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An Essay/Review on:
A Country That Works: Getting America
Back on Track
by Andy Stern,
(New York: Free Press) 2006, 212 pp. $24.
America Needs a Raise: Fighting For
Economic Security and Social Justice,
by John Sweeney (New York: Houghton Mifflin) 1996, 167
pp. $18.95.
* * *
* *
From Monsignor Sweeney to Reverend Andy
Labor’s“New” Agenda For
America Hasn’t Improved With Age
Book Reviews by Steve Early As politicians
pursued voters and media coverage around the country
this Fall, labor’s most voluble and highly visible
national spokesperson was out on the hustings as well. A
non-candidate himself —at least for now—Service
Employees President Andy Stern had a new book to
promote. It is packaged very much like the “campaign
bios” manufactured every four years to burnish the image
of Democrats and Republicans seeking the presidential
nomination of their respective parties. Stern’s
A Country That Works also reminds one of John
Sweeney’s 1996 manifesto,
America Needs a Raise, which landed in
bookstores during the AFL-CIO president’s own brief
ascendancy as a widely-acclaimed “new voice” for labor.
To find out how the
political thinking (and book marketing) of American
labor leadership has evolved—for better or worse—during
the intervening decade, it’s worth examining these two
slim volumes. Laid side-by-side, they shed considerable
light on the over-lapping SEIU careers of the authors
and the dramatic developments, within the AFL-CIO, that
gave birth to their respective ghost-assisted literary
efforts. (The title page of America Needs a Raise
credits former White House speech-writer David Kusnet as
Sweeney’s main wordsmith; meanwhile,
A Country That Works buries its “special
acknowledgment” of Jody Franklin’s “excellent writing
and editing skills” on page 201).
Each book appeared
in the wake of a high-profile AFL-CIO shake-up.
Sweeney’s collage of childhood memories from the Bronx,
old SEIU war stories, public policy prescriptions, and a
modest account of his 1995 bid for the federation
presidency was published when he was still basking in
the glow of that election victory—the first by a
non-incumbent in 100 years. Aided by a chorus of outside
academic boosters (in Scholars, Artists, and Writers for
Social Justice), Sweeney’s PR handlers were trying to
position him as the main public spokesperson for “social
movement unionism” in America. He was a labor leader who
would not shun “appearances on national
television”--like his pallid, conservative predecessor
Lane Kirkland often did, leaving labor without “a strong
voice and a visible presence in the debates of the
1990s.”
Instead, as the
head of a new, media-savvy AFL-CIO, Sweeney received
rave reviews from leading figures in politics, feminism,
the civil rights movement, and academia. The author of America
Needs a Raise was hailed as a “visionary
leader” (Cornell West) who, “with the audacity and
diligence of FDR during the Hundred Days, has
transformed American labor” (Daniel Patrick Moynihan).
After Sweeney’s election, progressives looked to “a
newly militant labor movement for a larger vision of
American business than the next quarter’s stock market
index” (Betty Friedan) and “a compelling strategy for
how working Americans can restore not only their living
standards, but also the traditional American values of
work, family, and community” (Marian Wright Edelman).
Said Julian Bond: “Anyone concerned with economic
democracy and social justice must read ‘America Needs a
Raise.”
Reading Sweeney’s
book jacket copy ten years later, it’s hard to
recognize, in such descriptions, the self-effacing
septuagenarian still hanging on to the AFL-CIO
presidency long past his promised retirement age. Nearly
73 and quite passé, Sweeney looks more like an old
Irish-Catholic priest than a “labor militant” or
“visionary.” He is, in fact, presiding--with greatly
reduced visibility (but still very high pay)--over a
much-diminished flock. Five million of his former
parishioners belong to another congregation.
