Bustin' Out All Over!
Last year, AFSCME was among labor's organizing leaders when more than 60,000 workers chose our union. But there's much more work to be done.
By Clyde Weiss
We did it! In 1998, the International launched an unprecedented effort to build a stronger, more vigorous, more powerful union, and we are achieving that goal: More than 100,000 new members have joined since then — more than 60,000 last year alone — putting ours in the front rank of America's fastest growing unions.
Today, we number 1.3-million-plus. We're getting more powerful with every new worker who joins our ranks — and they keep on coming. In January, 160 professionals and non-professionals at St. Mary's College in Maryland voted to establish a voice in the workplace through AFSCME. Welcome, new Sisters and Brothers!
Although total membership rises and falls from year to year as circumstances change, our rapid growth last year occurred in the midst of an economic downturn and despite opposition from unfriendly employers and government officials. Boasting a bit, that's a tribute to our professional organizing staff and to every member who actively supports our union. It's also a tribute to our many volunteer memberorganizers.
"They add a new dimension to our organizing campaigns — lending both their hearts and their understanding of real-world workplace issues," says Pres. Gerald W. McEntee. "Whether it's the workers who put their jobs on the line to take a public stand to support our union, or the members from other states who volunteer to travel on their own time to help, their personal sacrifices make our victories possible."
But the story of AFSCME's latest growth spurt involves more than numbers. It's about building an even stronger union, gaining bargaining clout for all members, plus political muscle in Congress, and its state and local counterparts. There, decisions are made on issues — privatization, health care and more — that affect our lives in the workplace and at home.
"Workers don't form a union just to win a representation election," says AFSCME Organizing and Field Services Director Jim Schmitz. "They do so to improve their lives, to give them a measure of power on the job."
Coast-to-coast wins
"AFSCME is helping to lead the charge for rebuilding the union movement," says AFL-CIO Pres. John Sweeney. "In 2001, tens of thousands of workers were able to make their work lives and communities better by organizing with AFSCME."
So proud was the AFL-CIO of our efforts that the organization set aside time during its 25th Biennial Convention last December for AFSCME to share our success stories with other unions.
Along with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and UNITE!, the garment workers union, AFSCME is in fact among the country's fastest-growing unions. Many of our new members last year came from four key areas:
That list is far from complete. Throughout the country, Head Start staff, school bus drivers, direct-care mental health employees in the private sector and many other public service workers have joined our family. For periodic updates, click on AFSCME's Website.
We are not content, however. As McEntee says, "We will continue to organize at a record pace in 2002 to help every worker who wants to win a voice at work."
Setting the goal
Adds McEntee, "Several years ago, AFSCME made a commitment to grow our union, and we backed that up with more staff and financial resources. Despite the challenging economic climate, we are making dramatic gains due to our aggressive efforts."
How aggressive? Last year, the International targeted $25 million toward the organizing program and ended the year winning 81 percent of its elections. At the AFL-CIO's convention last December, Sweeney cited our union as one of the few that have actually increased the share of resources they spend on organizing — a necessary step if growth is to be more than a hope.
"We have to devote more resources, combine unions' efforts and redefine our culture," Sweeney said. "AFSCME is at the forefront in all three areas. We can all learn much from their success in 2001."
The AFL-CIO's "benchmark goal" is for unions to devote 30 percent of their resources for organizing. We're close at the International level — about 25 percent — and we expect councils and locals to increase their efforts in the year ahead. A Convention resolution passed in June 2000 raised our target to 30 percent. That was not expected to happen in a single year, but the resolution marked the goal line and started us moving toward it.
Unfortunately, just 24 of the 66 unions in the AFL-CIO managed to increase their memberships during the past two years. Overall union membership, as a percent of the total workforce, dropped to just 13.5 percent (16.3 million members) in 2001. That's down from its peak in 1953, when membership hit 32.5 percent.
Last December, Sweeney warned: "The American labor movement is failing to help new workers organize at anywhere near the level we need to, and this failure must be addressed by those of us in this hall — or the future of this federation is at stake."
Matter of will
The causes of the decline in union membership are many, including employer hostility, the bias of some state governments against worker rights and the downturn in the economy. But unions, themselves, contributed to the problem.
"The boom years, when membership was added without new organizing efforts, contributed to a complacency" among labor leaders, says Lawrence Mishel, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute. That was a serious miscalculation: Union power, in Mishel's view, "depends not on the number of members but on the share of the workforce that's organized, so complacency was inappropriate."
AFSCME's organizing director agrees. "For many leaders in the labor movement, it was a question of will," Schmitz says. "They asked themselves, 'Is organizing something I'm prepared to undertake?' Unfortunately, I think a lot of people answered that question negatively."
Richard Bensinger, who was hired by Sweeney as the AFL-CIO's first organizing director, says the wake-up call came in the form of a decline in union influence as labor's share of the workforce eroded. Even so, he asserts, "I don't think the call has reached most unions yet. I think most are still in denial, making — at best — token change."
No tokenism here
AFSCME, too, had fallen into a sense of complacency about organizing. After all, much of our membership is in the public sector, and membership there had increased, rising from 11.4 percent of the workforce in 1955 to 37.4 percent in 2001. By comparison, fewer than one in 10 private-sector workers were unionized by the end of the century.
