This and the Counterpunch article seem way overblown. In the case of the Farmworkers campaign (where I had friends working as organizers who were telling me years ago about the problems- most of them not of the AFL's making), you had the first serious field campaign of the United Farm Workers in almost a generation in one of the toughest industries to organize in the country. The Coastal Berry campaign ended up as a defeat, but the argument that an industrywide approach would succeed better without any pattern contract is just speculation. The problems in the UFW are pretty serious - its structure makes most unions, unfortunately, look like democratic bastions. And a single vote -that can be reversed with a switch of 50 workers - is not everything. Many labor struggles have been won after losing one or more votes. UNITE in the south has usually had to struggle for years through multiple votes to get a toehold.
What is interesting about the Counterpunch article is how selectively critical it was about the large-scale campaigns mounted in recent years. Not even mentioned were the nearly 100,000 home health care workers organized in Los Angeles this year (and tens of thousands more around the state in recent years) due largely to exactly the complicated combinations of top-down political deals and bottom-up organizing that Sweeney and company have promoted. You can point to the relatively successful organizing of janitors around California - capped most recently by organizing Hewlett-Packard janitors in Sacramento.
Now, these campaigns were not the ones mentioned by Counterpunch and may be what they meant by "local campaigns" but they also had high-profile national support, not just in SEIU, but from a whole range of other unions. (With many of these campaigns started by a chunk of folks who moved from SEIU to the AFL-CIO offices.) You can pick out the failure of specific campaigns by the AFL-CIO -- but the atmosphere created by Sweeney has made a difference in encouraging greater cross-union support. If the Organizing Institute has been less than a success in training a large corps of new organizers, it has helped inspire a whole new pro-labor wave of organizing on campuses - notably in this Spring's explosion of anti-sweatshop campaigns on campuses across the country.
There are plenty of problems of union democracy, but that exists as often in union locals as in union internationals. My old union HERE had the odd pattern of a completely undemocratic international forcing a whole bunch of undemocratic, often racist locals to begin serious grassroots, multiracial organizing that has transformed hotel organizing across the country, especially in key locals like Los Angeles and Oakland.
What bothers me most about the Counterpunch article is not the argument but almost the relish with which it documents failure, since this is not a story of venal acts by the AFL-CIO hierarchy (which was all too common in the past) but of possible mistakes in strategy that can be attributed to honest differences of opinion among people of good will. There have been failures in recent years, but there have been successes as well, and a more useful article would have documented the successes in order to explain why those successful campaigns worked and why the botched campaigns failed.
Why good progressive folks enjoy trashing other progressive folks so much has always baffled me? God knows I have strong opinions on what to do but I can assume others have different strategies based on something other than, as Counterpunch wrote, "self-promotion and arrogant, bureaucratic one-upmanship." The AFL-CIO staff may have made large strategic mistakes that can be fairly criticized, but why can't that be said without the personal trashing?
--Nathan Newman