Changing to Organize

The Nation (September 3, 2001) | Kate Bronfenbrenner

On Labor Day 1995, for the first time in decades, the major media were filled with stories not about broken strikes and corrupt union leaders but about the promise and possibility of labor's revival. John Sweeney, Richard Trumka and Linda Chavez-Thompson had launched their campaign for leadership of the AFL-CIO pledging to organize on a massive scale, "to open up and reinvigorate the labor movement at every level." There was talk of building a national organizing fund, recruiting thousands of new young organizers and organizing millions of workers in new occupations and industries.

In the months following Sweeney's victory as the new AFL-CIO president, "changing to organize" became the mantra of a newly energized labor movement. For the first time, the federation had an organizing department, a director of organizing and an organizing fund to support large-scale, multi-union campaigns in key industries. The AFL-CIO also launched Union Summer, bringing in hundreds of college students to assist in a wave of new organizing campaigns.

These initiatives were not limited to the AFL-CIO. Across the country, local and national unions engaged in an aggressive effort to improve significantly their organizing capacity and success. This entailed shifting staff and financial resources into organizing, mobilizing leaders and members to support organizing campaigns, and developing and implementing more effective organizing strategies and tactics. By 1999 the combination of organizing victories and employment expansion in unionized industries resulted in a net gain of 265,000 union members, the first such gain in more than twenty years. The great American decline in union organizing seemed to have finally bottomed out.

But the good news was not to last. This past January, the government released union density figures for 2000 that once again told a story of decline. For last year was a presidential election year, and just as in the past, unions shifted enormous resources, including organizing staff, to the election campaign, leaving fewer staff and resources for organizing. Overall, organizing activity was down, and there were none of the massive victories that had dominated the 1999 organizing cycle. To make matters worse, in the last weeks of 2000 there was a series of plant closings and mass la yoffs in unionized manufacturing and retail companies, raising the bar even higher if the number of newly organized workers was to offset those lost to the sudden downturn in the economy.

Even leaving aside the unusual events of last year, it is clear that despite all the new initiatives and resources devoted to organizing and all the talk of "changing to organize," American unions are at best standing still. They will need to organize millions, not hundreds of thousands, of workers each year if they are to reverse the tide and begin to regain their influence and power in American society.

Why is this so difficult? Why has it taken so long for new organizing initiatives to bear significant fruit? After spending the past fourteen years conducting a series of studies analyzing the factors contributing to union organizing success, I find the answers to these questions to be painfully obvious. Building capacity for organizing is one thing. Changing the structure, culture and strategy of the large, entrenched, democratic institutions that American unions have become is quite another.

Transforming the way unions operate is particularly hard at a time of escalating crisis and employer opposition. While labor has finally begun to regroup, the economic, political and legal climate has only grown more hostile. Each year, employer anti-union campaigns increase in intensity and effectiveness. Discharges for union activity, plant-closing threats, intimidation, harassment and surveillance have become routine elements of the organizing process, so much so that fewer than a third of those attempting to organize succeed in gaining representation under a collective bargaining agreement.

But it is too easy to blame employer opposition alone. American unions must shoulder a good portion of the responsibility for their organizing failures. The problem is not that the labor movement does not know what it takes to win. The problem is that the majority of unions organizing today still run weak, ineffectual campaigns that fail to build their strength for the long haul. They are not doing everything we know is necessary to succeed in the current climate of mobile capital, aggressive employer opposition and weak and poorly enforced labor laws.

There are no silver bullets, no simple formulas that guarantee union victory. Instead, as my research has shown, union success depends on using a multifaceted strategy including a broad range of union-building tactics: committing sufficient and appropriate staff and financial resources; using strategic research to select organizing targets and to increase bargaining leverage; emphasizing grassroots, person-to-person outreach and leadership development among the workers being organized; training and utilizing rank-and-file members as volunteer organizers; focusing on issues that resonate with the workers being organized and the broader community; building for the first contract during the organizing campaign; and engaging in escalating pressure tactics in the workplace and the community to foster commitment among the workers being organized and to deter employer opposition. The more comprehensive, aggressive and multifaceted the union strategy is during the organizing campaign, the more union-building strategies used, the more likely the union is to win.

There is no question that in the past five years more unions have begun to run aggressive campaigns. But for most, the shift toward a greater emphasis on organizing has been piecemeal. They have invested some money in organizing, recruited a few more organizers and added one or two new tactics to their arsenal. But they have not made the wholesale strategic, structural and cultural changes required to take on the diffuse, globally connected and extremely mobile corporate structures that dominate the American economic landscape today.

Nowhere are these deficiencies more evident than in the realm of choosing organizing targets. At a time when private-sector union density has dropped to 9 percent, unions can ill afford to waste precious time and resources on campaigns and targets that will not advance their long-term goals. Instead, they need to focus their energies where they are most likely to win not just the election but also the first contract, and on the units that, once won, will have the greatest impact on strengthening their bargaining power in existing units. Unions that attempt to organize any type of worker in any industry with no regard to the union's bargaining leverage in the enterprise, community or industry risk seriously diluting their power, and the power of other unions, at a time when they most need to concentrate their power in any way they can.

This puts a special burden on unions in core sectors such as manufacturing, where win rates average as low as 30 percent and where employers are much more likely to engage in the most aggressive anti-union tactics such as discharging union supporters and making plant-closing threats. It is understandable that many industrial unions look longingly at the hotel and healthcare sectors, where win rates average as high as 60 percent and plant-closing threats and discharges for union activity are much less common. But as tempting as those service-sector targets may seem, it would be a grave mistake for industrial unions to give up on organizing in their primary industries--and for the AFL-CIO and service-sector affiliates to turn their backs on the struggle to organize in manufacturing. Sixty years ago, it was organizing in manufacturing that helped build theAmerican labor movement and the American middle class. Today, manufacturing workers have felt the worst effects of globalization, both in declining job security and in deteriorating wages and working conditions. Absent intensive efforts to organize the nation's most mobile and global industries, working conditions will deteriorate even further. If manufacturing is not organized, there will be nothing to stop the race to the bottom in wages, benefits and working conditions for all organized and unorganized workers in all industries.

Even the country's more successful unions--including many operating in the service sector--cannot rest on their laurels. Despite their notable victories, they too have yet to organize on the scale necessary for labor's revival. Ironically, part of the problem may lie in their haste to expand their ranks. Too many of these unions, along with the AFL-CIO, have shifted resources into organizing, at the expense of funding for union education departments and programs. Thus, at the very time the labor movement most needs structural and cultural change, it is depleting the funds of the single most effective force for that change--membership and leadership education. Increasingly this has meant that the frontline work of organizing is being done by a flying squadron of new and inexperienced organizing hires, not by member volunteers or rank-and-file leaders within the unit being organized. Instead of building a union from the bottom up, these blitz campaigns often are little more than flash-in-the pan mobilizations that fail to build the sense of ownership and commitment among the rank and file that is necessary to withstand the bosses' anti-union onslaught.

In addition, some organizing funds have been squandered on expensive public-opinion polling in a never-ending quest to determine which issues and which words receive the most positive response from unorganized workers. Not only has this been an enormous waste of resources that could be better directed toward actual organizing. It is also based on the false premise that the most effective efforts merely speak to workers where they are, rather than using education and action to move them to an understanding of what organizing a union is all about. The emphasis on polling also ignores the transformational process that triggers most organizing campaigns, when workers discover that there are some problems that can only be resolved through the independent collective voice and power that a union can bring.

Meanwhile, only a handful of unions are mounting the kind of comprehensive external pressure campaigns--targeting parent companies, investors, suppliers or customers in the United States and around the globe--that are required to win against the world's largest and most powerful multinational employers. And where these external tactics are being used, they are too often carried out by staff from the international union or the AFL-CIO, completely divorced from the rank-and-file organizing campaign. This undermines the external pressure campaigns themselves as well as the rank-and-file ownership and empowerment essential to surviving daily assaults from anti-union employers.

