REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Labor of Politics
WSJ.com OpinionJournal
The AFL-CIO decides backing Democrats is more important than expanding its membership.
opinionjournal.com
Friday, March 4, 2005 12:01 a.m.
The leaders of the AFL-CIO beat back an internal revolt this week, and the biggest winner was . . . the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
John Sweeney, president of the union federation for about a decade, defeated a challenge led by the Teamsters and Service workers who wanted to spend more on union organizing. Mr. Sweeney and allies prevailed with their strategy to keep pouring money into Beltway politics on behalf of the liberals who lost control of Congress in 1994. You can see why Tom Donohue, the man who has revived the Chamber as a potent political force, would be happy.
Our view of unions in the workplace has always been that if a company can't stop its employees from being organized, that's its problem. The problem for the AFL-CIO, on the other hand, is that fewer workers want to join unions.
The chart below shows that the unionized share of the total U.S. labor force declined once again last year, to 12.5%, down from 12.9% a year earlier and continuing a gradual but steady slide since 1983. The trend is even worse in the private workforce, where only 7.9% of employees now carry the union label. The one semi-success Mr. Sweeney can point to is in the public sector, where nearly four in 10 workers are organized and where the AFL-CIO's political clout can be brought most to bear.
But that emphasis on politics may also be the root of Big Labor's larger membership crisis. Back in their industrial heyday, unions were responding to the needs of workers in the marketplace. As hard as labor leaders bargained with management, they also understood they had a stake in business success. Over the years, however, and especially on Mr. Sweeney's watch, they became much less interested in the creation of private-sector jobs.
Instead, they became part of the ideological left and its regulatory and high-tax agenda. So instead of favoring oil drilling in Alaska, which would create thousands of new middle-class jobs, Mr. Sweeney's shop leaned toward the rich liberals of the Sierra Club. And while many union members are cultural conservatives, the AFL-CIO has spent its scarce political capital fighting conservative judges. No wonder millions of workers look at union organizers and shrug.
A genuine labor reformer would make the union agenda more relevant to today's workers by adapting it to the global economy and the information age. That would mean making health insurance more affordable--and transportable from job to job--not more expensive through new government mandates. A real labor rebel would support tort reform because runaway asbestos claims are bankrupting companies and destroying good jobs. And such a reformer might consider personal Social Security accounts that could let low-wage workers build assets for retirement, instead of relying on industrial age defined-benefit pensions that won't exist 40 years from now.
None of this was on this week's agenda, of course, and Mr. Sweeney won't hear any of it. But at least he and his colleagues will continue to occupy one of the most elegant office buildings in Washington.
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