Tiny labor.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side - AFL-CIO - Column

As that modern-day Titanic, the AFL-CIO, drifted toward the iceberg, the folks in the lower decks seemed curiously unconcerned. The SEIU, UFCW, Teamsters, Laborers, and UNITE-HERE have formed their own newly announced Change to Win Coalition, and some of them threatened to bolt the AFL-CIO entirely if President John Sweeney was reelected. But Tom Lewandowski, president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council, concludes that after several lengthy discussions among his delegates and rank-and-file: "The consensus was we really didn't care who won because we've gotten our asses kicked out here and have to build from the ground up anyway."

I find the same bafflement and indifference among my brothers and sisters in the National Writers' Union, which is part of the UAW. Journalists' per-word rates haven't gone up in twenty years, and we've lost our health insurance, so don't expect us to be transfixed by the Oedipal clash between SEIU President Andy Stern and his former mentor Sweeney.

Something has to change, though. In the fifty years of the AFL-CIO's existence, Big Labor has shrunk to a third of its former size, but it's been clinging to its outsized clothes and outmoded habits. While membership dwindles, the AFL-CIO has continued to act like a big shot--doling out tens of millions to the Democratic Party and occupying a palatial spread located within kiss-blowing distance of the White House.

Nor has it budged from the style of "business unionism" developed by Samuel Gompers in the early twentieth century, in which unions act much like big insurance companies, offering their "consumers" the prospect of better wages and job security. It's Tiny Labor today, and--split or not--the challenge is to make it also lean, mean, and scrappy as a starving terrier.

Herewith a few suggestions, culled from discussions with labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan and dozens of other labor activists around the country:

Organize, don't subsidize. The amount spent on organizing is one of the key issues separating Change to Win from the rest of the AFL-CIO. Stern and the other dissidents want to boost the federation's organizing to $72 million; Sweeney would increase it to $30 million out of a total budget of $125 million. Where does the rest of that money go now? Well, a lot goes to subsidize the Democratic Party, with a view to electing more labor-friendly candidates. But the best way to pump up the Democratic vote is, in fact, to organize. According to the AFL-CIO's...