Interesting History Here... 'Lack of Organizing Deters AFL-CIO' - ProgressivePopulist

[WillyT]

Lack of Organizing Deters AFL-CIO
By Bill Johnston - Progressive Populist
Bill Johnston is a retired staff organizer of the United Food and Commercial Workers. He is a member of the National Writers Union (Pacific Northwest Chapter)

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In 1972 George Meany, the longtime president of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO), was interviewed by Haynes Johnson, Pulitzer Prize winner at the Washington Post, for his book, The Unions.

Union membership had been at 35% of the American workforce in 1955 but was dropping by 1972. Concentrated in the ten largest industrial states, the number of union workers remained weak in the growing South and Southwest. “Some labor leaders see the entire future of unions threatened,” Johnson wrote -- but he found organizing was not a priority concern in the executive offices of the AFL-CIO leadership..

“To me, it doesn't mean a thing,” Meany told him. “I have no concern about it.” Lane Kirkland, the AFL-CIO's secretary, who was to succeed Meany in 1977, was of the same frame of mind. Kirkland added that he didn't care if any more American workers joined unions – that he had no “ideological compulsion to organize them ...”

For 30 years I worked for unions, both in the private and public sectors, and those quotes from Meany and Kirkland go a long way to explain a great deal as to why private-sector union membership is now at only 7% of the American workforce. Also why public employees are in the dire predicament they are in today -- especially in Wisconsin. With few exceptions this lack of interest in organizing was the attitude held by the hierarchy of union leadership that I saw throughout the 30 years I worked on staff -- often as an organizer.

Organized labor still functions on a model developed in the 1890s and used to organize in the 1930s. Over the last 70 years American unions have failed to evolve as organizations.

They have failed to educate their members; failed to educate and reach out to the public; failed to develop a popular culture showing Americans how union collective bargaining moves everyone up the economic ladder; failed to improve the workplace benefits that were basically in place by the late 1950s and finally they have failed to see their membership as the only real power they possess and work to develop that power.

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Link: http://populist.com/11.6.johnston.html

:kick:

Plus...

Early in December 1971 35 businessmen – all chairmen or presidents of a cross-section of America's largest corporations -- attended a private dinner in New York of what came to be called “the Labor Law Study Group.” The group met to discuss a plan they all agreed on: how to destroy any union economic or political power.

That was 40 years ago.