The new economic policy trickled down no better than the old. In 1992, 12 percent of all families, and 22 percent of all children, lived on less than the amount defined as poverty level (37 percent of median family income), including nearly half the households headed by women with minor children. Real wages continued their decline—by 1996, they were 12 percent less than in 1979. Other components of working-class economic security deteriorated. Pension coverage at large and mid-sized companies fell from 91 percent in 1985 to 80 percent in 1995, and postretirement medical coverage fell from 80 percent to 52 percent.
The new Democratic administration was no friend to labor. A bill to ban replacement workers died in Congress while the White House focused on completing the North American Free Trade Agreement, which removed restrictions on investment and trade between the U.S. and its two neighbors. The AFL-CIO opposed NAFTA, expecting it to cost U.S. jobs and overturn labor laws as restraints on trade. NAFTA passed Congress in 1993 with votes from many “friends of labor.” In the 1994 Congressional elections, Lane Kirkland quelled labor opposition to NAFTA Democrats. AFL-CIO political strategy proved helpless when Republicans swept both houses for the first time in forty years.
Corporate attacks on labor rolled on. The first line of defense was keeping the union out. A study of union drives in 1993–95 found that one-third of employers fired workers for union activities, a sixth used electronic surveillance to monitor employees, and more than half threatened to close or move if the union won an election. One employer rented a trailer, painted “Moving to Mexico” on the side, and parked it at the main entrance. (About 15 percent of employers did close in part or entirely after losing a union vote.) When the Laborers tried to organize the Perdue poultry plant in Dothan, Alabama, in June 1995, the plant’s 1,000 employees—mostly African American—came to work the day before the vote to find a burning cross draped with “Union Yes” tee shirts. The union lost 646–242.
Decatur, Illinois, became one of the fiercest battlefields of the corporate campaign. Trouble had been brewing for some time at A. E. Staley Manufacturing, which was owned by British transnational Tate & Lyle and made corn syrup. In 1991, management demanded twelve-hour shifts, subcontracting rights, and the elimination of many seniority and grievance provisions. United Paperworkers Local 7837 decided to remain at work, developing an in-plant campaign of working to rule and a corporate campaign targeting major Staley customers. The same year Caterpillar rejected a UAW contract patterned after a settlement with John B. Deere Company. The UAW called a partial strike, but returned to work in April 1992 and started its own in-plant campaign. In June 1993, after Staley workers joined a rally in support of the Caterpillar local, Staley locked them out. Almost a year later the UAW finally called a strike at Caterpillar over unfair labor practices. The next month the Rubber Workers struck five Bridgestone Tire plants—including the Decatur facility—over company demands for employee copayments for health benefits, wage reductions, and a twelve-hour straight-time workday. Decatur became a war zone, with massive marches, police attacks on demonstrators, bitter divisions between the strikers and scabs or replacement workers, and among the strikers themselves.
When Staley “Road Warriors” brought their traveling solidarity show to the AFL-CIO Executive Committee’s February 1995 meeting in Bal Harbor, Florida, they found union leaders pondering the sorry state of unionism and Kirkland’s resignation. The plan called for him to retire gracefully at the next convention, set for New York City in October, in favor of Secretary-Treasurer Tom Donahue. Kirkland changed his mind and resigned in May, and a coalition of union leaders from the UAW, UMW, USWA, AFSCME, SEIU, and the Teamsters decided to make their own nomination, selecting SEIU’s John Sweeney to head a “New Voice” slate. Kirkland appointed Donahue interim president to give him the advantage of incumbency.
Just before the October convention, the Labor Resource Center at Queens College of the City University of New York held a conference on the future of the labor movement. Activists discussed union democracy, membership diversity, political action, international cooperation, and organizing the unorganized. That was the New Voice platform.
* Though not for their own staff. CWA staffer John Scally once remarked, “Unions, you know, are the worst employers around.” In 1987, CWA staff union leaders joined delegates from six other staff unions in the International Congress of Staff Unions, to discuss common problems and generally raise morale. More than forty staff unions had affiliated by 1990.
