U.S. unions begin to recover

BY STIG JUTTERSTROM The trade union movement in the USA has began to recover, after decades of decline. Last year is regarded as a turning point, as the national trade union centre AFL-CIO recruited 600,000 new members, a net gain of 265,000. This is the largest annual increase in 20 years, according to official figures in a government report. The report states that the number of trade union members in the United States rose from 16.21 million to 16.48 million last year, and the percentage of unionised U.S. workers remained steady at 13.9 per cent, reversing the declining trend. John J. Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, is the man behind this new optimism, which is most welcome on the eve of federal elections in November this year. METAL WORLD met with him in a noisy breakfast room at a hotel in Geneva, a stone's throw from the huge building of the International Labour Organisation, where Sweeney was going for a meeting. We were particularly keen to get an answer to our question about the current strength of the American trade union movement, and the influence it believes it can exercise on the development of American society. "We are turning the corner, but we are not at our destination yet," he says. "Today's data indicate that our renewed emphasis on helping working people form unions is having an impact. Our challenge for the future is to remain focused and to broaden our efforts. It's crucial for unions to continue to grow if working men and women are going to have a stronger voice in the issues that matter most to them." DISAPPOINTED ABOUT NAFTA Q: You were elected president of the AFL-CIO in 1995. What is the most important achievement you have made? A: When I was running for president, I said many times that the real issue wasn't who was going to be elected. It was where the AFL-CIO was headed. In 1994, we suffered a big defeat in our government elections for Congress. A lot of our members were disappointed about Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement, so they stayed home. The numbers of organised labour in the workforce were declining. I thought that it was time for us to take a look at ourselves and see how do we change and what do we change. I campaigned on the platform that we had to organise more aggressively to build a stronger labour movement. We had to be more effective in our politics, and we had to improve the perception of the labour movement among our own members, as well as its perception with the public. Q: Could you describe what happened when the election was over? A: We had an election which divided us. But since the election was over, everybody joined together in solidarity and supported the programme. All the proposals I made in terms of increasing resources for organising and doing a more aggressive outreach to our rank and file for their involvement in politics were approved. All this was done after we had carried out surveys and focus groups, and I felt confident that what we were proposing were subjects which our members supported as well as the rank and file. I realised that it couldn't be accomplished overnight. But what was important was that we had set a structure in place. We have a training institute where we trained a pool of organisers and made that pool available to the individual unions. We put some of the AFL-CIO's money into affiliates' organising and tried to provide them with some start-up money. If we could increase last year's number of new members from 600,000 to a million, we would see some net growth of approximately half a million. And if we could build a culture of organising constantly, we would over a period of time build a stronger labour movement. A SURVEY WITH YOUNG WORKERS Q: Is it correct to say that the U.S. trade unions are beginning to recover some power and some influence after years of decline? A: Yes, but we haven't kept up with the expansion of the workforce. We haven't made the kind of inroads that we should in the high-tech industry and the growing health-care industry. We are certainly making some inroads in the health industry. The challenge is going to be how we address the highly unorganised industries, like high-tech. I see indications of organising in these areas if we attract the workers. If you look at doctors, for example, with the changes which have occurred in our health care system, they are becoming more and more like employees rather than independent practitioners. They are coming to the realisation that they have to have some collective action and that some of their issues can't be addressed without something like collective bargaining. We have seen the same attitude within a survey of young workers last summer. We found that they understand their working career is going to be a lot different from that of their parents. Their parents may have had two or three jobs in their entire work life. Young people, maybe, will have 12 to 15 different jobs. If they have children, they are very concerned about what benefits the employer provides. The number of people in our country without health insurance is rapidly increasing. A few years ago, when President Clinton tried to get through a national health-care reform, he couldn't obtain support in Congress. It was accepted that there were 35 million Americans without health insurance. Today, the government's figures are 43 million. Young people recognise this. They don't trust their employers to take care of them. They also understand they can't