Editor’s Preface

The following essay by Jonathan Tasini, labor journalist and president of the National Writers Union (UAW Local 1981), is part of the Future of Labor series which we began in 1992 with the goal of encouraging debate about the path to reviving the U.S. labor movement. In 1992 we said: “Labor cannot afford the luxury of ignoring its own crisis. The labor movement will not grow spontaneously. Nor will it grow because of pro-union government largesse resulting from a change in the occupant of the White House. Without conscious and pervasive remedial measures, the American labor movement will recede into irrelevance.

“For labor to meet its unique and primary obligation in the process of reversing its own decline, it must engage itself in a frank discussion of both the internal and external obstacles to its growth. We reject the notion that such debate plays into the hands of labor’s adversaries. Unlike its adversaries, labor enters this discussion with the goal of its own revitalization. But more importantly, whether intended or not, anything less than the promotion of open discussion and debate within the labor movement implies the preservation of the status quo and the further marginalization of labor in American society.”

Today, comments likes these are considered obvious first principles for any discussion of labor’s revitalization. Over the course of the next period, LRA associates will conduct new and fresh research and analysis that will seek to provide viable options for labor leaders searching for ways to rebuild in an era of dwindling internal resources and relentless employer-government attack. Tasini’s essay is the first of what we hope will be many such efforts. We encourage readers to participate in this process by sending in their own comments and contacting us if they are interested in pursuing further research and analysis.

Greg Tarpinian
Executive Director
Labor Research Association
October 1995

Introduction

If one strolls past the Department of Labor building in Washington, D.C. towards union station one is walking on prime real estate worth millions of dollars. Nestled on this land are several buildings owned by international unions: The National Association of Letter Carriers; the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America; and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Throughout Washington, the AFL-CIO and other unions-the National Education Association, United Food and Commercial Workers, Mine Workers and American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees-have formidable physical homes. Labor can even count a few parking lots in its assets.

These buildings are the symbols of our own Edifice Complex. These structures have ensnared us in a political culture that chokes off our lifeblood and is alienating unions from their members and potential new recruits. The buildings also represent a division of fiefs that no longer makes sense in the global economy of today. Indeed, their very existence is giving comfort and sustenance to a political system dedicated to eradicating the labor movement. And, finally, from a very practical perspective, these monuments are worth multi-millions, perhaps a billion dollars of resources that lie fallow at a time when more money is needed to organize new members. For labor to survive into the 21st Century, we must sell off these buildings and return to the heartland, to the cities and small communities in which the desperation, frustration and pain of millions of working people grow every day.

Why now? We are dying. To say anything else to our members is a lie. By any measure, we are in a crisis. We are in a time of great danger, a moment when labor, here and around the world is under the most concerted, effective and powerful attack in this century and teeters on the verge of extinction. The seamless global economy, oiled by the vast technological revolution sweeping the world and the unabated dash towards an international order with virtually no minimum labor standards, is humming every day with only token resistance from unions. Billions of dollars flow in seconds from country to country, handing control over our working lives from politicians to money managers who are so powerful that even Business Week took the step of asking whether they have become “a shadow world government-one that is irretrievably eroding the concept of the sovereign powers of a nation-state.” Without a doubt the staggering power of corporations has, in part, come from the acquiescence and outright support of the political system, which has been poisoned and warped by the influence of money.

At the same time, we must accept some responsibility for the crisis, rejecting the easy but deadly course of blaming all of our ills on external forces. We can no longer simply point to the media’s relentless stereotyping of unions as the reason we fail to organize. Nor can we use the imbalance of the legal system, weighted at every level in favor of corporate interests, to shield us from a tough look at the way we function. In the 1920s and 1930s, company and government goons openly threatened, beat up and killed union organizers and striking workers. Yet, that period saw a great wave of union organizing. In Pennsylvania, public employees organized a union and had more strikes long before the right to collectively bargain passed into law.

Pointing fingers at the outside enemy and making excuses cannot explain our embrace of a political system that inspires deep disgust and rejection from a cross-section of America, including many union members. It will not help us see the reality of the Ross Perot buttons worn by our members. Nor will it help us understand how too many Americans see labor institutions as incapable of helping them cope with the daily grind of the workplace.

Ironically, during this dark time a great opportunity lies before us. If we seize the moment, we can have an unparalleled, honest, frank, sometimes painful but, hopefully, an ultimately productive debate over our future. Freed from the Cold War’s ideological polarization, which paralyzed many into opposite camps; sobered by the Republican ascendancy in Congress, which obliterated labor’s access to the political levers of power and should have wiped away our illusion of influence, we can perhaps look at ourselves with a clarity unimaginable just a few years ago. We can ask deep, penetrating questions about how we spend our money. We can wonder whether the way we are structured makes sense. We can rethink and recapture our role as the leader of community-based social movements, raising our moral voice with a keen vision that sees beyond the walls of our workplaces.

Until the recent split in the top echelons of the AFL-CIO, the debate had mostly taken place between labor elites, divided into two camps: elected leaders in one camp, critics or self-described dissidents in the other camp. Neither can find any common language through which to discuss opposing views. Elected leaders see all critics as uninformed dissidents or malcontents and a threat to power. Dissidents have the unsettling tendency to view every elected leader or staff person as a “bureaucrat’ or a “sell-out” and exhort for more militancy without necessarily offering a plan to deal with pervasive fear in the workplace. Now we witness a new split, pitting one camp of elected leaders against another.

Neither of these elites will acknowledge the singular failure and obstacle they all share: an inability to communicate with most union members, not to mention workers who do not belong to unions. The vast sea of union members, a sleeping giant still numbering in the millions, neither come to union halls or meetings except when they have a specific individual or group grievance, nor do they understand or even relate to the often-ideological language, which makes no connection to their daily lives at work.

This project began prior to the recent power struggle in the AFL-CIO. Though clearly one cannot ignore these events, my own view is that our problems are much deeper than personalities and small cliques. Working people’s wages are falling and our power is waning, so we should look at what we are doing. In other words, the issue is what is our program and view of our mission. Moreover, we will only successfully evaluate our predicament if we choose a course of action charting a fifteen- to twenty-year battle.

No one person should pretend to have all the answers or solutions. More than offering pat answers or solutions, the perspectives expressed here are intended to provoke debate and raise questions derived from two experiences. First, as president of UAW Local 1981 (the National Writers Union) for the past five years, I have been deeply involved in expanding the union’s power and membership, which now stands at more than 4,100 members nationwide. Born in 1981, our union has expanded during the time conventional wisdom said it could not be done. We have done so by organizing outside the confines of the labor laws; our budget has a line item for legal assistance of $1,000; and, perhaps, most important, much of the work defending our members has been done by unpaid volunteers spread across the country who put their paying work aside in order to fight for their union brethren. Second, making my living as a freelance labor journalist (not a union official), I have traveled to every part of this country, spent weeks, days and many hours with union members in every conceivable industry.

I acknowledge that what I suggest here entails some risks. On balance, though, I believe we have no choice because I am certain of only one thing: if we continue to ignore the reality of our conditions, if we stifle debate, if we are unwilling to consider dramatic changes, we will certainly die. And that death will harm all of society because, as the labor economist Solomon Barkin observed in 1961, long before the current crisis, the decline of unions “is not only a challenge to the membership and leadership of the unions but also to public leaders concerned with the foundations of American democracy. Political freedom and democracy in the twentieth century, in this country at least, depend upon an effective internal balance of private economic power.’

What is Our Mission?

Our basic challenge is to step outside our normal frame of reference, which limits our field of vision, and look at the way we’ve been doing things almost automatically for nearly half a century. Though we despise many of the ideas Newt Gingrich stands for, he is correct when he says one cannot truly change an institution without first changing the culture supporting the institution; otherwise, you make cosmetic changes by replacing bankrupt stewards with people who will soon lose their legitimacy. Or put another way, cultures define institutions and when institutions no longer mirror or respond to the culture, they fail or collapse. Today, the labor movement does not mirror the culture it seeks to represent. Indeed, the culture the labor movement reflects has, in many respects, been rejected by labor’s current and desired constituency.

I subscribe to the notion that the roots of the decline go back at least forty years. One aspect of the crisis was laid out by C. Wright Mills as early as 1948 in his penetrating book, The New Men of Power. Business and labor “both wish to do as well in a business way as they can, which is to say, that under the aegis of the AFL, business unionism has been as American as business enterprise itself” he wrote. “This brand of unionism is not an evangelical movement of classes but a business-like operation, based on a business-like idea and put into practice by business-like men …They have become labor’s entrepreneurs.’ Soon after Mills wrote his book, the witch hunts of the McCarthy era descended on America. And it was perhaps the labor movement that was most indelibly stamped with the stain of the anti-communist hysteria that swept the nation.

From here, a significant critique of the labor movement unfolds: we became focused on “servicing’ current members at the expense of organizing new members because the political constituency of elected leaders and staff on a daily basis are those people who pay dues; labor, therefore, became a special interest, occupied with an agenda aimed solely at safeguarding its members’ well-being. This is the essence of the phrase “business unionism.’

There is some legitimacy to this evaluation. But it is very limited and has been used too loosely, including by this author in the past. There is an odor of accusation, bordering on suggestions of corruption, to the title “business unionist’ or its frequent companion “bureaucrat.’ It implies a hidden motive or dictatorial process imposed from the top (clearly a mode of operation in some unions) on unsuspecting union members, rather than a two-way street of, on the one hand, members demands and expectations welling up from a long-term institutional educational process and, on the other hand, the political imperatives imbedded in union culture (the need to get re-elected to union posts, for example). There is a somewhat more subtle implication: members are too stupid to know for themselves what is good for them.

Far more important, in my view, is our support of the state. Government is the problem, as many people are crying out. Not in that it shelters the poor or protects the disenfranchised but that it siphons the vast wealth and resources of this country to a very few. It is a system that allows productivity gains-the result of the sweat of our members-to go almost entirely to corporate profits over the last 15 years, a reversal from previous times when a rise in productivity showed up in pay raises for workers. It is a political system that endorses more work, rather than spreading out diminishing good work to more people through a four-day work week and no overtime. It is a bi-partisan way of thinking that tries to convince us that six percent unemployment is acceptable.

We not only do not appear to be a safe haven for the increasing numbers of workers who, as expressed in recent polls, want a political party or movement to represent “the people.’ Labor casts the same shadow, in many peoples’ minds, as the very institutions and forces they believe are undermining their future. Faced with what it views as limited options, labor supports this system-with money, human resources and words of comfort-undermining our moral authority or voice to represent the people. Rather than defend the rule of the Democratic Party leadership in Congress, we should have been in the position to criticize its behavior (outright corruption, stifling of democratic debate and arrogance) without being seen, to the outside world, as in anyway endorsing the Republicans as an alternative.

Part of the problem, I believe, flows from the underlying foundation, the solid bedrock philosophy, upon which the labor movement has always anchored its appeal to the working person: the embrace of the cult of growth. The appeal has gone something like this: join a union and your wages will rise, you will get benefits unimagined before, your workplace will be safer and, with all this in hand, you will vault into the ranks of the American Middle Class. Together with company executives, union leaders spread the notion that reaching the promised land of the American Dream would be done by hitching the fortunes and self-identification of workers to American corporate global preeminence. If the company excelled-whether at home or abroad-this had to mean good things for the U.S. worker. Whatever actually happened in the world to other workers, union or non-union, was not usually spoken about, particularly in the period prior to the mid-1980s. The world was so big, no one really ever knew or cared.