The media spotlight
has shifted accordingly to the flashy “mega-church”
minister down the block who spirited them away and
replaced Monsignor Sweeney, on the public stage, as
America’s most-quoted labor leader. A number of
union-oriented intellectuals have left Sweeney’s parish
as well, moving to new pews in the amen corner of Change
To Win (CTW). According to one of them, best-selling
author Barbara Ehrenreich, “the future of the American
dream” is now “in the hands of Andy Stern,” who has a
“vital agenda for change” and “a bold vision for reform”
(as opposed to Sweeney’s now dusty, decade-old sermons).
Stern first seized
the microphone (not to mention the blogosphere) from his
one-time mentor during the 2003-4 media campaign that
accompanied his creation of a “New Unity Partnership”
with Bruce Raynor and John Wilhelm, leaders of the
yet-to-be married UNITE and HERE. Round Two of Stern’s
PR blitz unfolded in 2005, when NUP morphed into CTW,
its affiliated unions stopped paying dues to the
AFL-CIO, and then boycotted the federation’s national
convention. Stern’s resulting “fifteen minutes” of
personal fame and media acclaim—in outlets ranging from
Business Week and Fortune to 60 Minutes
and the Sunday Times Magazine—has been very long
indeed. It was recently extended further via the fall
2006 nationwide book tour that followed publication of
his new book.
Stern’s superior
preaching style notwithstanding, his emergence as
labor’s premier pitchman in the marketplace of ideas
leaves us with a serious “messaging” problem. The SEIU
president may be a much better “talking head” than
Sweeney--on TV, radio, in print, or in person. But his
recent statements, on a number of political and economic
issues, have aroused growing concern among progressive
trade unionists, including members of his own union. His
conservative pronouncements—usually made in front of
business audiences and dressed up as creative new
thinking--don’t improve with repetition or further
elaboration between hard-covers. In Stern’s book, CTW’s
demand—“Make Work Pay”—comes across as a cosmetic
re-working of Sweeney’s mantra, “America Needs A Raise.”
Furthermore, Stern’s “bold unassailable plan” to “get
America back on track” actually falls short of Sweeney’s
1996 proposals on similar topics—workers rights,
retirement, health care, education, and taxation. And
definitely missing from Stern’s laundry list of “vital
reforms” is the warm and fuzzy feel of Sweeney’s
valiant defense of the post-war “social compact” and the
good old days of the Great Society and New Deal.
According to Stern,
“anyone who might long wistfully for a return to the New
Deal policies of 1935 should consider that America today
is as far from the time of FDR as the New Deal was from
Abe Lincoln and the Civil War.” Instead of such liberal
nostalgia or the politics of Democratic Socialists of
America—a group that still counts Sweeney as a
member—Stern serves up a brand of futurism that’s just
plain fuzzy. Inspired by the likes of Alvin and Heidi
Toffler, A Country that Works is a breathless
celebration of “change processes” in politics,
government, the economy, and unions, which fails to
assess the actual positive or negative impact of
particular changes on workers or society. (The word
“change” itself is used 50 times in just 212 pages; in
the mind of the author, it clearly denotes something
good coming down the pike—regardless of content or
circumstances.). In the church of Reverend Andy,
Americans are urged to “[P]ause and take the time to
appreciate the glory and grandness of our future.
Humanity faces a quantum leap forward, and we are
engaged in building a remarkable new civilization from
the ground up. No single generation has ever been
offered such possibilities; we should seize them with
passion and zest.”
Not surprisingly in
light of such passages, Stern has been communing lately
with a fellow “change agent” named Newt Gingrich. The
author reports that he and Change To Win chairperson
Anna Burger were “pleasantly surprised” by the former
House Speaker’s thoughtfulness and candor,” plus his
“smart, contemplative demeanor,” when they all met at a
Republican Main Street Partnership meeting in Chicago
where the speakers included Burger.
