The Future of the Democratic Party is tied to labor

Andy Stern wants to change the Unions, Democrats and America [digested below]

... Of course workers had been punished by forces outside their control, Stern said. But what had big labor done to adapt? Union bosses, Stern scolded, had been too busy flying around with senators and riding around in chauffeur-driven cars to figure out how to counter the effects of globalization, which have cost millions of Americans their jobs and their pensions. Faced with declining union rolls, the bosses made things worse by raiding one another's industries, which only diluted the power of their workers. The nation's flight attendants, for instance, are now divided among several different unions, making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to wield any leverage over an entire industry.

Stern put the union movement's eroding stature in business terms: if any other $6.5 billion corporation had insisted on clinging to the same decades-old business plan despite losing customers every year, its executives would have been fired long ago.

...Stern's 10-point plan would essentially tear down the industrial-age framework of the House of Labor and rebuild it. The A.F.L.-C.I.O., he says, would consist of 20 large unions, and each union would be devoted to a single sector of the 21st-century economy, like health care or airlines. Ever the apostle of field organizing, Stern wants these restructured unions to put more time and resources into recruiting new members in fast-growing exurban areas -- in the South and the West especially -- where a new generation of workers has never belonged to a union. His plan would slash the amount that each union pays in dues to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. by half, provided that those unions put some of the money back into local organizing. This is not a small idea; it would, essentially, take resources away from the federation's headquarters, which uses it for policy studies and training programs, and give it back to the guys who set up picket lines and rallies.

Workers of the World, Globalize?

Even if big labor eventually does come to be made up of bigger unions, Stern sees a larger challenge: can you build a multinational labor movement to counter the leverage of multinational giants whose tentacles reach across oceans and continents? The emblem of this new kind of behemoth, of course, is Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer. Wal-Mart has, in a sense, turned the American retail model inside out. It used to be that a manufacturer made, say, a clock radio, determined its price and the wages of the employees who made it and then sold the radio to a retail outlet at a profit. Wal-Mart's power is such that the process now works in reverse: in practice, Wal-Mart sets the price for that clock radio, and the manufacturer, very likely located overseas, figures out how low wages will have to be in order to make it profitable to produce it. In this way, Wal-Mart not only resists unions in its stores with unwavering ferocity but also drives down the wages of its manufacturers -- all in the service of bringing consumers the lowest possible price.

"What was good for G.M. ended up being good for the country," Stern says. "What's good for Wal-Mart ends up being good for five families" -- the heirs to the Walton fortune.

Re-engineering the Party

The more Andy Stern looks at organized labor and the Democratic Party, the more he sees the parallels between them. Like big labor, the modern Democratic Party was brought into being by imaginative liberal thinkers in the 1930's and reached its apex during the prosperity of the postwar industrial boom. Like the union bosses, Democratic leaders grew complacent in their success; they failed to keep pace with changing circumstances in American life and didn't notice that their numbers were steadily eroding. Now, Stern says, Democrats and the unions both find themselves mired in the mind-set of a bygone moment, lacking the will or perhaps the capacity to innovate or adapt. What you see in both cases, Stern told me, borrowing from the new-age language of business theory, is "the change pattern of a dying institution."

The big conversation going on in Democratic Washington at the moment, at dinner parties and luncheons and think-tank symposia, revolves around how to save the party. The participants generally fall into two camps of unequal size. On one side, there is the majority of Democrats, who believe that the party's failure has primarily been one of communication and tactics. By this thinking, the Democratic agenda itself (no to tax cuts and school vouchers and Social Security privatization; yes to national health care and affirmative action) remains as relevant as ever to modern workers. The real problem, goes this line of thinking, is that the party has allowed ruthless Republicans to control the debate and has failed to sufficiently mobilize its voters. A much smaller group of prominent Democrats argues that the party's problems run deeper -- that it suffers, in fact, from a lack of imagination, and that its core ideas are more an echo of government as it was than government as it ought to be.

Virtually everyone in the upper echelons of organized labor belongs solidly to the first camp. Stern has his feet firmly planted in the second. The economic policy of the Democratic Party, he says, "is basically being opposed to Republicans and protecting the New Deal. It makes me realize how vibrant the Republicans are in creating 21st-century ideas, and how sad it is that we're defending 60-year-old ideas.'" Like big labor, Stern says, the party needs to challenge its orthodoxy -- and its interest groups -- if it wants to put forward a program that makes sense for new-economy workers.

The Big Questions

Stern is not the first giant of the labor movement to talk about breaking up big labor or the Democratic Party. Reuther and the United Auto Workers stormed out of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. in 1968 and formed a new alliance with the Teamsters. A few labor leaders, furious at Harry Truman's treatment of workers, followed Henry Wallace out of the Democratic Party in 1948. Neither venture lasted long enough for anyone to remember much about it. Reuther died suddenly in 1970, and the new alliance barely outlived him; Wallace's Progressive Party finished fourth in the 1948 election, behind the Dixiecrats, and faded away. Arguably, the lesson of these and other rebellions is that the threat of building new workers' institutions usually proves more potent than the reality.

The facts of our time are clear enough: a ruthless kind of globalized economy is upon us, and it is not going away. Many American industries are bound to be surpassed by leaner competitors, and the workers left behind by this tectonic shift have little power to influence the decisions of corporate barons whose interests know no national boundaries. More Americans now hold stock -- often in a 401k -- than are members of a union. And the institutions that have, for the last century, protected the ideal of the American worker -- organized labor and the Democratic Party -- are clinging mightily to structures and programs born in the era of coal and steel, perhaps out of fear that innovation would somehow discredit the things they have worked for all these years, or perhaps for the simple reason that no one knows what to do next.

The visionary men who built big labor and the modern Democratic Party met the challenges specific to their moment. What Andy Stern is doing, in his own way, is provoking an argument more relevant to our moment. Can American workers ever be secure in a global market? Can a service economy sustain the nation's middle class? And are we brave enough to have the conversation?