Exacerbating the situation is the persistent racial and gender gap separating union leaders and organizers from the workers being organized. It's true that significant progress has recently been made in recruiting more women and people of color as organizers, but given the demographics of current and future union membership, the representation of women and people of color among union organizers, and especially among union leaders, remains woefully low. For more than ten years, the majority of newly organized workers have been women and people of color. But too many unions still see these new members simply as dues payers for the status quo, failing to grasp that they expect a seat at the table and a voice and power in the union.

The labor movement has made important gains in its effort at changing to organize. Unions are running and winning more campaigns, and winning them in larger units. But they still have a long way to go before they are organizing on the massive scale promised by the new leaders of the AFL-CIO six years ago. It won't be easy. Not only do unions face ever more powerful external opposition from employers and government. There are serious internal obstacles as well--but these, at least, are within their control. The challenge is to move beyond a simple tactical effort to increase numbers, and to engage in the self-reflection and organizational change necessary to reverse the larger pattern of decline. Only then will labor be able to build a social movement powerful enough to take on global capital and win.

Forum: Replies to Bronfenbrenner

by Adolph Reed Jr., Kim Moody, Andrew L. Stern, et al.

Adolph Reed jr. replies

As is her norm, Kate Bronfenbrenner is right on target in her assessment of the challenges now facing the labor movement. She presumes that labor's charge is, or should be, to "build a social movement powerful enough to take on global capital and win." In light of this understanding, the internal limitations that she describes are mainly expressions of labor's retreat from movement-building.

I imagine that Bronfenbrenner would agree that this retreat stems from several sources, perhaps most immediately the consolidation of the service model--often it seems more accurately described as an insurance company model--of unionism. This legacy of the postwar capital/labor accord devalues member education and mobilization, a tendency reinforced by the powerful inertia that characterizes unions as organizations that combine procedurally democratic accountability and centralized governance. Often it seems that the most incremental changes in union cultures are as difficult and come as slowly as turning an aircraft carrier.

In this context, the sea change in AFL-CIO leadership, while certainly significant, doesn't get us to where we need to go. Bronfenbrenner accurately describes the limitations of the federation's new commitment to organizing. It has been much more successful at projecting the imagery of social movement unionism--in large measure, instructively, by annexing the symbolism of women's and black and brown people's struggles for civil rights--than at acting as such a movement. This image consciousness gives the appearance at times that the new model is all tactics, no strategy.

As I read Bronfenbrenner's argument, I was struck by an irony. Through the 1960s and much of the 1970s the orthodoxy was that organizing outside the industrial sector or trades was impossibly arduous. Justifications for this view ranged from the legal restrictions on collective bargaining for public employees to arguments about the logistical and ideological implications of the small, dispersed workplaces common in what were understood as service-sector jobs. Lurking beneath those justifications, it seemed at the time, were assumptions about the limitations, and maybe undesirability, of the kinds of workers who held those jobs--disproportionately women and nonwhites; "service sector" often seemed to be a euphemism for those workers. It is largely the cumulative success in organizing those once widely treated as almost unorganizable that has intensified the demographic disparity between leadership and rank and file that Bronfenbrenner notes as a current problem.

Much of the relative success in organizing outside the industrial sector in recent years has resulted from factors that Bronfenbrenner indicates--perhaps chief among them relative immunity from threats of capital flight. However, another source of that success has lain in the extent to which organizing among women and Hispanic and black workers has been linked, even if only evocatively, to a larger struggle for social justice. Although it is certainly important for union leadership to look more like union membership, that goal is necessary but not sufficient for reinvigorating the labor movement as a broad, working-class-based social movement. It must also tie itself to a larger social agenda, and articulate and struggle for a political program that rests on a vision of what public policies would look like if society were governed by and in the interests of the vast majority of people who live in it. Only the labor movement has the resource base to conduct serious national education and mobilization in pursuit of "practical utopias" such as real national healthcare, removal of financial constraint from access to higher education, commitment of federal support for affordable housing and the many other concerns that are felt most acutely by working people, whether they belong to unions or not. This kind of broad fight for social justice could do more to open up organizing opportunities in all sectors than anything else that can be imagined.

Adolph Reed Jr. is a professor of political science on the graduate faculty of the New School University. His most recent book is Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New Press). He is a member of the interim national council of the Labor Party.

Kim Moody replies:

Kate Bronfenbrenner has hit the nail on the head. Labor has failed to organize because most unions resist change and lack a clear industrial strategy. This situation is all the more alarming because an already dire economic and political context has recently grown even more sour.

As Bronfenbrenner points out, much of the problem comes from the inertia of the unions themselves. Two aspects of that inertia are the lack of democracy--and hence member involvement--in most unions and the confusing social vision that the AFL-CIO and its affiliates present to their own members and the millions who need organization.

Union democracy is important not simply because we value democracy in general. It is, in fact, the only way to consistently mobilize and expand the activist layer of the unions as the major force in organizing the unorganized. Without democratic debate it is also unlikely that unions will develop a coherent strategy that inspires both current and potential union members. Finally, it is the power of an involved and active membership that can help unions regain lost bargaining power and convince the unorganized that it is worth the risk to fight for a union. As long as real decisions and debate are monopolized by the leadership and other "labor professionals," inertia will remain the dominant force.

Not surprisingly, "pure" examples of the effect of democracy on union practice are all too rare. But there are more democratic unions, such as the United Electrical Workers, that succeed in combining a more open internal political culture with a more effective bargaining practice that produces above-average contracts. Perhaps the best example of the change that union reform brings was the impact of a transformed Teamsters union on the 1997 strike against UPS. Here a union in the midst of a deep, if still incomplete, democratic change conducted one of the most effective strikes of recent years by uniting member initiative from below with solid support from the leadership.

The election scandal that surfaced shortly after and the subsequent return of the Old Guard provided a tragically negative demonstration of what a reversal in democratic direction can bring, as the gains of the strike were later eroded. Still, the advances in democracy produced by the reform movement and its backbone, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, have left a legacy of highly democratized local unions like 206 in Portland, Oregon, and the predominantly Latino TDU-led Local 556 at IBP in Washington State.

Related to the lack of debate in most unions is the confused and blurred vision that most of US labor presents to its members and the working-class public it hopes but fails to organize and influence. The AFL-CIO in particular offers a socially empty rhetoric of "middle class" workers and "working families" that applies to everyone and no one. It has improved its public positions on diversity, immigration and internationalism, but its leaders resist the one concept that can tie all of this together and create the common identity that is the historical basis of unionism--class. The "us versus them" side of class is further obscured by the official language of "partnership" with industry.

Only a broad class vision can unite the ever more diverse millions who compose the working class. While most unions point to the growing disparities in income and wealth, however, only a handful dare name the class reality that underlies these trends. For those suffering the daily effects of stagnant or declining incomes, downsized/intensified work and insecure futures, the unions offer no clear alternative vision.

Capital is at war with labor at home and abroad. What is needed in the United States is not simply bigger unions and improved techniques but a labor movement with dynamic unions at its core drawing on many kinds of working-class organizations and communities. To get from here to there requires open debate within the unions. It demands a class identity that recognizes difference, but defines what we hold in common in society and who the enemy is.

Kim Moody works with the independent labor activist monthly Labor Notes and is the author of Workers in a Lean World (Verso). He is currently teaching labor studies in New York.

Andrew L. Stern replies:

I agree with many of Kate Bronfenbrenner's premises. A dramatic expansion in union organizing is important to everyone in this country who wants to see a more equitable society, and all readers of The Nation ought to actively support campaigns to get employers to respect workers' freedom to choose a union.

