Labor Lost.

• Author: McMenamin, Michael
• Position: Declining influence of labor unions

Why the AFL-CIO's cynical survival strategy is doomed

Organized labor was a one-century phenomenon. Look it up. Union members were only 9.5 percent of the private sector work force in 1999, down from a peak of 37 percent 40 years earlier. The last time union membership was that low was in 1902, when union members were 9.3 percent of the private sector work force. And back then, unions were true member-based organizations poised to play a significant role in the new century's economic growth, not the government coddled, coercive institutions they have become. The current union leaders, led by AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, have no realistic plans to change course. They are presiding over the final, terminal stage of organized labor. And they like things just the way they are.

Today union leaders, politicians, and employers conspire to take from their members, constituents, and employees hundreds of millions of dollars every year, in violation of the First Amendment. What was once a proud mass movement that improved and dignified the lives of its members in vital segments of the manufacturing-based economy is now no more than a special-interest adjunct to a political party, humored and tolerated less for the voting bloc it no longer commands than for the soft money it can deliver. Organized labor in the private sector no longer serves the interests of its members. It has failed to adapt to the new information economy, as it successfully adapted to industrialization in the early 20th century. It is dying before our eyes.

No one symbolizes the sad, cynical future of organized labor as just another special interest group with money to throw around better than Sweeney, the well-padded former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The SEIU, whose core members are janitors and low-level health care workers, is now the single largest union in the AFL-CIO. Sweeney, who majored in economics at Iona College, has been a union employee all his adult life; he started working for SEIU in 1960. He has never cleaned office buildings or emptied bed pans, as have the bulk of the SEIU's members, whose hard-earned dues paid his expense account and supported his comfortable, six-figure-income lifestyle while he headed up the SEIU.

Sweeney was elected president of the AFL-CIO in 1995, over the opposition of the old industrial unions. His campaign theme: Do what I did. Stop spending so much money on your current members, negotiating and administering their contracts and processing their grievances. Instead, trust their employers to do the right thing. Then spend more money on organizing new members. Sweeney's goal was to increase AFL-CIO membership by 3 percent annually, i.e., an additional 600,000 new members each year--a tough goal he has yet to meet. In 1998, for example, the AFL-CIO added a record 475,000 new workers to its member organizations. But with other union members leaving through plant closings and downsizings, the net gain was only 65,000.

Even the net gain is deceptive because the union members leaving through plant closings and downsizings are not being replaced by members holding comparable jobs. Organized labor grew in the 20th century as America changed from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Things are very different today, and organized labor has found no analogous role in the post-industrial economy.

Even academics sympathetic to unions concede that they're on the skids. In his recent book, From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America's Future, Stanley Aronowitz, a Marxist-leaning professor of sociology at the City University of New York, writes: "As we approach the new century, organized labor has fallen on hard times. Once the force that encouraged government intervention in every aspect of economic life, the labor movement, over the last twenty years, has become a symbol of what many see as a surpassed system. Many younger people, who never experienced the Depression, World War II, and the days of postwar prosperity, are now mesmerized by the ideology of individual initiative and the promise of a gleaming high-tech future."

Sweeney already knows that unions have nothing to offer to people "mesmerized by the ideology of individual initiative and the promise of a gleaming, high-tech future." The simple reason: They're making too much money. But if the New Labor of John Sweeney holds no attraction for employees in the post-industrial economy, and the manufacturing work force of the old economy continues to shrink, what is Sweeney's business plan for maintaining labor's cash flow from member dues? His new paradigm for labor is to organize the working poor, those people employed in minimum-wage or near-minimum-wage positions.

That paradigm is embodied in Sweeney's own SEIU, one of the few unions that consistently shows net membership gains. The SEIU spends 47 percent of its annual budget on organizing, and its locals devote approximately 20 percent of their funds to the same task--a total of more than $60 million, $33 million of it from the locals. To appreciate the magnitude of this, as recently as 1993 no more than 10 of the SEIU's 77 locals put any money into organizing, and in 1995 the SEIU and its locals spent only $20 million on organizing. Even the SEIU's 1995 spending level is impressive when you consider that as recently as 1996, according to Richard Bensinger, director of the AFL-CIO organizing department, only 3 percent of union funds nationwide was spent on organizing.

The marketing strategy is working. In 1998 the SEIU won 66 percent of the elections in which workers chose whether to certify it as their representative. By contrast, the Teamsters won only 44 percent of their elections, and the...