Working for a Labor Union Is
The Cushiest Job in the U.S.

Reading a long July 4 panegyric extolling the values and virtues of the labor movement, I was struck by one sentence that, in the midst of heavy platitudes, expressed a glittering truth. The sentence read:

“People who work directly for unions get good wages and benefits.” (You betcha!)

Starting at the top, the three AFL-CIO executive officers each earn about $250.000 a year with a guaranteed 60 percent of their salary for each year after they retire. All of the 51 members of the AFL-CIO Executive Council get salaries in the 6-figure range, And don’t forget the pensions and the perks! And none of them has ever been fired from their or suffered a wage cut!

As for job security, it’s not uncommon for presidents of international unions to cling to their high-priced positions for 15 or 20 or more years until they decide to retire with fabulous pensions. And that’s true of many officers in AFL-CIO’s state and local affiliates.

Some time ago, Labor Notes, the monthly magazine, ran a list of union officials earning big annual salaries that are hard to justify. Salary increases are usually granted by a pliant executive board, not by a vote of the local or international membership, so the fig-leaf of union democracy is retained.

There are also thousands of jobs that are filled by people working at a variety of union institutions, including administrators, lawyers, organizers, communicators, clerks, receptionists and other personnel. It is rare that unions do not offer an affordable health insurance plan, because if they didn’t, they would receive unfavorable publicity.

And the best part of being a union jobholder is that you usually keep your wages and benefits intact during an economic recession. Do you think Trumka and his cronies took a wage cut when millions of union members lost their jobs?

Sure, it’s great for them to have a union-paying job, but what about us who don’t have one?.

Are We Headed for a Two-Tiered Working Class?

When it was announced that as many as 800,000 union members had left the AFL-CIO in 2008, there were no alarm bells ringing at the Federation’s headquarters in Washington. There were no signs that an effort was being made to reclaim these members. AFL-CIO leaders were thinking, if not saying: Who needs unemployed or economically-strapped workers who can’t pay their regular union dues?

The top AFL-CIO jobholders have no plan to help working families that are struggling to survive on jobs that pay a minimum wage or slightly better, and with health-care plans that are beyond their reach.

For years, the AFL-CIO has bragged that there are some 50 million workers who would like to join a union if they were free to do so. But the Federation leadership and their affiliated unions have not tried to organize even a tiny fraction of them.

In June 2010, there were 6.8 million people who had been unemployed for 27 weeks or more—and the list is growing each week, Congressional Republicans and a few Democrats are determined to limit or cut their benefits.. But what would happen to these millions when, at some point, their benefits expire? How would they and their families survive? This is a problem that should worry the AFL-CIO hierarchy. Yet the Federation’s web site contains almost no expressions of sympathy or labor solidarity, much less actual assistance, to the long-term unemployed.

But what about the campaign for 11 million public works jobs? That campaign, based almost exclusively on fiery speeches by Trumka and e-mails to Congress, has collapsed, leaving an army of unemployed in despair, with the knowledge that, hundreds of thousands will never have a decent job again.

Also largely abandoned are the millions of workers who earn a meager living in various low-wage industries, (fast food, child care, restaurants, hotels, supermarkets, garment factories and office cleaning), many of whom pay union dues that provide the funds to maintain those prized union-based jobs.

Is the labor movement going to be split between those who have good union jobs and thos who have poor, unprotected ones or none at all?—Harry Kelber

LaborTalk (80) will be posted here on Tuesday, July 9, 2010 and on our two web sites, https://www.laboreducator.org/ and www.laborsvoiceforchange.org.