by Naim, Moises
As I have argued when discussing the ascent of the micropowers in previous chapters, the point is not that these new challengers will dislodge the megaplayers. The point is that they will deny them options that in the past the big players could take for granted. The new charismatic churches, for example, will not dislodge the Vatican or the Anglican Church. But they will narrow the range of possibilities and reduce the power of these large institutions.
The success of the new denominations inevitably comes to the detriment of mainline Protestant groups like the Anglicans and Lutherans, and most of all, the Catholic Church. Until a few decades ago, the Vatican’s principal problems were the gradual secularization of Europe and the aging population of priests. These were serious issues, and the Church sought to modernize in response, notably through the decisions of the Vatican II council—for instance, by requiring Mass to be given in local languages rather than in Latin. But nothing prepared the Vatican for the competitive challenge of the Pentecostal and charismatic churches, not just at the far limits of its reach but in places like Latin America long considered the faith’s backyard. Already in the 1970s and 1980s, the Church faced internal dissent with the emergence of liberation theology in Brazil and elsewhere in the continent. The threat of liberation theology has diminished, particularly with the spread of democracy in the region.12 But the inroads of the new denominations and the greater intensity of renewalist religious practice (more people attending longer services and adapting more aspects of their life to the church’s requirements) are chipping away at the influence of the once overwhelmingly dominant Catholicism. “If the church doesn’t make changes to its centralized structures and authoritarian messages, it will suffer a genuine collapse in Latin America within roughly fifteen years,” in the estimate of Elio Masferrer, the chairman of the Latin American Religious Studies Association.13
Scholars and analysts were slow to take in the scale of the trend, perhaps because they found it easy to dismiss Pentecostal worship as odd or exotic. Now, however, it is unavoidable, as evangelical groups have grown influential in politics (fielding candidates for office in countries like Brazil) and the media (launching radio and television networks in many countries). Neither the Catholic Church nor the mainline Protestant denominations have found a way either to halt the spread of these small and fast rivals or to stanch the defection of their own adherents, with all its implications for revenue and relevance.
Why? In part, that failure has to do with doctrine, and the ability of the evangelical churches to offer a message based on wealth and spectacular services—with their faith healings and deliverances—that contrast with Catholicism’s austere and repetitive rituals. But the core advantage, the one that makes the rest possible, is organizational. The changes in the composition and practice of Christianity are as drastic a case of the decay of power, away from large hierarchical and centralized structures and in favor of a constellation of small and nimble autonomous players, as the world has known.
The essence of the Pentecostal and evangelical advantage lies in the ability of these churches to spring up without regard to any preexisting hierarchy. There are no lessons to receive, instructions to await, or ordinations to earn from the Vatican or the Archbishop of Canterbury or any other central leadership. In the classic case, unless they have emerged from an already existing evangelical church, a pastor simply appoints himself or herself (while Catholicism still forbids women priests, there are any number of Charismatic women apostles, bishops, and prophetesses) and puts out his or her shingle. In this respect, the church resembles nothing so much as a small business launched in a competitive marketplace without funding from a central source; it must succeed on the basis of the members it draws, the services it provides them, and the tithes and collection revenue they can be persuaded to give.14 As John L. Allen, a reporter covering the Vatican and author of The Future Church, has observed: “Barriers to market entry in Pentecostalism are notoriously low. Any Pentecostal who feels dissatisfied with the offerings of the local church is free to move on to another, even to start his or her own church in a basement or garage.”15
The churches that succeed are the ones that adapt to local circumstances in the manner of a well-imagined niche business, in every respect from the doctrine of their teachings to the location and timing of worship, amenities and community services such as child care or job-finding assistance or support groups of all kinds, and business and media initiatives. Immigrants, indigenous groups like the Mayans in Guatemala, or other communities with needs that political leaders and mainstream churches have neglected are perfect targets for these new churches. In many Latin American countries, the historic ties of Catholic bishops with the political elite rendered them less sensitive to the conditions of the poor and especially of indigenous people.16 The rigid hierarchy of the church and the need for doctrinal sanction from the Vatican prevented them from adjusting, and left room for the evangelical churches to outflank them. An explicit message about wealth and prosperity and an emphasis on individual actions and redemption fit settings where poverty and exclusion have been the norm. But the evangelical churches can also minister with more sensitivity to the communities where they operate, react in real time to economic and political events, and adopt the styles and sounds of local culture. As one evangelical pastor in Potosí, Bolivia, put it: “Our churches are more open, the songs use local rhythms, and I visit my people every day.”17
