The Labor Split:
Defining the Battlefield
By Bart Mongoven
Two of the United States'
largest unions -- the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union
(SEIU) -- announced July 25 that they are pulling out of the AFL-CIO. Three
other major unions said the previous day that they would boycott the 50th
annual meeting of the AFL-CIO. These five unions, united under a reform agenda
called Change to Win (CTW), claim that the AFL-CIO has failed to react to the
changing dynamics surrounding public policy development, and as a result, has
become rudderless and ineffective.
The CTW unions, led by SEIU head Andy Stern, claim that they have a new and
unique strategic approach to strengthening unions and improving wages,
benefits, security and health of workers. They claim their approach reflects
the changing times and represents organized labor's best chance to regain
relevance in policymaking.
At the center of its strategy is CTW's contention that Washington - allegedly as a result of the
election of President George W. Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress -- no
longer can act as the center of the policymaking universe for successful
liberal causes. Implicitly, the CTW strategy also assumes that globalization
(read, trade liberalization and its consequences) is occurring and for
political reasons cannot be reversed; therefore, a successful labor strategy
must deal directly with globalization rather than try to reverse or stem it.
Further, despite union leaders' talk about consolidation and oligopoly in the U.S. economy,
the CTW approach assumes that self-contained successes at a single company are
insufficient, and that labor will achieve its objectives only if workers are
united across entire industries.
As the rebelling unions lay out their plans, the CTW message comes across
primarily as a critique of AFL-CIO, with a tone and style that suggest the
AFL-CIO is not doing any of the things that CTW calls for. This is untrue: The
AFL-CIO is indeed trying to increase union membership, broaden its appeal and
globalize its activities. CTW's real contention is not that the AFL-CIO lacks
the proper goals, but rather that it has the wrong understanding of the
battlefield upon which it plays. The critique is akin to that of conventional
forces attempting to fight a guerilla insurgency. Though some of its leading
loyal members (e.g., the Steelworkers) have recognized the new playing field
and are working in it, the AFL-CIO does not yet appear to have grasped what it
means to fight in a world with a different trade structure, and with limited
power in Washington.
CTW thinks it has.
CTW supporters and leaders argue that labor is going to have to stop acting
simply as a special interest lobby and become an activist movement. The group's
leader, Stern, suggests that labor must cease to think of public policy as
something that emanates from Washington
and is forced by government upon corporations. Rather -- as consumer, human
rights and environmental activists increasingly are coming to understand -- the
best chance for liberal constituencies to bring about the changes they want is
to work toward their objectives outside the government realm, he says.
CTW argues that labor will have to work with business, not government, and gain
commitments from entire industries at a time, rather than looking for victories
within single companies. This is the heart of the strategic divergence between
CTW and the AFL-CIO.
CTW appears to view victories over individual corporations as means to an end:
achieving across-the-board victories throughout an industry. AFL-CIO,
meanwhile, has allowed itself to view company-specific agreements as victories.
This is implicit in, and to an extent driven by, the AFL-CIO's organization.
Workers in a single industry are often represented by a number of unions,
varying according to the employer. A victory by a union against one employer,
therefore, will reflect the strategic objectives of the workers only for that
one company, rather than for workers throughout the industry. CTW argues that
the labor movement needs a central, unified leadership that will approach a
single employer with the demands of all workers in an industry in mind and then
use the agreement with one company as a lever against all companies in the
industry. This is not a new strategy, but it is quite difficult to do given the
number of competing AFL-CIO unions and the structure of the organization.
Paradoxically, if CTW follows through with this plan, the strategy will require
that labor begin by focusing on one company at a time in an industry (but with
objectives that stretch across an entire industry or even across the labor
movement). This is most clearly visible in the emerging campaign against
Wal-Mart, an issue on which Stern has staked considerable amounts of his credibility.
