Pearl River      The AFL-CIO held their recent convention in Minneapolis with delegates from the member unions.  Given the focus on Minneapolis over recent years, this seems like it would be a good venue choice, if the agenda was designed to focus on solidarity and the resurgence of communities and working people to meet the challenges of these times.

I’m actually not sure how this all worked out.  Even with Gallup polling indicating that unions are enjoying record popularity at over 70%, outside of the convention hall this almost seemed like a nonevent.  It’s not too far in the distant past that AFL-CIO conventions were big news, and what they had to say was widely reported.  I can remember being a delegate at the New York convention when John Sweeney was elected and again at the Los Angeles convention when labor changed its policy on immigration in recognition of the growing number of Hispanic members in our ranks.  Those conventions mattered.

In fact, I didn’t realize the convention was happening until I read a piece calling into question the federation’s membership figures.  I thought this was odd, since I also remembered that unions recorded a positive growth rate in absolute numbers and percentages in 2025 for the first time in a while.  The piece was written by the Chris Townsend, former political director of UE, the United Electrical Workers, an independent union, and director of organizing and field mobilization of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), an AFL-CIO affiliate.  Townsend’s piece called into question the membership claims by the federation of almost 15 million, claiming that almost one-third were suspect, which is a pretty serious charge.

The crux of his point is how to understand – and to count – associate members.  There are the almost 4.7 million members that came into the federation as part of the Working America canvass operation.  Canvassers from Working America over the last several decades would have knocked on their doors, usually as part of a get out the vote operation, asked them for support and collected a donation from them, along with their personal details, making them an associate member.  This was tactically brilliant, as designed by Jon Hiatt, the former general counsel of the federation.  The way political money worked then, and to some degree now, unions and other organizations could use their own money to education their members about elections, and with this technical twist, that added all of the associate members to the recruitable constituency for unions and the federation to justify their political expenditures.

Townsend’s beef, and he has a point, is that this number doesn’t really represent rank-and-file, on the job union membership of the federation’s affiliates.  At the same time, these associate members do in fact have value, especially when the AFL-CIO is realistically evaluated as a political and lobbying organization, which is its real function.  The AFL-CIO is a purpose-build organization of unions, but in most ways, it is not a union at all.  Yes, it has some legacy direct affiliates that date back a generation or more, but that’s almost irrelevant to its mission.  When it organizes, it enrolls people in the affiliates, and it doesn’t do much of that.  It doesn’t handle grievances and represent individual workers or bargain contracts, even as it can significantly speak for all workers, advocate for policy, and promote legislation.  It’s just not a union, plain and simple.  A union puffing up their membership figures on a governmentally required Labor Management report might be in a bit of pickle, but a federation like the AFL-CIO is more like a trade association, than a union.  Always has been, and, sadly, despite John Sweeney’s best efforts, likely always will be.

Politically, if they claimed another 10 million members, and it won more for workers, I could be OK with that.  Townsend is right to worry that underneath these figures may be some lagging growth in actual union members, but that’s on the affiliates, not the AFL-CIO.  Affiliates and the federation are apples and oranges, not math problems.