Meanwhile, the barriers that previously held small upstart churches from having an impact beyond, say, their neighborhood or ethnic community have completely collapsed. The communications revolution and the rise of private media have ended the advantage of large organized churches in spreading the message, giving any self-declared pastor the ability to reach television viewers, radio listeners, or Web surfers and sending blessings beyond borders and collecting money in return. With more access to global media platforms has come the spread of the model first honed by American televangelists. Heightened migration and travel have increased the reach of the more flexible renewalist churches and given them a potential foothold demographic in many countries from which to grow. And the more adherents these faiths gain, the less weight there is to the moral opprobrium of exclusion or excommunication from the Catholic Church. The cost of heresy is down.18
Other major religions such as Islam and Hinduism seem less vulnerable to the rise of charismatic Christianity, probably for deep-seated cultural reasons. But to one degree or another, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Taoism, Shintoism, and others are also much less centralized and hierarchical than the Catholic or mainline Protestant churches. The Grand Rabbi of Israel, the Grand Mufti of Cairo, and the high priest of a major Hindu temple carry a certain moral weight and may enjoy decision-making authority in their country or region, but they have rival leaders within their own faith who can offer different rulings on any matter. Within Islam, for instance, political factors make certain tendencies (Sunni versus Shia, or Wahhabi versus more liberal interpretations) dominant in different Muslim countries, yet influential scholars offer competing visions of the faith to adherents around the world via often-sophisticated media operations. Egypt-born, Qatar-based Imam Yusef al-Qaradawi, for instance, reaches an estimated 60 million viewers through his television program on Al Jazeera.19 Hinduism, meanwhile, has always been highly decentralized, with numerous sub-traditions, sects, and faith communities and no single governing authority. On a smaller scale, Indian religious exports from the Vedanta Society to the Hare Krishnas via Amma, Sai Baba, Osho, and the Maharishi share some of the organizational advantage of the Pentecostal groups, and have exploited it with similar success.
LABOR: NEW UNIONS AND NONUNIONS
Just as the Catholic Church confronts a growing challenge to its power from upstart denominations that have proved more nimble and flexible in meeting the needs of today’s salvation seekers, so, too, have established unions struggled to maintain their clout in the face of efforts by new unions to fulfill the needs of workers
shaped by the More, Mobility, and Mentality revolutions. “Are American unions history?” asked a headline in the opinion pages of the Washington Post in 2012. Harold Meyerson—a self-described democratic socialist and a pro-labor journalist—goes on to remind his readers that “in the U.S. private sector unionization has fallen below 7 percent from a post–World War II high of roughly 40 percent.”20 It is clear that the power of the US labor movement has been waning, and surely the drop in its membership is a driver of this decline. But declining membership is not the only reason. The power of traditional labor organizations has also decayed as a result of forces that, as discussed in these pages, affect all traditionally powerful actors. In fact, while the sway of the labor movement is broadly declining, megaplayers like the AFL-CIO have been more affected than some of the new, nontraditional rivals that have appeared in this field, such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Here, too, we see that the barriers that used to protect the incumbents from the competition of their rivals have become easier to penetrate, circumvent, or overwhelm.
THE HISTORY OF UNIONS PARALLELS THE HISTORY OF MODERN enterprise. One could argue that trade unions in Europe have even deeper roots in the professional associations and guilds that stretched back into the Middle Ages. But the advent of factory-scale industry in the nineteenth century was almost immediately accompanied by the emergence of organizations meant to improve conditions and advance the rights of industrial workers. Although unions formed in Britain and France earlier in the century, most of the forerunners of the unions in the oldest industrial nations were founded in the second half of the nineteenth century. And although the structure of the union movement varies from country to country—for instance, between those where unions are mostly specific to certain companies and those where unions cover entire industrial sectors or multiple sectors—confederations intended to assemble all of these disparate parts and give them a strong, centralized, unified voice have been around since the late nineteenth century. The organization that became Britain’s Trades Union Congress (TUC) was founded in 1866. France legalized unions in 1884 and its largest federation, the CGT, was founded eleven years later. In the United States, an organization called the Knights of Labor was an embryonic national federation in the 1870s and 1880s; one of its offshoots, the American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886, would centralize the union movement for several decades.
Even among just these three countries, the histories diverge in the twentieth century: although the TUC has remained the umbrella group for virtually all labor unions in England to this day, France’s CGT saw the rise of rival national federations (CFDT, FO) with less radical political orientations; in the United States, the Confederation of Industrial Organizations (CIO) took a more radical line until it merged with the AFL in 1955, forming the AFL-CIO, which would serve as the umbrella for union labor in America for half a century. For the last several decades in the industrialized world—where unions have the most penetration, recognition, and history—the typical set-up has consisted of one or several (two to four) national confederations, assembling several dozen major branches (either components of the national organization or independent but affiliated unions) usually organized by industry. Germany, for instance, has one major national confederation; Spain has two; Italy has three; Russia, where unions were once regimented components of the Soviet communist system, has four.
