The Dance of Sweeney and Stern: Sweeney Ascends
The Dance of Sweeney and Stern: The SEIU Takes the Lead and Divides the House of Labor (full series)
“Big” Labor in1990 | Justice for Janitors | Sweeney Ascends
Sweeney’s Understudy Becomes a Rival | Stern Pushes the Button
Sweeney Ascends
Pressuring Kirkland into retirement was not enough for McEntee and the other leaders of labor’s left wing. They included Teamsters leader Ron Carey, elected following a consent decree with the federal government that settled racketeering investigations into the notorious and formerly Republican-leaning union, and controversial United Mine Workers of America head Richard Trumka, who had led several violent strikes. They saw Donahue, despite his liberalism (he had served in the administration of President Lyndon Johnson as an Assistant Secretary of Labor), as too close to Kirkland’s right-deviationist faction. They instead turned to Sweeney of the SEIU, the architect of Justice for Janitors, and ran him against Donahue in the union federation’s first contested presidential election since the AFL and CIO united in the 1950s.
In his analysis of the labor movement published shortly after the AFL-CIO election, Green noted there was little substantively different between the ideologies of Donahue and Sweeney. He quoted Donahue, ostensibly the centrist candidate, as telling NPR, “We need to be—just as John [Sweeney] has said—the force that drives the Democratic Party to the left.” Perhaps it should not have been a surprise that Donohue and Sweeney were close in ideological alignment. Donahue was an alumnus of Sweeney’s SEIU and had arranged a staff post in a New York City local for Sweeney early in his career.
A contemporary Los Angeles Times story on the AFL-CIO election concurred: “During the four-month election campaign, the two camps offered nearly identical platforms, both calling for stepped-up organizing and grass-roots political campaigns.” But Sweeney, whose SEIU had doubled in size over his presidency even as the labor movement had shrunk, proved more able to convince his fellow union bosses that he could reverse the Long Decline with militant organizing in the style of Justice for Janitors.
But Sweeney’s record wasn’t as crystal clean as the Justice for Janitors mythology let on. First, Sweeney’s SEIU had some officials with questionable ethical backgrounds in senior posts. One, Gus Bevona, led New York City-based Local 32B—the very same local that had accepted Thomas Donahue’s arrangement of a job for Sweeney many years before. Bevona was a union boss of the old school, notable for his $400,000-plus in multiple annual salaries and alleged but never proven ties to the Mob.
Not just Bevona had alleged corrupt ties. SEIU was historically deeply mobbed up. The Chicago organization of what was then called the Building Service Employees International Union or BSEIU was at various times penetrated by operatives of Al Capone’s criminal enterprises, with longtime eastern district organizing lead and later BSEIU national president George Scalise involved in labor racketeering and embezzlement on the Capone operation’s behalf.
While national leadership improved over time, the local unions retained ties to family fiefdoms that sometimes intersected with Mob families. During Sweeney’s SEIU presidency, those fiefdoms remained powerful. Robert Fitch, a scholar of union corruption, characterized Sweeney as “a mediating figure between the crooked and reforming factions,” not a crusader for clean unionism.
Second, the SEIU’s meteoric growth in membership amid the general decline in unionism involved much more than Everything Leftist organizing among non-union, ethnic-minority populations the AFL-CIO’s old guard thought it difficult to bring in as dues payers. The SEIU also grew its numbers in the Sweeney years by a more corporate-style growth strategy: Mergers and acquisitions. SEIU agglomerated so many existing labor unions into itself during the Sweeney presidency and early years of his successor, Andy Stern, that the mergers were estimated to account for roughly half of SEIU’s total growth.
None of that mattered to the AFL-CIO leadership, who controlled the electoral votes (based on the membership of federation-member unions) needed to secure Kirkland’s old office. The unions that had wanted Kirkland out also wanted somebody other than Donahue in the role, so they put in Sweeney. Upon the announcement of the election result, President Clinton commended the new boss, saying he “has led one of the most progressive, growing, and innovative unions in America” and “has been a force for inclusion and activism.” Labor Secretary Robert Reich said, “There are substantial numbers of workers who are not now unionized who are ripe for the picking.”
Clinton and Reich had good reasons to crow about Sweeney’s election. Upon taking office, the new AFL-CIO boss, reported to be a member of the left-wing Democratic Socialists of America, began an aggressive political effort to unseat the Republican congressional majorities elected in 1994. The union jacked up its political spending for the 1996 Congressional elections, authorizing the then-unheard-of $35 million for voter education efforts targeting 75 Republicans. Sweeney also launched the 1996 “Union Summer” program, which sought to bring in a new, young cadre of left-wing activists into the AFL-CIO as organizers.
But while President Clinton was comfortably re-elected, the AFL-CIO could not dislodge Congressional Republicans from their majorities. Indeed, the legacy of “Union Summer” might be a repeating metropolitan-media phenomenon: stories proclaiming an imminent resurgence in union membership and power that never seems to materialize. Newsweek, for one, proclaimed that “It’s Hip to Be Union” while following SEIU organizer Tyrone Freeman canvassing across Georgia. (Seventeen years later, Freeman would go to prison for embezzling from an SEIU local union.) As would become a common refrain in the decades to come, Newsweek claimed, “The young are especially sympathetic to the cause.”
But the numbers did not bear out Newsweek’s hype. The decline in union workplace power continued through the next presidential election year despite Sweeney’s efforts, with a drop from 14.9 percent unionized in 1995 to 13.5 percent in 2000. With Clinton departing office, Sweeney’s AFL-CIO backed Vice President Al Gore, and the New York Times reported that the AFL-CIO vowed to “spend more money than ever before”—$40 million—to elect almost exclusively Democrats up and down the ticket. (The one Republican the AFL-CIO planned to support named in the Times report, Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH), was also a member of the Future Felons Club, like the union organizer from the Newsweek story.)
But instead of a Democratic success, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush was elected president and Republicans would hold a federal trifecta, their first since 1955, for the first six months of his presidency. (They lost it when Sen. Jim Jeffords, elected as a Republican from Vermont, became an Independent and switched party caucuses to join Democrats.) Union membership continued declining, with total membership having fallen by almost 900,000 from 1995 through 2004, and workforce union membership density having fallen to 12.5 percent.
The continued decline was not for Sweeney and his AFL-CIO progressive bloc’s lack of trying. In addition to their less-than-successful political endeavors, the union federation created a prototype for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing, launching the Center for Working Capital. The center rated investment houses on their support for the AFL-CIO’s boardroom agenda, with a threat that those houses that did not support the agenda would become ineligible for union pension fund contracts. In 2000, the AFL-CIO executive council endorsed amnesty for illegal immigrants and a pathway to citizenship, a reversal of its longstanding position, in part to pursue union organizing among immigrant workforces and in part to rally new citizens to the labor-left alliance’s political cause.
In the next installment, Andy Stern consolidates and centralized power over the SEIU.
Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-dance-of-sweeney-and-stern-part-3/