resolve the problems by themselves and that they need some collective action. They have to come together. FOCUS ON ORGANISING NEW MEMBERS Q: Even though the current figures look positive, they remain low compared to the 1950s when some 35 per cent of the workers were unionised. They are also low when compared to a number of European countries. Why is this? A: There are several reasons. One is that a lot of our industrial work moved to other countries. Plants closed and moved to other parts of the world. The membership of the Steelworkers, Autoworkers, Machinists and other unions declined. The growth has taken place within the service sector. The high-tech industry is highly unorganised. In some cases workers are treated as independent contractors. In many cases they work at home and don't get together with their fellow workers, except on the Internet. And the other part of it is that the organisers shouldn't do what they are doing today. They are spending their time representing the workers they have organised, which is good. But what we have tried to get them to focus on is how to deal with organising new members at the same time. John Sweeney also pointed to the labour laws, which are possibly the strongest enemy facing the American trade union movement. It is a slow and complex business to set up a trade union. First, the workers have to send a formal application to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for permission to start a union. The NLRB then decides who is entitled to vote in the matter. Meanwhile the employer tries to use all available methods, often with the help of outside anti-union consultants, to stop the formation of a new union. People who want to launch a union don't have the same rights to canvass for votes in the workplace. Some 10,000 workers are sacked every year for trying to start unions. "GINGRICH SCARED THE HELL OUT OF US" Q: How strong is the American trade union movement in terms of political influence? A: 1994 was the turning point. Newt Gingrich, who was the leader of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives at that time, didn't do anything good for us. He scared the hell out of us. We had to focus on how to do things better. When I was elected in 1995, we started to turn things around. In 1996, we were more effective in our national elections and elected more members to Congress, but it wasn't enough to achieve a majority. In 1998, we elected additional members but were still short by five seats of a majority. In 2000, I think we are going to win a majority in the House of Representatives. And these are indications of how we are mobilising our rank-and-file activists around political issues and will hopefully elect Dick Gephardt (Democratic Party leader) as the speaker of the House of Representatives. Q: What means do you use to canvass for votes in the various states? A: We had an anti-labour referendum in California in 1998. It was called Proposition 226 and had a label on it called "paycheck protection". That sounded pretty good, but in June, when they found out that it was really intending to cut off our political fund-raising and our political contributions to candidates whom we supported, the people of California defeated this paycheck protection. We had mobilised 25,000 workers to get out to their communities and to their worksites and deliver their message, and that was essentially what turned this whole issue around. We kept those 25,000 people active in the political campaign from June to November, and in November we elected Gray Davis as governor of California, we elected a state legislator and we elected a Democratic senator. If we can do that kind of mobilisation in California, we should be doing it in Michigan and in Pennsylvania. Q: Will this be of decisive importance for the November election results? A: This is going to make us much stronger politically and much more effective because our members understand that they have to elect a majority in order to get some changes in the laws. THE REFERENCE TO THE MAFFIA IS SOMETHING OF THE PAST Q: Do you fear a return to the anti-labour platform of the Reagan-Bush years, if George W. Bush becomes president? A: Yes. George W. Bush would be worse than his father and even worse than Ronald Reagan. The reason I say that is because he has been anti-labour and anti-worker as governor of Texas. He makes constant references in his campaign speeches, attacking unions and attacking workers' issues. Q: Jim Hoffa is president of the Teamsters' union. Which association does the name Hoffa carry in the U.S. today? A: Jim Hoffa works very closely with the AFL-CIO and other unions. He is doing a really good job at rebuilding the Teamsters' union. He is trying to make it as strong as it used to be in the past. Q: And there are no signs of connections with the maffia anymore? A: I don't see any indication about that. The reference to the maffia is something of the past. Q: The United States is dominating the world. It dominates business and communications, its economy is the world's most successful, its military second to none. Does the only superpower of the world know how to behave? Is America something special or a nation like any other? A: I think it is like any other nation. There are differences in culture, there are differences in history. The U.S. is enjoying a very successful economic period. The profit picture among corporations is up, productivity is up, the stock market is up and CEO compensation is up. The only thing