A New Labor Federation Claims Its Space

The founding convention of the Change to Win (CTW) Federation, held in St. Louis on September 27, was, if nothing else, filled with enthusiasm. The mood was captured by SEIU President Andy Stern in an impromptu press briefing; said Stern, “The change process has ended, and now that we’ve changed, we can win.”

The one-day event was well managed. CTW’s top leaders put forward a lean and organizing-focused agenda which was adopted without a hint of dissent. Leaders’ speeches introduced themes and calls to action in a well-charted sequence. Several were punctuated by the introduction of rank-and-file workers invited to tell stories that highlighted either CTW’s immediate impact or scenarios where CTW action would likely produce victories.

Some 460 delegates, and over 200 observers, overwhelmingly made up of local officers and staff, gave rousing approval to every resolution put before them.

Also on display was the absence of profound differences between the seven CTW unions and the AFL-CIO they leave behind. However historic Change to Win’s formation will ultimately be deemed, on launch day it offered little to distinguish itself from the abiding traditions and utilitarian culture of its former mother-ship.

There were a few nods to such questions as poverty (to be reduced by creating full-time work for anyone who wants it), “revolutionizing our failing health care system,” creating a new political movement (often described as finding “good” Democrats and Republicans to support), championing diversity, and “globalization,” a vaguely noted threat with little elaboration.

FOCUS ON ORGANIZING

The theme “organizing is power” was woven throughout the day’s proceedings, and the centrality of organizing underpins the entire CTW structure, constitution, and virtually all resolutions adopted.

Three-quarters of all CTW funds will be devoted to organizing, starting with the federation’s $16 million initial budget and derived from the dues-based $.25 per capita per affiliate member (which is estimated to total $750 million annually). These funds are federation organizing monies, separate from the even greater amounts expected to be spent on organizing by CTW affiliates.

CTW’s organizational structure includes three basic components—Executive Office, Strategic Organizing Center, and Organizing Fund, all under the direction of a CTW Leadership Council that meets every two months. The Leadership Council selects the CTW Chair (currently SEIU’s Anna Burger) and a Treasurer (Edgar Romney, UNITE-HERE Executive Vice President).

Greg Tarpinian was named CTW Executive Director. Tarpinian, executive director of the Labor Research Association, is an advisor to Teamsters President James Hoffa Jr. and has been a labor advisor to New York’s Republican Governor George Pataki.

Picked to head the all-important Strategic Organizing Center is SEIU Executive Vice President Tom Woodruff. Woodruff outlined the goals of the new federation, noting that in the 14 employment/occupation sectors where CTW affiliates currently represent (six million) workers, there are 44 million unorganized workers. He defined these as CTW’s target population.

Common to the unions making up CTW is the fact that each is largely unaffected by globalization, or as Woodruff put it, “off-shoring.” Here is where the fault lines of the U.S. labor movement have been widening for years.

CTW carves out most, but not all, of the “landlocked” employment sectors, leaving the AFL-CIO with those most damaged by capital’s ever increasing mobility—industrial and digitized sectors, public sector blocs not yet privatized, and a loose collection of other unions.

SUPPORT LABOR NOTES

BECOME A MONTHLY DONOR

Give $10 a month or more and get our "Fight the Boss, Build the Union" T-shirt.

Among those remaining in the old federation’s fold are the centerpiece unions of the great CIO upsurge of the 1930s and ’40s—auto, steel, electrical, chemical workers, along with most public employee unions, the Mine Workers and Machinists and, among others, the high-profile Communications Workers, who have retained a somewhat aggressive organizing and collective bargaining reputation but, like others, suffer from global capital’s bare-knuckle agenda.

During the convention, several floor speakers referenced the rise of the CIO and some reporters speculated on comparisons between CTW and industrial labor’s 1930s juggernaut. But local unions emerging at the thousands of workplaces in the initial CIO era were generally robustly democratic and built in part by worker self-activity. CTW’s operational perspective is unapologetically top-down and internal democracy didn’t make the convention talking points.

The CIO was also home to a significant number of left worker activists who led many of the organizing and direct action struggles that empowered the country’s working class, particularly in mass production industries. Many of those rising leaders offered a broader vision that could, in their view, fundamentally transform the whole society.

‘VALUE-ADDED INTEGRATION’

The language of the CTW convention favored technocratic phrases like “grow the labor movement” and “value-added integration,” a phrase that appears to be designed to replace the word “solidarity,” which appeared nowhere in the convention’s five resolutions.

Spokespersons deflected inquiries about CTW’s position on such questions as the war in Iraq (Anna Burger’s response was “that affiliates can take their own positions and some have”). CTW’s position on whether to support the striking mechanics and cleaners at Northwest Airlines was also “up to the individual affiliates.”

When asked about how to talk with the union membership, Stern said, “Blogs and the internet. Union halls and small groups aren’t working.” At one point in the interview he said that engaging in “class struggle unionism was outdated” and that “a new partnership with employers was necessary to build unions and America.”

But, when asked why workers weren’t joining unions today, he responded firmly that “employers are why workers don’t join unions.” Later, he stated that “we need global unions to compete with global companies.” And on the subject of politics he said, “Democrats don’t have a clue. When they figure out how to solve working families’ problems, then they’ll get somewhere.”

We now have two competing labor federations in America. Yet neither represents a break with the culture, traditions, and failures which have pushed us so deeply into the crisis they have both acknowledged. The emphasis of each federation may differ, but their competition is still within the realm of business or “partnership” unionism.

Change to Win, with the most to prove, will more effectively deploy its resources to organize within the sectors it claims. And some successes are likely. AFL-CIO leaders will counter with their own structural and tactical changes.

But what’s still missing, even after many long months of in-house debate and the AFL-CIO split, is an overarching vision of what a just society should look like. Neither side has proposed such a vision for labor, one to contrast with that of the economic elitists who are waging one-sided class warfare against workers around the world, and neither side has suggested how to build the solidarity to promote and sustain such a vision.

Today in the United States, there is no major center to provide an alternative analysis of class struggle strategies and a new model to replace the failed “partnership unionism” of the past. What is now needed are rank-and-file workers, activists, intellectuals, and others with the enthusiasm for such a center and alternative voice. Then the real debate can begin.

A longer version of this article appeared originally in Monthly Review.