With only 8.2 percent of the private-sector work force still enrolled in unions, why bother to keep track of a bright former social worker like Andy Stern? Two reasons. First, his union, the 1.6 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), jolted the political world last week by joining with the biggest union of government workers (AFSCME) to endorse Howard Dean. (The communication workers’ and teachers’ unions will soon follow.) This may be seen in retrospect as a key moment in the Democratic contest and perhaps even the fall campaign. Second, Stern’s approach–clean, idealistic, grass-roots organizing to bring in new members and voters–may be the only hope for saving not just the Democratic Party but the American labor movement.
Everyone knows it: unions are still fat and calcified. Until the SEIU and a few others stirred, they existed largely to perpetuate themselves and protect midcentury work rules, however asinine. And Democrats are gutless in cleaning their own house. Last week, for instance, a brave New York City Council member, Eva Moskowitz, was skewered for having the temerity to scrutinize school contracts that leave hundreds of classrooms half painted (one union paints walls only up to 10 feet; another the ceiling) and keeps teachers and principals from being fired for incompetence. Much of the problem is structural. The AFL-CIO has no power to tell locals to shape up or to merge competing fiefdoms. So unless organized labor’s constitution is overhauled, the movement will keep withering.
What keeps labor kicking–and possibly poised to grow again–is what one 19th-century essayist called “plunder from above.” President Bush’s reward-the-rich ethos is creating class consciousness among working people for the first time in years. They want health care fixed and money for college. How strong is this liberal impulse? Not clear, but leaders like Stern are trying to capitalize on it. They’re reversing age-old labor positions by championing immigration and organizing once-snubbed low-wage hospital and clerical workers–often minority women–who truly need a union, then bringing them into the Democratic Party.
If Dick Gephardt is your father’s Oldsmobile, Howard Dean is a sporty Miata, turning heads even as it risks swerving into the Bushes. Gephardt has the older blue-collar unions; Dean the newer white-collar ones. Gephardt, ironically, has the more innovative labor proposals–including a “global minimum wage” (varying by country)–and he could better tell his old friends hard truths as president. But Dean’s outsider status appeals to unions that felt taken for granted in the Clinton era. And Dean offers the same organizational energy that fuels the SEIU. “We’re going to make our union shop stewards into precinct captains,” says Stern, who was told months ago by Dean that “you have the power to make me president.”
Even with the opting-out of spending caps (by Dean and, last week, John Kerry), Campaign 2004 will be fought less in the air and more on the ground, less on TV and more on “GOTV” (get out the vote). This is good news for democracy: 30-second ads are alienating; a nice knock on the door or a Meetup.com event empowering.
It’s all about intensity: the GOP made huge strides in the 2002 midterm elections when its “72 Hour Plan” brought its base to the polls. But Bush later lost his one union–the Teamsters–when he blindsided Teamsters boss Jim Hoffa by failing to warn him of an unfavorable decision on Mexican trucking. (Was Karl Rove asleep at the wheel for that one?) Meanwhile the Democrats are suddenly energized, with labor and environmentalists united and “hip-hop summits” organized to register voters. In Philadelphia, an eye-popping 86,000 blacks and Latinos were registered this fall. That got Mayor John Street re-elected and bodes well for the Dems in pivotal Pennsylvania.
It’s going to be Dean versus Somebody for the Democratic nomination. (Don’t count out John Edwards, who has the best pure “candidate skills” of the bunch, though a doctor-versus-lawyer showdown would not favor him.) If Gephardt is the UnDean, the political campaign will mirror the fissures within the AFL-CIO. The Republicans hope that will amount to nothing more than the 1950s (Gephardt) versus the 1960s (Dean). But history is always preparing something new. Andy Stern has heard the Bob Dylan lyric: you’re either “busy being born” or “busy dying.” A year from now, we’ll know which.