Racism and nationalism played a major role in this picture. From the time they were small children, U.S. workers barely read about other countries in their history books. One such 752-page tome entitled America! America! refers to Mexico a grand total of five times, taking up less than eight pages. When they did, it was always in the context of U.S. global preeminence: morally and culturally. It was “us’, the U.S. worker and U.S. corporations, against “them.’ Until the past couple of decades, this was expressed with puffed chests, confidence and swagger. It began to turn ugly, the beating death of an Asian man in the Midwest and the picture of a worker using a sledgehammer to smash a Japanese-made car are vivid examples, when the bottom fell out in the late 1970s.

The Boundless Bull and Robert Reich

We promote the culture of the Boundless Bull, a term coined by Herman E. Daly, who was a senior economist at the World Bank but has since left the institution, which tried unsuccessfully to muzzle him. Daly, once a free-trader, sees the Merrill Lynch bull as the metaphor for the U.S. economy. It is worth quoting at length from an essay he wrote describing the culture: “If you want to know what is wrong with the American economy it is not enough to go to graduate school, read books, and study statistical trends-you also have to watch TV. Not the Sunday morning talking-head shows or even documentaries, and especially not the network news, but the really serious stuff-the commercials…One such ad opens with a bull trotting along a beach. He is a very powerful animal-nothing is likely to stop him. And since the beach is empty as far as the eye can see, there is nothing that could even slow him down. A chorus in the background intones: ‘to…know…no…boundaries…’ The bull trots off into the sunset…Finally we see the bull silhouetted against a burgundy sunset, standing in solitary majesty atop a mesa overlooking a great empty southwestern desert…”

“The message is clear: Merrill Lynch wants to put you into an individualistic, macho, world without limits-the U.S. economy. The bull, of course, also symbolizes rising stock prices and unlimited optimism, which is ultimately based on this vision of an empty world where strong, solitary individuals have free reign…Why do they want you to believe it, or at least be influenced by it at a subconscious level? Because what they are selling is growth, and growth requires empty space to grow into. Solitary bulls don’t have to share the world with other creatures, and neither do you! Growth means that what you get from your bullish investments does not come at anyone else’s expense. In a world with no boundaries the poor can get richer while the rich get richer even faster. Our politicians find the boundless bull cult irresistible.”

It is irresistible because it is the culture we have all been socialized to applaud. We endured every economic downturn in history by waiting breathlessly for expansion. Promising renewed growth is the bi-partisan cornerstone of every major national political campaign. What politician can forget the public ridicule Jimmy Carter endured for suggesting a meek form of consumptive restraint during the energy crisis in the late 1970s?

Our problem, however, is that, as a global society, there is no room to grow if all we do is consume resources like a parasite and don’t look at how wealth is distributed throughout the globe. The globe has too many people, more than a billion of whom, according to conservative estimates, are unemployed or chronically underemployed and living in conditions below basic sustainable levels. Corporate profits are up in no small part because of the technological revolution-which is also wiping out hundreds of thousands of jobs around the globe every year, not to be replaced either by well- or even poorly-paid positions. Some even suggest the recent spate of killer viruses is a precursor for worldwide plagues as the earth’s own survival mechanism thins out our ranks.

We can’t shake the persistent economic malaise gripping us over the past decade precisely because we have been unwilling to shift our cultural appetite for growth. Today, we are being told, by liberals and conservatives, that economic security-in other words, more growth-will come when we work harder, become more highly-skilled and better educated to compete in the world economy. That is just foolish. Economist Juliet Schor has documented how we already work harder, almost to the breaking point, than ever before in history. Ruy A. Texieira and Lawrence Mishel, co-authors of The Myth of the Coming Labor Shortage, actually looked at 23 industries and 23 occupations, using among other data, figures issued by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. They found that “demand for higher skills is barely increasing’ and projected rates of growth through the year 2005 were “far less than those of the 1970s, and are even slightly less than those of the 1980s.”

It is that contradiction that collides with the institutional political alliances we have forged. As an example, let us look at our embrace of the views of Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who is the pre-eminent labor force trends thinker within the Administration. Secretary Reich should be applauded for his assault on “corporate welfare’ but we must study deeply and be far more concerned about his exhortation for a more highly-trained, highly-skilled workforce (more commonly known as the Field of Dreams strategy-train the workforce and the jobs will come) as the panacea for the deep malaise drifting through every community in the country. This is not, as we have been told, about the fear of moving into the future, as he and others in the Administration argue in order to paint their critics as troglodytes or neo-Luddites. It is not about whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. It’s actually the problem of the glass itself.

In August 1994, Reich was, once again, laying out his Field of Dreams theory before an audience convened by the Center for National Policy at the Hyatt Regency in Washington, D.C. Standing at a lectern, he was reading more or less from a text written by some invisible speechwriter when he decided, suddenly, to stray. Picking up the drinking glass sitting at his elbow, he said, “Take this glass next to me and you see that what you are paying for, what a consumer is actually paying for is less and less related to the actual production that goes into making the glass, more and more into the design engineering, the marketing, the legal services, all of the management consulting services, the distribution services, all of the services that go into making up this glass. These are not necessarily bad jobs, some of them are very good jobs, some of them are highly skilled jobs. We’ve got to make sure that more and more Americans get those kind of jobs.”

The audience was mesmerized, taken in by this powerful mind who could, in the middle of a complicated speech, deftly analyze the value of a glass. Unfortunately, Reich simply made it up and was demonstrably wrong or, at best, he conveniently told only one side of the story. Frustrated, frankly, with Reich’s ability to be unaccountable for reckless pronouncements, I decided to track the glass. One finds out that its wholesale cost is ninety-five cents and it’s called an Arctic Pattern, made by J.G. Durand, a privately-held French company with more than 12,000 employees worldwide. Although about 800 people work here in the U.S., the “Arctic Pattern [is] mostly produced in France” a company spokesperson told me. More important, she said there is almost zero design engineering value in this glass-because it’s been around for twenty-20-years.

Libby Inc., a unionized Durand competitor, makes a very similar glass called the Winchester. Wayne Zitkus, the company’s technical manager, completely contradicted Reich’s theory that the production costs are declining. “I don’t think that’s generally true” he said. In fact, “labor costs are very high, energy and materials, those costs have all increased over the years’ and account for more of the production costs, not less. He added that the basic design of the glass was done ten years ago.

Even more revealing, Zitkus said that although the industry has entered into a higher-automated computer age, the company does not need people with higher levels of education for most of its jobs-Reich’s central Field of Dreams contention. With the exception of a few advanced jobs, does someone off the street need more skills, I asked? “Probably not” he said. “We’re probably measuring people the same way [we did] ten years ago. We have tests to give to people to see whether they have general mechanical skills that we need. We’re educating people ourselves. We’ve trained people so rather than turn knobs they’re looking at numbers.”

The key fact from this whole episode is that what computer automation did do was not raise the required skills level but eliminate 35,000 jobs in the industry over the last ten years. Nobody has been able to find any direct connection between technological progress and skill upgrading-as Zitkus himself illustrated.

And, then, there’s the notion that to make a decent living you have to earn a college degree. This idea could be described as the “wage gap’: the difference in wages for college-educated versus non-college educated workers. The gap is undeniable. But it comes mostly from the precipitous drop at the lower end-partly because of the merciless wage concessions, decline in unionization and growth in low-wage jobs-not from a dramatic gain on the highly- educated, high-skilled end. Wages for high school graduates dropped 12.7 percent from 1979 to 1989 while the college educated folks saw their pay rise in the same period an underwhelming 0.2 percent. Reich apparently fails to read his own Department’s data: assuming a moderate growth of 2.6 percent, the Department actually says that from 1990 to 2005 the economy will produce about 26 million non-farm jobs. More than 21 million of those jobs will come in the low-wage service sector and other low-wage occupations. Nine out of the 10 fastest growing jobs are in such occupations as retail clerk, nursing aide and janitor none of which, for a family, provide economic comfort. However, once you get those jobs, as we know, you are unlikely to be able to maintain a middle-class lifestyle.

You might think Reich’s glass snafu is an isolated, picky incident. But it is the essence of Reich’s modus operandi: pull out an example or idea from thin air, wrap strong, colorful words around it and regurgitate it repeatedly-even if he can’t prove it. And, while this is standard fare in some intellectual circles, it has profound consequences for millions of working people. Yet, we applaud Reich and celebrate him as the defender of the working class.

What is happening here? In part, Reich and other liberals do not have the courage to challenge (or worse, they may see as harmless or inevitable) the acceptance of the flagless corporations knowing no national boundaries in an insatiable search for profits. This is no dark conspiracy and is laid out in the open every day in the pages of The Wall Street Journal and Business Week. High-ranking corporate officers of multi-national companies based in the U.S. are not shy and, though they are not averse to patriotic cheerleading to get their way, they are, to some extent, far more honest than political leaders, presumably because they face neither the pressure of re-election nor any kind of restraints on their behavior. They have openly told the government that “in order to survive, they are taking actions they believe are not in the national interest, including selling off key U.S. assets and placing R&D facilities and advanced manufacturing plants abroad.”

But, labor cannot hide behind this phenomena as our only obstacle. If we return for a moment to Herman Daly, we learn that our problem, as labor union members and society as a whole, is that we fail to distinguish between a growing economy that gets bigger versus a developing economy that gets better. “An economy can therefore develop without growing, or grow without developing…The advantage of defining growth in terms of change in physical scale of the economy is that it forces us to think about the effects of a change in scale and directs attention to the concept of an ecologically sustainable scale, or perhaps even of an optimal scale.’ He sums up by arguing that “the apt image for the U.S. economy, then, is not the boundless bull on the empty beach, but the proverbial bull in the china shop. The boundless bull is too big and clumsy relative to its delicate environment. Why must it keep growing when it is already destroying more than its extra mass is worth? Because (1) We fail to distinguish growth from development, and we classify all scale expansion as ‘economic growth’ without even recognizing the possibility of ‘anti-economic growth’-i.e. growth that costs us more at the margin; (2) we refuse to fight poverty by redistribution and sharing, or by controlling our own numbers, leaving ‘economic’ growth as the only acceptable cure for poverty. But once we are beyond the optimal scale and growth makes us poorer rather than richer, even that reason becomes absurd.”

And here is where the ultimate contradictions and challenges for the labor movement lie. It is only in more recent years that we have begun acting globally in a manner befitting the notion of international solidarity-in part, because the end of the Cold War swept away the obstacle of seeing world events through the prism of the power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. But, perhaps as a young child learns to walk after tumbling a few times, labor has not helped challenge the very philosophy driving the globe to ruin and, indeed, our tacit or explicit acceptance of the current view of worldwide growth contradicts our other more lofty rhetoric.

We say to American workers we seek to revive the old American Dream but, at the same time, we also argue for a world where all workers make a sustainable wage, labor in safe conditions and live in communities relatively free of environmental disasters. And, yet, too many of the stark numbers must suggest to us the unpleasant notion that, perhaps, we are facing two options that are contradictory and mutually exclusive: our wages will continue to rise and buy an American Dream-type lifestyle benefitting just six percent of the world’s population and, at the same time, a quarter of the globe’s population will emerge from poverty.

