Stately: The Fight For A New American Labor

LEWIE: The battle over labor's future is heading toward a showdown at the AFL-CIO Convention, beginning Monday July 25th in Chicago. But the confrontation pitting a team of insurgent unions led by the Service Employees International Union against the AFL-CIO establishment is shaping up to be organizationally bloody, but spiritually bloodless. We're fighting for the heart and soul of the labor movement as though we had neither.

Given the general ho-hum about all things labor, one might say that any news is good news, and most of us progressive labor folks think a shake-up is long overdue. But there's a nagging unease on all sides about the terms and tenor of the debate. The sound bites never get much beyond blah, blah, blah, blah, organize, blah blah blah, blah change" And the skirmishing is all about mathematics: How much money for organizing? How many international unions should there be? What percentage of dues should go to the Federation?

But the numbers obscure the bigger questions at the heart of our struggle: Organize how? Change how? What kind of labor movement do we envision? How will it make the world more equitable for the most number of people? And what are we willing to sacrifice in order achieve it?

JIM: No, look lewie, we sometimes get criticized by members who don't understand why we have a position on Central America, on abortion, on God knows what," a labor colleague from a liberal union once told me, "but there are a majority who believe there is a connection to organizing and what we produce for the workers. If the work is just to get a contract, and you don't have a vision to empower masses of people to change the country, then it will never occur. If the organizer's vision is too small, the union will be too small.

The real problem with the current labor debate is not that it is too large, but that it is too small.

LEWIE: I think when I first went to work at SEIU in the early 1970s, in the first wave of baby-boom unionists that includes many of those now bidding for top leadership, the AFL-CIO wore the dull grey suit of business unionism and a cloak of Cold War paranoia. Its leaders nurtured a bureacratic style and a disinterest in new organizing. Moreover, the institution enthusiastically helped destroy many left-leaning labor leaders in other countries, while maintaining a Soviet-style grip on internal U.S. labor dissent. Women and minorities were ignored whenever possible, and otherwise treated with condescension and disdain.

But despite all that, we fell in love with the historic mission of organized labor: to demand a fair share of the wealth for the people who do the work; to protect employees from arbitrary management and harmful treatment through collective action; to put human rights above the protection of property. And, although we often bickered over strategy and tactics, we shared a communal dream: a world in which political democracy and a ...