Resurrecting road kill.

• Position: Organized labor

John Sweeney, the new president of the AFL-CIO, told delegates to the labor federation's annual convention in New York City to vote for him "if you are tired of being treated like so much road kill on the highway of American life."

The question now is what organized labor can do to revive itself, after being flattened by NAFTA, job flight, coercive management, and an increasingly hostile political climate.

Union membership has dropped from 34.7 percent of the American work force in 1954 to 15.5 percent in 1994, The New York Times reports. Labor's cause has also suffered in public-opinion polls, as Rush Limbaugh and other conservative faux populists persuade lower-middle-class workers to side with their billionaire bosses against a caricature of corrupt and lazy unionists who whine about wages and working conditions.

Sweeney is right when he says that American workers have not been this badly off since the Depression. Locked-out Staley employees in Decatur, Illinois, know it. So do the striking newspaper workers in Detroit. So do hundreds of thousands of people in cities like Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Youngstown, Ohio, who have seen well-paid jobs in manufacturing dry up and blow away. So do the growing number of people all over the country forced to work long hours for low pay and no benefits in service-sector jobs.

Sweeney's promise to spend $20 million a year of the AFL-CIO's funds on organizing, and to press individual unions to spend 30 percent of their money on getting new members, is certainly a good start. And his track record as the head of the Service Employees International Union is in many ways heartening. The SEIU doubled in size under Sweeney, mainly by drawing in women, immigrants, and members of minorities who work in jobs that had not previously been unionized. His confrontational tactics--staging massive marches, tying up traffic, getting hundreds of demonstrators arrested--are also refreshing in an era when labor leaders have too often remained above the fray.

But it would be a mistake to look at Sweeney as labor's messiah. It will take much more than electing one person to revive the movement. And, as Jane Slaughter, veteran of Labor Notes, points out, Sweeney is a member of the establishment that helped labor to arrive at its current weakened condition.

This weakness is visible even in one of SEIU's proudest organizing success stories--the Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles. The campaign drew thousands of...