Our union, now the largest in the AFL-CIO, has boosted the number of workers who join us each year from a rate of 20,000-30,000 in the mid-1990s to 70,000-80,000 now--the result of a huge shift in resources at both the national and local levels. We have focused on uniting workers in the three sectors where we represent significant numbers of members--SEIU is the largest healthcare union, the largest building-service union and second-largest public employee union. This year, thousands of janitors who have organized into SEIU from New Jersey to Baltimore have won raises from $5.50 per hour to more than $9 per hour. Thousands of healthcare workers at Catholic Healthcare West, the largest hospital chain in California, have joined us in order to win progress on understaffing and other problems that affect the quality of care.

To take our efforts to the next level, we have started new programs to train hundreds of rank-and-file members and committed young people as organizers. In cooperation with Morehouse College and Cornell University, SEIU has launched an education institute to develop new leaders. Through a variety of initiatives, women and people of color are playing a far greater role in our union at every level.

Yet, as Bronfenbrenner says, the labor movement and its allies need a greater sense of urgency about organizing. Independent public opinion polls consistently show that about 30 million workers who do not have a union would like to have one. The main reason they don't is that employers use one-on-one pressure from supervisors and other tactics to intimidate workers who try to form a union. Workers are taken aside on work time by their bosses, who control their job security, work schedule and chances for promotion, and are given the clear impression that their future treatment will be determined by whether they steer clear of union involvement. This abuse of power is similar to sexual harassment by an employee's boss, and ought to be opposed by progressives with the same sustained effort that has made that practice both illegal and socially unacceptable in most workplaces.

It is the responsibility of everyone--from union leaders and members to readers of this magazine--to help reduce employer interference and to let every public official know that they cannot get our support if they don't stand up for workers' freedom to choose a union. That's the only way that we will build a movement in America that can get off the defensive and win real progressive change.

Andrew L. Stern is president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

Jorge Mancillas replies

Thanks in large part to effective organizing efforts under president Andy Stern, SEIU has become the nation's largest union. But it hasn't been uniformly successful, and the uneven progress of different locals and campaigns shows how the key issues that Bronfenbrenner identifies affect actual organizing drives.

Labor's greatest achievement in years, gaining union recognition for 80,000 Southern California home-care workers in 1999, was achieved using the multifaceted approach that Bronfenbrenner recommends. A lucid leadership and a team of seasoned organizers reached out to rank-and-file workers at 80,000 worksites, developed a close alliance with the clients who depended on their labor, ran an effective public relations campaign and engaged in vigorous targeted political activity.

SEIU's concurrent healthcare organizing efforts elsewhere in California, on the other hand, reveal what can happen when not all of these components are in place. More than four years ago, SEIU launched an ambitious plan to organize 148,000 employees in 473 California hospitals. The centerpiece of the "Healthcare Action Campaign" was a drive to organize ancillary workers among the 39,879 nonmedical employees of Catholic Healthcare West's forty-eight hospitals. Yet, four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, the campaign was limping along--partly as a result of its excessive reliance on an aggressive corporate campaign. While the corporate campaign exposed CHW's poor record of community service, a chaotic, high-turnover rank-and-file worker effort, which relied on young, inexperienced organizers, took a back seat. Only in mid-2001, after putting experienced organizers in key positions and moving toward solid rank-and-file worker organizing, did SEIU experience a series of electoral victories, bringing their new members to 8,000 in twenty CHW hospitals (including 3,000 in four hospitals in May and July). While encouraging, the total represents just 5 percent of SEIU's goal.

Harder to overcome has been SEIU's fateful decision to organize not only hospital employees and licensed vocational nurses but also registered nurses, unleashing a quarrel with the California Nurses Association. This jurisdictional battle has evolved into a vicious ground war, with negative campaigning and mutual accusations of dirty tactics undermining both sides. Unfortunately, such conflicts are becoming increasingly common as unions expand their organizing efforts.

Politics is another area where unions can be unnecessarily divided. To their credit, the leaders of the AFL-CIO and SEIU have vowed that in politics they "have permanent issues, not permanent friends." Personal alliances, however, still too often influence decisions on where to invest financial and human resources. From 1996 to 2001, a dynamic labor electoral machine took advantage of term limits in California and helped wrest the legislature and governorship away from the Republicans. But term limits also forced labor to choose among friends, resulting in a self-defeating scramble: In 2000, several reliable allies in the State Assembly went to battle over Senate seats, and unions that had worked together to elect these representatives spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to defeat each other's candidates, when labor had no real stake in those confrontations.

A deeper problem is that too little emphasis has been placed on creating district-based organizational structures--otherwise known as the "labor-neighbor" strategy--to provide continuity to labor election volunteers, link politics to organizing, offer political education, nurture new labor candidates and create a vehicle for continuous issue-based political advocacy around programmatic goals instead of relying on individuals elected on the basis of political marketing techniques. In addition to "changing to organize" from within, labor needs to change the political climate in which organizing occurs. And that requires an equally deep and systematic commitment--animated by a broad vision of social justice--to achieving political change.

Jorge Mancillas was until recently Southern California political director for the SEIU California State Council. A veteran of union campaigns in Mexico, England and the United States, he currently works for the California Faculty Association and SEIU's Local 1983, and is a columnist for the Mexican magazine La Crisis.

Jennifer Gordon replies:

The US labor movement's ability to reclaim its roots as a social movement depends in large part on its approach to immigrant workers. A few unions, particularly on the West Coast, have successfully recruited large numbers of immigrants as both members and leaders. SEIU and HERE are the obvious examples, with others scattered around the country. But for much of the labor movement, immigrant organizing remains a puzzle.

To ask broadly, "What do unions need to do to organize immigrants?" just doesn't compute. There's no such thing as the immigrant attitude toward unions. How long someone has been here, how long she plans to stay and her past experiences with unions and activism are all critical factors. Nevertheless, any immigrant-heavy campaign will face common challenges. A few obvious ones: Many newcomers fear deportation and shy away from organizing that puts them in the spotlight. Too many unions still lack the commitment to cultural and linguistic diversity critical to victories in immigrant workplaces. And then there is Bronfenbrenner's list of why organizing is rough for all workers, a list that hits immigrants equally hard.

How to overcome? My years of work with immigrants have given me a profound respect for what they have to offer to the labor movement: their histories of organizing against dramatic odds, tightly knit communities and determination to build a better life. These strengths are squandered in a vision of organizing that limits itself to winning a union election and negotiating a contract, followed by a lifetime of grievances serviced by union staff. A contract is critical--but it is far from enough. The lesson of the successful union campaigns and independent workers' centers in immigrant communities is that when organizing travels beyond a narrow economic vision, immigrants can and will join in large numbers--and that their presence can help create a powerful social movement labor hasn't seen for more than half a century.

One area of opportunity for such a confluence is that of amnesty, a hot topic these days. The 2000 AFL-CIO endorsement of immigrant legalization was historic. On this issue of tremendous importance to immigrant communities, the risk is that the federation will take a top-down approach to winning legalization, with strategists, pollsters and lobbyists calling the shots. To date, member unions have sponsored or supported a few marches, hearings and petition drives, some impressively large. But unions must go beyond mobilizing immigrants to turn out at protests if they want to take advantage of legalization's potential to build a mass-based movement.

A serious bottom-up campaign that intertwined organizing for amnesty with organizing for workplace representation would draw immigrants into intensive discussions of power, politics and economics, support them as they developed organizing strategies in workplace and legislative arenas, and then use labor's muscle to carry those strategies out. This movement would be a more attractive starting point for many immigrants than campaigns limited to worksite confrontation. And it has far more potential to develop immigrants' skills and leadership--not to mention their union support--than a series of protests alone. After a few years, a broad amnesty might be in hand or it might still be a distant goal. But what the labor movement would have created in the process is a network of organized immigrants. And that--among other things--is exactly what it needs.

Jennifer Gordon is the founder and former executive director of the Workplace Project, an immigrant workers' center in New York. She was awarded a MacArthur Prize in 1999 and is currently writing a book on law, organizing and low-wage work.