CHAPTER
12
BRAVE NEW WORLD
Only once before—in 1894, when Sam Gompers lost the AFL presidency for a year to Mine Worker John McBride—had the Federation’s leadership ever really been in doubt. Interim President Tom Donahue waged a vigorous campaign, matching the New Voice slate promise for promise. But at the October 1995 convention, delegates representing 56 percent of the membership stuck with the insurgents, and John Sweeney became the fifth man in a century to head the Federation. Richard Trumka from the United Mine Workers became Secretary-Treasurer. Linda Chávez-Thompson of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees took a new Executive Vice President position.
The state of the labor movement was grim. In Decatur the Bridgestone workers had already ended their strike in May. The UAW declared the Caterpillar strike “in recess,” cut off strike pay, and sent local members back to work the first Monday of December. Three days before Christmas, members of the Staley local ratified the contract they had rejected three years earlier and sent their pickets home. Labor had lost the war in Decatur all the way down the line; in fact 1995’s total of thirty-one strikes by a thousand or more workers was an all-time low. Union membership also declined in 1995, to 16.4 million workers covered by union contracts. In the private sector, the rate of union density had fallen to the level of 1930.
New Voice leaders called for organizing the unorganized. The AFL-CIO budgeted $20 million for organizing in 1996, $30 million the next year. But more than money and staff was required. Paid organizers signing up workers for NLRB elections one workplace at a time, against employers who had no reason to respect federal or local labor laws, could only slow the loss in membership. The unions had to create an “organizing culture” in which labor was part of a social movement, in coalition with religious, civil rights, and other organizations, building a network of community-based organizing centers where unions led the defense of workers’ rights and interests. Easier said than done. Reversing the federation’s decline required changing nearly every aspect of trade union work, from rooting out corruption and bolstering democracy in affiliates, to reaching out to allies old and new, to working out common programs among workers and unions with very different histories, expectations, and interests.
Unions faced an ever more difficult terrain. After the economy recovered from the 1991–92 recession, the stock market kept rising, and profits soared. A new corporate merger wave in the mid-1990s created even larger companies. Transnational investment increased. Foreign direct investment in developing countries increased by half in 1994–97, to more than $120 billion, and commercial loans more than doubled, to more than $100 billion. The total debt burden for all developing countries became a staggering $2 trillion. Around the world, rebellion mounted against the repressive regimes formed to contain communism and against cuts in social spending—opposition parties took power in South Korea (1997) and Venezuela (1998); dictators fell in Zaire and Indonesia in the same years.
The North American Free Trade Agreement worked pretty much as opponents had predicted. In NAFTA’s first five years, 200,000 U.S. jobs were lost to trade. (The government stopped trying to count jobs created after it found only 1,500.) As more manufacture and assembly relocated to take advantage of wages about one-twelfth U.S. or Canadian rates, U.S. trade with Mexico went from a billion dollar surplus to deficits over $10 billion.
Deregulation led to new crises. The Mexican peso collapsed in late 1994: businesses failed, real wages fell
about a third. As international currency exchange transactions reached $1,500 billion a day, similar crises hit Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Korea in late 1997, Russia and Brazil the next year. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank sought more “structural adjustment” as the price of rescue from national default: remove controls on markets and investments, sell state-owned enterprises, accept multilateral free-trade agreements. Meanwhile debt crushed some developing economies: debt service cost Nicaragua more than it spent on all social programs, Mozambique twice as much as it spent on health and education, and Uganda more than five times what it spent on health care.
Free-market policies widened the gap between rich and poor nations. Broad areas of sub-Saharan Africa devolved to an economy of meager subsistence and resource extraction, often at gunpoint—the Nigerian government hanged author Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists who protested the environmental degradation of the Ogoniland oil region by companies like Shell, Mobil, Chevron, and Texaco. On the other side of the world, the Indonesian army disciplined workers at gold and copper mines on Irian Jaya run by Louisiana-based Freeport-McMoRan Corporation. New capitalists rich from speculative expropriation of state assets dominated the republics of the Russian Federation, while ordinary people lived more and more by barter, public services deteriorated, and both life expectancy and the birth rate declined.
