When I came to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) in 1998, not long after John Sweeney was elected president, the enthusiasm and hope around organizing was contagious.
I’d spent much of my twenties as a union organizer in the South, talking with working people in their homes and witnessing the tsunami of employer resistance they faced when unionizing. I knew at my core just how hard it was for US workers to organize. Nevertheless, it seemed that the Kirkland-era stagnation was finally out, and a new vision for movement growth was in. Calling for a revival of the “culture of organizing,” Sweeney persuasively pledged that “with an army of organizers . . . we can do what the labor movement did decades ago: organize workers and raise wages in entire industries.”
Today the US labor movement is smaller, weaker, and more embattled than the day Sweeney took office thirty years ago. Though workers have managed heroic union organizing victories during the Sweeney years and beyond, none of these have turned the tide of decline, and the millions of new members never materialized. Union membership has dropped from 15 percent in 1995 to 10 percent today, and private sector union membership is at its lowest since 1900, at a mere 6 percent.
Unions’ failure to grow has hit America and its working class hard. When working people remain unorganized, they live as individuals at the mercy of unchecked corporate power. That insecurity has left them deeply angry, and that anger helped open the door to the right-wing demagoguery and plutocracy that we now face at our nation’s helm.
For many years, and especially in the Sweeney years, unions were able to punch above their weight in political elections….
Auteur: Lane Windham