Sherrod Brown replies:

Soon after I was elected to the Ohio legislature in 1974, a steelworker told me, "What we win at the bargaining table, you people in Columbus can take away. That's why it matters who wins elections." The 2001 version of that might be, "What we gain through organizing and collective bargaining, we continue to lose through trade agreements." Gains in wages and labor rights, in food safety and even in union membership itself are all vulnerable to the deleterious effects of US trade policy.

Organized labor in the United States has done a good deal to identify the threats and to counter some of the worst initiatives of corporate free traders and their political allies. But my friends in the labor movement need to do a lot more if they are going to turn trade into an organizing issue with broad resonance. To be sure, union members have been dislocated as a result of NAFTA and other bad trade deals. But more often than not, the victims of irresponsible free-trade policies are unorganized workers. Labor needs to make the connection in the minds of American workers that their best bulwark against the uncertainties of globalization is a union card. Educating nonunion workers about trade will not only create the base for defeating trade agreements that harm workers in the US and other countries, but it will aid organizing in sectors of the economy where labor is most vulnerable. Labor leaders need to recognize that the best way to deliver the message is to reach out to all of the communities, groups and individuals--both at home and abroad--for whom trade has become an issue in the aftermath of the anti-WTO protests in Seattle.

The opening is there.

To many of us in college during the early 1970s, George Meany and much of labor represented conservatism--on civil rights, women's rights and especially the Vietnam War--and we didn't much like unions. By and large, that has changed. Thanks to the efforts of leaders like John Sweeney and Steve Yokich, and groups like Jobs with Justice and the National Labor Committee, the labor movement has evolved into a proactive force on issues that resonate with young activists. The labor movement is immensely more attractive to college students, environmental groups and human rights activists today. The issues that young people care about--human rights, fair labor standards, the environment--are at the heart of the free-trade debate, and they understand that unions are on their side in that debate. But these promising alliances are still young. And it's critical that rather than being asked to tame their passions, these newcomers and their energy should be welcomed into the labor movement.

The labor movement is regaining its momentum. Fighting for trade agreements that reflect and preserve the values labor represents can bring us together around an expansive progressive agenda. Rather than allowing globalization to deplete our ranks, we can make use of this battle to revitalize the labor movement. It is both an opportunity and an imperative.

Sherrod Brown, a member of the House Energy and Commerce and International Relations committees, will play a key role in the effort to block passage of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas in the House. The author of Congress From the Inside: Observations From the Majority and the Minority (Kent State), he is writing a book on the myths of free trade.

Bruce Colburn replies:

Organizing millions of new members into unions is the first, second and third priority facing the labor movement on this Labor Day. As Kate Bronfenbrenner points out, success will come only if our short-term gains and victories actually build long-term strength and power. To make that happen, the AFL-CIO and its unions need to change internally and culturally, reorienting themselves toward building an organizing movement--a social movement that focuses the full power of the labor movement on the fight to win a voice at work for all who want to organize. Bronfenbrenner notes the importance of manufacturing unions and workers to this project, but she only scratches the surface of the challenges and opportunities ahead.

At the AFL-CIO field mobilization department, we have devoted our energies over the past five years to developing such an organizing movement. Our Union Cities strategy sets a framework for central labor councils to contest for economic and political power in local communities and to deploy that power to support organizing and build a "voice at work" movement. Examples from across the country show that this strategy has great potential that has barely been tapped. Witness the community support for immigrant workers' rights in Houston, for Justice for Janitors campaigns in Los Angeles and elsewhere, for packing-house workers in Omaha and for "organizing friendly" local ordinances in California and Wisconsin. As a follow-up to Union Cities we launched the New Alliance campaign, which aims to bring unions together at the state level to develop a long-term agenda, emphasizing the growth of an organizing movement. It also seeks to build new powerhouse regional labor federations with the capacity to carry out an aggressive program. The renewed focus on building a voice-at-work movement has been the key to reinventing these labor councils and state federations.

This fall, Union Cities central labor councils are launching a leadership development initiative to build a more diverse leadership for the emerging organizing movement. And one of the goals of New Alliance is building a labor movement with structures at the state and local levels that are not only for unionized workers but can open up the labor movement to millions of unorganized workers too. Unless the labor movement figures out how to broaden its appeal, both programmatically and structurally, we will never reach the organizing goals we have set for ourselves. Certainly, these initiatives are only one part of the solution--international unions and their locals do the direct organizing--but they are vital. Although the pace of change needs to be greatly increased, the momentum is clearly in the right direction. We would, however, welcome an open and thorough assessment of all these efforts.

Every day, the labor movement is faced with dozens if not hundreds of immediate problems and demands. The real challenge is to stay focused on and committed to building a long-term organizing movement, which is what labor really needs.

Bruce Colburn is deputy director of the Field Mobilization Department of the AFL-CIO. Active in the labor movement for thirty years, he has served as an elected official in several unions, and he led the Milwaukee County Labor Council in the early 1990s.

Nelson Lichtenstein replies:

Although it's hard to disagree with anything in Kate Bronfenbrenner's comprehensive analysis, her across-the-board set of best-practice proposals actually deflects attention from the dilemma, and the opportunities, the unions face today. Labor is beating its head against a brick wall of management intransigence, but there are cracks in that edifice that the unions can exploit if they effectively merge their purposes with the rights-conscious political culture that has become such a potent feature of American life since the 1960s.

A bit of comparative corporate history explains why this is so important. During the 1980s, Shoney's Restaurants still did business in the Jim Crow spirit that had shaped the racial mentality of founder Ray Danner when he opened his first Nashville Big Boy decades before. More than two-thirds of all African-American workers were confined to the kitchen. When Danner found a restaurant in which the dining room staff was too "dark," he ordered the managers to dismiss the blacks and "lighten" it up. An embarrassing scandal ensued, and in 1992 the NAACP easily won an extraordinary $132 million settlement against Shoney's. Danner was forced to pay nearly half out of his own pocket, after which his board kicked him out of the company. Thousands of African-American workers took home sizable checks, while Shoney's promised to "set human resource standards to which other companies aspire."

Compare all this with what happened to the Latino women who worked for Sprint Corporation's La Conexion Familiar in San Francisco. In the low-wage world of telecommunications Taylorism, their dignity was under constant assault. By 1994 most had joined the Communications Workers of America, but as they prepared for a National Labor Relations Board certification vote, Sprint shut down La Conexion and laid off all the employees. After CWA protested, the NLRB slapped the company with more than fifty labor law violations, including bribes, threats and firing workers in direct response to the union organizing campaign. The government agency ordered Sprint to rehire the workers and pay them back wages, perhaps as much as $12 million.

But nothing happened. In contrast to the shaming and redemption through which Shoney's passed, Sprint executives felt no cause for alarm. They successfully lobbied the Clinton Administration for various favors, reiterated their hard-line opposition to trade unions, and got a federal appeals court to throw out the adverse NLRB order. The company even codified its tactics in a "Union-Free Management Guide."

For the unions to grow again, American political culture has to change. The fears and expectations that framed the Shoney's settlement have to be brought to bear when companies behave as Sprint did. Given the right set of ideological benchmarks, it does not matter all that much what kind of organizing techniques the unions deploy. In the 1930s and in the 1960s, all sorts of maladroit, stodgy unions did quite well. The challenge, then and now, is to transform management behavior so that executives and public officials calculate that the political and economic fallout from breaking or resisting a union is just too high.

This is daunting, but we are beginning to see the way forward. It starts with the power still retained by a post-1960s sense of rights consciousness. Despite all the conservative assaults, American elites still fear to be seen as hostile to racial or gender-based work rights. This explains why living-wage campaigns have resonated so much more strongly in local politics than efforts to unionize those same minority workers. A living wage is a state-mandated "right" whose benefits flow almost entirely to minority workers. Likewise, the Los Angeles labor movement has made progress because of the symbiosis there between Latino consciousness and institutional trade unionism.