The international gap was mirrored in U.S. incomes. In 1990, the average pay of the chief executive officers of the 500 biggest U.S.-based corporations was only about $2 million a year, eighty-four times the average blue-collar worker’s pay. By 1999, the CEO average had gone to more than $12 million, 475 times the blue-collar average. For transnational executives the gap was bigger. In 1999, General Electric’s CEO Jack Welch made about 15,000 times more than his average Mexican employee. Overall, fewer people made more, and more made the same or less. Between 1989 and 1997, the top 20 percent of families took an ever larger share of total family income. The trend was accentuated at the extremes: average family incomes in the bottom 20 percent fell slightly in real dollars, while for the top 5 percent average income rose by more than a fifth. By the end of the 1990s, though U.S. unemployment had declined, income inequality had returned to the level of the 1930s—about 100,000 millionaires alongside 36 million people living in poverty (as defined by the government). More than two million of the poor worked full-time year round, another seven million part of the year. By 1998, 2.7 percent of total private employment fell into the government category “help supply services,” more than four times the 1982 figure. Many households faced their own debt crises. As banks aggressively pushed unsecured credit with high interest rates, people displaced from employment, facing divorce or medical emergencies, or carrying expensive student loans, began going broke. Bankruptcy filings increased more than a third after 1994. By 1997, one of every six families living on $25,000 or less a year paid 40 percent of their income in debt service.
MAKING CHANGE
The new AFL-CIO leadership made some changes in the Federation’s foreign and domestic policies long advocated by grassroots activists and already practiced by some affiliated unions. The Federation dismantled its international operations, replacing them all with a Center for International Labor. The AFL-CIO let lapse its sponsorship of the Canadian Federation of Labor, set up in 1982 to rival the social democratic Canadian Labor Congress. (The CFL folded in 1997). But the international labor establishment was ill equipped to deal with recurrent crises. Dominated by government-supported unions, the Asia Pacific Regional Organization of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions promoted government-labor-management cooperation in maintaining each nation’s competitive edge. When financial crisis swept the Asian industrial economies, APRO met in Singapore in February 1998, but could only petition international agencies to ameliorate demands for structural adjustment and set up a telephone hotline for the hundreds of thousands of displaced workers.
In Mexico, more than 3,000 plants operated in the maquiladora export zones by 1998. As privatization proceeded in long-nationalized industries, the official Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos lost more than 40 percent of its members, but the CTM demanded the extermination of indigenous rebels in southern Mexico, not the release of CTM union leaders jailed for opposing privatization. The Teamsters joined the United Electrical Workers in setting up a Labor Center in Ciudad Juárez with the independent Frente Auténtico de Trabajadores to promote a “culture of organizing” against a “culture of fear.” The Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras helped Sony rank-and-file workers in Nuevo Laredo contest their official union leadership. John Sweeney visited Mexico in January 1998—the first such trip since Sam Gompers’s demise—and met both CTM and independent union leaders. Though CTM president Leonardo Rodríguez Alcaine warned that “Mexicans should . . . resolve their own problems,” the Arizona AFL-CIO supported a 1999 strike against layoffs by copper miners in Cananea, Sonora (which ended when the Mexican army took over the town).
At home, AFL-CIO leaders turned their attention to the masses of unorganized low-wage workers. Despite a 1991 raise, the minimum wage had fallen to the 1950 level in constant dollar value. Sweeney published America Needs a Raise in 1996 during a successful AFL-CIO campaign to raise the minimum again. The Federation also endorsed organizing welfare recipients assigned to workfare, but the efforts faltered when most courts decided the workers were not employees covered by the National Labor Relations Act.
