy. They say
the Federation is under- spending on unionization and
overspending on failed efforts to elect Democrats. Union
critics of John Sweeney—especially Andrew Stern of the Service
Employees International Union and James Hoffa of the
Teamsters—further say that they have withdrawn from the
AFL-CIO to dramatize their opposition to these policies. The
reforms they demand include a refund of part of the
affiliates’ per capita membership fees so that individual
unions can spend more on organizing instead of on political
action.
In truth, the reformers’ charges are farcical
and their remedies hollow: Membership fees to the AFL-CIO are
a very small fraction of affiliates’ total expenditures (and
income). Moreover, it’s a rare affiliate that ever paid the
dues of its full membership to the Federation, and that
includes Stern’s and Hoffa’s unions. The affiliate unions
usually retain most of their income, which they are free to
use for any purpose, including organizing. Their charges
against the Federation’s failure to organize are specious. The
basic responsibility and authority for organizing has always
belonged to each affiliated union, not to the Federation.
(Incidentally, did either Stern or Hoffa poll their members to
determine their views on disaffiliating from the AFL-CIO? Some
union members, reacting to their autocratic rule, are asking
for continued affiliation with the Federation.)
The real dispute here is over the leadership of
the Federation. And to no one’s surprise, John J. Sweeney has
been reelected AFL-CIO president. While the organizational
infighting is a farce, the effort to depose Sweeney imitates
Greek tragedy. Sweeney took a small private sector union, the
Building Service Employees International Union, and built it
into the Service Employees International Union, a giant union
whose numbers are in government. He passed his achievement on
to Andy Stern, the man who would be king. That’s Greek tragedy
Part I.
Greek tragedy Part II is this: A decade ago, in
1995, Sweeney orchestrated the ouster of AFL-CIO president
Lane Kirkland, his predecessor, on identical grounds—failure
to organize—that Stern has recycled against Sweeney! Had Stern
overthrown Sweeney, would it make a difference? Would the more
than 90 percent of unorganized private workers in the U.S.
discover the benefits of unions? In a word, “no.”
No matter who is president of the Federation,
union membership and density will continue its long-run
decline. Worse, not only has the total number of workers
unionized and the share of workers unionized fallen, but so
has the number of unions and, most importantly, the number of
union locals. Numbering about 60,000 in 1960, the number of
current local unions has dropped by about one-third. For
American unionism, no structural component is more essential
to its vitality and stability than the local union.
Of all the industrialized G-7 countries, none
has a private sector union movement that has escaped the loss
of members and the loss of union density in the workforce. All
of them—including Canada—have seen government unions supplant
private sector unions in numbers, importance and density. In
fact, the U.S. is the only country in which private sector
unions still represent a majority of all organized workers,
but not for much longer.
The reasons for the worldwide decline in private
sector unionism are common to all nations: There is
competition in international and domestic markets, and
structural changes in the labor market (industrial,
occupational, gender, geographical). Joseph Schumpeter’s
theory of creative destruction (that capitalist enterprise
creates new consumer goods, new methods of production and
transportation, new markets and new forms of industrial
organization to replace the old) explains why and how these
forces work.
By contrast, public policy and employer
opposition have played minor roles in the decline of unionism.
Pro-union labor laws have been of limited benefit to private
sector unions, even in Canada, while employer opposition, far
more intense in the U.S. in the 1930s, has not been a major
factor. More important is employee opposition to unionism: the
fact is most workers don’t want union representation. And this
brings us to the alleged organizing achievement of Stern’s
SEIU and Hoffa’s Teamsters. The SEIU is predominantly a public
sector organization built by merger and acquisition— or what I
call “organizing the organized.”
Consider this example from California. When
Sweeney was its president, a 100,000-member public employee
group joined the SEIU to prevent raids on its members. During
Stern’s presidency, officials for Los Angeles County virtually
handed over some 80,000 home care workers to the SEIU, an
action that was mimicked by other public jurisdictions. And
still the health care and social services sectors remain less
than ten percent organized in the U.S. The private sector is
largely beyond Stern’s efforts to unionize it. Even janitors
and service workers, Stern’s favored targets, are only 18
percent organized, and many of them are government workers.
Hasn’t Stern cast stones from a glass house? The same holds
true for Hoffa: Truck drivers are only 18 percent organized
and the trucking industry is 21 percent unionized. For decades
government regulation of the trucking industry promoted union
growth, but after deregulation, market competition reduced the
Teamsters’ power and numbers. The Teamsters union once
recorded more than 2 million members, but currently it is
thousands of members below that count. Meanwhile, the
Teamsters union is trying to organize so many industries
outside trucking (including government) that it qualifies as a
“General Union” (i.e., any worker is fair game).
Leaders like Stern and Hoffa have proclaimed
their dedication to organizing low paid workers. If so, let
them return to Sweeney’s failed goal of a decade ago, the
organization of the strawberry workers! Finally, as to the
Democrats and politics: Because organized labor’s in-kind
support of the Democratic Party outweighs its direct financial
aid, I have long identified the Democrats as the de facto
Labor Party of the U.S. The departure of the Stern and Hoffa
from the AFL-CIO does not change that status.
Leo Troy is Professor of Economics at Rutgers
University-Newark and an expert on labor relations. His
numerous articles and books include The Twilight of the Old
Unionism (M.E. Sharpe, 2004) and Beyond Unions and Collective
Bargaining (M.E. Sharpe, 1999).
