AFL-CIO makes organizing top priority

by Fred Gaboury

This article was reprinted from the March 1, 1997 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

LOS ANGELES - Joe Hill's "Don't mourn for me - organize" could well have been the slogan of this year's winter meeting of the AFL-CIO Executive Council when it met in the City of Angels the week of Feb. 17.

Before the meeting ended, the 54-member council had committed 30 percent of the federation's 1997 operating budget to organizing - agreeing to plunk big bucks into helping the United Farm Workers organize 20,000 California strawberry workers and for a coordinated organizing campaign by 15 construction unions in Las Vegas and adopting an ambitious four-point "Organizing for change; changing to organize" program.

The very fact that the meeting took place in Los Angeles is testimony to the decision of the Sweeney leadership team that the AFL-CIO will, in Sweeney's words, "become a lean, mean, fighting machine." Debra Dion, an AFL-CIO spokeswoman, said Los Angeles was chosen so council members could go to a place where there "is a lot of organizing going on."

She said organizing in Southern California was going "in the direction the AFL-CIO favors, namely reaching out to immigrants." Los Angeles is also the nation's largest manufacturing center. In recent years Los Angeles has been the scene of dramatic organizing drives among janitors, drywall workers, harbor-area truck drivers, hotel staffs and clothing workers.

The unions that led these efforts have, themselves, been through profound transformations - hiring organizers, fostering rank and file activity and undergoing dramatic shift within their leadership that reflects the demographic shifts that have taken place in the area's work force. According to one recent study, organizing campaigns that enlist the rank and file have a success rate three times campaigns that depend on "professional" organizers.

In brief remarks to a family "picnic" in Union Station, Sweeney told hundreds of union families, "The problem of our political program is that there are far too few union members in the United States." He said that bringing new numbers into the ranks of the labor movement is essential to stemming the two-decade-old decline in real wages and narrowing the gap between the rich and working people.

Sweeney admits the campaigns he advocates carry with them certain risks. "But at a time when the voices of working people are weaker than they have been in a long time, we must respond," he said. "No matter the odds or the cost, the buck stops here."

A measure of what Sweeney calls "changing the culture" of the labor movement is to be found in a pamphlet addressed to local union leaders by the AFL-CIO Elected Leader Task Force on Organizing. In it the task force calls upon local unions to devote more resources to organizing and warns that successful organizing campaigns "are an expensive process" and that "organizing for change requires more than small change!"

The task force report points out three other elements of a successful organizing campaign: development of a strong organizing staff, devising and implementing a strategic plan and mobilizing the rank and file. The task force says the case for involving members is strong. "They bring the ability to speak from the heart and from personal experience about how the union really works, countering the traditional management tactic of claiming the union is a 'third party' that gets between employees."

In an explanation of the decline in both absolute numbers and as a proportion of the work force, the Elected Leader Task Force says the decline can be attributed in part to deregulation, downsizing, technological change and the flight of capital as well as to paring work forces by outsourcing and replacing 'full-time, full benefit' employees with temporaries and casuals."

The task force says that President Reagan declared open season when he fired PATCO air traffic controllers and employers took that as a signal to "embrace the goal of 'union-free' workplaces and they pursued it aggressively."

Richard Bensinger, AFL-CIO director of organization, said the labor movement failed to respond in the proper way to changes in the economy and the growing anti-union climate. The labor movement collectively chose the short-sighted strategy "of trying to protect current contracts of members instead of organizing new members" and the result is there for all to see, Bensinger said.

AFL-CIO affiliates must bring 300,000 new workers into their ranks every year just to replace those who retire or lose their jobs. Another 100,000 must be recruited if union growth is to keep up with growth of the workforce - and a million workers must be organized every year for the next 20 years if "union density" is to recover to levels of the early 1950s.

In a speech last August, Sweeney said the labor movement "has yet to be tested" in union representation elections and, until it had, there was "absolutely no chance of changing our movement or changing our country. We either reverse the long decline in our membership or decide to slide quietly into the back pages of our history books."