The "new" AFL-CIO - what others say

by Fred Gaboury

This article was reprinted from the May 3, 1997 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

Amy Dean says there "is a new sense of hope and optimism" percolating at the grass roots today - that "a sense of purpose has been injected into the labor movement" - and attributes much of it to the leadership team of John J. Sweeney, Richard Trumka and Linda Chavez-Thompson who assumed stewardship of the AFL-CIO in October 1995.

Dean, business manager of the South Bay Labor Council in San Jose, California, is one of several labor leaders interviewed for this article. We began by asking each to list the two or three developments that best characterized the "new" AFL-CIO. Our second question was "what next?" for the AFL-CIO convention set for late September in Pittsburgh.

Dean said establishment of the Central Labor Council Advisory Committee to the AFL-CIO Executive Council which she chairs, "was an important development. The councils are no longer distant cousins of the Executive Council who's views were never solicited. Now we are on the ground floor in thinking through the strategies and policies for rebuilding the labor movement."

As for the next two years, Dean said, the convention "will offer delegates the luxury of taking a pause to reflect on our successes and accomplishments of the last two years and to lay the ground work for the next two."

Others we interviewed - state federation and central labor council leaders, local union officers and grievance committee members - agreed with Dean.

In the words of Warren Gould, president of the Greater New Haven Central Labor Council, the AFL-CIO has been "transformed from a dinosaur into a labor movement" and he credits the Sweeney team with setting the "pace and standard" that made that possible.

"The pace of change has been much faster than I anticipated," Gould said while admitting that he is "sometimes impatient."

"If we are to finally succeed," Gould said, "every international union officer and every local union officer must buy into the effort to change parochialism to solidarity. In the past some leaders believed they could organize on their own - but it's been proven you can't."

Gould sees the September convention as an opportunity to build on Union Summer and Labor '96. "If all international unions respond we will have reached our organizing goal by 2000 - and that includes that year's elections."

Stewart Acuff points to the "changed focus" of the AFL-CIO to rank and file mobilization, organizing, political action and coalition building as the "overarching, most exciting development" of the Sweeney leadership.

"All the energy that has been bottled up for years has been turned loose and central labor councils are encouraged to mobilize their activists and allies in demonstrations, pickets and the like. At one time the Atlanta council was considered 'too militant' but everybody's doing it now."

Acuff, who chairs the Atlanta Central Labor Council, and heads the local Jobs With Justice chapter, puts Labor '96, with its "vote like a worker" slogan, at the top of his list of accomplishments over the last two years. "We didn't wait for '96," Acuff continued. "House Speaker Newt Gingrich is from our area and we have a special responsibility to keep the spotlight on him."

And they fulfilled that responsibility, beginning with a "visit" by 300 trade unionists and supporters to Gingrich's district office in March 1995. "We may not have broken the right-wing grip on the House of Representatives but we stopped the Contract on America and protected people like Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) all over the country," Acuff added.

For Acuff, the Pittsburgh convention should be geared to building momentum around the Union City campaign. "We must take clear, concrete steps that will bring the labor movement to the new work force - and to make the labor movement and its leadership look like that workforce. We've done that in the make up of the leadership of the Atlanta council."

Marilyn Lenard, is a member of the Communications Workers of America and Bertha Louise Poe, is from the American Federation of Teachers.

Both are pioneers in the fight for diversity within the AFL-CIO structure - Lenard as the second-ever woman to head a state federation and Poe as the first woman to hold the post of secretary-treasurer of the Michigan State AFL-CIO. Both said the struggle for a diverse leadership is an essential part of the campaign to change the image of the labor movement.

Lenard said, "Sweeney's message" is filtering down to the rank and file. "How else can we explain the fact that 750 people attended our April 19 "Organizing for Change - Changing to Organize" conference, more than double the number expected?" she asked.

As one might expect from a labor leader from Florida, a state where only a little more than one in 10 eligible workers belongs to a union, Lenard sees organizing the unorganized as the key task before the labor movement.

"If we are to succeed in doing that we have to change our image. That's why I like the focus on the need for the AFL-CIO and the labor movement generally to represent the interests of all people," Lenard continued. "The two go hand-in-hand."

Poe, too, gives high marks to the Sweeney leadership team. "They've got the labor movement on the fast track and have begun the process of getting the grass roots up and running," she said in an interview during one of her "out and about" forays.

Poe, born and raised in Alabama, takes special pride in the fact that the labor movement has begun to put forward an agenda to improve the living and working conditions of all working people, the poor and disenfranchised. "Our voice is being heard and listened to," she added.

Poe gives Labor '96 credit for the defeat of GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole in Michigan. "Without our work, Dole would have carried the state."

Charles Deppert agrees with those who speak of the new responsibilities given state and city bodies.

"I've been an executive officer of the Indiana State AFL-CIO since 1987, and until 1996 no officer of the AFL-CIO as much as set foot in the state. Now Sweeney, Trumka or Chavez-Thompson comes buzzing through here on a regular basis," he said approvingly.

He credits these trips for helping to generate a "new excitement" at all levels of the labor movement. "We're not afraid to look at new ways to bring workers under the umbrella of a union contract or affiliation with the AFL-CIO."

Now president of the state organization, Deppert said Labor '96 was the best initiative of the new leadership. "If we've made the other side mad, we must be doing something right," he said, laughing at the frenzied attack by the ultra right on the role the AFL-CIO played in the last election.

Deppert is equally impressed with Union Summer that sent nearly 1,500 students and young workers into the field. "We've opened up a whole new resource after neglecting youth and young workers for so many years."

Deppert, like the others with whom we talked, hopes the September convention continues the thrust of molding the labor movement and its allies into a "bottoms up" coalition that speaks to the needs of working people.

When Bruce Bostick isn't spending his "free" time out building support for the strike at Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel, he's probably out working as a member of the Volunteer Organizing Committee (VOC) of Steelworkers Local 1104 in Lorain, Ohio.

"We organized eight shops and won a contract in every one of them in the last year," he said, adding, "We may not yet have a situation where we have a nationally-coordinated organizing campaign like we had in the days of the CIO but we are beginning to gather the forces to do just that. I think the organizing conferences now underway will go far in speeding the process."

Bostick, who chairs the Local 1104 grievance committee, counts the new approach to international solidarity among the most important developments of the past couple of years. "This opens the door to taking on the transnational corporations in a way fundamentally different than in the past," he concluded.

Tom Balanoff, like Acuff, wears two hats - the first as president of Service Employees Local 73 in Chicago and the second as chair of Chicago's Jobs With Justice. He characterizes the first months of the Sweeney administration as a period that has brought "comprehensive change" to the AFL-CIO itself and to the way it carries on its activities. "The organization is being transformed into a bridge to the 21st Century," he said, laughing as he remembered that Sweeney had once spoken of blocking bridges if that was what was needed.

Balanoff sees two areas that need strengthening: "We need to develop a stronger commitment to coordinated bargaining," he said and called the Union City program "a step in that direction."

"My second concern," he said "is our approach to political action and the need to be more independent. Yes, we have to continue to do what we did in the Labor '96 campaign. But we need to take it one step further and develop trade unionists as candidates for political office at all levels of government. There are too many millionaires and not enough workers in Congress."

It's been an interesting couple years and should make for an exciting convention. As Shakespeare once said, "The past is but prologue."