Also, it is indeed remarkable that the old CIO unions never got to set the tone in the AFL-CIO. Fitch notes that "every candidate for the AFL-CIO presidency has come from the AFL" (p. 78). Now, due to the decades-long employer attacks on industrial unions, "the four largest unions in the Federation are all AFL unions": AFSCME, the Teamsters, the SEIU, and the UFCW (p. 78). In short, unions that have more modern structures and have been friendlier to the universalist welfare state have gotten bested by the old AFL unions that, probably excepting AFSCME, have adapted themselves better to the low-wage no-benefit postmodern capitalism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
That's what last year's split may have been all about. Fitch characterizes Andy Stern's Change-to-Win federation as consisting of "the nation's bottom-feeding unions" noted -- excepting SEIU -- for "their elasticity on questions of ethical practice" (p. 294). Severe judgment, but there's a lot of truth to that. The SEIU and the UFCW have grown -- in the case of the SEIU phenomenally -- but at the cost of an inability to lift new members out of poverty and to maintain labor standards (see the chapter entitled "Andy Stern's Dead Souls"). Moreover, the SEIU's growth comes more from lobbying than organizing, Fitch says. Give a lot of money to politicians, and politicians turn clients of welfare programs into "employees" ("home care aids") of new public authorities and agree to recognize the union if it wins representation elections (which are low-turn-out affairs). The SEIU gets to boast of growth and collect dues, but its new clients -- formerly welfare program recipients, now nominally employees but doing exactly the same thing as before -- are basically as poor as before (earning about $650 monthly [minus dues and taxes] in the case of Local 434b's LA members, since more than half of them work less than 80 hours a month [p. 308]). That's not a model that works for other unions.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>
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