Let us take a look at some numbers to illustrate the cold reality we may not want to confront. If we were able to somehow raise global per capita just three percent over the course of ten years (and it’s questionable given the anemic growth we’ve experienced globally during the last decade), income disparities would simply widen. Based on 1992 figures, for example, U.S. per capita would rise over ten years by $7,257 while Ethiopia’s would grow by just $41. One could use any of the developing countries as a counterpoint because, to mention just one of the daily horrors faced there, they are the countries whose population make up the majority of the one quarter of the globe’s population who can’t even afford food.

So, we are faced with a conundrum. Clearly, it is not in the political discourse to both redistribute income globally and reduce population. From there, one would conclude that the only solution is to drive up global expansion five- or ten-fold. The only “minor’ flaw in this route is that it will lead to environmental collapse within our lifetime. And, even if the globe could absorb such an expansion, as shown previously, growth will only exacerbate, not alleviate, poverty and the gap between rich and poor.

A Difference Debate on the Economy

Unions cannot simultaneously champion the cult of growth, on the one hand, and the notion of international solidarity, labor rights and the lifting of hundreds of millions of workers out of poverty around the world, on the other hand. At the very least, what I am arguing for is honesty. It may be that a world of equitable distribution of resources is an idealistic fantasy that is not feasible given the last one hundred years of human history. But, then, we should say, essentially, we cannot give up our ways, so engrained in our culture for so many years, and will do our best to help make things somewhat more bearable for most of the rest of the world. In doing so, however, we must also acknowledge to ourselves that we are not willing to guarantee a hospitable world for our descendants-one of the central themes of labor’s plea for a better living today for its members.

Of course, a bolder path would be more desirable and visionary. What we need is a public debate to redefine the American Dream for the 21st Century-and the labor movement is well-suited to open up this discussion. Rather than blind growth, labor should demand economic policies that construct a sustainable, equitable global economy by redistributing wealth and reducing population. We should focus on charting a developing economy-one that gets better for everyone but doesn’t necessarily get bigger. In the long term, this might mean a different-lower, in the conventional way of thinking-standard of living for Americans but a better quality of living and even more job security.

The first salvo in a national debate could be aimed at the perception of our members’ that our societal growth has been, with upticks and downturns, essentially on a upward trend as measured by the Gross National Product (GNP) or Gross Domestic Product (GDP). When Dan Rather gleefully reports to us that the GNP or GDP has risen, is this good or bad? What does it measure? Who benefits? We have been socialized to accept the GNP and GDP as neutral indicators, devoid of political judgments and values. But, indeed, they are astonishingly political numbers: they ignore the costs of pollution (in fact, pollution gets counted twice-once when waste is created during production and again when it generates economic activity aimed at cleaning up toxic dumps or the air); income distribution (you can have a net rise in either indicator if the rich are getting richer even when the poor are sinking deeper into despair); and long-term resource depletion.

One alternative measure, proposed by an ad-hoc group called “Redefining Progress” is dubbed the GPI: Genuine Progress Indicator. Unlike the GDP/GNP standard, for example, the GPI takes into account: resource depletion (the loss of resources we cannot replenish like minerals); unemployment and underemployment (as negative costs per hour); long-term environmental damage (for example, the cancer-causing destruction of the ozone layer, the accumulation of toxic wastes and the costs to clean up pollution are all counted against the GPI); income distribution; and the lifespan of consumer durables and public infrastructure. Once you use these measurements, a startlingly different picture emerges: “it becomes clear our perception of economic progress, as measured by GDP, is an illusion’ and that since the 1970s “total costs of increased production have outweighed the benefits.”

The veteran union official or field organizer is likely to find this path incomprehensible. Most of them will say, backed up by independent polling data, that without the promise of a job with rising pay, there is no allure to join a union. I do not minimize the conundrum labor faces if it adopts a sane global perspective, but the premise in that fear is that people are ignorant, that they cannot or will not contemplate change.

There is a silver lining hidden behind the apprehensions and misgivings workers feel about the future. Though they cannot put specific numbers behind global trends and probably tune out the dense gobbledygook of macroeconomists, many workers intuitively feel the world has changed forever. They tend to express their anxiety through fears that their children, grandchildren and future generations will have a much tougher economic road to travel. In other words, though they no doubt have a short-term, self-interest (wanting more money to pay bills, for example), people also have a deep-seated yearning to feel the future is secure for those they love who will outlive them.

As a result, people, hurting as they are, may be more open to a shift in values, one that would ironically return labor to its inspirational roots and bring it more power. Fundamentally, unions lead the fight for justice: social, economic and in the workplace. The thirst for a better life through higher wages was a more recent phenomena, obscuring the more important collective message of ending arbitrary and abusive treatment. In fact, many unionized workers-janitors, farmworkers, immigrants-have organized simply because they were not getting paid (even if the money was minimum wage or less), were collapsing at work from poisons and wanted more power over their lives.

There really is no choice for labor. Increasingly, people do not believe that unions can arrest the global economic trends. The AFL-CIO’s own confidential poll in 1994 said that people “want to see unions recognize the new economic realities, and the new challenges” a code for a plea to help companies be more competitive. We could ignore all the evidence and choose the rhetoric of the short-term, promising, like all politicians, what we cannot deliver-long-term economic stability and an egalitarian global society.

Or we could grasp the cry for help and fashion a positive message that can both reject Darwinian free trade and competitiveness in favor of cooperation and global economic management. We could ignite the debate over a new economic vision by forging a delicate balance. In organizing campaigns, unions could stress the traditional rallying cries of justice and power, issues labor’s own polling data show are paramount concerns of workers. At the same time, we could publicly call for a nationwide examination of our long-term economic policies here and abroad that rest on barreling forward blindly into the future, a path that we must admit we advocated for generations. We would, for example, need to publicly reject the Secretary of Labor’s Field of Dreams strategy as an unsubstantiated theory that offers empty hope. This would require political courage.

Ultimately, we would also solve one of our greatest riddles: who are union members in this modern age and what is our message to them? We can longer draw class lines along income categories. When people making $75,000 a year-traditionally a secure bracket in the middle class-cannot make ends meet, often because of the lack of or cost of health insurance, they become potential union members. When white-collar professionals-who presumably have more education than many assembly-line workers-are insecure because their job can disappear half way around the world in seconds, we are looking at a new configuration of the labor movement.

And what draws these people together will be their equal suffering in the face of global instability brought on by the maddening pursuit of growth and profits. Can we extend our hand to them?

Unfortunately, labor has not been very good at thinking long-term nor at self-criticism. It should be cause for concern that the born-again insurgents in the AFL-CIO-most of whom for years pursued the exact same policies as their opponents-have not been willing to acknowledge their role in labor’s demise. This reeks of opportunism and a naked grab for power, rather than a path reached through epiphany.

Bold leaders are not those who simply make fiery speeches about change. They are the ones who are willing to say something unpopular, perhaps even threaten their chances for re-election, because they believe it is in their constituency’s long-term interest. If a new AFL-CIO leader can capture workers’ imagination with a vision that reshapes the public discourse so we begin recasting our intuitive embrace of the traditional view of growth, history may remember that leader as a truly great and courageous person who helped lead us down the road to a sustainable and economically harmonious future.

It’s clear that the unstated obvious conclusion we must reach is that labor can no longer accept the free enterprise system, as it has done throughout modern history. The anti-communist hysteria made it impossible for us to use the term “class warfare’ lest one be branded a dangerous radical. But the global economy has made even the most mainstream observers concede the emergence of a deep divide between the rich and the poor. So rather than debate whether the economy is good or bad for us based solely on the number of jobs created, we have to challenge ourselves to rethink the organization of the economy. The unrestrained growth model accepts the notion that capital can seek any means to increase profits. Challenging the growth model means rejecting the prerogatives of capital, something labor has accepted for generations, and opening up extremely difficult questions with no easy answers: for what purposes do we work? What does society want income from work to provide for? How does our standard of living clash with the ecological realities of the globe?

Money and Our Political Alliances

Ultimately, this line of thinking leads us directly to the question of our political alliances. There is no clearer bi-partisan agreement than the fundamental belief that unrestrained, unchallenged growth-and, therefore, the sanctity of the prerogatives of capital-is the path to economic security. But, even at the less macro level of labor laws, safety and health and other economic-related legislation, we have tried to win a better life for our members by attempting to buy power through a corrupted political money-giving system. We have lived under the illusion that the tremendous amounts of money we have spent bought us power and access-a sentiment we then pass on to our members who frankly don’t believe it because their daily lives have not changed or have gotten worse.

In the political arena, the overall approach goes something like this: we pony up millions of dollars to win the loyalty of candidates who we believe only give us access because of political contributions. We are then surprised, hurt and angry when elected representatives, who can easily go elsewhere for dollars, abandon us at crucial times. Most of our members never experience the “access’ money allegedly purchases on their behalf. Truth be told, most union members deplore the practice.

The amount of political cash we have thrown into the process-a picture sketched out by a look at the vast amount of money labor has spent on direct contributions, through political action committees (PACs), in federal election-is nothing short of staggering. According to a special analysis conducted for this project by the National Library on Money & Politics, from 1979 to mid-1994 labor PACs contributed more than $239 million (it is a figure worth repeating to oneself) to federal election campaigns, the overwhelming amount going to Democratic Party candidates.

As the following charts show, building trades and industrial unions showered more than $85 million on their candidates, 97 percent to Democrats. Only transportation unions, particularly the PACs run by the Teamsters, Seafarers and the Airline Pilots, strayed with any regularity from the fold, dishing out 12 percent of their contributions to Republican Party candidates.

On top of direct contributions to specific candidates, the labor movement pours substantial so-called “soft” money-funds exempted from limits and restrictions of federal campaign laws-into the operation of the Democratic Party. These dollars go for get-out-the-vote drives, voter registration and other Party-sponsored electoral activities. The “soft” label obscures its true impact: allowing financial supporters to circumvent federal election campaign laws.

According to a study by the Center for Responsive Politics, labor unions spent more than $4.2 million in the period January 1, 1991 to December 31, 1992, most of which went to the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Dinner Committee. Only a little over $60,000 went to the various political offshoots of the Republican Party [note: records of soft money contributions are only available beginning January 1991]. While $4.2 million is certainly a hefty amount, consider the following: labor unions accounted for a bit over 12 percent of the total “soft” money flowing into Democratic Party coffers, while contributions from business and individuals (primarily wealthy donors in corporate life) made up more than 83 percent (over $28 million). So, who bought more access and influence?

Significantly, this amount does not include the sums-easily counted in the hundreds of millions of dollars in cash or human energy-expended by international affiliates, central labor bodies or local unions in national and regional political operations such as get-out-the-vote drives. I invite others to compute what their respective unions have paid out in the political arena.

Many good union leaders hold to a legitimate view that the political money-giving process buys us important access, which, in turn, has lead to gains for the labor movement. Perhaps one could argue that the money would have been well spent had it actually produced widespread results. I certainly agree that we have gotten something from our political work. Sadly, however, the overall record shows a dismal picture. Measured by the standard of living of our members-a steady decline in wages-and their rights on the job, what we have gotten in return during the past 15 years is minimal, and most legislative “victories” have been rearguard actions aimed at staving off further erosion.

