Labor pains.

OVER Labor Day weekend, the two contenders for the presidency of the AFL-CIO were debating on Meet the Press. John Sweeney, head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), had just explained that "we really have to fight aggressively for affirmative action, especially in national policy." His rival, Thomas Donahue, interim president of the AFL-CIO, boasted that his running-mate was the first woman ever to hold one of the federation's top two offices. Sweeney's response: "We've gone a step further, and we are nominating not only a woman, but a person of color . . ."

This is not your father's labor movement. George Meany's AFL-CIO fought the Nixon Administration's quota proposals. It was also anti-Communist: Meany refused to endorse George McGovern's 1972 presidential bid largely because of the latter's opposition to the Vietnam War. But in the late Seventies and early Eighties the labor movement began to move leftward, particularly on social issues. Labor's alliance with civil-rights groups dictated a reversal on quotas; its alliance with feminism dictated a reversal on the Equal Rights Amendment and support for "comparable worth" legislation. By 1983, the AFL-CIO was coming out for anti-discrimination laws to protect gays and lesbians.

As president of the AFL-CIO in the Eighties, Lane Kirkland maintained its anti-Communism, and many conservatives speak warmly of him for that reason. Otherwise, the AFL-CIO's agenda was indistinguishable from that of contemporary liberalism. In the last Congress, labor supported President Clinton's "Goals 2000" education program, national service, the tax-hiking 1993 budget, the inclusion of abortion as a health benefit for federal workers, the Violence against Women Act, and the Clinton health plan. It opposed the Balanced Budget Amendment and reform of unfunded mandates. These positions, particularly on health reform and budget balance, place the AFL-CIO several steps to the left of most union members.

The current race developed after Kirkland was forced to retire in June. Criticism had mounted as organized labor under him continued to lose both members and political power. The rap on Kirkland, recently delineated by John Judis in The New Republic, is that he was effete and out of touch with workers, preoccupied by foreign policy, and insufficiently aggressive and creative in organizing workers. Disgruntled union leaders led by Sweeney and Gerald McEntee, head of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), tried to persuade Donahue, long the AFL-CIO's number-two official, to run against Kirkland, but Donahue, out of loyalty to Kirkland, was unwilling. Only when Kirkland resigned did Donahue toss his hat in the ring, but too late to win the support of the rebels.

The labor movement is likely to turn more militant if, as expected, Sweeney wins the election next month. Many of the people in his camp have backgrounds in the New Left or in the left wing of the labor movement. His union, the SEIU, has a reputation for leftishness. It has worked with the radical Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a group best known for threatening small-business owners with pickets and boycotts unless they hire "from the community" and give money to ACORN. Judis remarks that "SEIU is the only union with a gay and lesbian caucus." Sweeney's running-mates -- Richard Trumka, head of the United Mine Workers, and Linda Chavez-Thompson, vice president -- are more militant than he is. Trumka is young, smart, and telegenic; he is widely expected to dominate Sweeney's administration and to be his heir. Marshall Wittman, a former union staffer now at the Heritage Foundation, says, "These guys are closer to the Rainbow Coalition than they are to the Democratic National Committee in their outlook."

The dynamics of the campaign suggest that Donahue would take the AFL-CIO in the same direction as Sweeney, though slightly more slowly. The two men are trying to outbid each other not just on affirmative action, but also on promises to spend millions of dollars hiring union organizers and to engage in more political activism. Donahue has launched an advertising campaign against the Republicans' alleged "all-out attack on America's working families" and is pouring money into the districts of vulnerable Republican congressmen like freshman Randy Tate (Wash.). And Donahue has been Sweeney's friend and ally for years; the two got their start in the same New York SEIU local. The anti-Kirkland insurgents approached Donahue first, after all.

Since the candidates are offering similar platforms, the election will probably have less effect in moving the labor movement leftward than another event: the likely merger of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. The merger would bring the NEA, the largest union in the country into the AFL-CIO. The NEA is unequivocally leftist on everything from educational standards to abortion to the Nicaraguan Contras.

Leo Troy, an economics professor at Rutgers University, argues that the labor movement's character has been affected by the increasing role of public-sector unions within it. While unions and management in the private sector often have conflicting interests, in the public sector they both have an interest in higher taxes and spending; and there is no competition to restrain their joint rapacity. Public-sector unionists also tend to have more liberal outlooks, particularly on social issues. In this context it's worth noting that SEIU members work predominantly in the public sector.

Public-sector unions loom so large in the labor movement today mainly because private-sector unionism has declined dramatically -- to less than one-third of its strength at its peak in 1953, when 36 per cent of private-sector workers belonged to a union. Conservative activist Grover Norquist observes that movements often grow more radical as they shrink. Waning press attention partly accounts for that phenomenon. Because of the movement's decline, the press has not been following the AFL-CIO election as closely as it did past intra-labor battles.

Whatever their politics, labor leaders will be lucky to arrest the decline of their movement. Hiring new organizers probably will not fix the problem. One of Sweeney's selling points is that the SEIU has almost doubled in size on his watch -- but as Troy points out, most of that growth was due to the SEIU's swallowing up existing public-employee associations. His record does not indicate that spending money on private-sector organizing will necessarily pay off. And while organizing in the public sector helps the movement financially, it will not yield the political victories that labor would need to pass its wish list of "labor-law reforms," because most government employees are already in the liberal coalition. Building a transnational labor movement, an idea much favored by left-wing journalists, is a pipedream. "It's hard enough for these guys to agree among themselves," says Rick Berman, head of the Employment Policies Institute. The most that unions can push for on this front is more labor side-agreements to trade agreements, as in NAFTA.

Political activism holds out no more hope for the unions than organizing does. They can oppose efforts to downsize government at both the state and federal levels, and they can try to co-opt Republican congressmen from districts with a lot of labor voters, as they recently did on some Amtrak votes (see Byron York's article in the latest American Spectator). But a Republican President could hand the unions a big defeat on the right to work, making it much harder for them to collect forced dues from workers. Like so much else, the future of organized labor depends on next year's elections.