It was a grim group that crowded into the President’s Room at 16th Street at 4 p.m. yesterday. Along with many people who participated via phone, the AFL-CIO staff vented their anger at John Sweeney and Bob Welsh, his executive assistant and chief of staff, for the brutal staff cuts announced Tuesday. Black Tuesday is a wound that will fester for many weeks, months and perhaps years into the future, among people who remain, people who end up retiring or taking a buy-out, or people, many of them young activists brimming with idealism, who leave embittered by their experience in the house of labor.
From reliable reports, I’ve pieced together this account. Understand the mood—safe to say that most staff members like Sweeney personally; the same cannot be said of Welsh. While they are furious about what has happened, the questions, demands and a few pointed accusations were delivered mostly without shouting, though full of emotion. It must have been the lowpoint in Sweeney’s ten years in office—to preside over a meeting signifying the dismantling of what he had built up organizationally.
A number of people voiced concern for the staffers who were perhaps 2-3 years away from retirement but face an uncertain future: losing the possibility of a full pension with a tough road to try to find new employment. “If corporate America did this, we would be out on the streets,” said one person, to loud applause (it is pretty unnerving that, in the past few months, labor has been pounding the airline industry for reneging on its pension obligations). “I’m pleading with you to direct your subordinates to find an equitable solution.” Sweeney’s response was roughly, “I appreciate the issue you’re raising and we will do our best to address this.”
A recurring theme which came up repeatedly was the feeling that the staff cuts were done unfairly, sparing managers while hacking away at the unionized staff members. The shop steward for the public policy department gave a very detailed and impassioned critique of how it all went down for her colleagues (recall, as described in Tuesday’s report of the cuts, Public Policy, Health & Safety, and Legislative were all merged into a newly created super-department called Government Affairs): according to her, 9 out of 10 Guild positions were defunded, the 10th was transferred, while 3 out of 4 managers were moved to the new super-department. She argued that the 4 managers jobs should have been defunded and the work transferred to Guild members because, as she sees it, Guild members can do the manager’s projected work created in the new Government Affairs dept. Where was the shared sacrifice, she asked. After her presentation, Welsh tried to make a joke, saying “I can see why we have you representing the AFL-CIO,” to which she responded, sarcastically and bitterly, “Not anymore.”
The point here really is this: I don’t know whether her description of the situation is accurate. What’s important is the environment Black Tuesday has created among AFL-CIO staff. No one knows what the work will be and what the positions will look like—there are no job descriptions for the new positions as described in Tuesday’s report.
I just find that astounding: you take a meat cleaver to an organization—no, a unionized workplace, no, the emblem to the outside world of who labor is—wipe out job categories with the stroke of a pen yet nothing is presented in their place except for vague job titles. Would any union leader worth his or her salt stand for that action at a workplace under a union contract? Of course not—every one of them would say, “hell, no,” kick up serious shit and be in the boss’ face 24/7.
The real tragedy is the tension that has been created between co-workers. As the public policy staffer put it, the Guild members had to go home to their families and explain how their livelihood may be gone, while managers went home not having to tell that to their families. In the coming weeks, there is the potential for very serious conflict over the leftover crumbs. Welsh is asserting that the newly-created titles represent a new kind of work with new responsibilities requiring a different skill set from the previous jobs. The Guild will argue hard that the jobs aren’t much different and that filling the new titles should be done simply on the basis of seniority. And a lot of people are going to be competing with each other for a relatively small pie. The whirring sound you hear is the fax machines dispatching resumes as fast as possible to international unions (and, I know for a fact one large international union is already looking at the people who were defunded to see who they can pick up).
How does this play on labor’s image? Another staffer from the South told the following story: A year ago he married a woman who works in corporate America. When he tried to explain to her what had transpired in the past couple of days, her response was: “I thought that shouldn’t happen to you because you have a union and you’re in the labor movement.” His worry, he said, was that as word gets out, “people are not going to understand and they are going to come to the conclusion that what we’re doing is exactly what corporate America is doing and we lose our credibility and moral authority.” Sweeney, though acknowledging that it was a tough situation, disagreed with that assessment, saying that the Federation is “confronted with the need to restructure if we want to grow and be stronger and also because we have a mandate from the leadership.”
The looming political struggle came up twice, more or less explicitly. Welsh tired to hang these cuts partly on the “insurgent” unions saying that “unions representing 40 percent of the federation put forth proposals to cut the staff of the federation in half. It’s against this background we’ve made tough choices.” And Sweeney was asked whether he thought these changes would stop any union from leaving the Federation, referring clearly to SEIU. Sweeney basically sidestepped the issue, saying the Federation would face up to whatever challenges came up.
And diversity came up at least twice: once when it was pointed out that, though Sweeney has made a big issue of promoting women, the one person dealing with womens’ issues in the civil rights department was defunded (I guess “defunded” is a euphemism for canned, fired, dumped). Sweeney’s response: very painful but trying to maintain programs. The second challenge, to applause, came when someone pointed out that virtually all the defunded positions in the political department except one were jobs held by African-Americans; adding that she wasn’t claiming management was racist…a charge Sweeney said was not justified.
There was a recurring theme in Sweeney and Welsh’s defense: that the cuts and restucturing were mandated by the Executive Council, and that this was part of a plan to create a stronger labor movement. Welsh, in particular, argued that, even though the Field Mobilization department was decimated, the smaller, new staff positions would create a longer term, skilled infrastructure out in the field particularly among State Federations. He said that the goal was to change the dynamic whereby weak state federations and central labor bodies rely on the Fed to help with rallies, a local political race–the Fed, he said, never has had, and never will have, the resources to fill all those requests. He probably has a point there. He spoke of breaking the cycle of dependence, focusing, instead, on building long-term local capabilities.
A number of people who spoke from the field expressed some doubt about Welsh’s plan. “Why on earth would we reduce resources when the work is even harder,” asked one. The field operation–now a catch all department called Political Mobilization–was cut from 67 to 37 people.
I’m a bit perplexed by management’s argument: as I pointed out in questions to Sweeney (to which, not to belabor the point, no answers have come), there has been no real coming to terms with the failure to organize and the failure in politics, measured by the results. Sixty percent of the membership of the AFL-CIO voted for general resolutions about focus at the last Executive Council meeting in Las Vegas–but there was ZERO recognition, beyond rhetoric, on the part of many individual unions what it would take in terms of changing their organizatons to build a real organizing and political program.These cuts don’t seem to have any relationship to a new strategy for organizing or politics, even though they follow the release last week of the officers’ recommendations.
I have pointed out many times that blaming the Federation and Sweeney for the mess we face is too easy and, to a large extent, misplaced: its the individual unions that shoulder the responsibility for the past and, thus, the key to any change for the future of labor. I’ll have more to say about that by early next week, pegged to the rumors about UNITE-HERE’s John Wilhelm possibly jumping into the race next week—and whether that matters or not.
To quote my grandmother: Oy.