The Folly of NAFTA

NAFTA was the most compelling and, perhaps, saddest example of our folly. In a shining example of what an awakened labor movement can do, we mobilized union members and other workers to oppose the agreement, a deal we rightly argued would be bad for all working people no matter where they lived. In every community, spurred on by our organizing, by our moral voice raised loud above the din of corporate lobbyists, people stuck together. Every union member should be proud of the work done during that fight because we won the debate (and, as recent events in Mexico have proven, we were right)-but lost the vote because the president of the United States opened up the public till and bought votes.

After the vote, cries of retribution were widespread and loud. Labor union leaders promised, sometimes using rancorous and bitter rhetoric, that members of Congress who voted for the North American Free Trade Agreement would be punished at the polls and, perhaps more important, in their campaign coffers. Instead, just a year after the NAFTA vote, it was business as usual.

An analysis of labor PAC contributions (covering the period between January 1, 1993-June 30, 1994) to members of Congress prior to and after the NAFTA vote shows that a vote for the agreement-which was viewed by labor as the most dangerous piece of legislation for working people in recent memory-did not shut off the flow of labor money. In fact, in some cases, money flowing from labor PACs to those members who supported NAFTA increased in the period after the vote on November 17, 1993.

Since most labor PAC money is pumped into supporting Democratic candidates (94 percent of the $43.3 million labor PAC money in the 1992 elections), looking at Democratic legislators was most instructive. For example, Rep. Robert Matsui (D-CA) was one of the Administration’s most vocal pro-NAFTA activists, rounding up many key votes in the House where the tally was relatively close (234 to 200). Without his dogged work, NAFTA might not have passed. Yet, almost two-thirds of Matsui’s labor money came in after the NAFTA vote. Similarly, other key pro-NAFTA Democrats were not shunned by labor dollars during the seven months after NAFTA passed, including then-Representative Dan Rostenkowski (D-IL) whose labor PAC money more than doubled after the vote, and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) who rang up more than $50,000 in that period.

On the Senate side, where the vote in favor of the agreement (61-38 on November 20) was more one-sided, the trend was similar. Of the senators running for re-election in 1994 who voted for NAFTA, seven saw their contributions from labor PACs go up after the vote: Jeff Bingaman (D-NM); John Chafee (R-RI); Slade Gorton (R-WA); Orrin Hatch (R-UT); James Jeffords (R-VT); Edward Kennedy (D-MA); and Charles Robb (D-VA). One Senator-Bob Kerrey (D-NE)-watched his labor PAC donations slip from more than $97,000 prior to NAFTA to $58,500 after his pro-NAFTA vote-still a significant amount.

Perhaps more than any legislative struggle, the NAFTA battle illustrated the weakness of labor’s strategy to attempt to match the business community in the political money firefight. Wherever labor PAC money decreased, business money made up the difference or cushioned the blow. Rep. Gerry Studds (D-MA), one of the more liberal House members, voted for NAFTA and saw his labor PAC money drop by a third. But, in the period after the NAFTA vote, Studds increased his business PAC contributions by almost twenty percent. Similarly, Rep. Sam Farr, who won a special election in June 1993 for the seat once held by White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, reneged on his campaign promise to oppose NAFTA, voted for it and saw his labor PAC money evaporate, from more than $195,000 before November 1993 to just $12,465 since the NAFTA vote. Not to worry, however; Farr picked up almost $68,000 from business PACs in the aftermath of NAFTA. Overall, pro-NAFTA forces-Corporate America and the Mexican government-spent a staggering sum of upwards of $50 million to influence the vote, according to several studies.

The price for working people goes beyond the impact on jobs because of the passage of NAFTA. Already softened up by business pressure and contributions going back to the 1992 election cycle, members of Congress exchanged their votes in return for billions of dollars in pork barrel projects and trade concessions to specific industries courtesy of the Administration-a price tag ultimately footed by the taxpayers, millions of whom are union members. According to a study by Citizens Trade Campaign and Public Citizen, the list included: the vote of Texas Democrat Rep. E.B. Johnson in return for the building of two more C-17 military transport planes (cost: up to $1.4 billion); the scaling back of a tobacco tax aimed at funding health care reform to secure votes of a gaggle of tobacco-state legislators (cost: $4 billion not to mention untold health effects because cheaper-priced cigarettes mean more smokers); a new “development bank’ for the vote of California Democratic Rep. Esteban Torres (cost: up to $250 million over five years); and a study center in Austin, Texas for the vote of Democratic Rep. J.J. Pickle (cost: $10 million).

Does this make sense to anyone? Though PAC money comes directly from members’ contributions and not from dues, it is a fair question to ask whether we could have raised this additional money from members by putting it to better use. To put this into perspective, let’s consider what has been spent on the AFL-CIO’s Organizing Institute, which has been recruiting, training and placing dozens of organizers every year in the field; suddenly, in the shadow of the struggle for power in the Federation, the Institute is the darling of many people in the top echelons of labor, some of whom are calling for increasing its budget seven-fold. The Institute has hurdled initial internal political opposition by producing results and winning converts among international unions.

In its first full budgetary cycle in 1990, the Institute received $365,000. It now has reached a budget of more than $3.1 million: about $2.4 million from the AFL-CIO and another $750,000 from affiliates who participate in the program. When compared to the dollars put into political action, which does little to build our numbers or power, the Institute’s underfunding is an outrage. For example, if the Institute had received “just’ the relatively minuscule (in this context) amount of dollars, $4.2 million-labor spent on “soft’ contributions in 1991-1992, its funding would have increased several-fold, leading to perhaps hundreds more organizers working on campaigns today.

Edifices and the Illusion of Power

As I suggested earlier, our presence in Washington serves two key functions: political lobbying and serving members. As soon as possible, we need to sell off as many of the labor-owned buildings, move our operations outside Washington and closer to our respective current and future members. Some of this money could clearly go to organizing. Let’s talk hard numbers. A cursory look through the official real estate records of the buildings we occupy uncovers a goldmine. As the figures on page 26 show, the assessed value of just a portion of the buildings labor owns tops $300 million [a number of internationals either own buildings that are part of a larger lot-and therefore the union’s individual stake could not be determined-or have other properties under separate names].

We already have a model to study, appropriately, one outside Washington, D.C. In the mid-1980s, the United Electrical Workers was housed right across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the heart of Manhattan. Though most people outside of New York would consider this hardly a heavenly location, the union operated from a beautiful building once owned by the Vanderbilts and purchased for $60,000 in 1943. At that time, it made sense: General Electric, a huge employer, was based in the city, and many UE members lived in the Northeast.

However, times changed. The union’s membership declined. GE moved to the suburbs and, more to the point, evolved into a multi- national giant whose Vice-Chairman Paolo Fresco encapsulated GE’s strategy in four words: “Being national doesn’t pay.” The union realized that a strategy for survival-organizing internationally against huge, borderless corporations-demanded a hard look at resources.

As a generational change began in the union among leadership and staff, a decision was made to move to Pittsburgh, where real estate was cheaper and, more important, a large portion of the members lived within a reasonable car trip. According to Amy Newell, the UE’s secretary-treasurer at the time, the New York City building was sold for about $6.3 million. Investing the money gave the union a stream of income of about $40,000 per month, more than enough to pay for the $20,000 per month, 10-year lease on two- thirds of a floor in a Pittsburgh office complex with a gorgeous view of the Three Rivers area. The extra money goes into expanding the union’s organizing efforts including an experiment with cross- border outreach in Mexico.

It’s not that we would necessarily be more responsive to members and service them better outside Washington, D.C., although there is at least some chance relocating would bring about such a change. It’s far more important as a first step towards breaking loose from the current political process and the illusion that we significantly change our members’ lives for the better by playing inside the political culture in Washington.

How is that illusion created? In part, it’s in the air we breathe, the culture we inhabit, the people we deal with, in Washington, D.C. It is true: a different language is spoken inside the Beltway, not just by corporate interests but by our own people and allies who rightly fight for the principle that government is good and taxes are our responsibility to maintain a viable, working society. Perhaps it once made sense to have a pervasive presence in the Capital, with labor buildings spewing forth union staffers and lobbyists on practically every corner. Today, it is a tragedy. At a time when every important deal made ultimately shuts us out of the process and punishes working people, we only reinforce our insignificance and ineffectiveness by playing inside rules we do not craft nor control.

The irony is that if we unilaterally declared we would not participate any longer in the warping of the political process and suspended all money-giving for two years to candidates and the major parties (obviously, we are speaking here primarily of the Democratic Party), our access and influence could grow, particularly in the current political environment. Consider the following scenario:

President Emma Goldman, head of a large international union, announces that her union has decided to make no direct financial contributions to individual candidates or parties (in real life, the United Steel Workers of America’s decision to cutoff roughly $5 million and funnel it into the ’95 Project sent shudders through the Democratic Party). Instead, the union declared it would only provide grassroots support: staff or members working for a candidate to distribute literature; phone banks; and get-out-the-vote drives. Moreover, any resources would be under the union’s direct control.

To get the union’s support, every candidate would have to come and sign a contract (unfortunately, “contract’ has attained a very bad political meaning). This contract would commit the candidate to support the union’s issues. True, this could not be a legally binding document. However, the message should be made clear: if you break the contract, don’t come calling for help when your next re-election campaign begins.

This charts a compromise position between those who want to have nothing to do with the two-party system and believe all elections should be publicly-financed, on the one hand, versus others who want to continue with business as usual, on the other hand. It would save millions of dollars we could pour into organizing. It would still allow political action in support of pro-labor candidates but under a new set of conditions: we dictate the use of resources, we keep control over them at all times and we don’t write checks that disappear into the night.

Perhaps most important, it would steer us in the direction of issues-education as a key component of our political action. Though I believe creating a pro-labor alternative party is unavoidable and a matter of survival, we must first address our failure to truly educate our members on the issues. When our members don’t follow us, we’ve convinced ourselves that all we need is to refine our “message’ by pouring millions of dollars into media; “message development’ is like cotton candy: sweet and reassuring for a few moments, but ultimately not very filling or nourishing when you have nothing really to say [as an aside, the AFL-CIO’s “Being Heard’ report calls the “Union, Yes’ ads produced by the Labor Institute of Public Affairs “the most successful, coordinated labor communications effort in recent history” though nowhere does the report-which otherwise dazzles the reader throughout with data and statistics-say what “Union, Yes’ actually accomplished.].

Taking away the focus from the personality and emphasizing, instead, a signed contract outlining support for our issues would put the spotlight on the question: what do the candidates really stand for? We would be taking a risk. But how dangerous a step could this be compared to the current political crisis we face?

Indeed, it is useful to pause, before proceeding, to consider the monumental task we face. How many members do we need to organize to keep up or expand our relative power in the economy? What would that cost? There are at least two studies which looked at the problem. In July 1995, the Labor Research Association calculated that “in order to maintain union density at the 1993 level of 15.8 percent, unions would have needed a net increase of 316,000 members. To increase density by one percent to 16.8 percent of the workforce, it would have had to organize another 1.08 million members, for a total of 1.324 million new members.’ LRA compared that to the net gain from NLRB elections of 71,818 members in 1994 and concluded that “in order to increase union density by 1% per year, unions need to organize 18.5 times more workers than they are currently organizing.”