Few Nation readers clean hotel rooms or work at dead-end telecommunications jobs. But we do help frame the issues, and no amount of advice to our comrades in the trade unions will be as important as our effort to tilt the nation's rights-conscious culture in a more proletarian direction so that the stark division between civil rights and union rights begins to evaporate. To the extent that management foes, as well as labor partisans, understand this reality, the union organizing job will be that much easier.

Nelson Lichtenstein, who teaches history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, January 2002).

To Build International Solidarity, AFL-CIO Needs To Dump Old Baggage | LaborNotes (May 2002) Judy Ancel

Many activists from both the United States and Mexico are rethinking their attitudes about one another. Many union attitudes in the US have been products of the Cold War and our history of economic nationalism--and many times we have been reminded by Mexicans of the mistrust they have of Americans and their unions.

John Sweeney's changes in the AFL-CIO's foreign policy are a major step forward. But they are only a start toward constructing international solidarity.

A little history: After World War II, labor's foreign policy was tied to the same business unionism that left American workers disarmed on the shop floor when the attacks of the Reagan era began. This link between business unionism and the AFL-CIO's foreign policy is the skeleton in the closet that the AFL-CIO must confront before it can ensure that the old policy doesn't resurface.

The international policies of the AFL-CIO under George Meany and Lane Kirkland developed largely to serve the goals of the US government--and therefore the goals of American business. The American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), for example, the AFL-CIO's arm in Latin America, was initiated by the Kennedy administration. It was always government-funded and was used as a CIA front.

Meany made a deal with the devil because he believed that the richer US corporations could become through dominance of the world economy, the more his members would benefit. The AFL-CIO and its "free labor institutes" selected "good unions" and "bad unions" on the basis of their friendliness to the US and its corporations. The AFL-CIO collaborated with the CIA to insure that workers in poor countries could only have unions that were pro-American. It labeled as "communist" or "unfree" those unions that resisted making their countries safe for US investment.

AIFLD in particular was an important operation for gathering intelligence on union members, structure, politics and ideology all over Latin America. With 84 percent of its funding between 1963 and 1974 from government sources, AIFLD helped overthrow democratically-elected governments in Guyana, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Chile.

Colossal Miscalculation

By the 1980s, it became feasible for corporations to export jobs to poorer countries. Meany and Kirkland's belief that they could promote a high standard of living in the US while ignoring workers' standards in poor countries was shown to be a colossal miscalculation.

Sweeney changed that policy not simply because he wanted to base foreign policy on American workers' needs, but because corporate America and the US government had reneged on the deal cut by Meany. American labor now needs the solidarity of workers in the transnational economy to be able to stop the downward spiral.

What makes it difficult to free ourselves from the past is the baggage we still are carrying. The legacy that AIFLD and the other international institutes have left us includes: 1) a habit of telling foreign workers and unionists what's best for them; 2) seeing our own interests through a prism of economic nationalism; 3) continued funding from government sources; and 4) a lack of open discussion in shaping labor's international agenda.

To dump this baggage, the Sweeney administration should start a top-to-bottom education and mobilization plan. It should address the following:

We know what's best for you. History is filled with tales of American labor reps going into foreign nations and selecting, undermining, coopting, and manipulating local labor movements. Simply changing policy doesn't necessarily get rid of the habit of telling people what's best for them nor the preference for only working with groups we can dominate or control.

Such practices have filtered down to the local level, where they show up even in the attitudes of some union members involved in international solidarity. How many of us have heard American members say of some poor country, "We ought to just go in there and teach them how to organize," or "I can't understand why these people put up with this. We wouldn't." Some have even proposed taking "Buy America" t-shirts to Mexico as solidarity gifts. The only antidote to such attitudes is people-to-people contacts so that American unionists can listen and learn about the obstacles workers in other countries face.

Such discussions are not one-way. Some examples of things I've learned from Mexican groups are new worker education techniques, direct action tactics, and their awesome combination of patience, optimism, and knowing when to act. On the other hand, they say they've learned from us about the power of an independent local labor movement, strategic planning, the global system, corporate campaigns, and, of course, that not all gringos are over-paid racists. The importance of establishing relations of equality can't be overstated. The failure to do so leaves unionists who build ties with US labor open to charges that they are mere puppets of the gringos.

Buy America

America firstism. The legacy of racism and xenophobia, especially against Asians and Mexicans, the whole attitude that workers in the rest of the world can stay poor as long as we've got ours, and Buy America campaigns all have deep roots in the US. The union movement has yet to educate members to repudiate economic nationalism and make it clear how it helps fuel the race to the bottom.

Progress has been made on this front, particularly with labor's recent change in its position on immigration. But just scratch the thin veneer of internationalism, and economic nationalism often rears its head. Two examples are the recent union campaigns against permanent normal trade relations for China and NAFTA trucking deregulation.

In both cases, a clear line could have been drawn that would put (for example) US and Chinese workers on the same side against the governments and corporations of both countries. The same could have been done with Mexican truck drivers in the NAFTA deregulation fight. But mostly, this wasn't done. Instead, it was us (the US government, corporations, union members) against the corrupt and/or undemocratic China or Mexico. With an economic downturn in the offing, bashing of foreign workers and immigrants is likely to reemerge with a vengeance.

Follow the money. The AFL-CIO's foreign operations, now under its American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), are still funded by the government. So are the AFL-CIO's new offices in Mexico City and Honduras. A brief search reveals that ACILS programs in over 30 countries-from Russia to South Africa to Indonesia -- are funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), an arm of the State Department.

One USAID entity, the Global Center for Democracy and Governance, says it "places particular significance on the role of free and independent labor unions as an important sector of civil society. In many developing countries, the ability of the labor sector to organize freely and voice its support for political and economic liberalization is held in check by restrictive laws and regulatory practices (emphasis added)."

Liberalization

It's a safe guess that "political and economic liberalization" means the corporate agenda of privatization and "free trade." The AFL-CIO has taken a strong stand against both, yet ACILS has a $45 million, five-year grant from the Democracy and Governance Project. ACILS gets another $4 million a year from the National Endowment for Democracy, known for funding AIFLD projects in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s.

Some government-funded programs do, in fact, advance worker solidarity. But given the history and the source of the money, ACILS can't help but be compromised and complicit with US foreign policy goals, which by no means can be considered worker-friendly.

Lack of transparency and democracy. AFL-CIO foreign policy is a secret from the members. How many have seen the document signed by the AFL-CIO and Mexico's Confederation of Mexican Workers which says that they "mutually recognize that they are the most representative labor organizations, respectively, of the United States and of Mexico"? The CTM, dominated by the former ruling party, is a thoroughly corrupt federation that routinely violates the rights of Mexican workers.

There are thousands of activists at the local level who are veterans of the fights against sweatshops, NAFTA, fast track, and the WTO. They have a depth of experience that could be a resource to the AFL-CIO and to its unions in shaping strategy. They are rarely consulted.

Many of today's union leaders participated in the Meany-Kirkland era. John Sweeney sat on the board of all four of the "free labor institutes," as did others who now serve on the AFL-CIO Executive Council. It's time to acknowledge that those policies did untold harm to workers in other countries and seriously damaged the reputation of American labor.

In her book on economic nationalism, Dana Frank calls for rethinking the line between Them and Us. If "Us" really means the workers of the world in a global economy, then US labor's international policy must be based on the interests of us all: American, Mexican, Chinese, Serbian, or South African. To make such a change, international solidarity must become a grass-roots, people-to-people effort so that the isolation of American workers is replaced by understanding of common interests.

A model for this type of solidarity-building can be found in the relationship of the United Electrical Workers (UE) and Mexico's Authentic Workers Front (FAT). From top to bottom there is great consciousness of building a relationship of equals. Members are involved through frequent rank and file delegations and internal education and news of the common activities.

It would be a good start if the AFL-CIO came clean, opened its records to the public, and acknowledged the role it played during the Cold War. A resolution asking the AFL-CIO to do this was passed last fall by the South Bay Labor Council and is being circulated to other labor councils.

