As AFL-CIO affiliated unions offer their proposals for the reinvigoration of the AFL-CIO, most share a similar error: each proposal focuses on leveraging the labor movement's financial and political clout, and improving labor's image.
As the IAM proposal says:
"The American Labor Movement may be a lot of things. But it is not politically impotent, financially bankrupt or lacking in allies. Its power base is considerable and the potential energy in that power base is incredible. But whether we use our power effectively is open to question."
The strategy is to consolidate or restructure the still immense resources of the AFL-CIO and its member unions, and divert that strength into capital stewardship, political action and organizing. A strategic omission, a failure of vision, a technocratic myopia is shared by all the proposals. If the labor movement is to succeed in transforming itself in a new age, its leaders should firmly grasp the obvious, and acknowledge that despite their institutional power, the "movement" as a broad, bottom-up, rank and file entity barely exists, and without that, the larger projects may fail.
Forget About Re-Branding
According to the IFPTE:
"For the labor movement to grow, both in size and in strength, we must renew our public image. We are often viewed in too many arenas as outdated, greedy, obstructionist or, most recently, as self-destructive. Regardless of how the public's gross misconception of organized labor came into being, we must dedicate ourselves to restoring and improving our image."
The labor movement doesn't have an outdated, greedy, or obstructionist image - it has been, at times, all those things, in reality.
Public relations isn't going to change that. Helping people in new ways will. Articulating a compelling vision will. The AFL-CIO's leaders have to think beyond political action - political action alienates many conservative working people from labor's cause; they have to think beyond capital stewardship - high finance is the territory of the wealthy, and working people can't connect with capital strategies in any meaningful way because it has nothing to do with creating a working class consciousness; and they have to think beyond organizing in the sense of "mobilizing our base," because the "base" is decimated.
Starting from Zero with Six Trillion in the Bank
Perhaps a problem for AFL-CIO insiders is that their long and valuable experience in the movement is a hindrance to thinking about it in new ways. If someone, on the other hand, was inexperienced in the political "realities" of labor institutions, and in how the labor bureaucracies interact on a daily basis, that person might be able to leverage his ignorance into a positive, worthwhile and imaginative set of proposals.
* Laborcommons Proposal #1
Start with people. Before you go on about structure, image and politics, make sure you put people first. It's not about how to manipulate workers into saving the institutions of labor but about how the institutions can do a better job of helping workers.
* Laborcommons Proposal #2
Form a Federation of retired union organizers and labor lawyers with local offices everywhere, and a national office and Web site to pull it all together, based on the model of the Service Corps of Retired Executives. The Federation should provide free legal and workplace rights advice to workers, outside of an organizing context, outside of a political context. An educated worker is more likely to be an activist worker. Unionists need to re-imagine themselves as mentors as well as organizers.
* Laborcommons Proposal #3
Sow the seeds for a new U.S. health care system by supporting local free clinics and community-based minor medical plans that can supplement and eventually replace greedy mega-corporate insurance companies. Discount plans like "Union Plus" only reinforce the power of big insurance companies. Alternative solutions like the "Ithaca Health Alliance" need to be considered.
* Laborcommons Proposal #4
Link the labor movement into the environmental movement in a small way, below the clean energy and good jobs strategy of the ambitious Apollo Alliance. Get involved at the neighborhood level. Focus on environmental justice, green buildings, and getting energy efficient appliances in working class homes. Approach workplace safety as an environmental concern. Have union members work with regional Rural Community Assistance Partnerships. Green can be the glue that unites Red and Blue.
* Laborcommons Proposal #5
Instead of sending thousands of new organizers into neighborhoods to knock on doors, figure out a way to have your neighbors knock on yours. Accessible, high-visibility local offices. This isn't about mobilizing voters, it's about making unions accessible to people who need them. It's about being a permanent part of the community, not an invading swarm. If your union's office is way out somewhere on Highway 61, move. If your local is so large that you need a Learjet to get around, you're doing something that is not very local.
* Laborcommons Proposal #6
Establish an internet-based micro-philanthropy network. Create a Web site where small donors can give money to workers and distressed neighborhoods. Or to CLCs, or to a cause. Reinvent the Union Community Fund as an online giving network open to everybody, not just union members.
* Laborcommons proposal #7
Offer every qualified High School-age union member a college scholarship. Make union-funded scholarships available to non-members.
* Laborcommons proposal #8
Offer associate union membership to unorganized employees. Link this into the healthcare, scholarship and counseling initiatives.
* Laborcommons proposal #9
Create a national strike fund for low-wage workers. The AFL-CIO should commit to making sure that strikers lose no pay during strikes in selected cases involving low-wage workers. Strikes get plenty of newspaper play and if low-wage workers can win a strike, that will restore labor's reputation as a refuge for the working poor.
* Laborcommons proposal #10
Leverage the power of the internet:
o The history of labor movement is almost completely absent from the public school cirriculum. An online, encyclopedic history of the labor movement should be created for the Web, using the same technology as WikiPedia.
o Build a new *all inclusive* labor portal for activists, reformers, union staffers and workers that is also deeply integrated with other causes and sites, especially environmental issues.
o Make it "hyperlocal." Imagine a network that extends to the neighborhood level. Have at least an associate union member on every block, ready to help a neighbor in need, ready to organize. Not a "neighborhood watch" network like some from the McCarthyite right want to build, but a neighborhood education, activism, and giving network that runs the gamut from organizing to philanthropy. A "neighborhood praise" network. A "neighborhood giving" network. A "neighborhood rescue" network.
What About Union Democracy?
The preceding has been a description of a base for democratic practice, rather than a repetition of the empty mantra "Democracy!"
A Working Class Without a Working Class?
The issue is not how to involve members in labor's political and legislative agenda, but how to involve unions in the daily lives of people who aren't in unions, and who don't want to be mere fodder for a political agenda. The professional communicators at the ILCA say the future must be all about championing "the fight against racism, sexism, hetero-sexism, xenophobia, religious bias, and other forms of intolerance." Notice the absence of the working class in this formulation. The working class, in all its diversity, is rife with these taboos, and the formulation ignores the one thing that all working class people really have in common: economic oppression. The ILCA is imagining a fight for the future of unions that essentially would be a fight against the working class.
Labor needs a strategy that unites workers in both Red and Blue states, and gets workers with different cultural values on the same side of the picket line - a strategy that addresses living wages, health care and fair treatment - a strategy that hinges on a sense of place, and on economic struggle. If you are thinking only in terms of "mobilizing and energizing our base," you've already lost.
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