Starbucks Union

The Future of Organized Labor

May 8, 2005

With U.S. union membership down to only 8% of the workers in the corporate sector - the lowest in 90 years - a clash of unions is underway within the AFL-CIO over the future direction of organized labor. The unions challenging the leadership of President John J. Sweeney - the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Teamsters UNITE and the Laborers - want more of member unions dues to the AFL-CIO returned for expanded organizing and want more mergers among the 76 existing national unions.

Beyond what they call "restructuring", it is remarkable what they are not demanding, other than new leadership this year from their own ranks. They are not focusing on the fundamental corporate attack on unions, workers and, via corporate globalization, the American economy itself. To be sure, these "rebel" unions do not see themselves as affected by WTO, NAFTA and the shipment of whole industries and jobs to authoritarian or dictatorial countries such as Mexico and China. SEIU represents service workers, retail, hospital and other jobs not easily shifted abroad.

But as long-time United Autoworkers' reformer, Jerry Tucker declared, the insurgents' declaration of Principles makes "only passing reference" to "the sustained destruction of decent jobs, the systematic forced reduction in wages, benefits and working conditions. And, little attention is paid to labor's inability, or unwillingness, to collectively marshal its forces to confront management's concerted aggression at the center of the crisis facing U.S. unions today."

Indeed in a long profile-interview of SEIU's president, Andrew Stern, in the New York Times magazine, there was no mention of the critical need for labor law reform to jettison the many obstacles to and opportunities for corporations and their union-busting law firms to smash any incipient organizing drive in factories or other large low-pay corporate workplaces like Wal-Mart.

In no other western country do such facile obstructions exist in law. In no other western country do the top executives of the largest corporations have compensation so massively larger than their workers.

In 2002, the CEOs were averaging $7400 per hour (apart from perks and benefits), while their workers were making anywhere from $6 to $26 per hour.

Tucker drives his point home this way: "Fifty years of business unionism, abetted by an evolving legal framework, have all but eliminated the most democratic of worker expressions, direct action. . . . .What's also missing in today's debate among the union heads is anger, a deep and resolute class-anger. . . Ours is a crisis with millions of victims. Those victims are being attacked by enemies - corporate and governmental - with a shared ideology. Labor should not shrink from condemning that ideology."

More at

http://www.nader.org/interest/050805.html

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