It would help, too, for them to acknowledge that US foreign policy (whether of Democratic or Republican administrations) is designed solely to help US corporations. Then labor could begin to construct an independent international policy based on the interests of workers wherever they may be.

A longer version of this article appeared in The Labor Studies Journal. Judy Ancel is director of the Institute for Labor Studies in Kansas City and a board member of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras.

Fletcher, Bill and Richard W. Hurd. "Is Organizing enough? Race, Gender, and Union Culture." New Labor Forum (Spring/Summer 2000)

As we enter the twenty-first century, the new AFL-CIO is attempting to lead the transformation of the U.S. labor movement. The centerpiece of this revitalization effort is the campaign to establish organizing as the priority. Unions are being challenged to shift resources to organizing, to develop strong organizing staffs, to devise strategic organizing plans, and to involve members in the process. The totality of the initiative has been captured by the slogan "Organizing for Change, Changing to Organize!"

Clearly the message has taken hold. Major national unions have reallocated significant resources to organizing, activist locals have created or expanded organizing departments, and the rapidly growing Organizing Institute, created by the AFL-CIO in 1988 to recruit and train organizers, struggles to meet the demand. And there have been results, however modest. In 1999, for the first time in two decades, union density in the private sector did not decline.

As gratifying as it has been to witness this reorientation, and as crucial as it has been to establish the organizing priority, we are convinced that it is essential to move the transformation process to another level. The "change" in Changing to Organize is more profound in its implications than some of its strongest advocates recognize. The prevailing view as to organizing and the rebirth of the U.S. labor movement is actually quantitative rather than qualitative. That is, it largely comes down to increasing the number of members in the existing trade union movement. Thus, the emphasis on reaching and organizing the millions of unorganized workers largely assumes that little will change in the structure, function, leadership, and culture of organized labor.

To the extent that qualitative issues are considered at all, the emphasis has been on building support for organizing among the members. The standard approach is to appeal to self-interest; the argument is that we have to organize to increase market share so that we can have more bargaining power and, in effect, take wages out of competition. As rational as this line of reasoning might be, it in essence accepts the narrow conceptualization of unions as bargaining agents that has dominated and limited the U.S. labor movement for the past fifty years.

We argue that the quantitative interpretation of Changing to Organize is self-limiting, if not self-defeating. If unions hope to attract a mass influx of new members, they must first address seriously the internal transformation required to build a labor movement of all working people. The highest priority should be on creating a culture of inclusion. We envision a movement that embraces, attracts, and promotes women, people of color, immigrants, and lesbians and gays.

We reach this conclusion in large part based on work with local unions that have endorsed the change to organizing. Although national unions play a central role in establishing the organizing priority and coordinating the organizing efforts, the changes that affect the day-to-day life of unionism occur at the local level. And the reality is that locals engaged in organizing face a host of substantial internal challenges.1 To the extent that these challenges relate to the organizing itself, they are well understood and are receiving attention at the national level (for example, the shortage of trained organizers and experienced lead organizers is widely recognized).

We are much more concerned about the challenges that are only indirectly related to the organizing per se. We have witnessed widespread skepticism among servicing representatives who doubt the viability of the organizing agenda and resent the perceived holier-than-thou attitude of young organizers. We are troubled that members' concerns are largely swept under the rug. Yes, a few of the more activist members are recruited as volunteer organizers and enthusiastically support the change. But most members do not really understand how the organizing relates to them and are primarily concerned about maintaining the level of representational services to which they have grown accustomed. And we are convinced that ultimately internal union politics will define the limits of elected leaders' commitment to the organizing priority. Local leaders want to be on the gravy train of labor's revitalization, but they are often not willing to risk loss of political control in the process.

What we see at the local level, then, is tremendous institutional inertia. This in and of itself is not necessarily a fatal flaw if locals can overcome internal obstacles and support an organizing program, and if unions as they exist offer an attractive home for unrepresented workers. Problems arise, however, when the workers in the organizing targets are not a demographic and cultural match for the dominant leadership group in the local they are being invited to join. The qualitative issues involved in Changing to Organize become especially clear when we look at them in the context of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation.

The scenarios presented in the following discussion are drawn from five years of fieldwork with organizing locals. The situations are factual and the quotes are real. They come from site visits and in-depth discussions with leaders and activists at about thirty large local unions, supplemented by interviews with staff and regional officers of several unions heavily involved in organizing. We incorporate formal input from sixteen different national unions concerning locals in a broad range of settings.

After considering the practices of these unions, and reviewing notes from the interviews with special attention to comments that reflect experiences with diversity and inclusion, we have identified three paths followed by locals whose leaders voice strong support for the organizing priority. The dominant path is traveled by locals that treat organizing as symbolism. These locals establish organizing programs not as a primary feature but merely as a symbol of the union's vitality. A second path is pursued by militant locals that promote the sanctification of organizing. These unions are absolutely committed to organizing, but representational activities and relations with members suffer as a result. The third path is explored by locals committed to organizing for inclusion. These unions strive to balance internal and external organizing and are intent on creating a culture of inclusion that transcends divisions based on gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.

The Dominant path-Organizing as symbolism

When we look to see how the change to organizing is operationalized at the local level, in most cases we find modest deviation from standard union practice, but little evidence of dramatic transformation. The locals that join the move to organizing are mostly good, traditional operations with a business union orientation and an insurance agent's mentality. The leaders of these locals want to be out front, but are ill equipped for the challenges they inevitably encounter. They typically take pride in the services theyoffer and view organizing in the same general context as political action-important work that supplements the core responsibility of the local.

One local leader's description of his commitment to organizing captures a common theme: "I run the local like a business....We sign people up to increase the budget." Organizing, then, is a pragmatic extension of the union's basic responsibility to bargain effectively on behalf of the members. In this context, staff assigned to organizing have other responsibilities as well. In one local we visited, for example, the newly hired organizing director has a law degree and is expected to assist with arbitrations. In another local the organizing coordinator still carries full responsibility as a business agent, and has volunteered to take on the extra duties because "organizing is the ticket to go anywhere with this [national] union."

The net result in locals that manifest organizing as symbolism is that representational work is at the core while organizing is an appendage. Local leaders are hesitant to push reluctant staff too hard, and they are quick to respond to vocal members who question new organizing. It is common for the commitment to organizing to wane over time, especially if initial efforts are not successful. Even in locals with the resources to maintain the established level of representational services while supporting an active organizing program, there is little effort to integrate the organizing into the heart of the union. Newly organized units are assigned to experienced representation staff, standard bargaining and enforcement practices are followed, and there is barely a ripple in the local's culture.

In the same vein as their approach to organizing, leaders of these locals also express a desire to reach out more effectively to a diverse constituency. Thus, one local leader promoted an African American woman from steward to business agent because "the guys respect [her]." Although her presence on staff is symbolically important and she serves as a point of contact for those members who are women and people of color, her assignment requires that she assist in the office; meanwhile, the responsibility to be in the field is reserved for the white male business agents. In another local the five-member volunteer organizing committee includes two African Americans and one open lesbian, but they report to a white male staff member who has designated a white male on the committee to coordinate its work. A large local in the Southwest has hired a Native American as organizer and assigned him to work on a large reservation. However, he complains of isolation: "I asked [the local president] to send organizers up to the reservation every month, but they don't come and I'm pretty much on my own."

The leaders, then, often understand the need to include women and people of color in the life of the union, but their gestures are marginal and translate into tokenism. As one African American woman suggests, "You could characterize it as a good old boy system.... [They] still prefer leadership that is male.... I always need to be superior plus. They tell me to shoot for the moon, and then when I do, they say I should have shot for the stars."

In locals that practice organizing as symbolism the result is usually a benign pragmatism. However, this approach can take a pernicious turn in certain circumstances. In one local in a right-to-work state, a white male was elected president as part of a racially integrated slate. He appointed an all-white staff and in subsequent elections replaced all of his African American running mates with whites. One former officer complains, "Blacks don't get attention from stewards or help with grievances." Even more troubling, the local's organizing program (focused on building membership within the unit) is headed by a white woman who "has no respect for blacks." The local president is proud of organizing success that has helped stabilize the union's budget, but he fails to mention how he has used the organizing to consolidate power and disenfranchise African American members.

