Labor comes alive: with a new national leader, unions are poised to become more aggressive to make up lost ground in membership and bargaining power - John J. Sweeney of the AFL-CIO - includes related information on chronological highlights in organized labor's history - Cover Story

Nation's Business, Feb, 1996 by James Worsham, Robert T. Gray

Organized labor, its ranks and political power at a low ebb, is rattling its sabers and marshaling its forces for a new crusade to regain the clout it once had in the nation's factories and ballot boxes.

It has thrown out its old chieftains and installed new, aggressive leaders who are pushing a provocative new message: American workers need a raise and a bigger voice in business decisions.

And it has served notice that it plans to organize nonunion workers and push for better deals for those who are unionized. To that end, labor's new leaders plan to use confrontational tactics: so-called corporate campaigns, which involve pressure, harassment, and public attacks not only on companies but on their officials, suppliers, stockholders, creditors - and customers.

"You will see a much stronger labor movement in the year 2000," John J. Sweeney, the new president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, told media representatives at the National Press Club recently. "Stronger in voice, stronger in membership, stronger in perception."

The AFL-CIO and its member unions, Sweeney said, will pour millions of additional dollars and hundreds of highly trained professionals this summer and fall into organizing nonunion workers, getting better deals for unions from businesses, mobilizing voters, and making higher wages a major political issue.

In an interview with Nation's Business, Sweeney made it clear that organizing drives would target small as well as large businesses and would involve corporate campaigns when deemed necessary to achieve union goals. He also said special efforts would be made to organize in the less-unionized Sun Belt. (See "The View From The Top," on Page 18.)

Sweeney made his comments in the aftermath of a major boost to labor - its victory in December in a 69-day strike by more than 32,500 machinists at Boeing plants in Washington, Oregon, and Kansas. The win was a welcome relief to labor officials after some high-profile setbacks in 1995.

Machinists at Boeing had struck for higher wages and job-security contract provisions. With orders from major airlines for new planes, Boeing saw a need to settle. In the end, the union got most of what it wanted: pay raises and bonuses, a commitment by Boeing to retain workers whose jobs were outsourced, and some changes the union had sought in health insurance.

Sweeney and the new AFL-CIO leadership had led rallies in Everett, Wash., and Wichita, Kan., and the settlement was the first major union victory on Sweeney's watch. It was also in an industry - aerospace - that is seen as important to the nation's competitiveness worldwide.

Another union victory in a highly critical and competitive global industry - telecommunications - was achieved in mid-January in a preliminary, partial settlement. The Communications Workers of America used a corporate campaign in lieu of a strike against Bell Atlantic Corp., which has operations in the Middle Atlantic states, to win greater job security for its members. The union's main weapon was media advertising it purchased criticizing the company.

These victories were in sharp contrast to the major union setbacks in the Caterpillar Inc. strike in Illinois - in which workers went back to their jobs after 17 months, having accomplished little if anything - and the Detroit newspaper strike, which continues even though the union has failed to stop the two dailies from publishing. The newspapers have continued operations with 1,400 replacement workers.

Business, of course, views labor's tough talk as counterproductive. "This new combative stance by labor isn't what the country needs, isn't what business needs, and isn't what labor needs," says R. Bruce Josten, senior vice president for membership policy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Sweeney was elected head of the 13-million-member AFL-CIO in October after insurgents forced out Lane Kirkland, who had held the top post for 16 years. Kirkland had failed to rally labor as union membership dwindled and strikes became less effective.

Those unhappy with Kirkland turned to Sweeney. As head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) for 15 years, Sweeney had seen its membership nearly double - partly through confrontational organizing campaigns such as Justice for Janitors, waged in various cities and centered on demands for higher wages - even as overall union rolls were shrinking. Sweeney's union grew from 625,000 members to about 1.1 million, while the total number of union members in the U.S. work force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fell from about 20 million to 16.7 million from 1980 to 1994.

Now, Sweeney is bringing his aggressiveness to bear at the AFL-CIO'S highest level. "America needs a raise," Sweeney says in his speeches, arguing that wages have not kept pace with the U.S. economic expansion of the 1990s. "Profits are up, productivity is up, executive compensation is up, and the stock market is up; worker wages and health benefits and pensions are down."