How much would union organizing cost? Richard B Freeman and Joel Rogers compared current organizing costs to the number of new workers organized. In 1993 dollars, they estimate that each new member gained costs about $757. To maintain, through NLRB elections, the 1992 private-sector unionized workforce level at 11.5 percent, unions would need to spend about $350 million a year. To emphasize: that would be just to keep our heads above water, not to grow.

With those numbers in mind, let us, then, return for a moment to the notion of the Edifice Complex. The resources we waste or misuse are not just buried inside the brick and mortar of the buildings. In today’s global economy, it makes absolutely no sense for the house of labor to be divided into these separate fiefs. While the corporations we either have organized, battled with or would like to target become fast-moving, adaptable, vertically-integrated operations, we are stumbling around in an outdated organizational mode. We have to speak the truth: this is simply a matter of power and privilege triumphing over the needs of working people.

No union, either in the private or public sector, has the power to leverage an entire corporation or public entity on its own. In the private sector, we are battling adversaries, whether small or large, who can marshal a network of financial, political and legal weapons unmatched in our historical experience. In the public sector (for example, government employees, university workers), it is no longer true that blatant anti-union tactics are politically risky for employers. Moreover, the globalization of the financial system-where mutual fund portfolios as well as the credit ratings of public institutions are influenced by a small cadre of financiers-has blurred the distinction between the public and private sectors.

We do not need repetitive departments, particularly in unions sharing very similar industry profiles. In no way should this be viewed as a criticism of the quality of work generated by many good people. Instead, as we attempt to break loose new funding for organizing, a priority must be consolidating the multitude of education, health and safety, communications, research and, most important, organizing departments.

Shaking Up the Structure

We need to push immediately for speedy merger of affiliates into more effective and logical organizations (such as the merger between the Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers to create UNITE). While the AFL-CIO represents 13 million workers, two-thirds of those members are concentrated in just 12 unions, according to Labor Research Association. Of the 80 affiliates, “52 have fewer than 100,000 members and 38 have fewer than 50,000 members.” Without raising our members dues one dime, we have hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps into a billion dollars, available today to unleash an unprecedented organizing drive. According to one recent study, 28 of the largest unions representing 80 percent of union members had $3 billion in real wealth and $2.5 billion in annual income in 1993.

The labor movement cannot wait until a union is near financial collapse or until a current president reaches retirement age so that two or more unions can merge. Though both slates currently competing for the leadership of the AFL-CIO have talked about encouraging mergers, we must be honest: issues of power-sharing, different cultures and histories are such powerful obstacles that we need some other impetus, perhaps an independent body that quickly reviews the options and makes recommendations carrying such moral authority that ignoring them carries with it significant political risk. The time spent refereeing raiding disputes (under Article XX of the AFL-CIO Constitution) would be better spent taking on the vital merger process. Indeed, we would probably eliminate most jurisdictional battles during which we have witnessed the insane and unfathomable practice of unions spending millions of dollars fighting each other.

The recent announcement of the potential merger by the year 2000 of the Autoworkers, Steelworkers and Machinists was a positive jolt to the labor movement. It was a recognition of the combined power of two million members and a strike fund of more than $1 billion. It apparently also did not escape the attention of two of the unions-the Steelworkers and Machinists-that they spent millions of dollars fighting each other over the right to represent 8,000 workers at USAir. LRA has estimated that the assets of the merged unions approach $1.4 billion, with the unification freeing up millions of dollars in money saved from streamlining operations.

Beyond that, however, it recognizes a need for the labor movement to have an industry focus for reasons of power, resources and consciousness. Without broad representation in an industry or sector, it will continue to be difficult to have power to bargain or defend workers’ interests. In other words, do we look at each contract negotiated in a specific shop as a unique jewel to be admired or do we return to past visions of industry-wide bargaining? And if the approach does not take an industry view, how can we hope to have enough resources to properly service a multitude of contracts particularly when most employers do not pay for that servicing?

A model for additional mergers might include but not be limited to:

-One union covering the energy industry, touching workers along the long chain beginning with exploration to generation and ending with disposal.

-One union sweeping up every person working in heavy industry (broadening the autoworkers-machinists-steelworkers merger to include machine maintenance and laborers).

-One union for all public employees.

-One union for all segments of transportation on the ground, air and sea.

-One union for the growing numbers of new workers in the health care industry.

-One union to represent every worker spread throughout the rapidly evolving telecommunications business (cable, telephone, entertainment and computing).

Evaluating our resources, with the goal being finding more money to organize with, can be done absent mergers at both the international and local level. Where one puts a local or international’s income-its resources-is an unequivocal statement of priorities. If a local’s line item for legal assistance to handle arbitrations or grievances amounts to a huge percentage of dues collected, it’s clear the priority is in enforcing a contract for current members, not bringing in new recruits. A survey a number of years ago by former farmworker organizer Marshall Ganz found that out of 27,000 union staff people in California, only 186 were organizers; nationwide, a small percentage of organized labor’s resources are directly funneled to organizing. Using a corporate analogy, if you don’t sink money into research and development (in this case organizers), new products (members) don’t just materialize out of thin air.

From a union local perspective, one could look at the work of SEIU’s Local 1199 in West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio. Back in 1980, the local had about 1,000 members. The local talked a lot about organizing more members in the generally unorganized healthcare industry in the region but, according to Tom Woodruff, the local’s president, did not put resources into the effort. Though the local continued to grow-by 1985, it reached 3,500 members and then hit 7,700 by 1989 (due in no small part to gaining the right to organize in the public sector)-Woodruff says only about 15 percent of the local’s income went back into organizing.

Though Woodruff and others wanted to sink more dollars into organizing, he realized that “you can’t from zero to fifty percent overnight.” In 1989, the local leadership began considering devoting more money to organizing. That year, by redirecting income from the membership growth, the local voted to increase its organizing resources from 15 percent to 25 percent of its total budget. One year later, the local took its case directly to the membership in the form of a request to raise dues. By adjusting the sliding scale for dues and asking the better-paid members to pay a little more (up to $10 more per week), the local expanded the share of the budget devoted to organizing to 35 percent. Three years later, in 1994, the local revamped the dues structure completely-converting it to a straight 1.5 percent of pay for every member-making it possible to approve a budget in September 1994 in which 50 percent of income goes to organizing.

This was not an easy process. “There is a vested interest for every dollar spent…some say spend all the money to handle all the grievances of the members” he says. “The honest truth is we got more organizing money by raising income not by transferring” money from other sources. Once the money is there, however, a change begins in terms of peoples’ thinking. “Because you use fifty percent of your money on organizing, it forces you to have the rest of the people in the union [who aren’t organizers] working on organizing issues.” In addition, the local leadership learned that “you can go to workers and get dollars if they have an inkling that it will change their lives” says Woodruff. Oh, yes: the local’s membership is now about 13,000.

Taking a hard look at budget resources can also happen at an international level. When Robert Wages took over as president of the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) in 1991, the union was losing members faster than it was recruiting them. The defense industry was contracting, hitting the union’s atomic and munitions workers; not too many oil and chemical plants were going to be built; and the labor-intensive plastics and automotive manufacturing was moving offshore. Yet, like many other unions, the OCAW’s financial condition was still stable-bills were paid and money sat in the bank-so no sense of urgency existed.

As a first step, the union had to admit, Wages says, that it did not know what to do in organizing. Consequently, he and some key leaders decided to look around at the experiences of some unions to see what worked. The common theme with all the success stories: a real dedication of resources to organizing and an effort to train people to organize.

In 1988, roughly 40 cents of an OCAW member’s per capita payment went into organizing-about four percent of the union’s total per capita income. In 1994, Wages won approval at the union’s convention to alter the allocation to about 65 cents; each automatic annual increase in the per capita now requires that 10 percent of the additional income go to the organizing fund. Along with shifting more money from the general funds, the organizing component of the union’s budget now approaches 16 percent-a quadrupling compared to six years ago.

It won’t do the labor movement much good if we liberate significant amounts of money-and then spend it fighting each other. In the interim, and absent the unlikely occurrence of a wave of union mergers within the next couple of years, we will still witness a staggering amount of money and time wasted on intra-union competition. Too many of our organizing departments are forced to mimic the corporate world. They are asked to produce “profits’ (new members) in a short-sited, short-term desire to show growth internally (to justify money spent on organizing, already a dicey political venture) and externally (to boast more power). As a result, unions are willing to go head-to-head with each other to pick up new members, even in industries where one union clearly has a better reputation or understanding of the sought-after workers.

This must stop. The only way to head off such confrontations is to have a regular coordinating body meeting prior to campaigns, ending up in some dispute resolution forum. Either by industry or as a larger configuration, we have to be able to parcel out work so all efforts are synergistic. In other words, if two units are organized by different unions working together in the same industry, the result is more than the sum total of members added to the labor movement because the combined work sets a foundation for coordinating post-election activities around bargaining.

Again, there are bright lights around. The Laborers International recently found itself on the verge of a jurisdictional skirmish with the United Food and Commercial Workers over three Southern plants in the poultry industry, a traditionally tough nut to crack. Both unions arrived roughly at the same time in response to a spontaneous walk-out at the biggest plant, the flagship operation of Perdue, Inc. “Traditionally, it was their jurisdiction” says Dwayne Stillwell, organizing director for the Laborers. “We felt that one of us could win but no one would win if we were both on the ballot.” So, the two unions agreed to divide the potential membership at the three sites, 2,500 going to the UFCW, 1,000 to the Laborers-and share staff and information during the campaigns, which were successful. “It took a lot of handwringing and headknocking to get it done but oddly enough it was the right thing to do” says Stillwell.

A New Way: Labor-Community Councils

The state federations and central labor bodies are a fascinating example of how far behind the times we are. At worst, the state and local labor bodies have stifled creativity and independence. In many cases, they appear to other unionists to be moribund institutions whose sole purpose is the enforcement of internal union protocol-you can’t invite so-and-so into your campaign until we give the go-ahead-or providing union jobs for a small cadre of loyalists. In New York City, still one of the more highly unionized urban centers, the labor council has had almost no visibility in confronting the corporate agenda. Indeed, it is frankly often ignored and seen as an obstacle.

But studying the most vibrant and well-meaning of the lot raises two fundamental questions. First, as previously argued, if one accepts the notion that too much of our structure and, therefore, resources rest on salvation rising up from the electoral arena, central labor bodies must either be eliminated or their purpose and structure radically changed. They show only signs of real life as an election cycle heats up: phone banks materialize; placards line their halls; and activists appear who rarely spend another hour during the year volunteering. They reflect the wrong priorities, mimicking the political system rather than bringing to bear energy around organizing campaigns.

Even if one disagrees with the critique of the electoral arena focus, these bodies show us a different folly which we suffer from at every level. Though they are essentially a coalition of unions, the state and central bodies operate independently-sometimes in outright dismissal-of other community groups. Once again, this posture flies in the face of real life. As we decline in numbers as a percentage of the workforce and as workplace issues rise in the consciousness of people as indistinguishable from the community’s concerns, we need to break down the organizational barriers between labor and the rest of society.

More important, whether we like it or not, our power no longer resides solely at the bargaining table. In a global economy, workplace problems-the movement of capital out of a community, the retention of jobs, environmental degradation-have to be fought outside the traditional labor-management paradigm. We lose if we restrict the struggle to questions of “global competitiveness” which invariably means the one-sided demand to lower labor costs.