that hasn't kept up is workers' wages. During all of this successful economy, workers have contributed to the success, but they haven't seen the high level of economic growth that corporations have seen. Other countries have higher levels of unemployment. Our employment is pretty good. Other countries, in some cases, have better labour legislation than we have. But as we see the expansion of globalisation, there is more of an international solidarity among workers in different countries on these issues. I think that as the economy becomes more and more global, workers and the unions have to address many of their issues from a global standpoint. THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IS A REALITY Q: How is the trade union movement influenced by financial globalisation? A: We are in the middle of a transition period, from national markets to a single global market. Multinational companies are changing their production and distribution patterns; they move jobs and money around the world faster than ever before. The global economy is a reality; global companies exist. This is a challenge for the trade union movement, but also an historic opportunity to build a new internationalism and global solidarity. Q: You have stated that it is not the global economy which is the greatest threat to the workers, but the lack of strong trade unions all over the world. A: Yes, that is what I wrote in a book published in 1998, "World Wide Workers". And this is one of the reasons why the AFL-CIO has created a new Solidarity Center to help trade unions in other countries to develop unions which are free from the influence of governments and employers. The really skewed markets are created by an absence of human and trade union rights. The global economy means that we can only guarantee and strengthen the rights of American workers by extending the right of belonging to unions to all countries. It is also important to ensure that workers' rights are enshrined in all trade and investment agreements. They must be given the same protection as ownership rights enjoyed in the World Bank's and the International Monetary Fund's conditions, and in the trading rules of the WTO. Q: Do you have any concrete examples of successful international trade union cooperation? A: What we see here at the ILO in terms of the focus on the declaration of basic rights and freedoms is an indication of the labour movement's activity in globalisation. I think our increased support in the developed world for debt relief in the developing countries is an example of how the labour movement is really focused on global issues. But there are so many individual situations. SOMAVÍA IS A BREATH OF FRESH AIR Q: Are international organisations like the ILO, International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and International Metalworkers' Federation too bureaucratic and too inefficient? A: I would say the same thing about the international labour movement as I would say about our own labour movement, and that is that we have to constantly be reviewing our structure and our programmes to make sure that we are addressing the issues to our purpose and our members. I think that Juan Somavía is a breath of fresh air to the ILO, and I believe that we will see changes at the ILO, making it more current in terms of how they address their agenda. Q: In the struggle on China's membership in the World Trade Organisation (WTO), you have been fighting hard against establishing permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) with China. Do you want to isolate China, or do you want to influence the conditions in China? A: Our activities against China PNTR were a concern for workers in China as much as for workers in the U.S. We oppose the China PNTR because there were no indications of workers' conditions improving. We think that human rights violations seem to be growing rather than declining. Giving China PNTR gives them a blank check. There will be no monitoring. Our past practice of annual review should have continued until China did change. Q: You have said that China has forced U.S. workers to compete with "sweatshop workers making as little as 13 cents an hour". But many Chinese workers say that labour conditions are generally better in foreign-owned plants than in state-owned or private Chinese-owned ones. They say that businesses U.S companies have invested in have pushed wages and safety standards higher and that the best way to improve their lives is by bringing in more such jobs. A: I disagree. We have no indications that they are. Even in discussions with American multinationals, when you ask them about conditions in China they say they are much better. But they can't give you any examples of things being any better. And the wages in China are not improving. WENT TO UNION MEETINGS AS A CHILD Q: Why did you decide to dedicate your life to the trade unions? Were your parents trade union members? A: I was raised in New York, in the Bronx. My parents came to the United States as Irish immigrants during the depression, in 1929 and 1930. My mother was a domestic worker and never a member of the union. My father was a bus driver in New York City and one of the early members of the Transport Workers' Union. I grew up in a home where my father appreciated very much what the union was able to accomplish, and I went to union meetings with him as a child. I was on picket lines when they went on strike in the late 40s to achieve the 40-hour workweek, and I enjoyed it!