The Dance of Sweeney and Stern: “Big” Labor in 1990

The Dance of Sweeney and Stern: The SEIU Takes the Lead and Divides the House of Labor (full series)
“Big” Labor in 1990 | Justice for Janitors | Sweeney Ascends
Sweeney’s Understudy Becomes a Rival | Stern Pushes the Button

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Summary: The 1990s saw a shift in the leadership of organized labor. Out went Lane Kirkland, the social democratic Cold Warrior head of the AFL-CIO since 1979, and his backers in mostly building-trades and traditional-manufacturing unions, and in came card-carrying Democratic Socialist John Sweeney, late of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The dance for power between Sweeney and his SEIU successor and former protégé Andy Stern would come to define the period between Sweeney’s AFL-CIO election and the 2008 election of President Barack Obama.

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If Samuel Gompers, George Meany, or Walter Reuther ever wished for a trade unionist to occupy the Oval Office, they must have done so on a monkey’s paw. The presidency of Ronald Reagan—erstwhile leader of the Screen Actors Guild, a member union of the AFL-CIO—marked a sea change in Big Labor’s political fortunes and command over workers’ loyalties. President Reagan rallied working-class supporters to his banner even as he pursued a political agenda that union leaders like AFL-CIO chief Lane Kirkland hated, most notably breaking the strike of air traffic controllers by dismissing striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) union since their strike was illegal.

Fewer workers were choosing union representation, with the proportion of union membership in the private sector falling from 21 percent in 1979, when Kirkland took over the AFL-CIO from Meany, to 11.8 percent in 1990. Raw union membership also fell, from 21 million members in the private and government sectors in 1979 to 16.7 million in 1990.

The Long Decline had taken hold, but there was a glimmer of hope for union organizers and the left-wing activists with whom union officials were increasingly closely aligned. Out west, in cities including Denver and Los Angeles, a militant union was organizing a new population of workers through novel campaigns based in class consciousness and racialized struggle, without the ideological compromises of Gompers’s, Meany’s, or Kirkland’s eras.

Union-friendly scholars would characterize the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) “Justice for Janitors” campaigns as akin to the Congress of Industrial Organizations drives against the Detroit Three automakers of the 1930s. The campaigns brought SEIU president John Sweeney to national prominence and led his fellow union bosses to wonder if his tactics taken nationwide could reverse Big Labor’s declines in membership and political command over working-class votes.

By 1995, Sweeney would be elevated to the head of the House of Labor, putting labor’s left wing in charge of the AFL-CIO for the first time since the AFL/CIO merger in the 1950s. He then led an aggressive organizing and political education campaign over the next decade or so, but the Long Decline did not stop. Worse, the Republicans—now a live force in the U.S. Congress in a way they were not from 1955 through 1994—took back the Presidency in 2000 and held it in 2004, suggesting the Justice for Janitors model had not restored the control union bosses once had on politics and the economy.

More pressing for Sweeney, his former protégé, Andy Stern of the SEIU, was agitating against his leadership of labor unionism. After the 2004 political defeats, Stern would lead several unions out of Sweeney’s AFL-CIO allegedly to focus on organizing, not politics.

But the claim of organizing not politics was misleading; Stern and his new federation conducted organizing through politics. After spending over $60 million of SEIU funds electing President Barack Obama and the wide Democratic congressional majorities that took office after 2008, he sought legislation that would grant federal sanction to the SEIU corporate campaign model that Sweeney had developed through Justice for Janitors.

The State of Not-So-Big Labor, 1990

In 1950, when last in this long series we surveyed the state of Big Labor, unionism was at its height despite internal division, Communist infiltration, and Mafia influence. By 1990, the internal division had healed; even the Teamsters had rejoined the AFL-CIO fold. The Communists had been driven off and their international sponsor was in its death throes. The FBI and Department of Justice had finally begun to take the Mafia seriously and were closing in on major compromised unions such as the Teamsters and the Laborers International Union (LiUNA).

But Big Labor’s membership was melting away despite the reforms and despite economic growth. The unionized share of the private sector had fallen from 21.2% when Lane Kirkland took over the AFL-CIO in 1979 to 11.8% of the sector by 1990. Total union membership— including the government sector, which had been the source of much union growth in the second half of the 20th century—had fallen from 21 million to 16.7 million.

Big Labor’s ability to command its rank-and-file in political life was evaporating even more quickly. Despite the Reagan administration’s Taft-Hartley Consensus approach to labor relations, most notably the breaking of the PATCO air traffic control strike, the white working and middle classes were breaking with the Democratic Party, not Reagan’s Republicans. Perhaps as a result of the political break with the white working and middle classes, organized labor shifted political alignment from the mainstream of the Democratic Party toward a prototype form of the “Omnicause” Everything Leftism that prevails in the contemporary era.

In 1996, Max Green, a former American Federation of Teachers staffer who later became disillusioned with trade unionism and joined the Reagan administration, wrote An Epitaph for American Labor to detail how the union movement was evolving into just another left-wing interest group. Central to the evolution was the development in organized labor’s approach to civil rights following the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, in which labor officials ran far ahead of the working-class voters they claimed to represent. Green wrote:

With the rise of social issues like busing and welfare, workers became unreliable supporters of labor’s program and favorite political candidates. Increasing numbers of workers were more interested in other issues and cold to “the welfare state agenda of the AFLCIO.” Meany was said to be shocked by the results of a poll, taken for labor by Joseph Kraft, that starkly revealed the wide gap separating labor leaders from rank-and-file workers on a number of salient civil rights and social welfare issues.

While working-class voters expressed concern about taxes and opposed forceful integration measures like affirmative action (which until the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision could include explicit racial quotas) and busing, union bosses pushed expanded welfare programs and the full suite of affirmative action programs, presaging organized labor’s contemporary alignment with Everything Leftist movements like Black Lives Matter. The result, as Green detailed, was an unprecedented defection of white union members and their families from labor’s candidates, with President Ronald Reagan winning them outright in 1984.

Big Labor also increasingly aligned with the cultural left, spending the Kirkland years supporting the Equal Rights Amendment, increasingly aligning with abortion-rights groups like the National Organization for Women, and joining the early gay and lesbian interest movements. Nevertheless, the Long Decline continued.

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In the next installment, the SEIU launches the Justice for Janitors campaign to expand union membership.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-dance-of-sweeney-and-stern-part-1/