In another local an African American president was thrown out of office when white union activists became dissatisfied with his conciliatory relationship with management. The former president and many of his African American supporters renounced their union membership, and subsequently crossed picket lines during a strike. When the strike failed, the African Americans re-joined and recaptured control of the local. A regional officer (and a leading figure in his union's change to organizing) described this local to us; he calls this situation a serious challenge; "Because of right-to-work, splits like this become dysfunctional; one whole group stays out because the other is in control."

These last two stories demonstrate that when organizing is merely symbolic there is the potential that a dangerous and divisive racial opportunism might hide behind the organizing facade. While we believe that such instances are rare, these locals offer a stark reminder of the potential for political manipulation of the organizing priority.

The sanctification of organizing

Perhaps the most excitement about organizing is generated by locals that are openly militant, building support among disenfranchised groups of workers by involving them in struggle in the form of public demonstrations and direct confrontation with bosses. Certainly, these locals are not content to accept the labor movement as it exists, and indeed see organizing as a way to change unions. A closer look at many of these militant organizing locals reveals a troubling disconnect between the life of the union as it exists for long-term members and the external organizing, which takes place in a separate world as a by-product of the sanctification of organizing.

A common scenario is for the leaders of the militant locals to be white males with longstanding reputations as leftists, often with backgrounds as student activists in the 1970s, or as community organizers. These leaders recognize that their political perspective is not necessarily shared with the members: "Myself and the staff have leftist politics. These ideas are embraced secondarily in the larger view by the leadership, but only by a minority of the membership." Or as another puts it, "This ought to be a revolutionary movement... This is more explicit with the staff, but the members have a sense that there's something different about us." The leftist views are closely tied to a preference for direct action: "Let it rip and we'll win more than we lose ...", "When in doubt, be militant...", "I enjoy action...crazy shit is energizing."

The militant tilt is evident in the organizing program and in the views of the organizers: "It ain't a union, it's a religion; this local is about a movement," and, "The revolution is around the corner." This fervor, unfortunately, does not inspire confidence and commitment among members in established units. As one representative (a former organizer herself) complains, "Organizers don't see members as having any use except as bodies for a rally or march, and the members feel it." This disconnect is also felt by staff as a field representative in another local reveals: "Organizers have an attitude because we're not into their actions."

The slight that members and representation staff feel is not imagined. The leaders of these militant locals have fashioned a sanctification of organizing by elevating organizing to a position that transcends all of the other work of the union. They are particularly impatient with day-to-day workplace concerns. One leader talks of the need to "take piddly grievance shit off of the organizers." Another echoes this: "Grievance work doesn't move anybody anywhere. We've got to push that work onto the members." These comments reflect initiatives in many organizing locals to shift resources away from representation work in order to fund organizing. When a proposal in one local to increase dues three dollars per month to fund organizing was overwhelmingly defeated by the members, the union's executive director was openly annoyed: "I don't have time for union politics and that silly shit."

The separation between progressive leaders and the members in the same locals endangers progress on the organizing front, and, simultaneously, raises questions about the entire effort to transform unions. In many militant locals we have visited, the members want to be participants in the organizing effort and the transformation process, but they do not glorify organizing. They want their own needs and opinions taken seriously. A representative who had been on staff for a little over a year, after several years as a rank-and-file activist and volunteer organizer, sums up the feeling of detachment: "They're asking members for more support for this campaign to improve the organization, but why end representation?... The organizers decide what the actions will be-the members agree with them, but why do they reject the members' ideas...? The leaders and staff need to have more identification with the workers." Similarly, a steward complains about his local's president: "He makes the decisions and doesn't want our help. His attitude is, You guys don't know anything; I can do it myself."

Discussions with those on the other side of this divide confirm the suspected attitudes. An organizing director admits that members are not involved in discussions of strategy, but then describes how "information transfer" and "participation in actions" involve members at the appropriate level. A local union staff director protests "Members are not prepared to run the union; even with experience we're having a hell of a time running the union." And in the ultimate depersonalizing comment, another organizing director notes, "We experiment with workers.... Mistakes are okay if they're part of the fight to move forward."

With organizing sanctified and separated from the rest of the work of these locals, it is little wonder that representational effectiveness suffers. One local leader confesses, "As well as we do with organizing, we have not been able to get respect from employers for members on the job." This is echoed by the organizing director of a different local: "Organizing success is not having a lasting impact on the local; it's not coming together."

The militant organizing local, then, operates as a bifurcated world. Successful organizing campaigns built on militant direct action function in isolated cloisters. The sanctification of organizing legitimizes the separation of organizers and volunteer organizing teams from the day-to-day life of the union's established units. In almost every case with which we are familiar, the separation is further complicated by racial and ethnic tensions. The organizing brain trust in these locals is almost always totally white. The organizing staff is diverse and matches the demographics of the targeted workers, but the decision makers are white. In one local, the situation is particularly tense because the organizing is concentrated in market segments where Latino workers predominate while the union's core membership is African American. One long-term officer observes, "The two groups distrust each other; the African Americans feel that immigrants are taking their jobs." A staff representative in the same local notes, "Blacks founded this local, and they're grumbling because there's no emphasis on them."

In another local, half of the members are African American, yet six of the seven staff members are white. An African American woman who serves as chief steward puts it mildly, "I have no problem with a lack of people of color on staff; there should be more though, because there are a lot of intelligent African Americans out there." The lone black on the representation staff observes that "members notice and it hurts in terms of belonging." An African American woman who spent some time with this local as an organizer looks back on her experience and reflects, "White male dominance alienates working people."

The observations are similar from a Latino activist in a local with a white president, a white staff director, and a white organizing director. "We have conversations about barriers every day; there are white people in positions of leadership while the rank and file don't have the opportunity to play a higher role." The white organizing director of a different local recognizes the inconsistency. "We have a cultural norm of white upper middle class on staff, and the structure is self-perpetuating."

When militant locals engage in the sanctification of organizing, a natural by-product is that attention to members is reduced, which comes across as lack of respect. Racial splits between established members and newly organized workers, or between members and leadership, exacerbate tensions. What is most troubling is that these divisions are not being addressed. The leftist leaders surround themselves with simpatico staff and set themselves apart from the workers. Commitment to organizing overshadows other concerns, and splits are ignored or suppressed so as not to detract from the perceived higher objective.

Organizing for inclusion

The most promising interpretation of the change to organizing takes place in locals that balance the organizing priority with the need to engage members in the life of the union. The basic philosophy of these locals is that the members need to be at the center of everything the union does. As one local president explains, "The member is the most important aspect of what we do. We are there for them, not them for us." Along with this attitude goes a faith that members will rise to the challenge. A president of a different local suggests, "Workers are way in front of union officers and bureaucrats.... We need to free people to do their stuff."

Although the locals we are describing have a strong commitment to organizing, they explicitly reject the style of other organizing locals. In reference to traditional insurance agent locals, an organizing director comments, "I've seen organizers with sweet tongues promise the world, but they leave and the servicers come in and don't do anything with the members or for the members." The militant organizing locals described in the previous section fare no better: "There are four problems with these organizing unions: the egos of the leaders, concern about numbers rather than building the union, lack of concern for members, and poor treatment of staff."

So exactly how are these locals different? First, although they focus on the members, they are very conscious about not creating dependency. "Servicing is not a concept that we allow." Similarly, every effort is made to concentrate on collective concerns rather than individual concerns. "We have no tolerance for people worried only with their own problems." These locals work very hard to balance external organizing with internal organizing. All of the work of the local, whether with current members or prospective members, is considered organizing work. "We need to keep organizing, regardless. It is the only way to pick up the pieces that divide us socially and politically." And part of this organizing explicitly confronts issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. These locals are committed to organizing for inclusion.

The African American organizing director of one of these locals explains why inclusion is central to how the union defines itself: "We now incorporate diversity awareness in staff training. We cover cultural and class differences, because black is more than a color.... We organize around economic factors; yet in trickle down, women and minorities are the losers, so diversity issues are economic." This general philosophy is evident in the daily life of the union. "If we stand for justice, that means we have to behave justly towards members and staff." Similarly, members need to learn to take charge. "We need a lot of emphasis on leadership development; we have to develop our membership." And such efforts pay off. "It's great to see people grow, especially women who stand up and take on the world."

Although the spirit of these locals is tied to organizing for inclusion, this does not mean that they explicitly organize workers around issues of race or gender. Most of these locals handle diversity with finesse rather than confronting problems head-on. As a regional director explains, "We are reluctant in a mixed unit to charge racism, because employers know how to use race to divide workers." Rather than emphasizing race or discrimination, these locals concentrate on building unity. "The more events members attend, the more race and gender constructs get broken down.... We have pictures of stereotypical 'Bubbas' holding hands with middle-aged African American women singing 'We Shall Overcome.'" Similarly, a white male organizer in one of these locals explains, "Members may have biases, but we have to earn their trust.... It's through events and interaction that the attitudes change."

The effect of this approach on members is indeed remarkable, and their enthusiasm for their unions is palpable. As one fiftyish white woman from a rural area in a border state explains, "I don't have to play a role. I don't have to lie about my mixed African American-white grandchildren."

One local that fits this description has a white man as president, an African American woman as secretary-treasurer, and another African American woman as one of five vice-presidents, along with two white women and two white men. Also a gay man and a lesbian are elected members of the larger executive committee. The six key staff positions are held by four women (one an African American) and two men. A majority of the members are women, and about 10 percent are African American. One of the vice-presidents summarizes her union's outlook this way: "Discrimination is all of our problem. We let bosses put up barriers and we fall for them-race, sex, homophobia. Any worker anywhere has a problem, it's our problem. We fight for workers' rights, that's the whole philosophy of our union."

The unions organizing for inclusion have aggressive external organizing programs that can be just as militant as those of the locals described in the preceding section. These campaigns are balanced by internal organizing and member education that focus on maintaining representational effectiveness in established units. This balance helps convince current members that their concerns will not be sacrificed on the altar of external organizing, and simultaneously, it demonstrates to potential members that attention will not disappear once the organizing campaign is over. This is especially important with diverse constituencies because of the temptation for one group to blame the other for perceived problems. The member focus of these locals invites all of the rank and file to participate in the life of the union, and a diverse leadership and staff demonstrate that all are welcome to the table where decisions are reached.

The glue that holds these locals together is a deep commitment to building an inclusive movement of working people to create a just society. As one executive board member says, "This is the first time I've been around people who truly believe in the rights of all workers." Given the values associated with the culture of inclusion, the members support the local's organizing priority and are open to learning from their diverse group of union brothers and sisters. "Members understand organizing. We don't appeal to self-interest; we do it because we're fighting for justice."

Among the thirty organizing locals we have observed firsthand, only four embrace the key principles of organizing for inclusion. Although membership in these locals has increased in recent years, we cannot claim conclusive proof that unions with this grounding are certain to grow. We are more confident of qualitative success; these unions have found a path that makes organizing central while simultaneously winning member enthusiasm for building a movement of all working people.

Balancing internal and external organizing is very difficult, as we have argued in detail elsewhere. And it would be premature to offer a formula that guarantees success. We suggest, however, that the following steps are associated with promising efforts to implement organizing for inclusion:

o A strong educational component that enhances members' union skills while building a culture of organizing and inclusion.

o Leadership development that specifically (but not exclusively) targets women and workers of color.

o Support from the national union that includes advice, perspective, and (usually) resources.

Notes on building for the future

The U.S. labor movement as it exists does not share a unified ideology. It consists of an amalgam of conservative business unions and progressive social unions, occupational unions and industrial unions, unions of professional workers and unions of low-wage service workers, skilled-trades unions and general unions. With the absence of a unifying philosophy or approach, it is no wonder that the leaders of the revitalization effort have chosen to emphasize a quantitative interpretation of union transformation. If the Change to Organizing simply means growing bigger, then there is something in it for every union and every union leader.

By avoiding the question of qualitative transformation, though, we avoid questions about serious flaws inherent in our movement. In particular, we must confront the reality that the labor movement as it exists is rooted in white male culture. This is just as true of the militant unions involved in the sanctification of organizing as it is of the more traditional unions that interpret organizing as symbolism and limit themselves to a marginal effort to increase the reach of their locals.

One possible outcome of the narrow interpretation of the organizing imperative is that it will succeed and unions will be forced to change to accommodate the demands of their new members. To put it bluntly, the new workers will wish to see themselves reflected in the leadership and staff of the unions that have organized them. In this vein is the presumption that if we change the culture on the organizing front, this effort will seep backwards into unions. We believe that the experiences we have described demonstrate that this view underestimates institutional inertia and the power of union politics.

We believe a more likely scenario is that efforts to organize women and people of color will not succeed on a grand scale unless there is a coinciding affirmative program to change the face and culture of the labor movement. Transforming the movement actually involves conceptualizing a different movement. It is in this context that issues related to gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation become critical. The locals that are organizing for inclusion are at least attempting to grapple with this challenge.

A problem with the conventional wisdom regarding the Change to Organizing is that sensitivity to race, ethnicity, and gender is often interpreted as having diversity among organizers or at demonstrations. Although this type of diversity is important, the larger question is one of transforming unions into vehicles in the struggle for economic and social justice. Special emphasis needs to go to the traditionally disenfranchised and dispossessed groups within the working class. This means that the culture and operations of unions must be friendly to the new members and must encourage their participation.

An idealistic young woman we interviewed had just completed a stint on a victorious organizing campaign with a major union. She was deeply upset because throughout the campaign the African American organizers would cluster together on one side of the room while the white organizers would sit on the other side. The same pattern held at meals. Although a small group of Organizing Institute graduates refused to go along and attempted to voice concern about the split, the lead organizer refused to deal with the issue. She came away from the experience convinced that racial balance in unions is a show rather than a reflection of cultural reality.

A field representative with a national reputation for innovations in workplace democracy raised a similar complaint: "Our union is piss poor at telling the truth internally about what is good practice and what is bad practice.... Our organizing culture is a male culture. We ignore stuff on women-many women have left because it's a macho game and they won't lead that kind of life."

The most troubling indictment came to us from an African American district director of a key union: "As you grow into these organizations, you find that all decision making about strategy, targeting, vision, hiring, firing, promotions, raises...is in a loop that is totally white male. Sure there's one black here, one Asian there; they locate folk of color who can kiss ass, follow instructions, follow proper procedure and put them in positions that appear to be positions of authority. But the decision loop stays the same. The labor movement is still exactly where it was in the 40s and 50s.... Racism is so deep, so nasty, so ugly it's pitiful."

Are these horror stories of extreme experiences from a handful of disgruntled unionists? Perhaps. Certainly, they are commentaries on the seamier side of unions. But when we discuss these concerns with people of color in the movement, the consensus is that they cut to the quick precisely because they ring true. As one African American organizer reminded us, "One Latino, one black, one Asian does not make us diverse-we have to develop a culture that fits the workers."

The entire process of transformation is both a practical and an ideological battle. Changing to Organize asks the members to look at the world differently, and to act differently, and to support the actions of others. Where issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation are ignored, there are grave dangers that any implemented changes will meet with intense resistance from existing members. Ultimately, the Changing to Organize process must be transformative in its essentials. It cannot seek merely to spread the movement as it exists, but rather must change the movement, and indeed build a new one. As the workforce becomes browner and more female, issues of transformation are not limited to matters of technique and alterations in the bureaucracy, but must address the fundamentals of what constitutes trade unionism.

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