“As only a history
scholar can, Gingrich talked in broad historical terms
of the change-making process, the challenges facing our
country, and America’s need to confront its future….he
argued [that] labor would have to continually rethink
its role in the changing economy—specifically, how it
could deliver increased productivity and better services
to its members and employers. Gingrich’s thinking
reinforced much of my own….” (emphasis added)
As a personal
memento of their conversations, Gingrich presented Stern
with “a set of diagrams he called ‘Designing
Transformational Change” that communicate twelve steps
to promote organizational transformation.” Newt
embellished this “parting gift” with “his handwritten
comments” on the diagrams and “followed up” by later
sending his new friend, Andy, “a personally annotated
edition of the Tofflers’ Creating A New Civilization.”
The U.S. Army is
among those civilizing institutions that Gingrich,
joined by Stern, applaud for “consciously and
continuously conforming itself to changing times.” In
their talks, “Gingrich cited his respect” for “the
army’s management” because the military “accepts change
as a fact of life and has worked for decades to reshape
itself to meet changing security needs. It actually
integrates change into its planning process.”
Stern notes that
some Americans wonder, nevertheless, whether the army
should still be blamed for the quagmire in Iraq.
Drawing on the insights of Gingrich, Stern believes
instead “that our political leaders rushed to war in
Iraq without a plan and enough troops to secure
peace—over the objections of many in the military, as
some former generals have revealed.” He concludes
reassuringly that, “If the Iraq fiasco was the outcome
of ineffective planning, then my guess is the army will
evaluate their planning process and make any
necessary”—yes, you guessed it—“changes.”
This example of
what Stern’s book jacket copy calls his “eye-opening
analysis” would be fairly eye-opening even if the
paragraph above wasn’t the only reference to “Iraq”
cited in the book’s index. One would think that a $2
billion a week war—not to mention America’s costly
post-9/11 military build-up—might warrant a little more
discussion in a book that purports to explain what’s
“Wrong With a Country That Helps the Rich Get Richer
While Most Americans Get The Squeeze.”
To be fair,
Sweeney’s book, “America Needs a Raise,” was equally
silent on the price that workers pay for the disastrous
foreign and military policies of their own government.
Yet, the AFL-CIO president wasn’t writing ten years ago
as the head of a union, which, like Stern’s, has adopted
an anti-war resolution at its most recent national
convention and then allied itself, through many of its
local affiliates, with U.S. Labor Against The War. Like
Stern, Sweeney indicts “mean- spirited business
leaders”—not capitalism or the military-industrial
complex—for making life worse for millions of Americans.
Both denounce corporate downsizing, the erosion of
job-based benefits and employment security, and the
resulting wage stagnation, income inequality, and longer
working hours, which take a terrible toll on family life
and opportunities for civic engagement among working
people.
The root cause of
such problems, as Sweeney defines it, is “corporate
America doing business the wrong way.” Too many
shortsighted employers are meeting “the challenge of
global competition” by taking the “low-wage path” of
“driving down wages and living standards.” Instead of
“cooperating with workers and improving the quality of
goods and services,” they’ve “decided to break the
postwar social contract” and utilize anti-union
decisions by National Labor Relations Board to undermine
labor and destroy the Wagner Act’s Depression era
“promise of industrial democracy.”
Enter Andy
Stern—after a decade of failed efforts by Sweeney to
“save our bosses from themselves.” In “A Country That
Works,” Stern uses management consultant jargon to offer
up a series of “twenty-first century policies to ensure
America’s continued economic leadership” based on “a
bold future-oriented vision…new ideas and a thoughtful,
collaborative, nonpartisan approach.” To entice
management into the same “value-added” partnerships
proposed more sparingly by Sweeney (but apparently
spurned by employers after they perused America Needs a
Raise), Stern distances himself from the “class struggle
mentality” that persists in some unions today. According
to the author, rank-and-file wariness about
labor-management cooperation is a counter-productive
“vestige of an earlier, rough era of industrial unions.”
