In February 1999, SEIU took in 74,000 home health care workers in Los Angeles County—the biggest union victory since 1937. The election capped an eleven-year drive that had required changes in state labor laws. The union had already absorbed the forty-year-old Committee of Interns and Residents, a doctors’ union based in New York City public hospitals, in 1997; in June 1999, the American Medical Association approved unions for doctors, and Boston’s 15,000-member National Doctors Alliance affiliated with SEIU.
That year also saw victories at two longtime Southern targets. UNITE and its ACTWU predecessor had been trying to organize Cannon Mills plants in North Carolina since 1974, in the face of massive labor law violations and a company policy that replaced prounion workers with new hires from new ethnic groups—whites, then African Americans, then Latinos, finally Asians. The union had lost four elections. After the NLRB ordered the 1997 election rerun, the company cut back antiunion activities, and on June 23, 1999, workers at Fieldcrest Cannon’s two-mill complex in Kannapolis voted for the union 2,270 to 2,102. It was the biggest private sector union victory in the right-to-work South for decades—for UNITE’s lead organizer, it felt “like we just organized G.M.” In November, Litton-Avondale Industries, Louisiana’s largest manufacturer, ended more than seven years of defying NLRB rulings by agreeing to let the 5,000 workers at its West Jefferson shipyard decide whether to be represented by one of the eleven craft unions in the New Orleans Metal Trades Council. The first contract was ratified December 2000.
The AFL-CIO seized a onetime opportunity when the government of Puerto Rico lifted its 1960 ban on collective bargaining by public employees. A five-union consortium (AFSCME, SEIU, UFCW, AFT, and UAW) persuaded 150,000 public employees to endorse collective bargaining in May 1999, then organized representation elections. In November 1999, the Federación de Maestros became the AFT’s largest affiliate. In deference to Puerto Rican labor concerns, the 1999 AFL-CIO convention passed an AFSCME resolution demanding that the Navy give up its bombing range on the island of Vieques.
However, employer resistance did not abate: some drives failed or stalled, and some strikes were lost.
Truck drivers working the Los Angeles-Long Beach port were lease- or owner-operators, “independent contractors” excluded from Wagner Act protection, and paid by the load. Most were Latin American immigrants. They had tried organizing before—striking in 1988 against excessive unpaid waiting time and in 1993 against diesel fuel price hikes. In 1995, a few activists approached CWA Local 9400 for help, and began organizing again. Within months their meetings regularly brought out hundreds of drivers. In May 1998, the drivers called a strike, both at the few companies that employed drivers and by signing up with a CWA-endorsed labor leasing company and refusing work from nonunion companies. The shippers got injunctions against pickets, brought in new drivers, and boycotted the drivers’ leasing company. Despite community and church support and strike relief from CWA, when the leasing company failed, the strike failed (though intra-harbor drivers won the right to be represented by ILWU).
In January 1997, CWA lost an election for clerical and service workers at US Air. In February the nineteen-month Detroit newspaper strike ended when Gannett and Knight-Ridder management accepted the unions’ unconditional offer to return to work—company stocks had soared during the strike, and many strikers were still waiting to be called back two years later. In September the UAW was embarrassed again at Nissan’s Smyrna, Tennessee, plant, when fewer than half the workers signed union cards. In November, G.M. announced the closing of its Buick City plant in Flint, after years of union and city concessions. The next year, the UAW settled the Decatur Caterpillar strike on close to the company’s original terms, plus a promise to rehire illegally fired strikers.
A two-year struggle at Northwest Airlines exposed other limitations. Three unions represented Northwest workers—the Air Line Pilots Association, Teamsters Local 2000 for flight attendants, and the Machinists for mechanics and ground crews, baggage handlers and clerks. They had all accepted concessions in 1993 to save the airline from bankruptcy; in 1998, they wanted restoration. The unions agreed that, if one walked, all did. The flight attendants organized Contract Action Teams to build support for the negotiations and solidarity in case of a strike. The pilots went out for fifteen days in August, winning phaseout of their two-tier pay structure and wage and benefit improvements. But the Machinists split—in November 11,000 mechanics unhappy with being “mired in an old factory union dominated by unskilled laborers” decertified the IAM in favor of the independent Airline Mechanics Fraternal Association, leaving behind 17,000 clerks and baggage handlers. Teamster negotiations went on another year, under Hoffa’s personal direction and with CAT dismantled by the union. In August 1999, Local 2000 rejected the first settlement negotiated, then ratified an improved offer in May 2000.
The United Farm Workers’ three-year strawberry campaign recruited only a few hundred members. In May 1999, the union was defeated at Watsonville’s Coastal Berry Company by an otherwise unknown Coastal Berry of California Farmworkers Committee. Teamster drives at Federal Express and Overnite also stalled after the NLRB kept FedEx under the National Railway Act, which required that all FedEx employees vote at the same time, and after Overnite kept running during a partial strike called in October 1999 after a four-year organizing drive.
