US Labor in the Early Twenty-First Century
Despite the recession of 2000–01, in the early years of the new century, US capital would continue to be favored by a continued fall in the value of labor power. In the first several years of the new century, real wages remained essentially stagnant, while productivity rose by more than 20 percent from 2000 through 2008. The gap between the two grew, indicating a further fall in the value of labor power.58 Union membership, however, after rising slightly in the late 1990s, began to slip again with the recession of 2000–01, falling from 16.3 million in 2000 to 15.4 million in 2006, with all of the loss in the private sector.59 First year increases in union negotiated agreements averaged 3.5 percent from 2001 through 2007, generally staying slightly ahead of inflation and clearly somewhat better than the average worker.60 But with union density down to about 8 percent in the private sector, these agreements had less and less influence on working-class incomes overall. While there was, as always, some resistance in the years before the Great Recession, the level of strike activity continued to plummet in the new century, falling by more than half from 392 in 2000 to 119 in 2009, a record low.61 The most important developments in organized labor in the first few years of the twenty-first century up to the “Great Recession” of 2008, however, were the changing nature of the unions, the increasing centrality of the SEIU, the split in the AFL-CIO, and the virtual “civil war” that exploded in 2009 between several important unions.
The first thing to note is that the unions that faced capital in the twenty-first century were very different from those of the late 1970s. For one thing, the industrial distribution of union members had changed significantly. Unions in traditional strongholds such as steel, auto, transportation, and apparel all lost members as employment dropped or shifted south, or held their own through mergers or absorptions of smaller unions. Union density in manufacturing had fallen from 32.3 percent in 1980 to 14.8 percent in 2000 and would fall further to a little over 11 percent in 2007, while density in a small number of service industries grew, most notably in hospitals, where it grew from 13.8 percent in 2000 to 15.3 percent in 2007, twice the level for the private sector as a whole.62
The industrial shift meant that union members had changed in terms of occupations and demographics as well. In 1978, 65 percent of union members were in manual occupations in manufacturing, mining, construction, transport, and telecommunications. By 2008 fewer than half were in those industries. There were by then as many workers in health and education services as in manufacturing. Women now comprised 48 percent of union members, whereas in 1978 they were less than a quarter. In 2008, while the proportion of African American members remained the same as in 1983 at about 12 percent, the percentage of Latinos had doubled from just under 6 percent to just over 12 percent. Between 2000 and 2010 half a million Latinos had joined unions.63 This reflected the growth and increased importance of immigrant workers in the US labor force and in the unions. If the decline of unionism in manual occupations symbolized labor’s weakening position in the economy, the industrial and demographic shifts brought some new strengths.
The first of these was the rising importance of immigrant workers in the United States referred to above. In 2000, the AFL-CIO abandoned its past restrictionist policy on immigration and came out in favor of amnesty.64 Recognizing the centrality of immigrant workers in its industries, the Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees (HERE) took the lead in organizing the Immigrant Workers’ Freedom March in 2003.65 An even more graphic reminder of the importance of immigrant labor came on May 1, 2006, when five million immigrants demonstrated across the United States for immigrant rights, many taking the day off of work. The Los Angeles waterfront was paralyzed, half the nation’s meatpacking operations closed, and construction was hit hard in areas of high immigrant population such as Southern California.66 Immigrant workers would also play an important role in the growth of the SEIU, which became the largest union in the AFL-CIO as the new century unfolded. Membership gains in the private sector came mostly in growing service-sector industries such as food services, hospitality, and health care.67
The scale of new organizing, however, was not sufficient to prevent overall shrinkage from 2000 to 2006. The number of NLRB representation elections involving new organizing dropped from 3,162 in 1999 to 1,503 in fiscal year 2008.68 NLRB elections had been declining for many years as that route to representation was undermined by employer resistance. A number of unions had turned to pressuring employers for “neutrality” agreements and “card check” schemes with some success. These are procedures in which an employer agrees to a simple majority show of authorization cards for recognition. Although organizing targets tend to be larger in these campaigns and the number recruited larger, the incidence of these new types of “voluntary” organizing tactics deployed remains small, rising from 227 to a high of 420 in 2001 and then falling to 258 in 2004, never amounting to more than 15 percent of all organizing efforts. What was clear was that the general level of new union organizing had been down for some time.69
In terms of growth, the great success story of the period was the SEIU, which had grown from 981,331 in 1995 to 1.8 million in 2009.70 Its most famous campaign was Justice for Janitors, drawing on the new immigrant workforce, which won a high-profile victory in 1990. By 2008 SEIU had gained representation for 225,000 building service and security employees. Some of this growth came from mergers, such as the 1998 absorption of New York’s huge health care workers’ Local 1199, which brought in 125,000 members. Another major source of growth was the 365,000 home and child-care workers organized between 1996 and 2007. This was largely the result of political deals struck with governors in several states, due to SEIU’s generous donations to the campaigns of these governors. In 2004, it had even given half a million dollars to the Republican Governors Association. SEIU was the biggest political donor in the AFL-CIO. In the 2007–08 election cycle, SEIU raised more than sixty million dollars in political contributions.71
In the name of more effective organizing and political clout, however, SEIU president Andy Stern transformed this union into a highly centralized, top-down organization. Beginning with the “New Strength Unity” program in 2000, more and more authority was given to the president while local unions were merged, so that by 2009 57 percent of the union’s members were in fifteen “mega-locals.” Trusteeships, where local unions are placed under the direct rule of the national union, were a frequent tool in this transformation, with twenty-six locals facing control imposed by the president between 2000 and 2007.72 Stern also adopted what many viewed as an extreme version of labor-management cooperation schemes which he called “value-added employer relationships.” The theory being, he wrote, that “improved quality, increased corporate revenues, and increased workers’ skills and opportunities should lead all to more equitably distributed financial rewards.”73 Linked to that is an effort to move away from workplace organization, the battleground of the last three decades, and substitute call centers for shop stewards as a means of dealing with growing on-the-job pressures, a direction that seems to be the exact opposite of what is needed. All of this was presented as the strategy for growth and renewed union power. This model would become increasingly controversial.74
Frustrated by the unwillingness of the AFL-CIO to prioritize organizing above all else, SEIU’s Stern and the leaders of the Teamsters and Carpenters formed the New Unity Partnership in 2003 to pressure the federation to adopt a more aggressive organizing policy and a basic reorganization of the AFL-CIO and its unions. Unable to move the AFL-CIO, in 2005 six unions, again led by SEIU, left the AFL-CIO to form their own Change to Win (CTW) Federation.75 At first it might have seemed as though the new federation was organizing where others had failed. In the two years prior to the recession, US unions were actually growing. In 2007, unions had a net gain of 311,000 members, 133,000 in the private sector, while in 2008 they gained 428,000, 151,000 in the private sector. The largest increase from 2006 through 2008 was in healthcare services, the major base of the SEIU, where union membership increased by 214,000.76 Despite SEIU’s gains, CTW as a whole, after slight