Stern believes that
all of organized labor should, like his own union, be
more appreciative of “employers’ competitive reality and
attempt to create or add value to their business models”
as “a basic operating principle.” In the apt description
of political consultant Donna Brazile, Stern favors a
“strategy of adaptive cooperation.” (In essence, if you
can’t beat them, join them.) As examples, he touts SEIU
“alliances with hospitals and nursing home owners” on
both coasts, with Kaiser Permanente in California and
the health care industry in New York. To forge the
Kaiser partnership, angry union members first had to
shed their attachment to “their own ineffective strikes
and concession bargaining;” In N.Y., SEIU 1199’s
“partnership approach challenged many leaders’
traditional ‘class struggle’ attitudes about employers,”
a hang-up they’ve apparently overcome while lobbying
together for increased public funding and, more
recently, hospital consolidation and closings.
To build “new
relationships with public employers in the South and
Southwest,” SEIU introduces what Stern calls “the ‘IQ’
program—innovation and quality,” while “eschewing
traditional collective-bargaining issues and focusing on
improving public services.” In states like North
Carolina, Mississippi, or Texas, it’s not hard to eschew
“traditional collective bargaining” because it doesn’t
exist in the public sector. One would think that the
real challenge there—which has been taken up by other
unions—is to build membership organizations that can
fight for and eventually win collective bargaining
rights for government employees. While it’s always a
good idea to link demands for better pay and benefits to
public service improvements funded through progressive
taxation, Stern’s focus, as usual, is on forging SEIU’s
own institutional “relationships with employers.” Worker
activity, community engagement, and political action
that might actually change the balance of power between
labor and management—all get short shrift, unless “the
power of persuasion” fails, and the union must then
resort to the “persuasion of power.”
As Stern admits,
most employers are not being persuaded, either way, that
they need a union “partner” (proving that Jesse
Jackson-style alliterative rhetoric only gets you so
far—even if you’re Jesse!) As part of his peripatetic
speech making to human resources managers and open
letter writing to Fortune 500 CEOs, Stern has been
promoting the idea that “responsible unions” should
embrace outsourcing. At the PC Forum, a national meeting
of high-tech entrepreneurs, he “shared a variation on
the outsourcing concept,” providing “a straightforward
intellectual argument that made solid business
sense--but there were no takers…” Much to Stern’s
dismay, “changing non-union employers attitudes…remains
a monumental challenge. They often don’t believe that
partnerships with unions are possible, nor are they able
to overcome their prejudices against unions in order to
establish a different kind of relationship that could
add value to their bottom line.”
A Country that
Works contains no thoughtful discussion about the pros
and cons of the labor movement “moderniz[ing] its
strategic approaches to employers in order to take into
account their competitive business needs.” The
California Nurses Association (CNA) has compiled an
impressive record of organizing, bargaining, and
legislative success, while remaining a leading foe of
“jointness” in health care. Yet its ideological and
organizational dissent merits only a two-sentence
dismissal from Stern. “Not every union agrees with our
approach,” he writes. “To this day, the CNA still
criticizes SEIU’s arrangement with Kaiser and has chosen
not to join us in the process.” Readers of the book are
left to wonder why CNA abstains—or find out on their own
what the downside of health care partnerships might be
for the quality of patient care or the right of
patients to sue their HMO (something SEIU has tried to
take away from Californians as part of its joint
lobbying with Kaiser).
On the subject of
legislative and political action, Sweeney and Stern
agree that Democrats are often a disappointment waiting
to happen—particularly in the area of worker rights and
job-killing free-trade deals. Sweeney recalls that
labor was extremely unhappy with the results of
Democratic control of both houses of Congress and the
White House during Bill Clinton’s first term. “After two
years in which working people had relatively little to
show from their friends, it is not surprising that, with
their abstentions and even their votes, they helped
elect their enemies [in 1994].”
Sweeney urges
unions to move beyond “politics as usual”—just making
COPE contributions and candidate endorsements—to greater
membership involvement in grassroots political
initiatives. He has few good things to say about
Republicans. Stern, meanwhile, says that “hitching our
fate to….Democratic politicians [has] proved to be a
losing strategy for American workers.” Unfortunately,
his preferred “alternative” is more check-writing and
deal-making involving the GOP. In this vein, A Country
that Works praises Republicans office-holders like
George Pataki, John McCain, and Mitt Romney—all for
their dubious contributions to workers’ rights,
immigration reform, or universal health care. We learn
also that, after his election as SEIU president ten
years ago, Stern:
“[R]eached out to
the Republican Party chair, Jim Nicholson, and SEIU
became an “Eagle”—a $10,000 donor to the Republican
National Committee. It was an expression of my interest
in engaging Republicans on issues of concern to
America’s workers, and I was promised a conversation.”
Stern remained
undeterred when the RNC “accepted SEIU’s contribution”
but never got around to having the “conversation.” Ever
the optimist, he reports that:
“SEIU continues to
keep an open mind and open door: At the Republican
Convention in 2000, we honored several Republican
legislators. We also employ Republican advisors. In
2004, SEIU was actually the largest contributor to both
the Democratic and Republican Governors’ Associations, a
fact that confused both party establishments.”
Nevertheless, Stern
admits, “the Republican Party’s agenda on issues of
work” is still “often not in our members’ best
interests.” In 2004, this was particularly true in
Indiana and Missouri where SEIU dollars helped elect GOP
candidates who then proceeded to strip state workers
(including some SEIU members) of limited bargaining
rights obtained under previous governors--an outcome
Stern neglects to mention. That same year, SEIU also
aided a GOP gubernatorial hopeful in North Carolina who
was running against a Democrat backed by the rest of the
local labor movement. (Fortunately, the Republican
lost.)
While his book
promotes this “independent, non-partisan approach,”
Stern’s true political identity is deeply Clintonite. As
Atlantic Monthly editor Joshua Green recently observed,
"veterans of Bill Clinton's White House often speak of
themselves as having been a ‘modernizing force’ in the
Democratic Party....Their guiding idea was that a more
pragmatic, results-oriented approach held greater
promise for achieving traditional liberal goals." As a
self-styled modernizer of labor, Stern couldn’t agree
more, in terms of both medium and message. “If the
Democratic Party wants to win elections,” he argues, “it
needs a permanent infrastructure--not controlled by the
party’s elected officials--that employs and integrates
the modern techniques of data management, marketing,
mobilizing and new communications technologies.”
“Bill Clinton’s two
[presidential] victories were not due to a Democratic
Party infrastructure but were the result of his
self-assembled, highly talented campaign staff and
consultants, his finely honed, disciplined message that
directly addressed issues of concern to voters, and his
extraordinary charisma and leadership.”
The tragedy of
Stern is the tragedy of Clinton—a fellow product of
Sixties liberal idealism whose similar media savvy,
organizational drive and ambition, personal charisma and
formidable political skills all could have done much to
advance a real progressive agenda, but instead have
always been deployed on behalf of a cramped,
technocratic, and triangulated politics, which has
achieved very few “traditional liberal goals.”
Like Clinton, Stern
is part of that generational cohort shaped by
Vietnam-era campus activism and the McCarthy, Kennedy,
or McGovern presidential campaigns of 1968 and 1972. In
Clinton’s career, youthful idealism quickly gave way to
a pragmatic centrism and the search for
business-friendly policy prescriptions that broke with
the Democrat’s traditional New Deal nostrums, like
reliance on ”big government.” Since Stern became a
Pennsylvania social worker union activist in the early
1970s, after a stint at the Wharton School of Business,
his ascendancy in labor has followed a similar political
trajectory. Like the former president, he sees himself
as courageously challenging official orthodoxy on behalf
of “new ideas.” In the media and before business
audiences, he counter-poses his persona--as a smooth,
sophisticated, globally-minded “change agent”-- to that
of blue-collar troglodytes in the rest of labor who
“just don’t get it,” don’t want to “change to win,” and,
instead, remaining sadly wedded to “class-struggle
unionism.”
When Stern
travels—and he is quite the globetrotter—the results are
invariably path breaking as well. We learn in his book
that he’s been to China six times. On one trip, braving
as always “a backlash from my American labor-union
colleagues,” he went to the Great Hall of the People in
Beijing to meet Mr. Wei Jianxing, the appointed
president of a red company union, claiming 137 million
members, that has shown little taste for workplace
struggle of any kind.
“Mr. Wei was
China’s highest-ranking labor leader, assigned by the
Communist Party. More important, he served as one of the
eight powerful members of the Politburo’s Standing
Committee, China’s highest governing body. Mr. Wei
wielded enormous power over all the affairs of China,
and his importance surpassed that of any labor leader I
had previously met.”
Based on this
conversation and others described in the book, Stern now
maintains—with little supporting evidence—that the All
China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) is
demonstrating a previously unnoticed “willingness to
transform itself to effectively counter the impact of
globalization”—a development hailed by the author for
its “far-reaching implications for workers everywhere.”
In their respective
arenas, here and overseas, Stern and Clinton both
command continuing attention because they represent
“success.” In the case of the former president, his is
based on being the only Democrat to serve more than one
term in the White House in the last 38 years; in Stern’s
case, proof of success comes from being, as his
book-jacket proclaims, “the news-making president of the
fastest-growing, most dynamic union in America” who has
“led the charge for modernizing the ‘house of labor,’
taking unions out of the past and into the twenty-first
century,” while building “stronger global alliances”
with the likes of Mr. Wei.
Within labor,
Stern’s message boils down to this: he and his union are
“winners,” most of the others are “losers”—so, if any of
them really want to be winners too, they’d better get
with the SEIU/Change To Win program. His message for
America is that we need A Country that Works and that
“government, business, and labor must work together as a
team in order for America to prosper in the new global
economy.” In Sweeney’s ten-year old concluding
chapter--“Changing Lives, Changing America”--there’s at
least some recognition that the motor force needed for
major change might be mobilization of the rank-and-file.
“For all our problems,” he observes hopefully, “the
labor movement can still draw on the energy, experience,
intelligence, and resources of more than thirteen
million members”--if working people better “organize
themselves to transform the economy.”
In Stern’s closing
argument for “common sense ideas” that would “get
America back on track,” there’s barely a nod to “the
power of protest” or the role that various social
movements played during the Sixties, “when the winds of
change were gusting.” Nevertheless, the author’s list
of “course-correction reforms” in the area of taxation,
education, health care, retirement, and
telecommunications are said to be “so compelling,
simple, and achievable that readers will find themselves
enraged that they haven’t yet been enacted.” On the
contrary, readers are more likely to end up wondering
how any future Democratic administration might be
pressured to adopt such an agenda without some real big
1960s(or ‘30s)-style gusts of wind.
A Country That Works is thus far less convincing
and coherent as a brief for reform than
America Needs a Raise because it deals so little
with the dynamics of successful, grassroots
movement-building. (Even the immigrant worker upsurge
around the country in the spring of 2006 rates a mere
two sentences). In Stern’s book, we’re left with the
impression that what really brings about “change” is not
mass mobilization, but rather some well-oiled labor
organization equivalent of the Clintons’ personal
political machine. In Stern’s union, not surprisingly,
one finds the same kind of finely-honed message
discipline, “highly talented staffers and consultants,”
non-stop fund-raising (i.e. “doubled dues” because “you
can’t have a champagne union with beer money”) and, last
but not least, a maximum leader (or two) long on
personal charisma, political opportunism, and relentless
self-promotion.
* *
* * *
Forthcoming in Working USA: The
Journal of Labor and Society, March, 2007, Volume 10,
Number 1. For subscription info, email:
subscrip@bos.blackwellpublishing.com
posted 5 January 2007 |