The focus on organizing was slow to pay off. Total union membership declined again in 1996 and 1997, when about 16.1 million workers belonged to unions, about 12.9 million to AFL-CIO affiliates. In the private sector, less than 10 percent of workers were in unions. The year 1998 saw a slight net gain nationwide of about 101,000 members, though union density continued to fall; 1999 was better—265,000 new members overall, with growth in private-sector union membership (12,000) for the first time in years. But to expand the proportion of union members in the working population, the Federation needed to sign up at least half a million new members a year. Job growth was taking place mostly in nonunion industries located in nonunion areas, according to an AFL-CIO study reported at the 1999 convention. Some unions devoted substantial resources to organizing—SEIU reported spending nearly half its budget on organizing, and HERE nearly a third—but many unions spent 10 percent or less. In 2000, total union membership declined again, a net loss of 200,000, and 80 percent of new union members were recruited by only ten of the 66 AFL-CIO affiliates. In private industry, where 160,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared in 2000, union density fell to 9 percent overall, though unions continued to represent significant numbers of workers in transportation and utilities (24 percent), construction (over 18 percent), and manufacturing (just under 15 percent).
The AFL-CIO became more aggressive in politics, contributing $66 million to candidates through 1998 (while corporations contributed about fifteen times more). The Federation pushed issues as well as candidates. When Congress debated raising the minimum wage, the AFL-CIO targeted thirty Republican congressional districts with media campaigns, persuading fifteen Republicans to break with their party leaders and vote for the raise. In California, union voter turnout produced a surprise June 1998 defeat of “Paycheck Protection” (Proposition 226), which required unions to get individual members’ consent before making political contributions from dues income. For the 1998 elections, the AFL-CIO executive insisted that endorsements be initiated by local or state councils (after hastily endorsing a challenger to an incumbent favored by unions in his district in 1996), and included some Republican incumbents who had supported labor issues. Though the Federation failed to meet its goal of creating a Democratic majority in the House, most of its candidates won. AFL-CIO lobbying was probably instrumental in defeating the Clinton administration’s “fast track” legislation requiring Congress to accept or reject trade treaties without amendment, though many Congresspeople were already reluctant to give up their places at the trade negotiations table. Republicans responded to AFL-CIO shows of strength by cutting the NLRB budget and introducing a steady s
tream of antiunion legislation (most failed).
Labor’s Democrat dilemma did not change. John Sweeney did not interfere when activists from affiliates like OCAW and ILWU, along with the independent UE, sponsored the founding of the Labor Party in 1996—the Party planned to concentrate on local elections. The AFL-CIO endorsed the founding of New York’s Working Families Party in 1998, which advocated a “fusion” strategy, building electoral strength by endorsing major-party candidates. And as political, environmental, and human rights activists prepared to rally in protest at the November meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, the AFL-CIO endorsed the movement and encouraged affiliates to participate.
TURN OF THE CENTURY
The issue in Seattle was “globalization,” specifically the WTO’s failure to incorporate labor and environmental standards in its trade guidelines. Several local unions had experience with one or another face of globalization. The ILWU had joined the worldwide solidarity strike in support of Liverpool, England, dockworkers that briefly shut down world trade on January 20, 1997, and a second solidarity strike that shut down the West Coast on September 8. In April 1999, Teamsters Local 174 and the Inland-boatmen’s Union joined with ILWU in a rush-hour “Port Workers Power” rally, and longshore workers shut down the port when Teamsters picketed nonunion shippers, and again when truck owner-operators demonstrated for union recognition. Striking steelworkers at Kaiser Aluminum got support from area environmentalists. On the day of the WTO meeting, 20,000 unionists rallied at a stadium, then marched downtown. They walked into a maelstrom of protest staged by loosely affiliated student, anarchist, and environmental groups, which caught the authorities by surprise. Between the roving protesters and the police counterattacks, the WTO adjourned ahead of schedule. The widely reported slogan found on one protester’s sign—“Teamsters and Turtles Together At Last”—expressed a major theme of the day.
The Seattle showdown helped put labor rights on the free-trade agenda and roused interest in the possibilities of mass direct action, but the everyday world of organizing, strikes, and elections looked pretty much the same. In January 2000, ILA stevedores were beaten and gassed by Charleston, South Carolina, police when the union tried to shut down a shipping contractor that had switched to nonunion workers. In April, in actions targeting the World Bank in Washington, D.C., unions rallied separately from the direct action networks and focused on opposing the administration’s proposal to establish permanent trade relations with China. Despite the Democrats’ record on trade issues, the AFL-CIO endorsed Vice President Al Gore’s candidacy for President. Though the Teamsters, USWA, and UAW flirted with the Green Party candidacy of consumer advocate Ralph Nader, only independents UE and California Nurses Association and a few union locals actually endorsed him.
By the year’s end, the Farm Workers had called off their sixteen-year boycott of California table grapes, and the Kaiser Aluminum locals had gone back to work on terms little better than what they had rejected in October 1998. A year and a half after 284 members of Longshore Local 1814 walked out of the Domino Sugar refinery in Brooklyn, New York, ninety-eight members had gone back to work and Domino’s owner Tate & Lyle looked likely to hold out forever—especially since the UFCW, with contracts settled at Domino plants in Louisiana and Maryland, balked at endorsing the corporate campaign and boycott that the food workers international trade secretariat had suggested to the Tate & Lyle North America Workers Council formed during the Staley strike in Decatur, Illinois.
