(C) Common Dreams
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Unions Need to Get More Serious About Organizing [1]
['Chris Bohner', 'Eric Blanc']
Date: 2025-04
While labor’s net assets have risen 225% since 2010, membership has declined by 1.8 million workers. I call this state of affairs Finance Unionism, where unions spend less on organizing and strikes than they bring in membership dues and investment income, investing the surplus in the financial markets.
No union has contested this data, and to my knowledge, no union has gone on record to explain the rationale for stockpiling assets rather than investing in organizing and strikes.
Union Democracy and Governance in 2024
Who makes the critical strategic decisions for organized labor? Who decides whether to invest union assets in the financial markets rather than organizing and strike activity? That would be the elected labor leadership. While the election of union leaders is formally democratic, the practice of union democracy is far from ideal.
As I’ve written here and here, the vast majority of top union officers are not directly elected by the members, and very few leaders face contested or competitive elections. In my view, the lack of substantive debate and member participation is a failure of democratic governance (for an alternative view, see this editorial). The 2024 conventions at some of the largest unions in the U.S. confirm this trend:
SEIU, 1,845,500 members: Mary Kay Henry stepped down in 2024 after serving fourteen years as president. April Verrett won the top position with 99.4% of the delegate vote. Many of the delegates to the convention were superdelegates — i.e., elected local officers who automatically became delegates without a membership vote.
American Federation of Teachers (AFT), 1,732,808 members. Randi Weingarten, the AFT President since 2008, was reelected to another term without any public opposition. Besides Douglas McCarron of the Carpenters (who has served for thirty years), Weingarten is the longest-tenured labor leader in the U.S.
AFSCME, 1,248,681 members: Lee Saunders, elected President in 2012, was reelected by the delegates by acclamation (i.e., no challenger) to another four-year term. By the end of his term, Saunders will have served for 16 years.
AFGE, 313,108 members: Everett Kelley, President of the union since 2020, faced a contested election at the convention, winning with 59% of the delegate vote.
UNITE HERE, 264,334 members: Taking over for President D. Taylor (my old boss), Gwen Mills was elected by delegates in an uncontested election.
Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA), 45,500 members: Despite President Sara Nelson’s endorsement of a resolution calling for direct elections of officers, the CWA-AFA Board of Directors voted against the constitutional change.
Of the large unions with a convention in 2024, only AFGE had a competitive election. The remaining unions — representing 5.1 million members and over a third of all union members — had no contested or competitive elections for the top leadership posts.
Labor Law Reform Version 4.0
With the relatively low organizing numbers and waning strike wave, what is the strategy of organized labor to reverse the decades-long decline? You won’t find any coherent plan outlined by the AFL-CIO, but it is the same strategy pursued for decades: reform labor law. It was the strategy of the 1990s (the Cesar Chavez Workplace Fairness Act), the strategy of 2008 (the Employee Free Choice Act), the strategy of 2020 (the Richard L. Trumka Protecting the Right to Organize Act), and it is the strategy of 2024.
Of course, labor law reform is vitally important, and it should be labor’s top legislative priority. But if Kamala Harris wins the Presidency, and if Democrats control Congress, Harris will have to overcome a certain filibuster in the Senate and wavering support from “moderate” Democrats facing unified opposition from employers. This is the traditional graveyard for labor law reform, but hopefully, a labor movement riding on a crest of popularity can transform the vibes into a legislative accomplishment.
The problem, however, is that labor’s legislative strategy has an expiration date. As long as labor’s share of the workforce continues to decline (5.8 million members lost since 1980 and counting), its political power also decreases. In 1980, one out of four voters was from a union household. In 2020, union households represented only 15.8% of voters.
Yes, organized labor should go all in for labor law reform, using every ounce of political capital to pass the legislation. To win, it will require subsuming the parochial political agendas of the sixty different unions to this one demand. But if the Democratic Party balks at reform as it has in the past, or if Trump wins a second term, then labor will need a backup plan. Ultimately, changing the political dynamic and forcing a new compromise between labor and capital will require unions to draw on their most potent source of power: workers withholding their labor and disrupting production and the economy.
This piece was originally published in the newsletter Radish Research.
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[1] Url:
https://inequality.org/article/unions-need-to-get-more-serious-about-organizing/
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