The Times Union (Albany, New York), July 30, 2005, Saturday

Copyright 2005 The Hearst Corporation
The Times Union (Albany, New York)

July 30, 2005 Saturday
3 EDITION

SECTION: MAIN; Pg. A7

HEADLINE: Labor movement is in deadly spiral

BYLINE: By MARIE COCCO

BODY:
WASHINGTON - Choose your cliche: A house divided itself cannot stand. United we stand, divided we fall. Solidarity forever - not.
The rift that has sundered organized labor is a dire omen. It foretells a period of turmoil among those who would claim leadership of stressed and strained workers at a moment when more stress and strain are not what workers should be forced to endure. At worst, it could be the death rattle of American organized labor, already at its weakest since before the Depression.
I do not know whether Andrew Stern of the Service Employees International Union and James Hoffa of the Teamsters are motivated by ambition or personality conflicts or by a genuine desire to do something - anything - to stop labor's slide. Whatever is animating them - and the leaders of the other unions who are poised to follow them out of the AFL-CIO - there are predictable certainties in the short term.
The split will not save the pensions of older workers who are increasingly likely to learn that after a lifetime on the job, the benefits they've earned are being slashed unilaterally, and with little notice. It won't stop the next crafty corporate operator from dumping a pension plan on the government's insurer, a maneuver that is supposed to be a fail-safe but has become a calculation to secure the bottom line.
It will not keep employers from raising health insurance premiums, co-payments and deductibles to shift the burden to workers. It won't stop jobs from moving offshore, or keep Congress from approving trade deals that make it easy for American companies to continue their quest for the cheapest possible labor, performed under conditions that would be illegal here at home.
It will not change the ideological bent of the National Labor Relations Board, which has amassed under President Bush's appointees a near-perfect record of siding with employers at the expense of employees who try to form unions. The board, says an article in the New York State Bar Association's labor and employment law newsletter, appears "headed toward the most radical non-legislative contraction of employee rights in the agency's history."
The right of various employees to representation - graduate teaching assistants, handicapped janitors, temporary workers - has been denied. The rules on union elections are being narrowed to suit management.
Approximately three fourths of employers, when confronted with a union organizing drive, hire anti-union consultants, according to research by Cornell University labor scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner. Most companies require workers to attend anti-union meetings, often one-on-one. Most manufacturing employers threaten to close a plant if the workers choose a union. Data compiled by the labor relations board shows that more than 20,000 workers each year are fired or somehow retaliated against for trying to form a union.
"It's hard for me to see that the problem of organizing is the percentage of money the AFL-CIO spent on it," says James Green, a labor historian at the University of Massachusetts.
This is, nonetheless, the chief complaint of Stern and his dissidents. They say that under John Sweeney, the AFL-CIO has failed to stem labor's erosion and has not organized enough workers in enough workplaces. Sweeney, a secondary charge goes, has spent too much time and money on electoral politics at the highest levels, instead of at the grass roots. The grievance echoes those of Democrats who were drawn to Howard Dean in the 2004 primaries, as Stern was. In his bid to be a kingmaker then, Stern broke with most of organized labor to provide Dean with the SEIU's early endorsement, in November 2003.
The press made much of the labor leader's supposed political prowess at the time. Soon after came Dean's spectacular fall. But Stern wasn't humbled. He sniped at Democratic nominee John Kerry even as the Democratic National Convention opened in Boston, claiming in an interview with The Washington Post that labor and the Democratic Party might be better off if Kerry lost the election.
Well, Stern got what he wanted. Did average workers?
Stern's vision of a broader, bottom-up movement is in the long term the only antidote to labor's death spiral. But the crisis for working people is also cultural, the product of a national sentiment that seems to accept pre-Depression weakness for workers alongside a Gilded Age concentration of wealth and power.
Transforming this ethos requires a marriage of many strategies. It is hard to argue the challenge is best met by a bitter divorce.
Marie Cocco's e-mail address is mariecocco@washpost.com