AFL-CIO Repositions Itself to Speak for All Workers

by Bill Fletcher Jr. and Jeff Crosby

The AFL-CIO Convention in September took an important turn to reposition unions toward speaking for all working people in the United States. This was a correction to the narrow focus on its dues-paying members and traditional electoral work that has cursed the movement for most of its history.

To argue that this turn represents an abandonment of current members, as Steve Early does here , is factually false and politically wrong.

It helps to understand what the federation is and is not. It is a collection of unions “held together by a rope of sand,” as a former federation president put it. From the central labor councils to the national organization, affiliates that don’t like the turn of events just quit.

10 Important Initiatives Coming Out of the AFL-CIO National Convention

by Kenneth Quinnell

The AFL-CIO quadrennial 2013 convention in Los Angeles was a flurry of exciting activity that promises to remake the labor movement in the United States and build a movement for all working people to deal with the new challenges and political landscape working families must navigate. While there were many important discussions and plans made at the convention that will be expanded on in the coming months and years, here are 10 important initiatives that came out of the resolutions passed by the convention delegates that you should know about:

1. Opening Up and Broadening the Labor Movement: The delegates recognized the need to expand the labor movement to be more broad and inclusive and to recognize all working families, whose rights have been under assault. No fewer than six resolutions were passed to expand the labor movement and partner with allies in new ways. The first invites every worker in America to join the labor movement, either through affiliate unions or through Working America. Another one provides for supporting political campaigns that protect and expand workers’ rights to organize. A third related resolution calls for expanded efforts to help workers organize around the globe. Other areas of renewed focus would be on organizing in the southern United States, in building lasting community partnerships with organizations that share our values and expanding and protecting voting rights so working families have a say in choosing those who pass laws that affect their rights.

AFL-CIO, USAS Establish National Partnership

Building on AFL-CIO Commitment to Broaden Labor Movement

 (Washington, September 25, 2013) – With the goal of strengthening workers’ rights and building power for students as well as workers, the AFL-CIO and United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) today entered into a new national partnership. The two groups will collaborate on important global solidarity campaigns, from ensuring safe working conditions for Bangladeshi garment workers to protecting the freedom of U.S. workers to organize for better jobs whether they work on campus or for companies with university contracts like T-Mobile .

The new partnership builds on calls for innovation and inclusion at the just-concluded AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles, where delegates agreed to open the door to the labor movement and engage with allies outside unions to tackle the challenges confronting working people. Today’s partnership agreement between the AFL-CIO and USAS is the first concrete step since the convention unanimously agreed to expand community partnerships.

AFL-CIO Announces Plans to Develop an Economics Curriculum Geared for Working Families

by Kenneth Quinnell

The way the media, corporations and the 1% talk about the economy is not only inaccurate, it is a means to maintain power for the wealthiest among us and keep working families powerless, delegates to the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles declared today. The latest resolution passed at the convention describes the scope of the problem and announces a concrete plan to change the conversation.

Despite the way the 1% and their allies describe the economy, it isn’t something that just happens. It is something that is created by the sweat, skill and talent of the country’s workers and is something that is controlled by the wealthiest members of our society, often at the expense of the very workers who create the wealth that those power brokers are taking to the bank. They tell us that the economy is fundamentally unfair by its nature and that to do anything to make it more fair would harm the economy, and the corporate media helps them tell this story. But this narrative is not backed up by the realities that the rest of us deal with, and day after day and year after year, for all of America’s working families, not just the few.

Longshore Union Got a Raw Deal from the AFL-CIO

By Carl Finamore

Carl Finamore

On August 29, 2013, the 60,000-member International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) announced it was leaving the 13-million member AFL-CIO.

The ILWU explained it was taking this action because of “the Federation’s moderate, overly compromising policy positions on such important matters as immigration, labor law reform, health care reform, and international labor issues.”

The Longshore union also cited “attacks from other national [AFL-CIO] affiliates, who actively tried to undermine our contract struggle by filing legal claims and walking through our picket lines.”

I was at the Sept. 7-11, 2013 AFL-CIO quadrennial convention in Los Angeles and can attest that the ILWU’s presence was sorely missed, especially when “overly compromising policy positions” were openly laid bare.

AFL-CIO Convention Days 3 and 4: Inspiring Resolutions & Internal Tensions

by Michael Hirsch

LOS ANGELES–If you go by a strict reading of the resolutions passed at the AFL-CIO convention that concluded Wednesday, this is a solidly progressive organization ready to speak with brio for all working people and not just its millions of current members and retirees. Calls for a smooth transition to citizenship for new immigrants, an alternative to the politics of austerity, organizing and acting in solidarity globally, significantly improving Obamacare leading to health care for all, ending mass incarcerations, organizing the South, and supporting workers of all sexual preferences are great stands.

