"We have a labor movement dangerously close to being too small to matter." SEIU Executive Vice President Gerry Hudson (8 percent of private-sector workers belonging to unions -- the lowest level in nearly a century)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A133-2004Dec14.html?sub=ARFor Labor, Tough Choices
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, December 15, 2004; Page A33
After the Democratic debacle of 1994, when Newt Gingrich's Republicans took control of Congress, no one predicted that it would be labor, of all the dejected Democratic constituencies, that would subject itself to fundamental change. Yet that's exactly what happened. John Sweeney, then president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), waged a successful insurgent campaign against longtime AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, promising to turn around the labor movement's flagging political and organizing programs.
Now, in the wake of John Kerry's shattering defeat, it's once again the labor movement that has plunged itself into a far-reaching debate over the changes it needs to make to rebuild a progressive, more equitable nation. Proposals to bolster organizing, consolidate unions, focus on battleground states -- and to fund some of these proposals by scaling back unions' dues to the AFL-CIO -- are bubbling forth from a number of unions. Many of these proposals are long overdue; others blame the AFL-CIO for what are really deficiencies in individual unions' organizing programs. But the collective din is a welcome signal that many of labor's key leaders understand the urgency of the unions' -- and middle-class America's -- dilemma.
No union leader disputes Sweeney's success in turning around labor's political program. In last month's election, 59 percent of the union household vote went to Kerry. In Ohio, Kerry got the votes of 66 percent of AFL-CIO union members, up from the 62 percent Al Gore won four years earlier.
The problem is that the number of union members in Ohio, and in the United States, has been dwindling as manufacturing has tanked. In 1992 just 19 percent of voters in the presidential election came from union households. By 2000 that figure had risen to 26 percent, chiefly as a result of the hard work of the AFL-CIO's political program. By last month, though, the share of union households in the electorate had declined to 24 percent. <snip>
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