Organized People Can Prevail Over Organized
Money
"America Needs A Raise"
by John J.
Sweeney
President of the AFL-CIO
with David Kusnet
Reviewed by Jeff Burman
SECTIONS:
When John Sweeney's "New Voice" ticket won the leadership of the long slumbering AFL-CIO in October of 1995, there were stirrings of change in the air. "America Needs A Raise" offers a vivid revival of the labor movement, one that can be a source of hope and growth. With the help of poignant quotes and hard-nosed statistics, Sweeney clearly and plainly explains the problems facing labor. And, having laid out the bad news, he then offers up a campaign of activism, emphasizing three central points -- a new social contract, more aggressive political activism, and more resources devoted to organizing.
Sweeney offers a new twist on "family values." If you work for a paycheck, you're probably spending less time with your family, less time in your church or synagogue, and less time in your community. Our jobs have become expendable, the extra effort we give to our work is ignored, the loyalty we feel for our employers is unreciprocated. Sweeney pleads for a new sense of community in which people come together to create a more responsive workplace and make a principled return to civic life and, by so doing, reshape the political landscape so that "their issues" are "our issues."
Sweeney reminds us that good people facing hard times will be vulnerable to opportunistic politicians who urge us to blame each other. You've heard them blame racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, the poor -- but the real cause of our troubles is often deliberately ignored. Sweeney devotes a great deal of space carefully laying out the economic trends that have left working people with a smaller and smaller portion of the wealth they help create.
The traditional relationship between labor and management was made popular by Henry Ford. Ford believed that if you paid your assembly line workers a little more, they would be able to buy more of what they produce. Increases in wages would help expand the economy. But in the last thirty years, business, and its allies in government, have done everything in their power to drive down wages and costs, and drive up profits. The examples and statistics offered in this book are staggering.
Sweeney confidently believes that "a revitalized labor movement can bridge the gap [for] working people whose living standards are stagnating and [for] those who work hard but have been shut out of middle class security. We can bring working people together, mobilize the potential power of their great numbers, and hold political leaders accountable to their concerns. We can prove that organized people can prevail over organized money."
Sweeney's plan has already been put to good use. Instead of traditional "checkbook politics" in which the AFL-CIO has supported democratic candidates and then hoped for the best, Sweeney has chosen to target specific races and run informational campaigns, explaining the candidates' positions on issues that matter -- things like jobs, wages, job safety, Social Security, pensions, health care, consumer protection, clean air and water, education and the much maligned social safety net. Sweeney is also intent on better informing the professional staffers that manage mainstream candidates, as well as cultivating his own candidates for political office, developing a "seamless garment" of activism.
Sweeney remembers the strategies that have succeeded in the past. The AFL historically concentrated on organizing specific crafts. The CIO was particularly good at organizing by industry. The civil rights, women's rights and community activist movements have succeeded in mobilizing around specific issues. All of these strategies will be drawn upon. And the beauty in each organizing success is a ripple effect of wage increases that extends beyond the shops unionized.
Much of the optimism and success embraced by Sweeney come from his battles as the president of the Service Employees International Union. For all the good the SEIU has done, many of the gains are for lower wage workers who may well be more inclined to strike because they have less to lose.
What does apply to us is the need to hear the broader analysis of how the adversaries of labor effectively keep wages down and make it more and more difficult to have union elections and enforce what remains of labor law.
One strategy in Sweeney's bag of tricks does offer useful parallels. At Apple Computer, Harvard University and more recently at Yale University, administrative and service unions won concessions as a result of public campaigns to, in essence, shame these revered institutions into adequately taking care of their own. In our case, with the ever increasing compression of our schedules, and the resulting "time famine" for our members with families, this kind of strategy may just be the trick.
To his credit, Sweeney is always on the lookout for innovative new strategies. He even invites your comment. If you have any thoughts to add to the revival of the labor movement, drop Mr. Sweeney a line: AFL-CIO, 815 16th Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005. Says Sweeney, "No kidding; we need all the ideas we can get."
America Needs a Raise,
by John J. Sweeney with David Kusnet
Houghton Mifflin Company
165 pages. $19.95
Board of Directors, representing assistants.
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter
Vol. 18, No. 1 - Jan/Feb 1997
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