Labor's new day?

There is nothing like an old cliche to convey a timeless moral. So here goes: The union movement, like a slumbering giant, awoke this summer. Not twitched, not rolled over, not raised an eyelid, but woke up. And perhaps for the first time in many decades, the union movement will stop being a shopworn topic for Labor Day editorials.

Three signs of new energy: (1) Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO for sixteen years, resigned under pressure--however deferentially expressed. (2) This has led to a contested election (unprecedented) for a new president in November, thus encouraging open acknowledgment (long overdue) of the declining fortunes of unionism, and a serious debate over how to win back members and organize millions of new workers. (3) The steel workers, automobile workers, and machinists, three of the nation's largest unions, with a total of 2 million members, agreed to merge over the next five years. What does this all add up to? In a world economy where corporate interests dominate and in the lean, mean corporate atmosphere within which unions must organize, unions need more vital leadership, the consolidation of resources, the end of competition to organize the same workers, and the commitment of money and personnel to organize.

This would all be to the good. But is it good enough? And in time enough?

The diminishment of the union movement's power and influence over the last quarter century can be measured in the steady decline of real wages, health and pension benefits, and job security. This is true for members and nonmembers of labor unions. The true advocate for working people are not government regulators, the Department of Labor, or the Democratic party, but rather labor unions. Their loss of power, and more critically of moral and political suasion, has had repercussions far beyond its own membership, which itself has declined over the last twenty years from about one-third of the nation's nonagricultural workers to less than 15 percent, some 13 million workers.

Labor's decline has been attributed to many outside forces: globalization of the economy; the flight of U.S. manufacturers to cheaper labor markets, first in the South of the United States and then abroad; a steady supply of immigrants willing to work for nonunion wages; and a shift from manufacturing to service jobs. But an economy that continues to produce millions of new jobs every year is an economy that has work for unions: organize workers.

In a classic essay on unions, Wilfrid Sheed quotes George Meany, Kirkland's equally long-serving predecessor, "Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not appear to want to be organized? If they prefer to have others speak for them and make the decisions which affect their lives without effective participation of their part, that is their right" (Three Mobs: Labor, Church and Mafia, Sheed & Ward).

When Meany spoke in 1974, 25 percent of U.S. workers were organized; time has shown how shortsighted his oddly complacent views were. Kirkland was no improvement. On top of that, many ensconced union leaders and wellpaid workers were themselves complacent in the face of the enormous economic shifts of the '70s and '80s. Writes Sheed, they made the "Roman Catholic Curia look downright flighty."

An aggressive organizing campaign--including commitments of money and new personnel--is promised by both Thomas Donahue and John Sweeney, who are competing to head the AFL-CIO. That will not resolve all of labor's woes, but if successful, it will go some way in giving working men and women a forum and a focus in an economy and a political system increasingly unwilling to acknowledge that their own health and productivity rests on justly compensated workers.

Yet unions themselves often seem equally remote from their members. It is curious that when a genuine American populism is pressing for greater responsiveness from the government and both political parties, that a greater measure of representation, if not democracy, is not being demanded in the workplace and the union hall. Perhaps the AFL-CIO should consider term limits for its officers and bring the wage scale of its leadership into closer parity with the rank and file. That might go some way toward convincing workers that labor unions are part of the solution and not part of the problem.