Solidarity Forever?

The AFL-CIO is celebrating its 50th anniversary by losing two of its largest unions, the Teamsters (who have always been sort of in and out of the larger organization) and the Service Employees International Union. AFL-CIO president John Sweeney is furious, and says this moves weakens organized labor disastrously. Andrew Stern, president of SEIU, says what organized labor needs is more members, and Sweeney's people aren't working hard enough to get them. "Throwing money at politicians," he says, is no substitute for membership.

The new organization (tentatively called Change to Win Coalition) is looking for new members primarily in the service sector. Child care workers, home health care workers, hotel and restaurant workers and like that. They have three things in common: their jobs are regarded as low-skilled, they are paid wages far below what even a single person can live on without subsidization from other family members or the public sector, and nobody has yet figured out a way to offshore or automate their jobs. As opposed to the information sector of the economy, where skills and salaries are high, but the work is in the ethereal realm of cyberspace or phonespace, and for precisely those reasons, employers have a huge incentive to hire more-or-less English-speaking people overseas to fill the jobs.

The new coalition itself may be able to get the ear of politicians, even without throwing money at them, if it can promise them the votes of an increased member base. That, of course, requires, first, getting those new members, and second, persuading them to bother voting at all. Who they vote for is almost an afterthought. While union members do typically vote in larger proportions than the rest of the working class, low-wage workers generally do not vote at all. Stern and his colleagues will have to put serious effort into changing this pattern. Fasten your seatbelts, folks, it's going to be a bumpy ride.