Tikkun Magazine, November/December 2005

Why the AFL-CIO Split Is Not Labor's Biggest Problem

by Paul Buhle

The exit of the SEIU from the AFL-CIO in July of this year marked the biggest split in organized labor since the expulsion of the original CIO from the AFL in 1935. This event is bound to accelerate a centrifugal movement already present in labor during the past decade: the break-off of individual units from assorted parent unions and the "raiding" of one union by another for members of assorted locals. Calamity and doom are widely predicted by AFL-CIO loyalists and Democratic party officials. And, especially if you don't look at the broader picture, the doomsayers have a couple of powerful points.

For example, much commentary within and around the labor movement (before and since the split) has been highly negative about the rebels on the solid grounds that the SEIU will not be less bureaucratic than its rivals. Rebutting claims made by the SEIU that larger and more efficient units will necessarily have more success in mobilizing workers, these critics point out that the numerical expansion of union bodies does less than nothing to bring about a much-needed democratization. Indeed, SEIU leader Andy Stern has espoused an explicitly top-down model of organizing that old-time union activists see as a tragic rebuttal of the egalitarianism the union movement once represented. [See Steve Early's piece in Tikkun, Volume 20, number 3, p. 45.]

And then we have the Democrats. If the labor movement has been staggering downward, its descent has been less rapid than that of the Opposition Party, especially in an era of continued low turnout. Many believe the Democrats will be hurt by this division and the hard feelings engendered. And they may well be right. But whether all this is likely to be as important as, say, the attitude of Democrats in 2006 or 2008 toward an increasingly unpopular war/occupation, remains very much to be seen. What's likely is that hawks and trade-policy neoliberals who used to get AFL support just because they were Democrats will now have a harder time.

These concerns about bureaucracy and politics obscure, however, the raison d'etre of labor. In the past, the workers at the center of the labor movement were blue-collar U.S. factory workers. Today, that view of labor seems unrealistic, since so few Americans work in factories. And that's just the point.

No one in the United States is untouched by capital's notorious "race for the bottom." Looking for ever cheaper labor, global capital outsources the actual task of creating value to immigrant wokers (legal and illegal) and to workers overseas. These workers will perform their labor for pennies on the dollar. On top of their work a new American economy has been constructed, a largely white-collar services- and -finances specialty market. It is illusory, however, to believe that this economy could exist without the low-wage, immigrant, and global labor market. All Americans who get a paycheck have a vital economic relation to this immigrant and global labor force. And that's why tomorrow's labor movement must be legitimately and sincerely internationalist, or its collapse is dead certain.

History

The history of U.S. labor shows that the union movement is invigorated when it is international, and fails when it looks solely to home. Indeed, the labor history of the past century indicates that internationalism married to disunity may be far better for the union movement than an exclusionary "unity."

The AFL provides a useful measuring stick for the power of internationalism precisely because that federation stood, until the middle 1990s, consistently against immigrant labor and real internationalism. Indeed, in the name of "labor unity" the AFL has had a sad history of excluding non-whites and others who did not "qualify."

Ninety-three years ago, the "Bread and Roses" textile strike shook up both the barons of industry and the staid and conservative AFL. The radically egalitarian Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) sought to unite unskilled and mostly immigrant workers in the United States with their European, Asian, and Latin American counterparts, promising (although never achieving) an international labor movement that would radically change the U.S. economy. Suddenly, unionizing was "in," the buzz word of the day, and unions of the unskilled grew.

World War I provided an excuse for federal laws mandating the expulsion-without-hearing of any immigrant suspected of sympathy for the IWW. Though the AFL picked up thousands of members during the war, it fell away to a shadow of itself in the 1920s. Not even the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed shook up craft union leaders, who opposed much of New Deal labor legislation as an invasion of their chosen territory.

Organized labor did move forward, massively, during the 1930s, thanks in no small part to organizational disunity bred in part on the grounds of internationalism. The Committee for Industrial Organization, expelled by the AFL, became the Congress of Industrial Organization, mobilizer of millions. The AFL got into the act mainly as competitors, offering safe, conservative unionism against the purported Red Threat as well as the "Jewish Threat." The two labor federations actively competed for members, and membership skyrocketed.

The rocket crashed a few years after the Second World War, when red-baiting became rampant and nearly a dozen highly militant unions were driven out of the CIO for political cause. The touted labor unity achieved thereafter (in 1955) marked, in many ways, the victory of the old AFL model. A significant number of government employees at various levels (from teachers to federal bookkeepers), successfully moved toward unionization, giving the new AFL-CIO a fresh white-collar image—both a much-deserved victory for professionalism and a reminder of unions as tending to represent the aristocracy of labor. And there, practically speaking, the door closed. Women and minorities, most notably those within the post-1965 wave of immigrants not already in jobs with unions, were likely never to be unionized. AFL-CIO leaders with corporate-level salaries were occasionally heard to observe that they already had all the members they needed. They certainly didn't need or want help from the 1960s and 70s generation of anti-war, anti-nuke, feminist, gay and lesbian activists.

Thus the steady shutdown of factories from the early 1970s drove organized labor ever downward. A few small unions (such as the once-large, then heavily-raided United Electrical Workers) remained outside the AFL, and it was here, most significantly, that some of the earliest cross-border activity began. A few uniquely growing unions that had placed their faith in organizing nonwhite workers and immigrants—the Service Employees International Union foremost—and took a leading role in overturning the inept and stumbling AFL leadership at the historic 1995 convention. Here the roots of the newest disunity can best be located.

Given this history, the current disunity is not necessarily a problem and may actually be a positive sign. What matters most, however, is not the disunity itself, but whether the breaking off of SEIU and other unions is a harbinger of an improved model committed to internationalism.

A revived union movement here at home certainly must hold onto its white-collar members and expand their ranks as far as possible. Over the short haul, labor's progressives who have abandoned the AFL and those who remained inside will be better off if they can find ways to work together. But the future of labor lies principally in those massive numbers at the bottom of the heap: the immigrants, minorities, and others whose membership would transform any future federation into an egalitarian social movement linked self-consciously to the fate of working people around the globe. Nothing less can possibly succeed.

Paul Buhle teaches labor and cultural history at Brown University and co-edited Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Source Citation

Buhle, Paul. 2005. Why the AFL-CIO split is not Labor's biggest problem. Tikkun 20(6):53.