But as much as unions get credit for major breakthroughs in working life, at least in rich countries (“the folks who brought you the weekend,” as the American sticker slogan says), the story of the great trade unions for several decades now has been one of decline. The numbers vary, and not every comparison is valid given the differences in structures from country to country. Still, both union density (the percentage of workers who are members of unions) and bargaining coverage (the percentage of workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement, whether they themselves are union members or not) have been declining in most OECD countries, in some cases steeply. In the United States, union density has plummeted from 36 percent after World War II to just 12 percent today. In the private sector, the drop has been even sharper, from about one-third half a century ago to less than 8 percent now. Union density in the OECD countries varies from 5.8 percent in Turkey to 68.3 percent in Sweden (according to 2008 data), but in almost every case the numbers have been at best stagnant, and more often declining, in a trend that has held in much of Europe for several decades.
The last period of strong growth of union membership across many industrial countries was in the 1970s.21 Even as of 1981, the AFL-CIO could muster 250,000 workers to come to Washington to protest President Ronald Reagan’s firing of air traffic controllers in a Solidarity Day held that September. Fast-forward three decades, to a protest held at the National Mall in 2010, and the labor unions could pull together only a small fraction of that number, with turnout lower than at Glenn Beck’s Tea Party rally five weeks earlier.22 And in 2012 another important defeat confirmed the waning power of the US labor movement as, despite a massive effort, unions failed to win a recall election against Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin.
The causes of this general decline include familiar factors: globalization and technological innovation have made it easier for employers to move jobs to other countries or to eliminate them altogether, changing the balance of power in favor of employers. Though the point of collective bargaining might have been precisely to protect workers from this situation, the forces that gathered in favor of flexible and global labor markets, often supported by governments ideologically committed to market-oriented reforms, usually proved too strong. Moreover, unionization historically thrived in industries and occupations that rely on unskilled labor, which is easier to organize. As automation replaced unskilled laborers in various heavy industries, or those jobs went overseas where unskilled labor was less costly, unions needed to move into new sectors such as services that needed fresh organizing. Few did. In many places, tales of corruption and complacency among unions were also part of the mix.
But changes in the attraction and effectiveness of unions have an organizational component as well. The structure of unions, from the specialization of individual unions or locals by company and industry sector up to the centralized national federations, logically mirrored the structure of dominant firms whose workers were to be unionized and represented. Unions evolved to take on the large, hierarchical, modern corporations that anchored capitalist business for most of the twentieth century before globalization and flexibility pushed those firms to start downsizing, outsourcing, and moving to part-time and contract labor.
A major innovation area for unions in the last twenty years has been to find ways to pressure companies whose operations span more and more countries, as well as to protect worker pay scales at home by fighting for more stringent labor standards in other countries. But occasional victories in these areas only soften the edges of the general pattern. In the United States, the one area where unions have gained ground in the last few decades has been the public sector (teachers’ unions, for example, or unions of municipal and county workers)—precisely the fields where the labor market has changed the least, and where employers still rely on centralization and hierarchy.
Where workers have won victories in recent years, the organizations they have used to deliver the win have been traditional unions that have radically rethought their structure and methods, new unions that have formed to bypass the old structures, and sometimes vehicles that are not unions at all.
Between 1996 and 2010, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) more than doubled its ranks, to 2.1 million members. And it did that by riding the wave of the More, Mobility, and Mentality revolutions. Many of its members, for example, labored in health care, the growing field responsible for more people living longer, healthier lives. Many of its members were also recent immigrants, beneficiaries of the trends in global mobility that were reshaping markets and workplaces. And like their predecessors in fac
tories and warehouses, all of them were driven by an aspiration to better themselves and achieve the gains that first lured them to the United States. Led by Andy Stern, recognized as an innovator not just in American labor but also in politics and social mobilization,23 the union secured major victories with collective bargaining deals for some of the most vulnerable workers in the United States, such as janitors and child-care workers, many of whom work multiple part-time jobs and do not speak good English.24 Historically, these groups had been neglected by a union movement focused on factories and traditional industries. To organize them required not just a bright idea on the part of Stern and his team but also new tools, including alliances outside the labor movement with community and immigrant groups, and a deeper involvement in elections than simply raising money and turning out the vote on election day for local Democratic Party candidates. Stern’s negotiating tactics with business also broke from traditional methods. For instance, he pioneered an arrangement whereby collective bargaining for a particular workplace would kick in only after a majority of the market in question was unionized, thus sparing employers from the competitive disadvantage of being the first or only ones to sign a union contract.
The SEIU is still very much a union rather than some mutant new breed, and it has faced the burdens of size and unwieldiness in its own right. Among Stern’s innovations was the combination of union locals into “mega-locals” of a million workers or more, in hopes of securing stronger bargaining power—but at the cost, his critics argued, of flexibility, internal democracy, and actual results. And its rival Change to Win, which was born in 2005 and thus far has not been able to scale up SEIU’s successes, represents an endorsement of the federation model, not a repudiation. But the nitty-gritty involvement of SEIU with community and immigrant groups, churches and nontraditional allies suggests that in order to maintain their own relevance, the large industrial unions of the past need to embrace new methods and languages and share power with smaller, outside parties.