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LABOR’S PRODIGAL SON RETURNS  
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Harold Meyerson
January 13, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ SEIU rejoins the AFL-CIO, even as arresting labor’s decline
remains a daunting challenge. _

By reaffiliating with the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees
International Union is boosting the Federation’s joint membership to
more than 14 million., John Rudoff/Sipa USA via AP Images

 

Labor’s prodigal son came back to the fold last week, when the
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) rejoined the AFL-CIO 20
years after it had up and left. In 2005, its departure had caused
quite a stir. Then as now, SEIU had roughly two million members, and
when its then-president Andy Stern announced that his union, along
with six others, was leaving labor’s longtime federation to form a
new not-quite-federation named Change to Win, it reduced the
AFL-CIO’s aggregate membership from a little over 13 million to a
little over 9 million, palpably diminishing the political heft of the
labor movement’s foremost lobbyist and election-time voter
mobilization operation.

By reaffiliating, the Service Employees are boosting the
Federation’s joint membership to more than 14 million. It’s also
tilting that combined membership a bit, both demographically and
politically. SEIU is a highly diverse union, whose members include
hundreds of thousands of home health care workers, hospital support
staffers, and janitors—groups that are disproportionately female,
immigrant, and racially diverse. At a time when the working-class vote
has been trending toward Trump, SEIU’s members are probably among
the least likely to be moving in that direction. They stand in
political counterpoint to more male-dominated working-class unions
like the Teamsters (who are not in the AFL-CIO) and the building
trades (who are). They will likely stiffen the Federation’s spine,
to whatever degree it needs stiffening, in opposing the mass
deportations that Trump has promised.

In rejoining, SEIU finds itself inside the fold with another
million-plus-member union of service-sector employees who are also
disproportionately people of color: the American Federation of State,
County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). There’s an even stronger
synergy between those unions: AFSCME is the largest union of public
employees (not counting teachers) in the eastern United States, while
SEIU is the largest in western states (California in particular, where
it claims 700,000 members). By rejoining the Federation, SEIU has
upped the odds (which I still think are rather low) of the two unions
combining. Of course, combining in itself doesn’t enable the union
movement to do what it needs most: grow.

In truth, though, both SEIU and AFSCME, along with the two massive
teachers unions—the National Education Association (NEA), which is
outside the Federation, and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT),
which is inside—have been working together for years, sometimes
almost as a de facto semi-federation of their own. Half a decade ago,
I moderated a public discussion among the presidents of those four
unions, introduced by a film their unions had produced in which the
presidents actually completed each other’s sentences. What the
presidents highlighted in their discussion was the joint work their
unions were undertaking, particularly in voter mobilization, which ran
alongside the Federation’s own efforts. Their combined memberships
totaled between eight and nine million—almost comparable to the
AFL-CIO’s—so they could justly claim to be performing a hefty
share of labor’s political work. Their efforts weren’t
counterposed to the Federation’s; AFSCME President Lee Saunders was
(and still is) the longtime chairman of the AFL-CIO’s political
action committee. But it was also clear that the presidents believed
they could better coordinate election-time activity by having the two
largest unions that didn’t belong to the Fed (the NEA and SEIU) work
in tandem with the two largest unions that did (the AFT and AFSCME).

Now that SEIU has rejoined, it’s the NEA that’s the main outlier;
with a little over three million members, it’s the nation’s
largest union. During the past four decades, there have been times
when the NEA (which disproportionately represents more suburban and
rural school districts) has considered joining the Federation and
merging with the AFT (which disproportionately represents more urban
school districts). But the NEA has consistently rejected that option,
to which the AFT has been more open.

