SEIU's 'United We Win' Opens Debate on the Crisis
Facing Working Families and the Labor Movement

The Service Employees International Union is the largest union in the AFL-CIO and has the best organizing record, so its views on the future of the labor movement deserve to be taken seriously.

SEIU's report, "United We Win," offers a series of proposals to reverse the continuing decline in labor's strength and workers' living standards. The report states: "The labor movement needs a structure, rules, and culture that help workers build industry and market strength." It says that a focused industry and market strategy is essential for "achieving breakthroughs in raising standards for pay, benefits and working conditions and reducing employer interference with workers trying to join unions."

I don't think anyone will quarrel with the report's assertion that unions would be stronger and workers better off if they could gain greater market share through more intensive organizing in specific industries. But how do we achieve that goal?

Specifically, the report notes that there are 50 million workers who say they would like to join a union. That's a huge market, and how do we get a share of that market? Neither the AFL-CIO nor any of its affiliated unions, including the SEIU, has come up with a specific plan to achieve at least part of that goal. Most labor leaders actually discourage unorganized workers from joining unions by constantly citing the various ways employers can intimidate them if they do.

The report states: "A labor movement that has national industry and market strategies can achieve enough unionization in an industry or market, or demonstrate a serious plan to do so, so that non-union workers have more incentive to take the risk of trying to join the union and employers less incentive to resist." Smart strategies, as we have seen, do not necessarily translate into organizing victories. What evidence is there that SEIU's new strategy will produce the massive organizing gains that will increase market share?

The report says bluntly: "The labor movement's current structure and culture actually stand in the way of building industry and market strength." It criticizes the AFL-CIO as unwieldy, with too many small, ineffective internationals, and with rules that "do not provide for mutual accountability to carry out united action."

But while SEIU leaders believe that changing the AFL-CIO structure is essential to labor's progress, it does not say how this is to be achieved - while maintaining unity within the labor movement. Surely, it is not hard to anticipate the enormous resistance that would be aroused to an arbitrary plan designed by leaders of a few large unions to shoehorn the 64 internationals into 15 industrial sectors or how union members, worried about their pension rights and potential disfranchisement, would feel about so drastic a reorganization. It would be a monumental task at best, and create bitter, long-lasting internal disputes that would distract unions from expanding their organizing campaigns.

The challenge is to develop a national organizing campaign that will inspire support not only from leaders but also members of the 64 unions, the way the CIO was able to do in the 1930s, but this is apparently beyond the capacity of the current members of the AFL-CIO Executive Council.

The report emphasizes the importance of changing the "culture" within the labor movement, without really defining what that means. For the past nine years, the AFL-CIO has tried to develop a "culture to organize," but that has not arrested the continuing decline of organized labor.

What is significantly lacking in the SEIU report is any discussion of why unions have failed to organize giant corporations in recent decades. How, for example, would the market share strategy help organize the 3,250 Wal-Marts, not one of which has been organized to date? Why is no mention made of the shortage of well-trained union organizers, without whom it will be impossible to unionize corporations with thousands of workers in order to reach substantial market shares in major industries?

"United We Win" (a mantra that workers and unions have used in their struggles throughout labor history) is a document worth studying. Its 30 pages contain excellent data and commentary about labor's problems.

SEIU deserves a great deal of credit for initiating and encouraging the debate. Let's hope that officers and members of other unions will join in the discussion.

I have asked Tom Woodruff, SEIU's executive vice president, to critique my set of proposals on "How to Organize 50 Million Workers Who Say They Want to Join a Union." We look forward to his comments.

Our weekly columns, "LaborTalk" and "Labor and the War," can be viewed at our Web site www.laboreducator.org. Union members who wish information about the rank-and-file reform movement should visit www.rankandfileaflcio.org.