The AFL-CIO Union Movement: Strategy and Vision to Build Worker Power

It has been a year since several breakaway unions left the AFL-CIO. Reflecting on the anniversary of the split, AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff outlined a vision for rebuilding America’s union movement. He offers a bold program for building worker power through organizing, improving public policy and making political leaders accountable to their worker constituents.
 
Below are Acuff’s remarks at the recent American Sociological Association in Montreal.
           
Can the labor movement rebuild? Yes. Absolutely.

Building the labor movement means building worker power. And we know there are several strategies we need to pursue to make that happen.

First, we must change the culture of our unions. This means building a greater capacity to organize, and moving more staff and resources to organizing and research.

We also must acknowledge that the old system of relying on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to conduct elections is broken. That is why we have to run large, strategic campaigns that have the capacity to change the dynamics of industries and regional economies outside of the broken NLRB process.

We have to abandon the NLRB process, and at the same time we have to become more facile at systematically leveraging power against employers and corporations globally. Our campaign is nothing less than a human rights struggle to restore the right to organize and bargain collectively.
 
In order to accomplish this, we must mobilize an army of activists and worksite leaders to carry out that human rights struggle. And we must embrace new forms of organizing and organizations—not as a substitute for collective bargaining—but as allies in building worker power. This means broadening our understanding of the labor movement. And finally, we must give all workers a stake in the success of the labor movement.
 
We already are well on our way to implementing these strategies. We have more affiliates than ever moving more resources, changing to organize and building essential capacity. I take heart in the fact that in two months this summer four AFL-CIO affiliates―AFSCME, AFT, UAW and CWA―moved more than $100 million in new money for organizing at their conventions. AFSCME, in particular, set a goal of organizing 70,000 new members a year.
 
Increasing resources allows us to build our organizing capacity, which is crucial to our victory, but we also must acknowledge that the current Labor Board representation election process is broken. Instead of allowing the board to delay and destroy organizing efforts, we must engage in large strategic campaigns independent of a process that clearly favors employers.
 
In the past year, AFL-CIO affiliates won many such campaigns using card-check. Unlike the long, drawn-out and often contentious NLRB elections, majority verification (also known as card-check) is a simple process by which an employer recognizes a union after a majority of the workers demonstrate their support by signing authorization cards.

• In the most important private-sector campaign in five years, CWA won majority verification at Cingular, the largest wireless phone provider in the United States. CWA organized 18,000 high-tech workers in 10 months and now represents 40,000 Cingular workers. In addition, CWA and IBEW’s 100,000 members at Verizon will use their leverage to organize Verizon Business (formerly MCI and Verizon Enterprise)  and Verizon Wireless, the nation’s second-largest wireless phone provider.
• In New Jersey, CWA and AFSCME just won recognition for 7,000 childcare workers in a joint campaign. CWA also organized 1,500 city workers in Jackson, Miss., after we elected a pro-worker mayor.
• Majority verification works even in the notoriously anti-union South where the UAW organized 50,000 heavy manufacturing workers in the last three years at Freightliner Trucks and at the two largest auto parts manufacturers, JCI and Dana.
• Using the worker power of Navajo union members, the Mine Workers recently organized 3,000 workers at the Navajo Nation though majority verification. Now the Mine Workers are engaged in a full-scale fight to win majority verification in the Midwest with the largest coal provider in the history of the world, Peabody. More than 700 religious leaders and over a dozen city and town councils have signed petitions and written letters to Peabody demanding card-check and a neutrality agreement. We’re going have a hell of a fight this year in the cornfields!
• Bringing 1,500 new Latino immigrants into the union movement, the Iron Workers organized JD Steel—the largest employer in their craft west of the Mississippi. Now they have moved on to the second-largest employer in their craft in the West, Great Western.
• The Steelworkers organized the first group of Goodyear workers in a generation—about 900 employees—after they negotiated majority verification and neutrality in their last global agreement with Goodyear.
• AFSCME is engaged in a long-term strategic campaign to organize 9,000 healthcare workers at Resurrection Hospital. During a rally at the hospital, the president of AFSCME, Gerald McEntee, pledged $1 million a year for this fight as long as it takes.
• In the largest agricultural campaign in decades, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee organized 7,000 cucumber workers in North Carolina and is now moving to other crops in North Carolina and beyond.
• The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) is organizing 900 workers at Blue Diamond Growers in Northern California—a company that exports 70 percent of its product overseas. The Blue Diamond effort, like many of these campaigns, has global implications. Just weeks ago, an ILWU member, an ILWU organizer and an AFL-CIO organizer went to Korea to talk with the largest customers of Blue Diamond.
• At about the same time, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and UAW President Ron Gettelfinger met with the Japanese autoworkers to discuss strategies to deal with the Japanese transplants in the United States.
• Global solidarity is also critical to our Peabody Campaign.  The company only operates in three countries—United States, China and Australia. We are actively planning effective solidarity actions with mine workers in Australia.

But it is not enough to engage globally one episodic campaign at a time. Nor is it enough just to go around the world asking everyone else to respond to U.S. workers and unions needs.  At a minimum, we must stitch together a network of unions, national labor centers and other worker organizations to confront global capital and to insist on and fight for workers’ right to organize —a fundamental, internationally recognized human right referenced in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
 
Here in the United States, we have a real fight to restore the right to organize and bargain collectively. There has been a 25-year intentional, sustained, strategic assault by corporations and the political right wing to destroy that right, lower workers’ standard of living and destroy unions.
 
Currently, the Bush-appointed NLRB is about to decide on three cases collectively known as “Kentucky River” that could strip up to 8 million workers of their collective bargaining rights through a redefinition of the term “supervisor.” The impact is likely to be particularly dramatic in the health care industry, in construction and in other skilled occupations where it is common for more highly skilled workers to direct less skilled employees. 

From July 10 to July 20 in more than 20 cities, workers turned out by the thousands to demand that the NLRB protect their right to join or belong to a union. The AFL-CIO’s Kentucky River Week of Action included marches, rallies and large-scale demonstrations at Labor Board offices and health care facilities. In Washington, D.C., more than 1,500 union members and supporters rallied at the NLRB headquarters for two hours, while labor leaders engaged in civil disobedience in the street―blocking traffic in a major intersection during the lunch hour.

We took our message out to the street. We stood up to a Labor Board that has refused to protect the rights of workers in this country. It is important to understand that the place where we are now as a labor movement is not written in granite, nor is it the result of market forces. It is the result of public policy, and public policy can only be changed when the politics change.
 
In the United States, we have gained a groundswell of support from the bottom up to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. The bill is the most significant federal legislative proposal in nearly 30 years to protect the freedom of America’s workers to form unions and bargain collectively. The act’s three main provisions are: majority verification by card check, first-contract arbitration and stiffer penalties for illegal employer conduct. Right now, we have 216 co-sponsors in the House and 43 in the Senate. The signatures on that bill are the result of local, grassroots lobbying by workers.
 
We need to continue to build our grassroots network, because winning the fight to restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain collectively will take an army. We must mobilize tens of thousands of worksite union leaders, stewards and rank-and-file members. We are now working with 21 unions to create, train and mobilize this army.  We have a great model in the USW Rapid Response Team, which has already proved its effectiveness by winning congressional support for the Employee Free Choice Act and by putting workers in motion during the Kentucky River Week of Action.
 
For our army to succeed in securing rights for all workers, we must reach out to those outside of the union movement. While there is no substitute for organizing that leads to collective bargaining, we have to embrace and support new organizing forms that build worker power in different ways.
 
One way is to organize workers in their neighborhoods and engage them in political and issue-based action. That is why we are vigorously supporting the struggle of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to leverage McDonald’s to pass through a pay raise for farmworkers. And that is why we’ve entered into a great partnership with the National Day Laborers to fight together for real immigration reform and for better wages and working conditions for immigrant day laborers. We must all fight against bad employers who exploit both immigrant and native-born workers.
 
Finally, we must give all workers, union and nonunion allies, a stake in our success. We must articulate a vision of social and economic justice and be the frontline of the struggle that fights for that vision.
 
I don’t believe that vision includes corporate partnerships that put workers to the task of serving shareholders or fighting for immigration reform designed to serve the interests of corporate America.
 
We know the task of increasing union density is critical because it translates into bargaining power.
 
But increasing density is only a means. Our end is much more fundamental. It is to build worker power and to use that power to push down wealth and power from those who have too much to those who have too little, to use that power to shine light in dark places, to make life less mean and work more noble.
 
And to fulfill our responsibility to the struggle that is as old as our species—to advance human dignity in every sphere of life.
 
And to most effectively meet that responsibility, we need to be united. Unity and solidarity are not mottos or themes or consultant-generated spin. Unity and solidarity are the foundation of our strength and workers’ ability to win.

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