In Stern's vocabulary, Wal-Mart is both a noun and a verb. He decries the
threat of the "Wal-Martization" of the entire U.S. economy,
by which he means that to compete with Wal-Mart, companies will have to
participate in a "race to the bottom" -- that is, hire people at the
lowest wages possible and with minimal benefits so as to provide customers with
lower prices. Stern also argues that Wal-Mart pushes demands for lower prices
onto its suppliers, who respond by cutting benefits, reducing starting wages
and, in some cases, moving manufacturing to less-expensive countries.
Finally, Stern says that Wal-Mart's approach is rippling across the global
economy. It is putting wage pressure on the Chinese suppliers who replaced the U.S. suppliers
ten years ago. It is placing demands on Asian clothing manufacturers that
threaten to undercut the possible gains globalization can bring to workers in
developing countries. Changing Wal-Mart, according to Stern, is central to
CTW's success, and CTW has advocated labor spend $25 million to finance
"large, multi-union movement-wide campaigns directed at reversing the
Wal-Marting of our jobs and our communities by large low-road employers."
As it stands, SEIU has invested considerable time and money in a Wal-Mart-focused
campaign, represented at the Walmartwatch.org website. The approach Stern has
taken shows his understanding of the shifts in the policymaking process and
provides a glimpse of the way much policymaking likely will be done for the
next decade. SEIU is working with environmental organizations, human rights
groups, consumer organizations, women's groups and civil rights groups to
develop a broad-based strategy to take on the retailer. The coalition acts as a
force-multiplier: Wal-Mart has specific vulnerabilities on myriad issues and
can be attacked from multiple directions at once. Under this strategy, the
workers that the SEIU wants to unionize ideally would hear about the class
action suit filed on behalf of female employees (one of the largest class action
suits in history), about various environmental allegations, and the human
rights complaints and then begin to seriously consider whether they are better
off organized. At the same time, SEIU will demand the company change its
practices to make union organizing easier.
Meanwhile, environmental organizations will press for the company to change the
environmental behavior of their suppliers, and human rights advocates will
demand Wal-Mart report on the chain-of-custody of its products to ensure the
company does not encourage child labor or sweatshop labor. The environmental
and human rights critiques will threaten to spoil Wal-Mart's image in the minds
of the jury pool that will be hearing the class action lawsuit. The SEIU
contends that under this kind of pressure, Wal-Mart can be forced to make
concessions on all fronts.
Ultimately, from SEIU's perspective, the Wal-Mart campaign is designed to place
pressure on the company to accept organized labor, but also to turn it into a
force for change across the economy. Any concessions Wal-Mart makes will place
pressure on its competitors to make similar concessions -- and to make sure the
playing field is level, one can imagine Wal-Mart would want to be at the
forefront of a movement to make sure that Target, K-Mart, Costco and other
competitors abide by the same rules. At the same time, SEIU will structure any
agreement with Wal-Mart to advance labor's goals with Wal-Mart's suppliers, and
it will make concessions regarding labor issues at the corporation in return
for Wal-Mart pressing pro-union policies upon its suppliers.
The lesson that Stern is teaching is that the economy has changed. Trade
barriers are coming down, and the United States' comparative
advantage does not generally lie in those areas where unions are strongest.
Unions can grow by improving their organizing in those industries where jobs
cannot be sent overseas, and by globalizing unions on an industry-by-industry
basis. CTW is not going to abandon lobbying and federal policymaking entirely --
it will play defense and work with the AFL-CIO to defend those advances they
have made in the past. However, CTW does not view traditional government
policymaking as offering the solution to labor's woes. In acknowledging this,
the coalition by necessity increasingly will behave like familiar activist
groups.
If they are successful, whether against Wal-Mart or elsewhere, the CTW unions
may bring to the public's recognition the degree to which old notions of
regulatory public policy development must be jettisoned. The policies passed
into law by elected representatives are important, but that is not where the
majority of regulatory public policy is being developed. Instead, policy
development is being decentralized: It is being determined by private agreements
between companies and between companies and stakeholders.
The CTW unions appear to have grasped this.
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