Intense campaigns to turn out union voters paid off; 26 percent of voters in November came from union households. Gore won the most popular votes but failed to carry enough states. The election came down to Florida, where Republican candidate George W. Bush’s brother Jeb was governor. State officials had disfranchised tens of thousands of registered voters wrongly identified as convicted felons. When the Gore campaign challenged ballots misread by machines, the U.S. Supreme Court halted recounts by hand and designated Bush the winner.
Eight months into his term, the President got his popular mandate. On September 11, 2001, Islamic militants flew hijacked airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., and crashed a fourth plane in Pennsylvania. More than 3,000 people perished. The attacks capped three years of assaults on U.S. military and diplomatic facilities by Al Qaeda, a clandestine network of religious fanatics opposed to secular government and U.S. penetration of the Islamic world.
The President declared a “war on terrorism.” The first target was Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi who directed Al Qaeda, had lived for several years. After a few thousand Afghans had been killed and a friendly regime installed in Kabul, Bush prepared to oust Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who had no visible connection to Al Qaeda but did control extensive oil reserves. On the home front the Bush administration moved to limit civil liberties, especially for immigrants; to expand executive powers, including plans for military tribunals; and to mobilize Americans to report any suspicious behavior by their neighbors to the new Department of Homeland Security.
The 9–11 attacks slammed an already faltering economy. New York City lost 100,000 jobs and registered a record number of homeless families. In 2002 a series of massive corporate failures precipitated a sharp decline in the stock market, devastating pension funds all across the country. It turned out that much of the 1990s boom had been based on fraudulent profit reports and stock manipulations.
Like most Americans, the AFL-CIO and its affiliates supported the President’s war, but he made no concessions to labor in return. Media coverage of 9–11 highlighted blue-collar heroism: the courage displayed by firefighters, police, and the 30,000 union members who cleared the World Trade Center site and recovered remains of the victims. Otherwise, labor got stiffed. The Bush administration refused to fund long-term monitoring of the health of workers on the Trade Center site and demanded that Homeland Security employees be exempted from union protections.
Some labor leaders went an extra mile to back the President. The Teamsters’ Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., volunteered his members to gather information for the Department of Homeland Security. In contrast, other unionists set up “Labor Against War” groups, first in New York City and San Francisco. The West Coast group denounced Bush’s threat to deploy troops in case of a dockworkers’ strike. New York activists joined civic and immigrant organizations to protest government detention of Arabs and Muslims.
At the 1997 AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh, John Sweeney declared, “We don’t need any new programs. We just need to do what we’ve been doing even better.” Most New Voice initiatives provided little more than endorsement from the top of strategies already practiced by grassroots activists. Even in the relatively good times at the end of the twentieth century, doing the same better had not been enough. As the twenty-first century ushered in times of crisis, the need for new directions seemed more urgent than ever before.
EPILOGUE
The history of American labor is one of constant struggle, against enslavement, impoverishment, and repression, for democratic rights, economic security, and dignity. The struggle has accomplished much. From the hours and conditions of labor to the regulation of occupational safety and health, to social welfare like minimum living standards for old and young or equal opportunity, even to the democratic franchise itself, many aspects of everyday life show the results of working people organized to advance their common interests. Despite these advances, the struggles never seem to end. Working people have returned again and again to the same issues of economic security and political democracy, though under new and changing conditions.
Though conditions develop and change, the basic structure of the society has been constant. Whether called “commerce” or “free enterprise,” capitalism—the economic system based on profit and private property—has dominated American society from the colonial era to the present day. The quest for private profit is by nature exclusive, expansive, and
unstable—reducing all value to profit, seeking always the highest rate of return, ever prone to speculation, overproduction, disinvestment, and crisis. For people who must work for a living, the struggle to defend and advance themselves, their families, and their communities either leads to mobilization for some level of workplace, community, economic democracy, or remains confined to individual efforts, heroic and admirable but limited and precarious.
The struggle for democracy depends on solidarity. America has always been multicultural, from indigenous peoples to wave after wave of immigrants, both forced and free. Each native and immigrant group has developed its own relationship to the common culture, and different groups have fared better or worse at one time or another. But their welfare has commonly depended on their relationship to the economy. For most people, whether they work for a boss or for themselves, this relationship has been characterized by dependency, subordination, and insecurity. Though the remedy for these weaknesses has always been cooperation and unity in action, securing solidarity has always been difficult.
When working people’s solidarity has been limited in scope and vision, the privileged classes—economic, social, and political elites—set the rules. When restricted by democratic controls, they have changed the rules to restore “balance” to their advantage. Working people and their movements have suffered historic defeats, from the expansion of slavery to the impoverishment of the Gilded Age to the suppression of modern movements for social justice to the devastation of deindustrialization. The stakes are higher now. Wealth and privilege are more powerful than ever. Out of the 100 largest economies in the world, only forty-nine are sovereign nations—the rest are transnational corporations, and transnational corporations control more than a fourth of the world’s economic activity.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 42