In contrast, Chicago UNITE leader Noel Beasley, one of the more rank-and-file-oriented contributors to the Mort collection, views the election of Sweeney and his "New Voice" slate in broader terms, as the product of membership reaction to lost strikes, concession bargaining and organizing defeats. "The new AFL-CIO is," he declares, "the accomplishment of thousands of union activists who pushed and shoved and argued against stagnation, who shook off the status quo." Those helping to lay the groundwork for change at the top in the nineties included reformers in the Mine Workers, Steelworkers and Teamsters whose grassroots organizing in the seventies and eighties was aided by Benson's Association for Union Democracy.

Benson traces the development of these and other less well-known union reform movements in his essay, "A Rising Tide of Union Democracy in the American Labor Movement." He recounts how New Voice slate member and now AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Rich Trumka got his chance to become president of the United Mine Workers because of the miners' decadelong struggle against authoritarian practices left behind by John L. Lewis. The even longer (and ongoing) rank-and-file fight for Teamsters reform contributed directly to the success of Sweeney, Trumka and their running-mate, Linda Chavez-Thompson, now executive vice president of the AFL-CIO. Carey's election as Teamsters president in 1991 put 1.4 million votes in the New Voice column four years later--providing most of Sweeney's margin of victory. Furthermore, according to Benson, the reformers' "successful insurgency in the Teamsters gave moral legitimacy to insurgency throughout the labor movement and demonstrated that such a revolt could refurbish labor's public image."

Since taking office, however, the main priority of the Sweeney administration has been external rather than internal organizing. The latter obviously remains the province of individual reform caucuses--where they exist--within the local, regional or national bureaucracies they seek to transform. What Sweeney and his staff have done is challenge AFL-CIO unions to "change to organize." To "make itself a living example of the organizing model," the federation has shifted millions of dollars of its own resources into campaigns to recruit nonunion workers. It has also aided the training and deployment of new organizers by expanding the activities of the Organizing Institute, brainchild of Richard Bensinger, a contributor to Mort's collection and, until recently, Sweeney's organizing director.

Bensinger's chapter highlights the gains made through efforts backed by his department, like the Las Vegas hotel and casino drives conducted by the Hotel and Restaurant Employees. He calls for more coordinated, multi-union campaigns aimed at strategic targets. He also wants greater member involvement in organizing (although one-third of all OI graduates are still recent college graduates rather than union rank-and-filers). Labor's attempt to increase its "organizing capacity" will not succeed, Bensinger predicts, without "a cultural transformation of our institutions," "a fundamental, even radical, urgent institutional shift" in the way unions operate.

Since writing for Mort's book, Bensinger's own boat-rocking in this area has earned him an early retirement from the higher echelons of the AFL-CIO. He was suddenly sacked this past June and replaced by an ex-SEIU staffer described by Fortune as "a career bureaucrat and former political campaign manager with close ties to Sweeney." This controversial move was protested to no avail by organizing directors from the AFL-CIO affiliates most actively involved in membership recruitment. In Fortune's account, Bensinger fell out of favor because he questioned the cost and effectiveness of the federation's ad blitz and the "large-scale staff buildup...in departments like field mobilization, which some on Bensinger's team derisively nick-named the 'Department of Buzzwords.'"

Such criticisms, needless to say, don't appear in the pages of Not Your Father's Union Movement. But numerous contributors to the Tillman-Cummings reader--all activists far removed from Washington headquarters squabbles--echo Bensinger's concerns in their critiques of mainstream organizing and contract campaign strategies. In six different essays or case studies, researcher Jane Williams, former organizer Michael Eisenscher, labor educators Staughton Lynd and Pete Rachleff, and longtime Labor Notes contributors Jane Slaughter and Kim Moody all make the point that, in Rachleff's words, these strategies "do not begin by empowering rank-and-file workers to fight their own battles directly, but rather are premised on taking such power out of the workplace as quickly as possible and putting it at a bargaining table where full-time union officials can wield it 'responsibly' in the interests of a 'larger agenda.'"

In Williams's chapter on SEIU's creative, high-profile Justice for Janitors campaign, she praises its tactical militance and strategic breakthroughs in overcoming contracting-out schemes designed to keep low-wage workers from unionizing anywhere in their industry. However, in both of the locals she mentions--in Washington, DC, and Los Angeles--tensions and divisions quickly developed because of the clash between the high expectations of newly organized workers and the "hierarchical power relations" of existing union structures. "We built this union," she quotes Local 399 member Cesar Oliva Sanchez as saying. "We want to be able to make the decisions.... We must be respected as much by the companies we work for as by the union we pay dues to." What Slaughter calls a "militancy-without-democracy" approach to organizing can boost union membership, plus add to bargaining clout, but, as Eisenscher points out, the ultimate source of any union's power is the members," and that power can be fully realized only if they--not just full-time staff and officials--are engaged in all aspects of union-building, including key decisions about leadership, tactics, strategies and goals.

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