The idea of making coalitions with non-labor groups is hardly new and has been advocated for by many people going back decades and put in practice in more recent times (I cite with pride the UAW’s leadership in this arena through its support of the Legislative Electoral Action Program in New England). What I am suggesting is that we in labor, with our vast resources, have the money to make this happen in an exciting and dramatic fashion.

What if we recreated the current system into Labor-Community Councils whose prime objective would be to further the rights of people at the workplace and in their communities? Either constituted as a local or state body (I would argue for the most local version feasible since rural and urban concerns can vary), such a Council would include a vast array of unique and overlapping constituencies: labor, seniors, environmental, people of color, children. The mission of the Council would be one: uniting people to balance private economic power.

Imagine how a union member, or a potential union member, might feel in the following scenario. When you paid your union dues, you knew that a portion of the money flowed back to your local council, either directly from your international union or from the AFL-CIO. All of a sudden, you begin to think that your union dues are not just buying you the right to have a grievance filed for you should that ever be needed. Nor do you have to wait for the every two- or three-year contract battle to feel your dues are worth it. Instead, you slowly see that your union is putting your money back into community issues like keeping a jobs base or keeping libraries open. And the general public, which overwhelmingly believes unions care only about issues touching on their members’ lives (the AFL- CIO’s “Being Heard’ poll says 65 percent of Americans think unions “are concerned only about their members’), will slowly see a different posture on our part.

Of course, this would not be easy. It would demand on our part a willingness to relinquish absolute control: this structure would run democratically, without a veto for any sector. It would mean that perhaps we would put money into a Council, which might not always put our particular issue as its primary agenda. But simply reforming the current structure, as has been suggested by some, is inadequate to the task; it will leave intact the corrosive political patronage culture.

In return, the non-labor community sectors would have to enthusiastically embrace unionization as a basic tenant of a democratic, safe and vibrant society, a shift that will not be automatic nor easy for some. We rarely have the forum to challenge the subtle and damaging anti-union feelings lingering just below the surface among those who call themselves either “liberals’ or “progressives’ who purport to be fighting for the average person. We have no place to regularly engage non-labor allies in a discussion of the punishing global economy, which makes unions even more important as an institution not only to lead the fight for an egalitarian society and protect our living standards but to foster our sense of community. We must create a framework where we can argue that our potential allies are cutting their own throats by, explicitly or implicitly, endorsing a world without unions in which wages are driven down, ties are cut between people, who are then pushed to see themselves as individuals not as part of an economic and social community.

One way of looking at such an approach is a slightly different model started in the garment industry by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers and continuing under the new UNITE. The union has spawned six Workers’ Justice Centers: three in New York City and one each in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami; they cost roughly $100,000 per center to run. At its core, the centers are trying to deal with one of labor’s weaknesses: its exclusivity. “The attitude that we serve our members and in the real world 95 percent of our resources go to servicing our members, is the death knell of the American labor movement” says Jeff Hermanson, UNITE’s co- organizing director. For $12 a year in dues, any worker can join a Center without needing to be a union member. For the dues, he or she gets an identification card with a photo (an important tool among workers who are new immigrants or undocumented) and access to English as a Second Language classes, some skills training and other orientations to work.

What the centers do is seed a society-wide base of support for the union. In the garment district, block captains have been designated to network with members from the center who live in the neighborhood. When non-union members fail to get paid or are paid below the minimum wage, the center mobilizes support, now drawing on thousands of people who are union members but also simply people who live in the community. The centers have built relationships with small businesses, churches and politicians. Essentially, the center speaks not just for union members but for all workers.

How would we create and implement Labor-Community Councils? First, we need a moral plea from a top labor leader, ideally the president of the AFL-CIO, who can reach out to the plethora of groups in society who have one unifying goal: the need to contest and provide a balance against private economic power. We could raise the notion during the nationwide hearings proposed in this project (see pages 55 to 58) at the same time we begin to canvass the various labor bodies at the international, state and local levels.

If the idea grabs hold, an initial organizing meeting needs to be convened at which the basic elements are laid out and tentative agreement can be reached on moving forward. I recognize the potentially dicey controversies liable to erupt. How will financial support translate into voting strength and/or decision-making power? Who will belong? Certainly, we need some membership criteria, combining a minimum size (adjusted for the locality; in other words, 100 members might seem tiny in New York City but significant in much smaller settings) with a balance of sectors. Within labor, we should not use the old ways to exclude important elements. In other words, non-AFL-CIO unions should be treated as having equal status with AFL-CIO-affiliated unions. We must approach the task with as much goodwill and flexibility, keeping our eye on the prize of expanding our collective influence exponentially.

The Union’s Culture

With more money in hand, we would certainly have some clout but this will not turn around our numbers. We need to re-examine the basic culture we promote throughout labor. How do we convince our members that organizing is important? What is the role of membership in the union? How do servicing and organizing co-exist? How does the union become relevant for our members when they are take their cues from a whole raft of institutions? In exploring these areas, I’ve made use of writings and extensive conversations with a wide variety of people who are engaged in some of the most innovative action and experimentation in the labor movement. Yet, no one has found, claims to the contrary, the magic solution for reconnecting with members.

We must start from an honest and straightforward admission: too many of our unions are not membership organizations-they are collective bargaining instruments. Without a doubt, people want their grievances processed. They want to have contracts negotiated that will give them better wages and working conditions. But, if that was the sole reason, workers would be knocking down the doors of every union hall in America; every wage survey shows that, on a dollar-by-dollar comparison, union workers earn more than non-union workers. What has always organized people into a union is a vision to increase power in their daily lives and be relevant to the kinds of issues they confront not just at work but in their neighborhoods.

We’ve actually schooled a whole generation, who were brought up with the notion that in return for dues money they would get something tangible in return. We’ve taught members to expect certain services. We’ve educated them that solving a problem at work means filling out a piece of paper (a grievance form) and that turning that paper into a result requires a particular kind of person. In 1993, the SEIU conducted a comprehensive poll among its members. In that the 1.1-million member union represents a broad cross-section of workers, the feelings of its members reflect union culture. The poll showed that “for many members, their relationship to the union is an implicit contract in which they pay dues and the union delivers better wages and benefits.’ Only 35 percent of SEIU’s members rank organizing new members to help increase the strength of the union as a top priority. So, there is a powerful message coming from the rank-and-file stressing delivering of services to them, not organizing new members, as an implied condition of continuing support for the union’s political leadership. It’s a fee-for-service relationship.

You see it even in our language: staff people are called “business agents” the plum job which pays a very nice salary, often comes with a car and an expense account. “People get on staff and they expect to get that good pay” one senior official in a major industrial union told me several years ago. “It’s a job, a profession with a 40-hour week where you solve problems and get home by dinner. If someone were to stand up and lecture people that they should work more than that or not be compensated like the industrial class, there would be an uproar.

The OCAW’s Bob Wages is blunt in looking back at the situation. “We had settled into an insurance company mentality, you pay us a premium and we give you an insurance policy” he says today. “Some international reps think they’re lawyers. In our union, organizing was the job of ill-repute. We put every worthless son-of-a-bitch in organizing with the thought ‘out of sight, out of mind’.”

It took some time to get the entire organization on board and the service structure still exists, with staff handling grievances but, slowly, the OCAW is trying to train local activists to handle some of the grievance work. Moreover, there is a push to instill among local leaders and staff to explore other ways to deal with employers besides filing a grievance, including leafleting the plant or suppliers and engaging the community in a workplace dispute. Has this shift brought results? Though it’s too early to tell, the first signs are encouraging. The level of organizing effort has doubled, Wages says, and the union has won a string of elections for small groups of between forty and fifty members. “We’ve turned the corner or at least we’re in the corner” he chuckles.

One solution, then is to rethink delivering services in an efficient way so that members don’t see what they get just as their own personal reward in return for dues but something they got because of the connection to their counterparts at work and throughout the industry. The Service Employees consciously set out to show its members and leadership in nursing homes that having and servicing hundreds of contracts for little units was counterproductive. By negotiating contracts in Detroit so they ran out at the same time, “the members and staff began to see how crazy it was to have all these different contracts” says Andy Stern, SEIU’s organizing director. “In other cities, we’re trying to get people to ask why are we all dealing with the same employer as if we’re in a different union.”

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers has been implementing a program called COMET, not to teach organizing techniques but to remind its members why organizing is important. The COMET training has multiple steps where participants: go over handouts on industry trends and statistics; fill out a questionnaire on the industry; discuss why the union should not organize (“new members add to unemployment in the local’); then discuss why the union’s mission is to organize; review “our founders’ wisdom’ to get a feel for the organizing tradition in the union; look at four ways wages are determined and the weaknesses in each one; discuss ten factors influencing bargaining strength; critique how the union lost sight of the mission of organizing; explore the similarities between the lives of union and non-union workers; and, finally, they evaluate how preserving their own entitlements has weakened the union. At the end of this training, the participants “are really ready to go out and spread the organizing gospel because they suddenly see the non-union worker in entirely different terms.”

But we need to add another element beyond the “service versus organizing’ argument. I offer the organizing of freelance writers as an example of the difficulties we face. They are a perfect reflection of aspects of the new workplace: people working in isolation, who are paid wildly differing amounts, receive no employer-provided health insurance or other benefits, and, most important, are not considered “employees’ under the law. Though their lives are not at risk from toxic chemicals and they have more options, they are “sweatshop’ workers in the sense of the lack of any recognized minimum standards in their industry. No industry-wide collective bargaining agreement protects them or sets specific standards; their pay declines every year; and the imbalance of power between writers and their employers is growing every wider.

These people are organized, generally speaking, one by one or in small groups, completely outside any legal framework; in traditional language, the NWU operates as a “minority’ status union. Members pay dues on an entirely volunteer annual or bi-annual basis and, therefore, evaluate their commitment to the union every day; it puts added pressure on the union to show on-going results and a reason for a members to maintain membership. As a result, the NWU recruits many people every year but also has about a 25 percent annual drop-out of members up for renewal.

What do they get for their dues? A lot-and very little. Prior to joining the union, they had very little knowledge of how to negotiate, had no one to stand up on their behalf and zero benefits. As union members, they are now engaged in a fledgling collective attempt to set basic standards in an industry with no standards; they have volunteer members who act as their advocates when they are wronged; they have access to a health insurance plan; and, just as important for isolated workers, they have contact with a community. More recently, we have successfully begun implementing a new tool for leverage: an electronic licensing and collecting system that controls and approves the use of a member’s work and passes on payment for that work.

In many ways, what members get today is a promise about the future. We grow because we have articulated a vision of how writers will gain power. We are clear that this will not happen tomorrow and will not be easy; we do not threaten to strike because we do not have that power yet, and we are honest about the overwhelming forces arrayed against us. As important, members see the union as a place to connect with other people working under similar circumstances. But many people who stick with the union for more than one year see the incremental progress as the union begins to force changes. They see no other choice.

Writers share something else with many of our members, and certainly many non-union members: they harbor some feelings that the union rhetoric of the 1930s isn’t relevant anymore. It does not help us to simply dismiss these thoughts, correctly or not, as backwards and uninformed. We need to transform people’s perceptions of how we can properly balance the power of corporations in the modern-age and become a part of people’s everyday life. How does the union become salient in the way the Christian Coalition seems to be to its members as it has successfully merged peoples’ private lives-through church, spiritual beliefs, cultural activities-into political activism?

