New Orleans   

Part of the story is in the numbers which continue to slip and fall.

Bureau of Labor Statistics announced another slight drop last year of union membership compared to the overall non-farm workforce from 11.9 to 11.8%.   Steven Greenhouse in the Times reports that union membership is now 14,760,000.  The public sector percentage was 37% and about 7,560,000 and the private sector percentage is now only 6.9% with about 7,200,000.  Private sector membership is clearly heading towards 5%, unless something serious and drastic happens.

The numbers could have been worse.  There is speculation that the AFL-CIO is claiming 3,000,000 members from its Working America unit as part of their membership totals, which would be wild, since these are “canvassed” members rather than “real” dues paying members in local unions around the country.  There are still scars on the ears of AFL-CIO staffers from 2008 who did phonebanking to the call list with that group and heard in no uncertain terms from many of these “members” that they had no idea they were part of a union?!?   The BLS numbers come from the Current Population Survey of 60,000 households taken on a monthly basis so those are much more reliable indicators than those reported by unions themselves.

But, I’m grabbing at straws in saying that it could have been worse.  This is plenty bad, and there’s no sign of anything being done in the labor movement to make it much better.  Counting on the economy to make the numbers look a bit better is not a strategy!

Kingston    

In recent communications with their workforce (“associates”), Wal-Mart lowered the boom by eliminating any access to healthcare insurance for any worker averaging less than 24 hours per week – and from our experience that would be a vast majority of their 1.4 million workers!  Additionally for employees who remain eligible the costs went up marginally on a weekly basis but the co-pays and deductibles went through the roof, sometimes moving from $1000 to as high as $5000.  Under the new Wal-Mart plan if you smoke, you croak.  Any admitted smokers would be required to pay additional huge premiums.  Other incentives that Wal-Mart (and may other large corporations) had supported to encourage coverage or savings for health care were substantially reduced or eliminated.

Wal-Mart’s argument was straightforward and simple:  it’s their economy, stupid!  Premiums had gone up and their profits were flat in the recession, so it’s so long, Charlie, and goodbye.  Will it hurt their workforce?  Hell, yes!!! Was that a factor, hell, no!  The company, which had been glad to herald its expanded coverage several years ago (though we questioned the veracity of their reporting!), now was very close mouthed about how many people were affected and how many would remain covered and actively insured.   Relatively speaking, I would bet from our experience that the numbers would plummet to less than 10% of the hourly, non-supervisory workforce, though Wal-Mart is always slick about the way it merges the salaried and supervisors into all figures about average wages and healthcare coverage.

Greenhouse indicated that some of the material on this change was supplied by OUR Wal-Mart (Organization United for Respect at Wal-Mart) and was clear that part of the original “reform” by Wal-Mart had been the result of widespread labor and community pressure, but it seemed to me that the company was once again reminding all of us how transient our efforts had been in the past and how irrelevant current programs like OUR Wal-Mart are to them in their current calculations.  Those of us who worked to organize Wal-Mart in recent years at least liked to try to rationalize all of our work by hoping that we had created the leverage that had led to some reforms, even if we thought the leverage was sold short and stubbed out when it could have yield more dramatic results.

An advocacy and communications campaign with a company as large as Wal-Mart certainly has some value, and ACORN International continues to aggressively and substantially support the work in India of our India FDI Watch Campaign which has kept Wal-Mart and other big box retailers bottled up and at bay on their expansion efforts in this huge market, so we understand why it is important.  Nonetheless Wal-Mart seems not to mind rubbing our noses in the dirt and reminding us that without deep and permanent organization inside the company of their workforce, the rest is just public relations and politics to them, entered based on their will and exited at their whim.

For all of the smoke and mirrors, sound and fury, unless there is a sustained, permanent effort to create a viable and internally powerful workers organization at Wal-Mart, the worlds’ largest private sector employer, nothing will check the ability of this company to give and take away based on whatever it deems expedient.  That simply does not work for its workforce, and when the giant roars others will follow, so the big footprints of the company will be dug deeper by other large and small firms moving to curtail benefits and protections in the wake of this action.  The company cannot be organized “old school,” and the UFCW and others have not yet mastered how to mobilize the resources, support, and commitments to successfully create the infrastructure that will build organization inside the company for the long term.

Wal-Mart keeps throwing down the gauntlet and proving one generation of labor leaders after another that they have the staying power and that any deals with them are temporary and contingent.  It’s all about them and the devil take the hindmost.

We need to make a commitment to organize this company come hell or high water, and finally mean it, not for a couple of budget cycles but until the job is done.

New Orleans

A couple of things brought this to mind.

Early this morning setting up Citizen Wealth and Social Policy at a conference being held by the Association of Labor Educators, I listened to a fellow from Stoneybrook complaining to a colleague about how union leaders themselves never referred to their members any more as workers or a part of the working class, but instead talked endlessly of losing “middle-class jobs,” assaults on the “middle class,” and so forth.

Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin seemed to make sure he was always a long way out of camera shot from the statue honoring populist politician and labor backer, Robert Follette, the legendary Wisconsin freedom fighter, during the recent evisceration of public workers rights in that state, where those same rights had been pioneered.  Now it seems there was a big controversy in Maine over a 36-foot mural in the state Department of Labor building there which depicted loggers, shoemakers, shipyard workers, and others, but also had a panel on the big Jay, Maine paper strike among other things.  The Governor Paul LePage, another newly elected Republican, has ordered it removed according to one of the last labor reporters on the newspaper beat, Steven Greenhouse.  He thought it offended some business folks, even though it has been up for 3 years with no real problems.