So is building up the state and local labor federations as active community organizations, supporting higher education and ending student debt and—most of all—actively and uniformly cooperating with militant social movement organizations on their goals, too. These resolutions marked the just concluded Los Angeles convention. In key ways affiliated unions, especially in the public sector, are already on board in practice.

The AFL-CIO and “Alt-Labor”

by Clayton Sinyai

This week witnesses thousands of trade unionists and labor activists assembling in Los Angeles for the 27^th Constitutional Convention of the AFL-CIO.  With union membership continuing to decline, the federation has been seeking new approaches to advocate for American workers.

The labor movement’s reach peaked in the early 1950s, when some one-third of US workers belonged to a trade union. This pinnacle was achieved under labor relations system created by the Wagner Act in 1935: workers voted in government-supervised election campaigns to decide whether they wanted collective bargaining and if so, which union would represent them. Labor and management would then negotiate a contract; the workers, now union members, would enjoy improved wages and benefits and pay dues to support their union in return.

In recent decades this system has broken down. Employers now campaign aggressively to discourage their employees from voting for union representation, often going beyond legal bounds (labor board investigators find this thousands of workers each year suffer such unlawful retaliation). Under these conditions unions have not succeeded in organizing enough workers in the new service sector and technology jobs to offset declines in traditional union strongholds like manufacturing.

Trumka’s Ploy: How the AFL-CIO president proposed revolution in order to get reform

by Harold Meyerson

Harold Meyerson

The AFL-CIO Convention concluded Wednesday, having made some major structural changes in the way labor will operate—though nowhere near so major as the changes that the Federation’s top leader was advocating in the weeks leading up to the convention.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka iterated and reiterated that labor would no longer limit its members to those who had successfully convinced their employers to recognize their union. With employers able to flout labor law with impunity, illegally firing workers who sought to organize and refusing to sign contracts with those whose unions had won recognition elections, the number of workers who actually emerge with a contract grows smaller with each passing year. So the Federation’s unions would welcome workers who had tried to organize their workplace but didn’t prevail. It would welcome workers such as cab drivers, who were misclassified as independent contractors and legally proscribed from forming a union, though they were actually employees. It would welcome domestic workers, who also had been excluded from National Labor Relations Act coverage, and day laborers.

Trumka didn’t stop there. With labor unable to make the fundamental changes to society and the economy that could jump start a new middle class, unions would have to form far closer and more enduring coalitions with other progressive organizations—the National Organization for Women, the NAACP, and the Sierra Club. It would make joint decisions with them in support of one another’s agendas; it would welcome them into labor’s governing body …

            It would welcome them into labor’s governing body??

Delegates Commit AFL-CIO to Grow Labor Movement Through Diversity, Inclusion

by Mike Hall

On the heels of last week’s groundbreaking young worker and diversity conference, delegates to the AFL-CIO 2013 Convention reaffirmed the federation’s commitment to grow an inclusive labor movement dedicated to issues that will build strength for and share prosperity with women, young workers, people of color and LGBT workers.

The trio of first-day resolutions addressing inclusion in the labor movement focused on the need for the AFL-CIO itself to continue and increase its efforts to ensure that the face of the union movement and its decision-making bodies at all levels—national, state and local—reflect the face of today’s diverse workforce.

The AFL-CIO Women’s Initiative Convention resolution says women’s equality is a “shared struggle” and despite a half a century of major gains, “women still don’t have equality.”

From the resolution:

We stand with women and insist on: Equality in pay and opportunity for all; the right of women to control their own bodies and be free from violence; and the right of every woman to meet her fullest potential and the opportunity to serve—and lead—her community. Nothing less.

It also commits the AFL-CIO to work “toward shared leadership to represent the makeup of our membership.” About 45% of union members are women. The resolution outlines four vital strategies to “grow the labor movement, revitalize democracy, respond to the global economic crisis and build durable community partnerships.”

Boots Online: Digital At #AFLCIO13

by Charles Lechner

The advance of online tools and digital strategy is very much in evidence at the AFL-CIO Convention. Some data points:

• The listening sessions conducted for many months included robust online conversations.
• There is now a Digital Department that has had thousands of participants in online webinars and offline training events.
• A number of well-regarded netroots pros have been hired over the last two years.

So it was a pleasant surprise, though not a complete shock, to see that the most prominent booth display at the convention was for the Digital Dept., complete with an amazing “Boots Online!” sign.

It’s also been great witnessing a robust conversation on the official hashtag #aflcio13. One journalist present even suggested that part of the program – dozens of 90 minute action sessions – were “designed to give the proceedings the trendy buzz of a Netroots Nation conference.” Sounds good, right?

We’ve been advocating since 2009 that unions take digital strategy more seriously. This requires a number of things all done at the same time, including: