Diversity Summit: Future of Unions Depends on Including All Workers

by James Parks, Sep 13, 2009

UAW Secretary-Treasurer Elizabeth Bunn (center), Nat LaCour, recently retired AFT secretary-treasurer, and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney were among speakers at the AFL-CIO Diversity Conference today.

More than 500 participants took part in the standing-room only AFL-CIO Diversity Conference.

The future of the union movement depends upon our ability to recruit and promote people of color and women, the fastest growing groups of union members. Today, at the AFL-CIO National Summit on Diversity, more than 500 union activists celebrated the progress made since passage of the historic adoption of Resolution #2 at the 2005 AFL-CIO Convention, which set goals to make the movement more diverse. They also mapped strategy to increase diversity at every level in the future.  

In a strong and emotional speech, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said the priority on diversity in his leadership may well become the biggest legacy of his 14 years leading the federation.

“If we are to have equal educational opportunity, and equal job opportunity, and equal economic opportunity in America, then we must also have equal union opportunity in America.

“We are motivated by our moral imperatives but we also are moved toward our goals by practical persuasions. Simply put, we cannot expect more from our younger and women and minority members unless they can expect more leadership opportunity from our federation.

“Brothers and sisters, we don’t have one dues rate for African American, or Hispanic, or Asian Pacific-American members, and another rate for the rest of our members.  Our women members don’ t pay lower dues than our male members.  We don’t have lower dues for our gay and lesbian and transgender members or for members with disabilities.  So why should they get fewer opportunities to lead and to learn?”

Sweeney’s message resonated with the audience, which interrupted his speech about a dozen times with applause and gave him six standing ovations.

UAW Secretary-Treasurer Elizabeth Bunn and former AFT Secretary-Treasurer Nat LaCour, co-chairs of the Executive Council Committee on Diversity, praised Sweeney for his leadership and determination to bring diversity to the union movement.

Calling Sweeney “our quiet lion,” Bunn said his patient efforts for diversity have paid off. She pledged that workers owe him a great debt of gratitude and will repay that debt by working every day to achieve justice and equality.    

LaCour reminded the audience that increasing diversity is “not just a numbers game.”

We want to strengthen the union movement because a strong movement will make it possible for unions to be the institution that makes America strong and builds the middle class.

A panel of state federation and local central labor leaders reported on their progress in making their unions more inclusive. Jorge Ramirez, secretary-treasurer of the Chicago Federation of Labor, talked about how the central labor council deliberately worked to increase the number of union members of color through skills training. He said the federation makes sure it recruits people of color and women to apply for jobs at the council—and the past six hires have all been women or people of color.

For the Ironworkers, diversity is a matter of survival, said Walter Wise, the union’s general secretary. Facing an aging membership and dwindling market share, the union reached out to the predominantly immigrant workforce. Like most U.S. unions, the Ironworkers union was built by immigrants, he said, and the union cannot build its future without including the new immigrants.

Because of its efforts, Wise said, the Ironworkers have increased membership by 7.5 percent in the past three years.

At the national level, several unions, including the Communications Workers of America (CWA), increased the membership of their executive boards to increase diversity. At AFT, for the first time, all three top officers are women.

But there is much more to do, Sweeney said.

We have to move further and faster toward diversity and inclusion because otherwise we are cheating many of our members out of their dues dollars and cheating our movement out of their full participation.

We can’t expect women and minority members to join us out in the streets, and on the phones, and in our workplaces, if more of them are not helping govern our international and local unions, state federations, and labor councils. They are paying full freight to be union members but we aren’t opening full leadership possibilities to them.

A diverse union movement is critical to making real working families’ top priorities: health care reform and the Employee Free Choice Act, Sweeney added.

We simply cannot keep half our members sitting on the sidelines and at the same time turn off half the people we are trying to help organize. We cannot win high quality, affordable health care for all without getting all of our members involved in the struggle. 

If we don’t win health care we cannot win back the freedom of workers to organize and bargain without risking their jobs to do so. And if we don’t win health care and labor law reform, we cannot win the even larger battle to turn around our economy and make it work for everyone.

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