What's more, the 1990s were a time of significant growth for our union. More than 29,000 new members joined in 1997, a record for the decade. But growth thereafter quickly slipped: Just 12,404 signed on in 1998. It was time to re-evaluate how AFSCME did things.
At the start of our 1998 Convention, McEntee delivered the bad news. "Despite our great successes, our union is no longer growing," he said. "In the last three years, we organized over 100,000 people. In that same period of time, we lost 104,000 members, so we had a net loss of 4,000" members through cutbacks, layoffs, downsizing, buyouts, retirement and other means of attrition.
But then our president heralded a new era of organizing: "To continue to win our battles, we must change the culture of organizing. It cannot be seen just as a function of the International union alone. It must be a cooperative effort" involving all councils and locals.
The groundwork for change had been laid two years earlier with the formation of the "Task Force for AFSCME's Future." Its call for a reinvigorated organizing drive was ratified at the Convention. The Department of Organizing and Field Services was totally reorganized the next year. Not only were more organizers hired (today they total about 200) but, unlike in the past, they were directed to focus on organizing and growth rather than split their responsibilities between organizing and member services.
'AFSCME in Motion'
The department also developed a comprehensive and proven model for carrying out its new organizing initiative. Essentially, the union embraced old-fashioned, face-to-face organizing, plus a new commitment to build strong employee organizations in every workplace. Dubbed "AFSCME in Motion," the new organizing model and manual, introduced in 1999, was described by McEntee as "possibly the most important document" the union had published.
We had come to realize that organizing, as Schmitz puts it, "wasn't about sending somebody a piece of mail or calling someone on the telephone. It was about knocking on their door, having a conversation about their workplace, talking with them about how their life at work could be better and about how AFSCME and unions could help make it that way."
It was also, he adds, about helping workers develop their own leadership skills, because they know AFSCME organizers won't always be around to achieve their goals.
Carrying it through
"AFSCME has made dramatic change in some of its councils and at the International level," says Bensinger. "I've been incredibly impressed — and inspired, as I've gone to various training sessions — to see the new organizers in the union," he said of AFSCME's International staff. "They're interesting, dynamic and diverse, by gender and ethnicity."
Bensinger says that one of the country's best organizers is Tracey Abman of Illinois Council 31. As the council's organizing director, Abman has worked tirelessly to organize private-sector, direct care workers who assist the developmentally disabled. Council 31 began its intensive drive to organize that industry in 1995.
"We looked at our existing membership in state-operated mental health institutions," Abman says. "What we saw was a slow and systematic effort by the state to close down state-operated beds and facilities that care for the developmentally disabled." The state's solution: turn that work over to the private sector, whose employees perform essentially the same duties. Although they are paid from public funds, "those [private] folks were making half of what our members were making."
The council's efforts have been noteworthy. In the face of strong and unprincipled opposition, nearly 1,000 new members joined last year, boosting representation of direct care workers — both state and private — to about 4,000, which equals almost a quarter of the industry in Illinois. "It's our biggest initiative," Abman says proudly.
Another success story is the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees (NUHHCE)/AFSCME Local 1199. The Philadelphia-based union represents more than 55,000 health care employees nationwide.
NUHHCE dedicated more than 45 percent of its budget to organize the unorganized in 1999-2000, an unprecedented commitment to growth. More than 20,000 new members have joined since AFSCME's Convention in June 2000. "I am a cheerleader seven days a week for organizing," says Henry Nicholas, president of NUHHCE and an International vice president. "On the ground, in the streets — wherever a discussion to organize takes place — is where you'll find me, 365 days a year."
There are many similar success stories in AFSCME. Your council or local may be one of them — and if it's not now, it certainly could be.
Changes ahead
"Our challenge now — after winning elections — is to create a new model of union building," says Schmitz. "The 60,000 workers who voted to be part of AFSCME in 2001 still have a big job ahead of them in 2002 — and beyond — fighting for a first contract, reaching out to fellow workers, finding new leaders and maintaining a campaign spirit."
By acting on their own behalf, he points out, workers demonstrate that they haven't voted to organize and then simply "turned it over to some negotiator to work magic for them."
At the AFL-CIO's 1999 convention, Sweeney called on unions to organize one million new members a year. It was an overly optimistic goal, and he acknowledged that two years later, saying, "We're on track to organize between 400,000 and 500,000 this year." Sweeney added, "That's more than last year, but that's still not enough."
Perhaps more than any union, AFSCME knows the truth in that statement. "There's nothing more important to AFSCME's future than building a larger and stronger labor movement," McEntee said at our union's first-ever Organizing Convention last September. "That's why we're committed to an aggressive strategy to grow our union and continue to build power for working families at the ballot box, in Congress and in the legislative chambers and city halls across the country."
Organizing Figures By State, 2001
Arizona: 31
California: 13,459
Connecticut: 413
District of Columbia: 100
Florida: 1,942
Illinois: 931
Indiana: 214
Iowa: 674
Kentucky: 9,955
Maryland: 3,240
Massachusetts: 1,175
Michigan: 2,814
Minnesota: 1,847
Missouri: 221
Montana: 37
New Hampshire: 50
New Jersey: 1,279
New Mexico: 1,030
New York: 2,753
Ohio: 1,319
Oregon: 207
Pennsylvania: 657
Puerto Rico: 9,459
Rhode Island: 104
Vermont: 14
Washington: 309
Wisconsin: 5,940
