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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Meyerson: Labor Seeks New Forms of Worker Participation

In his WaPo column, “Labor wrestles with its future,’ Harold Meyerson provides an update on what the trade union movement is planning, not only to increase union membership from the current low figure of 6.6 percent of private sector workers, but also to provide new forms of worker participation in politics, as well as economic uplift. Meyerson explains:

…Unions have begun to experiment with answers, even if, as the unions readily admit, they’re a poor substitute for collective bargaining. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has detailed dozens of organizers to fast-food joints in a number of cities: There have been one-day strikes of fast-food workers in New York and Chicago, and such actions are likely to spread. The goal isn’t a national contract with companies such as McDonald’s but the eventual mobilization of enough such workers in sympathetic cities and states that city councils and legislatures will feel compelled to raise the local minimum wage or set a living wage in particular sectors. This means, however, that the SEIU is helping to build an organization that won’t produce anywhere near the level of dues-derived income that unions normally accrue from collective-bargaining agreements. This new approach may not pencil out, but neither does the slow decline in membership that labor will continue experiencing unless it changes course.
The AFL-CIO has embarked on a similar — and perhaps even more radical — roll of the dice. “We’re not going to let the employer decide who our members are any longer,” federation president Richard Trumka told me in a recent interview. “We’ll decide.”
Instead of claiming as its members only the diminishing number of workers in unions whose employers have agreed to bargain, the AFL-CIO plans to open its membership rolls to Americans not covered by any such agreements. The first part of this plan is to expand its Working America program, a door-to-door canvass that has mobilized nonunion members in swing-state working-class neighborhoods to back labor-endorsed candidates in elections in the past decade. In New Mexico in recent months, Working America enrolled 112,000 residents on their doorsteps in a campaign that raised the minimum wage in Albuquerque and then in an adjacent county. But the goal of such campaigns, says Karen Nussbaum, the organization’s director, isn’t just to win a raise; it’s also “to get as many workers as we can involved in winning the raise and hope this carries over to specific workplace activism.” They aim to build a workers’ movement — even though, as with the SEIU campaign of fast-food workers, securing workplace contracts (and the kind of membership dues that sustain unions) isn’t on the horizon.
The AFL-CIO’s plans don’t end there. “We’re asking academics, we’re asking our friends in other movements, ‘What do we need to become?’ ” says Trumka. “We’ll try a whole bunch of new forms of representation. Some will work; some won’t, but we’ll be opening up the labor movement.” Forming a larger organization of unions and other progressive groups isn’t out of the question, though it would take time to pull off.

Organized labor is rightly concerned with increasing its membership. But the new emphasis on searching for other forms of worker participation is a healthy development. A stronger union movement would be a tremendous asset for the Democratic Party (and vice-versa), and broadening the pathways of participation for workers in social and political change would be a very good thing for America.

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