Speaking softly, which he can do, and which he does with faint traces of his native Bronx, Sweeney, 61, seems more like someone’s Uncle Lenny than like Lenin. However, he was elected to lead labor because he is thought, with reason, to have ‘Tire in the belly." He has sufficient girth to accommodate a conflagration. His suspenders are blindingly red, like the flags that were to flutter over the barricades at the dawn of justice. “Arise . . . "
Sweeney’s exhortation to organized labor and to laborers not yet organized is “Arise, ye prisoners of wage stagnation!” It does not have quite the snap of the “Internationale,” but it will do in a pinch. And organized labor is in a pinch, not only in Newt Gingrich’s Washington but in today’s global economy. The U.S. economy is enduring the disciplining rigors of international competition as never before. It is thriving, but only because many companies have become leaner by shedding workers, and workers’ benefits. (Last week AT&T announced plans for doing without 77,800 managers-half its supervisors.) And many Americans believe life has become meaner.
It certainly has for organized labor. Union membership as a percentage of the work force is at the lowest level since the Wagner Act was passed in 1935. (In the six years after that, union membership tripled.) Union membership was 33.2 percent of the work force in 1955. Today it is 15.5 percent. In the private sector it is 10.9 percent. Since 1979 the United Auto Workers membership has shrunk from 1.5 million to 800,000, the United Steelworkers from 380,000 to 140,000. Much of organized labor’s recent growth has been in the public sector, where 38.7 percent of the work force is unionized. However, it is a mixed blessing for organized labor to be so heavily identified with government. True, government cannot be moved like a textile plant to South Korea, and in spite of the mini-semi-demi-crisis misnamed the government “shutdown,” government never goes out of business. But government may yet go through the sort of wringer the rest of the economy has been going through for more than a decade.
Only 3 million of the 70 million jobs added to the economy since 1950 have been manufacturing jobs, so unions have had to seek members in the public sector and in the private sector’s service industries. One union that has grown like Topsy–by 500,000 members during the last 15 years, doubling its size-is the Service Employees International Union. It is now the third largest union, behind the Teamsters and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. SEIU represents janitors, doormen and other support workers in commercial buildings, and service workers such as those delivering home health care. During those 15 years of explosive growth the SEIU’s president was John Sweeney.
His elevation to the AFL-CIO presidency has sent a frisson through the remnant of the American left because when his rhetoric is rewed up, old leftists (there aren’t many young ones) hear echoes of the United Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis and other thunderers from the ‘3Os. Sweeney, the son of Irish immigrants, has a flair for blarney, as when he says that “every workplace in America is being turned into a sweatshop” by “greedy employers” (Microsoft? Bill Gates?). Sweeney says workers are “being treated like so much road kill on the highway of American life.”
Such rhetoric strongly implies that the principal threat to the welfare of American workers is the nasty character of American employers. Would that it were. Demonizing bosses may be cathartic, but labor’s problems arise from the increasingly open and deregulated world, featuring the unimpeded mobility of capital and the sudden entry into the world labor market of more than a billion Chinese and others. Sweeney and his allies speak of sit-down strikes and other civil disobedience to protest layoffs or resistance to unionization. Such theatrical tactics might help energize attempts to organize the unorganized (for example, poultry workers in the South), but they are no answer to the economic gales sweeping through the global economy.
When asked what he would seek from Congress if he could wave a magic wand and make Gingrich go away, Sweeney first mentions an increase in the minimum wage. As an act of militancy, that would hardly amount to storming the Winter Palace. Labor would like a law banning the hiring of replacements for striking workers, but labor could not get such a law when Democrats controlled Congress. When Samuel Gompers was AFL president for 37 years, he was asked what he wanted for workers. He said “the earth and the fullness thereof” and gave abundant particulars. What many workers want now is security. Congress is powerless to give them that even were it so inclined, which it isn’t. The first Democratic president in 12 years relied on Gingrich’s Republicans to pass NAFTA, which labor (and a majority of congressional Democrats) opposed. Labor wants protectionism but the only presidential candidate singing from labor’s hymnal is Pat Buchanan, whose increasingly weird “conservatism” expands reverence for property rights into the notion that workers have something like property rights to their jobs.
Bill Clinton, forever trying to square circles, stands foursquare for “change” but against anxiety and insecurity. Organized labor under Sweeney may be more forthright, seeking protection from the wider world and saying that change is not worth the cost in anxiety and insecurity. If so, labor will have the satisfaction of consistency, but only that satisfaction.