We need to transform people so they believe what they are fighting for is a moral and civil right; that the role of the union is central to their future; and their participation in the union is the most important thing they can do to shape their lives. We have models of such transformations every day. Anti-abortion protesters-many of whom are generally viewed and view themselves as mainstream law-abiding citizens-block abortion clinics and have been arrested by the thousands. One may not like their views, but it is an unassailable fact that they have been transformed; they feel abortion is a paramount moral issue for which they are willing to cross a line they normally would not even consider stepping over.

The health care debate is a perfect example. Many people argued that we couldn’t play the game in the same way we were accustomed-a relatively small group of well-intentioned people pushing a campaign with tenuous connections to grassroots, aimed at gaining what we want by traditional lobbying methods. We had to give it the same weight and urgency as the movement to end segregation and racial discrimination, perhaps calling for actions in which people would sit down in hospitals or at insurance company offices like Blue Cross/Blue Shield or maybe taking 20,000 people to Hartford, Connecticut (the capital of the insurance industry) and shutting down the city for a day.

We ended up failing, not just in New York City but throughout the labor movement, to create a movement that captured people’s imagination. We needed to convey a message that health care was not just a benefit but a moral and civil right. Instead, because of the divisions in the labor movement over the health care debate, the failure to endorse and push a single-payer system, the fear of giving up health care as a union bargaining role and the embrace of the Clinton plan which no one could understand, we let slip a historic opportunity that may not return for a generation.

During its 1989 strike against the Pittston Coal Group Inc., the United Mine Workers, inspired by the civil rights movement’s experience, staged regular civil disobedience. Groups of miners, along with their wives and children, sat in front of company plant gates, blocking trucks hauling coal. Two weeks after the strike began, 39 women took over Pittston’s local headquarters in Virginia, holding it for more than thirty hours.

The high point of this confrontation came on September 17 when 98 miners, dressed in camouflage and mining helmets, stormed a processing plant in southwest Virginia and held it for four days. It was perhaps the first such sit-in at a plant in more than 50 years. In addition to the occupying miners, 1,000 other miners and supporters jammed the road and bridge leading to the plant, facing off against state troopers and security guards and preventing the government or the company from retaking the facility. Out of sheer luck, I was part of a New York City group that took part in that action.

What remains with me today is not just the action itself but the larger transformative effect the whole Pittston campaign had on the people in the community. Most of the miners and their wives were law-abiding citizens and the thought of breaking the law was a foreign and scary idea for many. Back then, Edna Sauls, one of the leaders of the women who took over the company’s headquarters, told me, with a laugh, “I never even had a parking ticket.’ But, pushed into a corner with no other options, Sauls says she was touched by a new awareness. If she couldn’t win, “we might as well go to jail because they’re taking everything we have.’

Giving more of a moral and civil rights tone to our culture is not just idealistic. It recognizes that we cannot deliver on our promises. It allows union leaders, who are caught in an impossible situation of having to show results (better contracts) in order to get re-elected, to argue forthrightly that we are in difficult times, that the power structure (legal and economic) is aligned against us, that progress will be difficult but that we should not cry or blame each other because we face awesome odds. We can’t do that in our current culture of union-as-collective-bargaining-instrument.

Recreating Our Movement: Shaping the Technology Revolution

Will we let a historic opportunity escape us? Had we been willing to see ourselves confronting the oppressive parts of government and private economic power, had we been structured to work hand-in-hand with non-labor groups on an equal basis, we might have been the leaders of a new movement to harness a revolution few people in human history experience in their lifetimes. By the end of the century, breathtaking technological changes will, potentially, fundamentally reshape the way people work, play and interact with each other every day. For labor, the struggle over how that technological future will look is crucial for the survival of all working people and the movement itself. Indeed, we must ask the questions and demand solutions no one dares pose lest they be branded as neo-Luddities standing in the way of the future. Yet, at the moment, we have almost no role or strategy other than reacting to the agenda of industry and government who want to build the National Information Infrastructure (NII) and see it only as an instrument for profit.

One can broadly sketch two competing visions of how our world should unfold. Alvin and Heidi Toffler, along with Al Gore and Newt Gingrich, see limitless possibilities for a completely interconnected society, global in nature, where the marketplace will make it possible for all people to exchange ideas and information without barriers of class or race. It is, they say, a time when civilization will undergo a mammoth transformation for which our current governing and societal structures are unprepared and inadequate. Fleshing out the workplace view of the arrival of the Tofflers’ Third Wave, Robert Reich has his companion, though slightly more nuanced, outlook often termed The Field of Dreams: if we just train our workers to be more highly-skilled, the jobs will come.

The other vision is best described by harkening back to the ideas of two writers, Matthew Josephson and Rachel Carson. In 1934, Josephson wrote a book called The Robber Barons to describe the shaping of modern-day industrial America by a few corporate titans-including Gould, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan and Vanderbilt-who seized economic and political power and altered the way we lived for decades; millions of workers would suffer the burden of the world these men built. Carson saw the slow, imperceptible death of the environment around her, as a world wealthy in sounds and smells evolved into an eerie stillness; this, too, is a legacy we have inherited in our daily lives.

And, yet, we are at the edge of a societal disaster, poised to repeat a Josephson-Carson scenario with terrifying consequences. As their predecessors before them, the New Robber Barons, with almost lightning speed, are consolidating in their hands a breathtaking amount of power. In the broadest terms, in the grasp of the New Robber Barons will be the technological and economic tools to control where we work, what we do, how we get our information and how we interact with our family, friends and neighbors. Indeed, they are creating a new industry, combining cable, telephone, entertainment, computing and publishing into a single, vertically-integrated business, which Business Week estimates could generate one trillion dollars in revenue.

Like the Goulds, Morgans and Vanderbilts, the modern-day Robber Barons-like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, TCI’s John Malone, and Time Warner’s Gerald Levin-are aided and abetted by a government unwilling to act to protect the public interest. In fact, the NII is viewed as a profit-making venture, not primarily as a society-enhancing undertaking; the Administration’s taskforce setting the rules and regulations for the NII is predominately composed of executives of large corporations, with only two representatives of labor and the public interested included. Instead of acting in the broad public interest, a bi-partisan chorus of legislators is singing the praises of “deregulation” a policy which played an important role in the economic debacle of the 1980s by destroying some industries-for example, the airlines-and letting the various Wall Street buccaneers operate without any restraints.

Though most people only vaguely understand what is happening around them, they are subtly seduced by the combination of the technology and its language. Think about it: the “information superhighway.’ Information is not like coal dust or toxic fumes; it comes if you want and imposes no physical danger. And, better yet, it’s delivered to your doorstep by a highway, one of the enduring symbols of the freedom and expanse of this country. Just as any driver would cruise up the on-ramp leading to a highway, step on the accelerator and, with enough gasoline, go forever, everyone is being offered limitless travel on the electronic pathways.

Unfortunately, this is a mirage. Rather than an open highway, the New Robber Barons are building a series of “tollroads.’ Sure, we can all count on getting direct through our television sets video-on-demand, new shopping networks and other entertainment. But only those people with the proper skills, equipment and, most important, money will plug into the information and resources that will potentially define power, access and, ultimately, economic survival in the future. Already information we once took for granted as free and available (e.g., some government data) has been privatized, hidden away in some electronic cubbyhole to which access is prohibitively expensive for most citizens.

And, so, as the New Robber Barons rake in billions, people will suffer. It is not easy to make a slogan or describe the urgency of a battle that is less immediate to millions of workers trying to make the rent or pay for food. Like Carson’s imagery, we will not see nor be able to capture a precise moment or stop time to observe the damage to a child denied an idea because he or she could not afford the equipment or the cost of the learning opportunity. What is the sound of millions of children and adults who are locked out of the flow of information? Instead, we will only be able to look back a decade or two, in breastbeating hindsight, at the social misery created by the rise of the mass of Silent Voices.

Many of my colleagues and other experts argue that the technological revolution is unstoppable, that we should accept it and expend our efforts to mold and shape the new information order in ways that benefit society. Sadly, they are probably right because we are far behind in this struggle and woefully out-financed.

However, that does not mean we should say this was inevitable. Indeed, the electronic world did not come as a response to a crying demand of the people. Rather, the newest technological revolution, like its predecessors, is driven by one key ingredient: the search for profit. As Sen. Bob Kerrey argued in fighting against the massive one-sided, rewriting of the telecommunications laws, “this one is being driven by corporations who have a desire to do things they currently are prohibited from doing under our laws. Successful communication corporations treat technology as if its status were somewhere between King and God…Rather than being a Contract With America, this legislation looks like a contract with corporations.’ And, so, it is still worth asking whether the investment of billions of dollars in private and public capital is money well-spent at a time when cities are decaying, our old-fashioned infrastructure (bridges and roads) is crumbling and all levels of government are strained to meet their constituents basic needs? Who will this network of “electronic tollroads’ benefit?

As was true in the NAFTA fight, we cannot rely on either major political party for salvation. In March 1994, I asked the National Library on Money & Politics to look at the political campaign contributions flowing to the key committees debating the shaping of the NII. As was the case with NAFTA and other key issues, money did not respect party lines. Just in the period from January 1991 to June 1993 (18 months), tens of thousands of dollars from the major telecommunications companies (the Bell telephone companies, MCI and AT&T, cable operators and large entertainment companies) went to Democrats and Republicans on the Senate’s Commerce Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Among those receiving money-to reiterate, from sources aimed at creating a system which will devastate our membership-were legislators with high AFL-CIO COPE ratings (according to 1992 statistics) including: Rep. Thomas Manton (D-NY, 94 percent lifetime rating); Rep. Thomas McMillen (D- MD, 88 percent); and Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI, 90 percent). In another study conducted by Common Cause, 23 senators had received at least $100,000 each from telecommunications-related companies in the period from 1984 through 1994. And, so it should not have been surprising that the most radical restructuring of the nation’s telecommunications laws-allowing an unprecedented amount of consolidation in an industry destined to drive the economy-received bi-partisan support in both houses of Congress, despite some lone voices like Kerrey’s.

How does labor engage this fight? We must first persuade ourselves and our community allies that an inside-the Beltway lobbying strategy is doomed to fail. We have to shake loose from a long-time labor tradition that one union or a small group of unions-who happen to represent workers in an industry-dictate the course of action on one issue, particularly when a small constituency of workers may be vulnerable to fears of bargaining-table reprisals if they confront their employers on a broader societal question. On a struggle of such paramount importance, the debate, participation and leadership must be broadened.

Clearly, a main concern should start on workplace issues and one group of workers is particularly vulnerable: creators. The unprecedented consolidation in the industries covering tens of thousands of creators should sound a loud alarm. If our employers are evolving, how have we, as unionized creators (writers, artists, stagehands, directors), adapted to meet this challenge? Barely, if at all. We still negotiate separate deals. We give up little pieces of our rights whether the loss is for a whole segment of creators or one by one. Too often, we have fought lonely battles. Unfortunately, the labor movement has been very weak at coordinating the workplace issues of creators.

Like our employers, we, too, must unite and share a common agenda, eliminating the barriers and petty competitions between us. We must give birth to a new way of thinking, a new culture. Indeed, if we simply change or create a new institutional structure, we will waste our time. In the past, we saw our futures disconnected; we danced around each other, oblivious of common ground. Too often, some unions protected the interests of their members often to the exclusion of working with other unions, not to mention other non-labor organizations. Outside labor, a multitude of small, medium and large organizations now thrive by offering certain services yet they often sidestep the overarching factor in creators’ lives: the exploitation of our work for profit. Alone, we represent many kingdoms, small and large, all of whom can be chipped away at by the people who control our working lives.