These are more than just canaries in the mine shaft.  The history of workers and the working class in America (and elsewhere!) has always been a behind-the-doors, back-of-the-house specialty.  Hearing how attendance has dropped among the labor educators as university programs have been pared down, unions forced to eliminate education programs, and states from California to wherever in bitter political purges of funding for such work, it is clearly a situation where there’s going to be even less and less that gets out there.  The chance that what emerges will find its way into the hands of workers themselves is even more unlikely.

The signals are clear that the right wants to bleach out the last of the blue collar as they glorify greed, bankers, and high-tech, even while we bailout them out and their secretaries print out their e-mails for them.  It feels like now that they see blood in the water and feel the whip in their hand, that the effort to make workers invisible and erase what remains of their work, honor, and tradition in our culture will build up force to try to sweep everything in the way of its rage.

No longer able to command the front page with news of strikes or settlements, it appears now we will find our place in the Arts section as more obituaries are written to mark the passing of our times.

We better stop it now, while we still can!

Washington

I stumbled into the fine hall after the ceremony had already begun, taking a seat just behind Jon Hiatt, Sweeney’s long time general counsel at SEIU and now the AFL, who reached out his hand, and Bill Lurye, from New Orleans sitting down the row past Ray Abernathy and Denise Mitchell, the communications wizards I had known so long.

Listening to John read his very personal speech, I could see Ray imperceptibly nodding as he heard the words that he had no doubt helped shape for John as he has so many times before.  In the wake of the Ted Kennedy funeral and the very public expressions of faith, including the revelation of the recent letter from Senator Kennedy that was hand delivered by President Obama to the Pope, John and Ray had obviously decided in this very Jesuit institution to have John speak very comfortably and personally in his own testament to his Catholic faith as part of his service to working people.  Bob Welsh later commented to me at the reception that for all of the thousands of speeches he has heard John give this was the first one he could recall that was so deeply and personally Catholic as a man, rather than as even a Catholic labor leader.

Having long heard the Sweeney standard preamble that recognizes virtually every labor leader in any room where he is speaking, the beginning was more personal and less political as he named every Sweeney relative in the room and only mentioned Rich Trumka, his coming successor, whom I visited with later, and Arlene Holt, who I may have missed in the crowd.  Clearly, I was hearing the end of Sweeney’s political service and something of his transition to whatever his new and more personal service is likely to be.

Reading the program, it was hard to believe that he had been at the AFL-CIO for 14 years.  Could it have been that long?  And, that he had headed SEIU for 15 years.  Was it really that brief?

The President of Georgetown, Dr. John DeGioia, may have captured his recent career better in noting what I would call his “stewardship” in keeping faith in hard times for institutional labor.  Perhaps that subdued and solid note is most apt. Though it’s sad in a sense of what “could have been” to those of us who stood and hollered, as I did as a proud delegate from the New Orleans AFL-CIO and comrade from SEIU for my President as he spoke as the candidate of change and hope to reform and revitalize labor and offered to lead the AFL-CIO in a different direction in New York in that convention, when Sweeney won as a reform candidate there now years ago.  Now, we have a shattered house of labor still trying to find its future, and an AFL-CIO that is still profoundly better than what he found there, I believe, but still not what we had hoped it might have become.

My friends, comrades, brothers and sisters with whom I’ve shared so much were there in full, graying force.  It was good to see Gerry Shea whose path has now crossed and intertwined with mine for 40 years now back to welfare rights.

It was sobering at the reception to visit with Steven Greenhouse, the Times’ labor reporter, and ask him, as one of the most knowledgeable observers from outside the various houses of labor, where he thought the best new organizing was happening in the country, and realize that what used to a casual and easy question, had clearly caught him off guard.   He easily cited for Joe McCartin the stories where he had covered my organizing on his beat, when I directed the HOTROC campaign among hospitality workers in New Orleans as part of the early Sweeney AFL-CIO organizing offense when our shared friend, Kirk Adams, was the AFL’s Organizing Director, and again in Orlando and Tampa when he covered the drives we were running among Wal-Mart workers on a project supported by the AFL, SEIU, and the UFCW, when we were still all together and still trying to break new organizing ground just five years ago until everything split apart in the middle of our work.  On one hand he confessed that his editors weren’t really interested in organizing, but also conceded that there wasn’t much he could find either.  His last big organizing story he said might have been the campaign that I had helped develop and shepherd through as a partnership with ACORN and the UFT to organize the tens of thousands of home child care workers in New York City.  Joe more gracefully changed the subject to the organizing I was doing internationally to create unions of waste pickers in India, but the work there doesn’t explain or excuse the “waiting for EFCA” vacuum in so much organizing here.

Sweeney time and service was being appropriately recognized, and he and his team deserved the thanks for progress made and promised kept, even if there were many dreams unrealized and disappointments on the road.  It was an honor just to be in the room and to be fortunate enough to be there for such a great occasion with some many comrades and friends.  Many if there were more hosts and facilitators like the good, committed Jesuits of Georgetown and the thoughtful wise veterans in the allied trades, like Professor and friend, Joe McCartin, we could still make many of these dreams still come true.