A Substitute for Organizing? What Mergers Make Sense?
April 2005
Though there’s a lot of debate within the AFL-CIO these days, it seems like everyone favors mergers to make the unions bigger and, presumably, better.
But what kind of mergers to what ends? Who decides?
When the AFL and the CIO themselves merged in 1955 there were 135 affiliated unions; today there are 58. Thirty-one mergers took place under John Sweeney’s watch alone. Yet union membership has declined from its high point of 22.8 million in 1978 to 15.5 million in 2004—over seven million members lost.
Unions that once organized along well-charted core industrial, occupational, or employer lines became holding companies of disparate units, divisions, and departments with little economic relationship.
The defensive mergers of the past half century are a consequence of decline: shrinking unions in search of resources. But these mergers are also a cause of decline because of how they have distorted the shape, content, and motivation of virtually all unions.
Over the past 50 years unions that once organized along well-charted core industrial, occupational, or employer lines became holding companies of disparate units, divisions, and departments with little economic relationship. Business union logic sought bigger treasuries and slimmer staffs for greater efficiency and more members for increased political clout, but seldom got either.
More importantly, they failed to address the problems that led them to merge in the first place: declining membership, shifting industrial lines, changing companies (whose own mergers brought varying union and non-union units into the same picture), and rising employer hostility. The mergers didn’t provide new resources to organize in core jurisdictions so much as they served as a substitute for organizing.
To make matters worse, the new multi-jurisdictional unions typically organized any group that seemed ripe for the picking.
NUP: BEFORE AND AFTER
SEIU and the short-lived New Unity Partnership (NUP) it pulled together pointed all of this out and insisted that mergers should be along industrial lines. This proposal didn’t even make it to the table in Las Vegas.
To be sure, there was an alliance of unions representing about 40 percent of the AFL-CIO’s per capita dues payers that pushed for a shift in resources toward organizing and for an extreme makeover of the AFL-CIO’s own programs. But it was a small number of unions, including UNITE HERE, the Laborers, UFCW, UAW, and SEIU.
This short list itself tells you why the SEIU plan to trim the federation down to 20 industrially focused unions was not likely to go far. UFCW is the original amalgamated general union, with department store clerks, barbers, meatpackers, insurance agents, and more. UAW has accumulated many jurisdictions, from freelance writers to university graduate assistants and adjunct professors. Even UNITE HERE, originally two of the partners in the NUP, strayed from the program when they merged in traditional general union style.
As the NUP was considering dissolving, the SEIU turned its advances for change in the federation to the Teamsters, just as that union was in the process of absorbing the Graphic Communications International Union in December 2004. Old habits die hard.
SEIU, it seems, is the only union to make the conversion from random mergers and acquisitions to industrial focus. From 1980 to the mid-1990s, like UFCW, it grew by absorbing national unions as diverse as jewelry workers and locomotive firemen and oilers. In those years, it also absorbed some 57 local and state unions, mostly of public employees.
The turn to greater focus on building services and health care probably came in 1996, when SEIU picked up the lion’s share of 1199 that eventually brought them some 170,000 health care workers. It should be noted, however, that this involved splitting the former National Hospital and Health Care Union (1199) into three smaller parts: one independent; one in SEIU; and one in AFSCME. Hardly a step toward focus or density.
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On the other side of the rift in the AFL-CIO, things are no better. In January the Steelworkers announced they were merging with PACE, itself the result of the merger of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) and the Paperworkers, who, a few years earlier, had absorbed the Allied Industrial Workers. The Steelworkers’ press release said it all: “The newly merged union will be the dominant union in North America in metals, paper and forestry products, tire and rubber, mining, glass, chemicals, energy and other basic resource industries.”
BARRIERS TO UNITY
Not all union mergers are irrational. The 1995 merger of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union that produced UNITE made sense, even if the more recent merger with HERE didn’t.
Ironically, however, the mergers that prove hardest to pull off are often those between unions in the same industry or the same occupation.
Despite years of negotiations, the American Federation of Teachers and the NEA have never been able to complete a national merger. Before it was absorbed by the Paperworkers, the OCAW was not particularly interested in merging with the International Chemical Workers Union, which went into the UFCW in 1996.
The reasons for this stand-offishness are not hard to find. Often there is a history of rivalry and raiding going back to diverse origins in the AFL and CIO, or in the case of the NEA, in its origins as a professional association. Then there are differing political styles in the leadership. Frequently it comes down to the difficulty of surrendering or sharing bureaucratic monopolies and habits.
TOP-DOWN
Rational or not, another problem is that mergers are almost by definition a top-down process. By the time members get to vote on a merger, most of the decisions on structure, democratic procedures, finances, political action, and just about everything else have been made.
The old unions typically become divisions of the dominant union and continue to handle bargaining in their former spheres. The relationship between members and leaders within the division is generally the same, but the relationship of all members to the top leaders of the merged union is bound to be more distant.
Since one reason for merging is often administrative efficiency in the face of declining resources, there is a tendency to want to merge small locals into larger ones and to create geographically vast mega-locals that diminish membership involvement and control. This has been the trend in SEIU, UFCW, and the Carpenters.
The idea of professionally administered mega-locals is appealing to many union leaders, but is bound to undermine the one place where union democracy often flourishes: the local union.
The welcomed debate over the future shape and directions of labor in the U.S. needs to brought down to the ranks. But the debate also needs to be broadened beyond a few organizational recipes. Density and industrial focus are central. But so are member mobilization and involvement and so is the winning over of the communities in which the unorganized and the organized live.