WHAT EXPLAINS THE DEFECTIONS OF 2005, which SEIU led? After all, SEIU
had been at the very center of the AFL-CIO. At the time, the
Federation’s president was SEIU’s former president, John Sweeney.
Remarkably, Sweeney had won the Federation’s presidency in a 1995
election against Tom Donahue, who not only came out of SEIU but out of
the same local as Sweeney (New York’s doormen and building
maintenance workers). As for Andy Stern, who led the march out of the
AFL-CIO, he had been SEIU’s organizing director when Sweeney was the
union’s president, succeeding to the presidency itself when Sweeney
decamped for the Federation.

Stern’s election as SEIU president had been part of a new trend in
American labor. Usually, when a union’s top slot came open, it was
filled by some senior vice president, and Stern had to defeat one such
senior VP in order to become SEIU’s leader. Stern wasn’t alone,
however. During the 1990s, at least two other major unions had seen
their top organizers, rather than their ranking bureaucrats, assume
union presidencies: John Wilhelm at HERE (the union of hotel workers),
and Bruce Raynor at the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers. The
three were all a generation younger than the Sweeney-Donohue
generation, and their victories reflected not only a triumph for
relative youth (or, more precisely, early middle age) but also for
labor’s newly rediscovered emphasis on organizing. Raynor had
overseen some remarkable organizing victories in the clothing and
textile mills of the deeply anti-union South; Stern had presided over
the unionization of immigrant janitors in big-city downtowns; and
Wilhelm had masterminded the unionization of Las Vegas’s
mega-hotels.

Sweeney, too, had based his campaign to take over the AFL-CIO,
following its 40-year ossification under George Meany and Lane
Kirkland, on his record as a master organizer. At a time when most
American unions were scarcely spending anything on organizing,
Sweeney’s SEIU during the 1980s and ’90s had spent a third of its
budget on organizing, and had nearly doubled in size (some of which,
to be sure, had come from affiliating other, small unions). The
membership numbers of other unions during that time had either
stagnated or shrunk.

At a time when the working-class vote has been trending toward Trump,
SEIU’s members are probably among the least likely to be moving in
that direction.

But after ten years with Sweeney at labor’s helm, the movement had
continued to shrink. Stern, Wilhelm, and Raynor were frustrated at the
failure to grow, and believed that some of the unions less zealous
about growth than theirs—including some of the building
trades—were holding labor back. For a time, it appeared that Wilhelm
might challenge Sweeney for the AFL-CIO presidency, but he never
seemed to have enough votes to pull that off. So their unions, along
with four others representing carpenters, laborers, farmworkers, and
supermarket employees, left to form Change to Win. Rather than
diminish the labor movement’s political clout at the state and local
level, most of those unions’ locals remained affiliated with their
respective state and local AFL-CIOs. The change, if change there were
to be, would come in organizing.

But it didn’t.

In 2009, I covered for the _Prospect_
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be Change to Win’s signature organizing campaign: that of the
roughly 100,000 workers who toiled in the warehouses of Southern
California’s Inland Empire, to which trucks brought the cargoes that
had arrived at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach for resorting
and loading onto other trucks that carried the goods to Walmarts
across the United States. Then as now, Walmart was the nation’s
largest private-sector employer, and it was thought that by organizing
key links in its supply chain, labor could gain the leverage required
to organize its stores.

But the same problems that vexed all organizing campaigns also
derailed this one, which was run by Change to Win and chiefly backed
by the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW),
which each sought to unionize distinct categories of Walmart
employees. To begin, the warehouse industry was fissured in every
which way, which made unionizing them a Sisyphean task. Walmart
wasn’t the workers’ employer, nor was the logistics company with
which Walmart had contracted this part of its supply chain, nor were
the individual warehouses with which the logistics company had
subcontracted, nor were the individual warehouses, which had
sub-subcontracted with many of the roughly 270 temporary employment
agencies in the area, which were the warehouse workers’ nominal
employers. I interviewed a number of workers who’d worked at the
same job in the same warehouse for years, even as the identity of
their nominal employer had shifted dozens of times.

