Stern's Determination

Stern's ideas about reorganizing the labor movement grew in part out of SEIU's success in organizing more than 730,000 workers in nine years, mainly by building strength systematically in a few strategic industries--building services, hospitals, long-term-care providers. He has even allowed some SEIU locals outside its core (like utility or laundry workers) to move to other unions. But he has been frustrated by other unions' attempts to undercut SEIU's strategic campaigns. (For example, as SEIU organized security guards in Los Angeles last year, it had to fend off organizing by Teamsters, Operating Engineer and independent union locals that offered employers deals to avoid SEIU.) Stern concluded that the labor movement should be reorganized from a collection of a few large general unions and many small, narrow ones into about fifteen to twenty big unions, each of which concentrates on a distinct economic sector, like healthcare or transportation. When unions represent a large share of workers in an industry, they acquire more power to organize and bargain. Since employers are increasingly multinational, he argued, unions need to reach across borders and become global as well.

Even before Stern made his formal proposals last November, many labor leaders had rejected his ideas on reorganization, from his first offhand remarks soon after he took office to a long SEIU discussion document widely circulated several years ago. They threatened the self-interest and practices of many union leaders, and strategists from both left and right criticized them as arrogant, self-interested, unworkable, analytically flawed or undemocratic. But some labor leaders shared his views. In the summer of 2003, four other unions--HERE (hotel workers), UNITE (historically garment and textile workers), the Laborers, and the Carpenters (which had already left the AFL-CIO)--formed the New Unity Partnership (NUP) to cooperate on organizing. Then, last summer, Stern told his convention that either the AFL-CIO had to change or SEIU would form something better, raising the specter of a split in organized labor like John L. Lewis's departure from the AFL in 1935 to form the new CIO.

The threat infuriated many in the labor movement, even some who partly agreed with Stern. "Labor unity is the most precious thing we've got with Bush in the White House," says Paul Booth, assistant to president Gerald McEntee of AFSCME (public employees). "We look askance at people who talk about pulling out." At Sweeney's urging, union leaders postponed internal debate to focus energy on defeating Bush, but the Machinists replied with their own threat to pull out of the AFL-CIO if Stern's ideas prevailed. When Stern tried to raise his proposals again after the election, discussion at an AFL-CIO executive council meeting was cut short, and he figured the odds were rising that SEIU would leave the federation.

Stern's ten-point plan included much that was at first glance relatively noncontroversial. It advocated doing more intensive political work, building global union alliances, expanding campaigns to strengthen worker rights to organize, better reflecting the diversity of workers, strengthening local labor federations and funding a $25-million-a-year crusade against Wal-Mart--a financially more ambitious version of a campaign already being planned. It called for a major national healthcare battle but skirted the crucial question of whether labor should pursue national health insurance or piecemeal reforms.

But the proposals for restructuring the labor movement and expanding organizing were lightning rods for sharp dispute. There were too many small unions, including forty in the AFL-CIO with fewer than 100,000 members, that didn't have the resources to organize, Stern argued. Even more important, most of the fifteen unions with more than 250,000 members were turning into general unions: Sixteen unions in a recent four-year period had tried organizing in at least five different sectors. And each sector was represented by many different unions: In thirteen of fifteen major economic sectors there are at least four significant unions, with as many as fifteen in transportation. But in some of the biggest, fastest-growing sectors there was very little organizing. As a result, Stern said, unions were unfocused and divided, while they increasingly faced national or global corporations.

Stern proposed to unite workers "in the same industry, sector or craft" under three leading national unions, with the idea that this would yield not just greater numbers but enhanced power and leverage for unions. This strategy, familiar to industrial or even craft union organizers of decades past, collides with the shape of many unions today, especially as they have tried to survive by merging or organizing simply to add members. The plan also triggered a backlash because it seemed to give the AFL-CIO great authority to merge unions and transfer responsibilities for organizing among unions, which critics regarded as an undemocratic violation of the traditional autonomy of individual unions. Equally important, Stern argued for three other reforms: rebating to unions half their AFL-CIO dues as an incentive to boost spending on organizing, prohibiting unions from undercutting established contract standards in an industry and mandating that the AFL-CIO either form new unions and innovative organizations or help old unions expand on labor's unorganized frontier.

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