Some union habits were hard to change. Despite years of federal and state prosecutions that had removed almost 400 Teamsters and more than a hundred Laborers officials by 1996, some unions still harbored mobsters or tolerated personal corruption. Officials from the Carpenters, Painters and Longshoremen in New York City were convicted of embezzlement and racketeering during the mid-1990s. The president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees retired in 1998 to avoid prosecution.
New Voice allies fell too, though not for labor racketeering. Sweeney and Richard Trumka strongly supported Teamster president Ron Carey over challenger James Hoffa, Jr., in 1996. In June 1997, a federal monitor voided Carey’s reelection after finding that his aides had washed $700,000 in union funds through Democratic Party accounts to pay campaign expenses. Carey was barred from the union, and Hoffa won the new election held in December 1998. AFSCME trusteed New York City’s District Council 37 in 1998 after officials were accused of embezzlement. It transpired that District staff and local officers had also faked ratification tallies to get the 1996 contract approved, helping Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani win reelection. Since AFSCME set the pattern for other city unions, almost a quarter million public employees had been duped. During a lawsuit brought by dissident local members, in 1999 SEIU forced the retirement of Gus Bevona, president of New York City building services Local 32B–32J (Sweeney’s home local) and at $422,000 a year the highest-paid union official in the country. At the end of 1999, New Voice supporter Arthur Coia—who had backed anticorruption investigations ordered in a consent decree—resigned from the Laborers’ presidency and pled guilty the next year to avoiding taxes on a Ferrari provided by the Rhode Island company that leased cars to the union.
Dissident union reform groups could be found not only in the Teamsters, Laborers, SEIU, and HERE, but also in the Bricklayers, Carpenters, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, American Federation of Government Employees, Letter Carriers, Treasury Employees, Machinists, and Auto Workers. Other reformers included local and state organizations like the New Directions Caucus in Transport Workers Local 100 and the Members for Members Caucus in AFSCME’s California State Employees Association. AFSCME lost the University of California clerical workers to the independent Coalition of University Employees over disagreements about union practices—CUE practiced grassroots organizing based on consciousness raising and membership mobilization, and needed only a single full-time staff person.
Unions continued to merge. In 1995, the United Rubber Workers j
oined the United Steel Workers, and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers announced their merger into UNITE—Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. The Laborers absorbed the 5,000-member National Federation of Independent Unions in 1996. In 1997, New York Local 1199 affiliated with SEIU and later took over SEIU health care locals in New York, New Jersey, and Florida. In 1998, the UFCW took over the Brooklyn-based, 10,000-member Production, Service and Sales District Council, and the independent Connecticut Union of Telephone Workers (CUTW) voted to join the Communication Workers. In 1999, the United Paperworkers and the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers formed PACE—Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy International Union. The International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE) became a division of CWA in 2000. Mergers were not always easy. ILGWU and ACTWU locals took some time to merge while members sorted out differences in organizing style—UNITE changed ILGWU plans for organizing Guess contractors in Los Angeles, and Guess sent the contracts to Mexico. CUTW’s leaders had actually recommended IBEW to their members. By 2000, the AFL-CIO had sixty-six affiliates, compared to 150 in 1955.
Despite overlapping jurisdictions, some merger talks failed. In 1998, the independent National Education Association, the largest union in the country, debated merger with the American Federation of Teachers. NEA conservatives who preferred a more professional approach joined liberals who objected to AFT support for U.S. foreign policy and its opposition to community involvement in public education to vote down the proposal. The Screen Actors Guild rejected a long-planned merger with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and the 18,000-member American Flint Glass Workers Union (a onetime Knights of Labor affiliate) rejected merger with UFCW the same year. Merger talks failed between the two largest railroad unions, the United Transportation Union and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, and UTU later left the AFL-CIO to protest raiding sanctions. In 1999, the AFL-CIO made a small first step to resolve its recurring jurisdictional disputes by requiring that unions planning local or industry strategic campaigns register with an Oversight Committee, which could evaluate claims from competing unions.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 40