Moreover, the organizers had deployed in anticipation of that year’s
Democratic trifecta in Washington, including the new Obama
administration, enacting a labor law reform bill that imposed actual
penalties on employers who illegally fired pro-union workers to deter
unionization campaigns, and maybe even compelled Walmart to
acknowledge it was really the warehouse workers’ employer, too.
Variations of those bills had passed the House and almost cleared the
Senate’s 60-vote hurdle in the opening years of the Carter and
Clinton administrations, but never quite made it to those
presidents’ desks. It never quite made it to Obama’s, either, and
was similarly to be doomed during the Biden presidency as well.

Some of the Change to Win labor leaders had occasionally insisted not
only that the broad movement wasn’t giving sufficient emphasis to
organizing, but also that it was giving too much attention to politics
at organizing’s expense. But the failure to amend labor law so that
workers could organize without fear of being fired doomed the
organizing campaigns of the Change to Win generation as it had those
of the Meany-Kirkland era, though in Meany and Kirkland’s time,
labor largely didn’t even try to grow its private-sector membership.

In time, some of the seven unions that had left the AFL-CIO in 2005
quit Change to Win and rejoined the Federation (the Laborers, the
hotel workers, the farmworkers, UFCW), while another also left Change
to Win but didn’t reaffiliate with the AFL-CIO (the Carpenters).
What remained of the Clothing and Textile Workers became part of SEIU,
so today, they’re back in the Fed, too.

HISTORIANS HAVE NO DIFFICULTY EXPLAINING why the AFL split in 1935,
when the Mine Workers, the Clothing Workers, and a few other smaller
unions left to form the CIO. The renegades left because they believed,
correctly, that labor could organize entire factories, indeed, entire
mega-manufacturing corporations like General Motors and U.S. Steel,
that were the commanding heights of the national economy, through
plant-wide and industry-wide organizing. The AFL, by contrast,
insisted its members stick with organizing by distinct trades: the
carpenters here, the welders there, and so on. The unions that stuck
with the AFL were composed chiefly of skilled trade workers,
disproportionately of native birth (which by then meant chiefly white
Protestant and Irish Catholic stock), while the workers who soon
flooded into the CIO were both more diverse and held jobs (such as
those on assembly lines) that were thought to demand fewer skills. The
gap between the AFL and the CIO was easily understood.

But what was the Change to Win split all about? It was rooted in the
belief that labor needed to organize or it would die, but that was
also at the core of the Sweeney ascendency, for which the activists
who went on to found Change to Win had assiduously worked in 1995.
When that ascendancy failed to arrest labor’s descent, the younger
generation of organizers (and Wilhelm, Raynor, and Stern were all
children of the ’60s) split with their elders, even though the
Sweeney regime at the AFL-CIO was itself filled with children of the
’60s—and some of the spirit of the ’60s—too.

Labor’s problem was, and labor’s problem remains, that labor law
has been so degraded by business and conservative interests that
employers can still fire workers at the slightest sign that they may
be thinking about going union, and despite the illegality of such
firings, there’s no effective penalty for this form of lawbreaking.
That problem has only been highlighted in recent years by the
organizing successes of such professional workers as university
teaching assistants, museum docents, think-tank researchers, hospital
physicians, and orchestra musicians—that is, by workers whom
employers can’t fire because they’re not easily replaced.
Organizing workers who _can _be replaced is still deterrable by their
bosses firing them, which is why organizing victories among such
workers are still very infrequent, and why the percentage of unionized
American workers is still at record lows.

Change to Win couldn’t change that, and despite the occasional
heroic victory by the UAW here, or the Teamsters or the Communications
Workers there, neither, really, could anybody else. American unions
are at record-high levels of popularity today, particularly among the
young, but the law is set against them, and American business and its
elected agents are determined to keep it that way.

So, welcome back, SEIU. Like all your peers, you’ve got a lot of
work—political as well as organizing—to do.

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Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.

* SEIU; AFL-CIO; US Unions; Union Organizing;
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