We have learned in the past two years, as we joined hands in recent campaigns, that we have the potential to dictate a powerful agenda and articulate the aspirations and rights of tens of thousands of creators. When The New York Times promulgated “work-for-hire’ contract language that threatened the very existence of many creators, several organizations (supported by colleagues internationally) came together quickly to oppose the draconian development. Creators have also banded together to repatriate reprographic (photocopying) rights monies and launch fledgling experiments in the collection of royalties and licensing of electronic rights.

Moreover, we must recognize that, as in other industries, the vast majority of creators do not belong to unions. For those two reasons, a cross-section of creators organizations have been discussing for the past two years establishing a Federation composed of organizations-labor and non-labor-who represent people working in the industries producing works of culture. In February 1995, ten of these organizations signed a mission statement setting forth general goals for the proposed Federation.

Beyond creators, technology is ending the jobs of tens of thousands of people. It is dispersing workers, moving them from highly-centralized work sites to decentralized locations. Where hundreds of people once shared common workspace, a watercooler or lunchroom, they increasingly will be far away, working on common projects but never meeting face-to-face and sometimes never knowing of each other’s existence. This has profound implications for union organizing.

If we accept the inevitability of the technological revolution, it is worth looking at the ways labor can exploit the electronic highways. For example, if the promise of a completely two-way, broad-band system (defined as, simply stated, the ability to send and receive text, pictures and interactive services if you have the money and technical capability) ever comes to fruition, labor could potentially solve an age-old problem: how to get our message out without the filtering influence of the mainstream media. Theoretically, we could have national and local electronic outlets beaming pro-labor programming direct to our members and non-union workers. Already, the first generation of the technological revolution-the Internet, World Wide Web, the pervasive use of e-mail-has opened up new avenues of projecting alternative messages.

We could even connect our members into organizing campaigns in a more effective and regular basis. In an initially confidential memo that is now circulating more broadly, Joe Uehlein, executive assistant to the president of the Industrial Union Department, outlined a very valuable idea he calls “Strategic Action.” This would be a full-time investigative and action unit which would “develop strategic information, make plans and take action.” As Uehlein correctly points out, “research done in the labor movement today is generally standard collective bargaining or public policy research, or else crisis driven, but not strategic and systematic.” [my emphasis]. A crucial part of his proposal argues for an integral training component, which would, slowly but surely, spread the knowledge, information and execution into the hands of local leaders and members, freeing labor of outside consultants who have provided invaluable services to unions but who rarely have the time or inclination to pass on the skills.

It is clear that the steep drop in the cost of technology-a central underpinning to the globalization of the economy-affords us a tool to be used within Uehlein’s Strategic Action: a computer network to coordinate strategic action and analysis and involve union members. However one configures the network (and there are many ways to set it up, factoring in cost and purpose), one could easily envision the following set-up: from every location in the country and overseas with a phone hook-up (let us agree that in the short term any location we might visit has phone service), a union organizer could access people (other activists, organizers or leaders) and knowledge (from available or specially-designed databases) from the very beginning of a campaign. Members could be tied into a system, actually help staff the running it from their homes with some very basic training and feed information on developments into the system.

We could even use technology to pump new life into union halls as centers for member activity. Many of our members’ children will increasingly be asked to obtain information for school projects from on-line sources (for example, the “Thomas’ database of the Library of Congress). At a relatively small cost, a local union could set up a few computer stations in its offices, inviting young people, particularly those whose parents cannot or will not lay out money for hooking up to cyberspace, to utilize the technology for their homework or other initiatives. From there, it’s even conceivable unions could offer such resources to the community at large-further raising labor’s visibility and reservoir of good will among potential union members.

On a policy level, we have to challenge the rhetoric of a fully interconnected society, or, to use another more common term, “universal service”-by demanding an honest discussion over how the real costs will be paid for. The California Department of Education estimates it would cost almost half a billion dollars to provide telecommunications capability into every classroom in the state; this does not include money for the actual local and long-distance phone calls to hook into electronic pathways. With no answer coming from industry or the administration, we need to use the “dirty’ words: taxes. And, yet, a recent report from the Administration’s NII task force rejected taxing profits from the superhighway as a path to insuring that every American be able to participate in the benefits of the NII.

Finally, we have to turn to the people of this country, most of whom have an instinctual fear of large concentrated power, asking them whether they want to see their lives molded by a handful of people who care only about personal profit and power, not the societal good. This is precisely what people want to see labor doing: fighting for an issue of importance beyond the ranks of union members.

The Hearings: “Working in America: The Real Story”

One of the lasting images from the 1992 presidential campaign had to be the bus trip which Bill Clinton and Al Gore set out on right after the Democratic national convention in New York City. It was a brilliant campaign stroke. Indeed, it could be argued that the journey through small communities in America, with its carefully orchestrated, manipulative Populist flavor, clinched the election early on for the Democratic ticket. In many voters’ minds, the trip’s message was: we’re with you. The campaign connected with people because voters believed someone was listening.

This comes to mind in the wake of the 1994 elections and the impending 1996 elections. However, one wants to try to interpret the 1994 election, it was clear that we lost important ground in our bond with current and potential constituencies; to say otherwise is an exercise in dangerous denial. The post-November discussions within organized labor were worrisome and fell into two categories. The first, rationalized the results along the following general lines: most people didn’t vote; “polls show’ that most voters didn’t understand, read or support the “Contract With America’ and don’t really like Newt Gingrich; and that many elections were decided by razor-thin margins. Conclusion: things aren’t that bad. At best, these are inadequate explanations and, at worst, serious delusions. The second and only marginally better stance, is a focus on what to do in the next two years: how to regroup, how to recapture the Congress and re-elect the president.

These two mindsets are ultimately destructive. We need to look at 1994 in the same way that the conservative movement viewed the 1964 Goldwater defeat: a debacle of serious proportions that has no quick fix and cries out for a long-term campaign of 15-20 years to reintroduce a progressive vision throughout the American consciousness.

We need an educational and political “bustrip” this time with real content, embarking on a two-decade journey: a set of nationwide hearings entitled “Working in America: The Real Story’ to provide a forum for working people-union members and non-union workers-to talk about their daily lives. The new Republican majority in Congress, lead by Newt Gingrich, is clear that it is conducting a fight over the definition of government and how it deals with the social ills plaguing America. The hearings would provide a counterweight, exposing the real threats to working families-not crime, “welfare mothers’ and “socialized medicine” but the daily war on people who cannot find decent jobs, whose workplace is more frightening and dangerous than ever before and who feel powerless to shape the global economy.

But we must approach and structure these hearings with a mindset to learn not preach. We need to allow a vast spectrum of opinions to come forth, including harsh criticism of the labor movement if it arises. Indeed, we would make serious inroads in the consciousness of the public if we stated, from the outset, that we have erred, that we seek guidance and inspiration from people throughout the land.

How would the hearings look? First, while the hearings should be spearheaded by the labor movement, they should involve a broad spectrum of organizations in communities throughout the nation. In each community/city, the hearings should include local participants. Second, we must see these hearings as a forum for average people, not as a soapbox for political candidates (including those who might be running for President in 1996) or organizational leaders, national or local, whoever they may be. This is perhaps one of the hardest challenges: convincing people to give up the short-term spotlight for a long-term gain. One possibility is to hold a lottery in each community through which a small panel of chairs is chosen to guide the hearings, with the help of a professional facilitator. Some system should be worked out to guarantee a panel reflecting the diversity of the community. Any working person in the community would be eligible.

Third, involvement of young people. And this includes children in grade school. Again, a two-decade vision of this process means we are talking about children in kindergarten today who will be the young voters electing government at all levels in 2014. Oh, yes. After each hearing, there has to be a dance. Seriously. People should get a sense that we need to also have fun and connect culture to the work of politics.

There is a sense of urgency people feel in the wake of the 1994 mid-term elections and the potential for further setbacks in 1996. If we agree that we are looking at a 10-20 year campaign, we should move decisively but deliberately. One scenario, though certainly not the only one, envisions the following timetable:

October-November 1995: plan the hearings including the appropriate organizations from the outset to help outline the framework. Execute the first set of hearings. No matter which slate wins the current contest for leadership of the AFL-CIO, the new president should leave the convention in New York City with a caravan of buses and cars through small towns and big cities, ending up in Decauter, Illinois, the site of three of the most current bitter labor struggles. At each stop, a hearing would be held.

· 1996: Learning and improving on the first set of hearings, hold the hearings in conjunction with the presidential caucuses and primaries. Every place a caucus/primary is held, a hearing is convened either the day of or shortly before, explicitly barring any candidate from speaking at the event. There are at least two advantages to this linkage. First, the educational message that this is the true forum for working people to get their ideas across and that it is explicitly separate from the politically-driven nomination process. Second, the concentration of media outlets, local and national, on the one hand, and the higher attention of the populace to politics, on the other hand, improve the chances of wider dissemination of the message.

With education an important element of the hearings, using the press is critical despite our criticisms. We should approach C- SPAN-a powerful, unfiltered medium reaching millions of people-seeking “gavel-to-gavel’ coverage of at least one of the largest gatherings and one in a smaller community. We should also attempt to use on-line postings. A cautionary note: the author recognizes that millions of people are now linked in the electronic world particularly through the Internet and so this must be an avenue we exploit. However, in the near-term future, the vast majority of people will remain outside this world, either because of cost and/or skill barriers. We cannot rest too heavily on the electronic world, thereby excluding most people.

After the hearings, the results should be compiled into a video and other educational materials (such as a CD-ROM or school reader) for unions to use in organizing and networking in communities. Within ninety days following the last hearing, a summary highlighting testimony and drawing from the stories of real people should be prepared, along with a set of policy recommendations to address the concerns raised during the hearings. The report should be sent to the President, members of Congress and state legislative bodies.

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I want to thank Greg Tarpinian, LRA’s executive director, for having the courage and vision to publish this work. His penetrating comments on initial drafts of this paper sharpened the focus, though he bears no responsibility for this essay’s point of view. LRA’s Chris Seymour provided valuable research assistance. Chris Nowlan did the fine layout.

Jacqueline Duobinis of the National Library on Money & Politics expertly and promptly turned my musings on labor’s financial role in politics into hard numbers with dollar signs. Thanks also to Ellen Miller, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, who not only unleashed Jacqueline on the project but continues the determined fight to end the financial corruption of the political process. Much of the information on the role money played in the NAFTA fight originally appeared in my article for Capital Eye, a publication of the Center. Thanks to its editor Margaret Engle.

In one way or another, the following people shared their time and thoughts: Richard Bensinger, Alec Dubro, Janice Fine, Rick Gilberg, Bruce Hartford, Jeff Hermanson, Thea Lee, Richard Leonard, Mike Lucas, David Morris, Amy Newell, Mae Ngai, Andy Stern, Gary Stevenson, Dwayne Stillwell, Bob Stropp, Joe Uehlein, Bob Wages and Tom Woodruff.

Many other people spoke to me but prefer to remain unnamed. To some extent, the purpose of this project is to make sure that they, and others like them, can speak out without fear in the future.