It’s kind of a natural thing for union people to stick up for the less powerful and weak. But, I think we shouldn’t extend our kindness to small and increasingly weak or irrelevant national unions.

I say this today because a number of people (including AFL-CIO staffers) have written to me or posted comments expressing concern that a weakening of the AFL-CIO would hurt smaller unions more than larger unions (by the way, keep the comments coming–it’s really great to see people
thinking about these issues and the point of this blog it to be a place
anyone can express a point of view).

That argument goes something like this: the AFL-CIO has a host of services (research and legislative, just as two examples) that big affiliates don’t need as much because they can afford to create such departments in-house. It’s the smaller unions that depend much more on the Federation’s staff. If the AFL-CIO staff gets even smaller–mainly because of substantially reduced resources if one or more affiliates leaves, which would compound the worsening of the Federation’s finances which have declined substantially in the past few years–the smaller unions would have no where to turn.

Okay, I hear that argument. Maybe it’s true that the Federation disproportionately helps smaller unions.

But, my question is: why should these small unions exist if they are so weak they have to lean on an even weaker institution like the Federation (a fact that is not partisan but has been true always because of the nature of the Federation)?

One of the most compelling arguments made during this debate is the need for immediate mergers to create larger, more powerful unions. I made this argument ten years ago–on the eve of John Sweeney’s election as AFL-CIO president–because it seemed obvious that we had to be organizing on a large scale, not by drips and drabs, and small unions couldn’t to it.

If you want some startling numbers to back that up, check this out: Just to increase our ranks a measly one percent above the current 12.5 percent (and that’s generously including public sector workers), labor needs to bring in a net of 1.5 million workers, according to Jeff Grabelsky, a labor researcher and strategist at Cornell University. The AFL-CIO says its affiliates netted 500,000 new members last year; I think that number might be generous because it probably includes affiliations of previously independent unions.

But, even if you take the number as real, it’s obvious that organizing a thousand workers here or there is a loser. Money isn’t the problem: unions still possess billions of dollars in assets. Personally, I would argue that labor should consider choosing a few big employers, commit to a minimum five-year campaign to organize their workers, and focus the entire labor movement on those strategic targets. Even if certain unions might not reap members immediately, taking down big targets will open up other opportunities down the road.

And small, weak unions that rely on the Federation to prop themselves up cannot carry their weight in that kind of organizing.

Everyone jumped all over SEIU when it argued in “Unite To Win” that the Federation should force unions to merge. Well, okay, maybe I can buy the argument that it’s hard to *force* independent unions to merge. But, when people attack the process, I always smell another motive: either people don’t want to change or they have no viable alternative to solve the obvious problem.

What the Federation can do, though, is show leadership by setting up much tougher standards for unions–including stop babying unions that can’t stand on their own two feet. Sure, that sounds a bit Darwinian. But, I’d argue that it’s far more Darwinian to say that we’re going to protect the few while 91 percent of workers in the country hang out there with no rights and no power at work.