January 30, 2005
The New Boss
|
|
All
of this makes Andy Stern -- a charismatic 54-year-old former social-service
worker -- a very powerful man in labor, and also in Democratic politics. The
job of running a union in America, even the biggest union around, isn't what it
once was. The age of automation and globalization, with its ''race to the
bottom'' among companies searching for lower wages overseas, has savaged
organized labor. Fifty years ago, a third of workers in the United States
carried union cards in their wallets; now it's barely one in 10. An estimated
21 million service-industry workers have never belonged to a union, and between
most employers' antipathy to unions and federal laws that discourage workers
from demanding one, chances are that the vast majority of them never will.
Over
the years, union bosses have grown comfortable blaming everyone else -- timid
politicians, corrupt C.E.O.'s, greedy shareholders -- for their inexorable
decline. But last year, Andy Stern did something heretical: he started pointing
the finger back at his fellow union leaders. 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.
''Our
movement is going out of existence, and yet too many labor leaders go and shake
their heads and say they'll do something, and then they go back and do the same
thing the next day,'' Stern told me recently. He is a lean, compact man with
thinning white hair, and when he reclines in the purple chair in his Washington
office and crosses one leg over the other, he could easily pass for a
psychiatrist or a math professor. He added, ''I don't have a lot of time to
mince words, because I don't think workers in our country have a lot of time
left if we don't change.''
A
week after the election in November, Stern delivered a proposal to the
A.F.L.-C.I.O. that sounded more like an ultimatum. He demanded that the
federation, the umbrella organization of the labor movement, embrace a
top-to-bottom reform, beginning with a plan to merge its 58 unions into 20, for
the purpose of consolidating power. If the other bosses wouldn't budge, Stern
threatened to take his 1.8 million members and bolt the federation --
effectively blowing up the A.F.L.-C.I.O. on the eve of its 50th anniversary.
Stern's critics say all of this is simply an excuse to grab power. ''What
Andy's doing now with his compadres is what Vladimir Putin is trying to do to
the former Communist bloc countries,'' says Tom Buffenbarger, president of the
union that represents machinists and aerospace workers. ''He's trying to
implement dictatorial rule.''
Stern
says he is done caring what the other bosses think. ''If I don't have the
courage to do what my members put me here to do, then how do I ask a janitor or
a child-care worker to go in and see a private-sector employer and say, 'We
want to have a union in this place'?'' Stern asks. ''What's my risk? That some
people won't like me? Their risk is that they lose their jobs.''
The
implications of Stern's crusade stretch well beyond the narrow world of
organized labor and into the heart of the nation's politics. The stale and
paralyzed political dialogue in Washington right now is a direct result of the
deterioration of industrial America, followed by the rise of the Wal-Mart
economy. Lacking any real solutions to the growing anxiety of working-class
families, the two parties have instead become entrenched in a cynical battle
over who or what is at fault. Republicans have made an art form of blaming the
declining fortunes of the middle class on taxes and social programs; if
government would simply get out of the way, they suggest, businesses would
magically provide all the well-paying jobs we need. Democrats, meanwhile, cling
to the mythology of the factory age, blaming Republican greed and ''Benedict
Arnold C.E.O.'s'' -- to use John Kerry's phrase -- for the historical shift
toward globalization; if only Washington would close a few tax loopholes, they
seem to be saying, the American worker could again live happily in 1950.
About
the last place you might expect to find a more thoughtful and compelling vision
for the global age is in the fossilized, dogmatic leadership of organized
labor. But Andy Stern is a different kind of labor chief. He intends to create
a new, more dynamic kind of movement around the workers of the 21st century.
And if some old friends in labor and the Democratic Party get their feelings
hurt in the process, that's all right with him.
The Old Boss
Earlier
this month, Tom Buffenbarger invited me down to the machinists' union's
training facility on the Patuxent River in southern Maryland, about a 90-minute
drive from Washington. The little campus features 87 hotel rooms, a library, a
theater and a dockside dining room. There was no training going on that week,
and as I wandered the empty halls, I peered into glass cases containing some of
the products made by the heavy-machine operators and plant workers who make up
much of the union's rank and file: a parking meter, aluminum soda cans, a
Winchester rifle, a box of animal crackers. There were black-and-white photos
of the union's past presidents with Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey and Ted
Kennedy. I glimpsed an exhibit meant to celebrate what the machinists
apparently considered a triumphant moment: the Eastern Airlines strike that
began in 1989 and ended, two years later, with the destruction of the company.
It was as if I had wandered into the industrial economy's version of Jurassic
Park: ''Welcome to Laborland, U.S.A., and please be careful -- there are actual
union leaders wandering around.''
At
its zenith, in 1969, the machinists' union was about a million strong, but that
was before robots supplanted assembly-line workers and Chinese factories began
replacing a lot of American plants. The union now has some 380,000 active,
dues-paying members. Buffenbarger told me that the union had lost more than
100,000 members in the last four years alone -- members whose jobs were
eliminated or moved overseas -- for which he placed the blame squarely on
free-trade deals and the Bush administration. Buffenbarger looks like what you
would probably imagine a union boss to look like. He is a big, fleshy man with
a bald crown and ursine hands. He began his career, decades ago, as a
tool-and-dye apprentice. Now he flies around in the union's very own Lear jet.
''We couldn't do what we do without it,'' he explained unapologetically.
Buffenbarger
said that Andy Stern is wrong in his central point about the labor movement: in
fact, unions have as much power as ever. The problem, as Buffenbarger sees it,
is one of public relations and messaging. All the unions need to do to reverse
their fortunes, Buffenbarger said, is to speak up louder. To that end,
Buffenbarger has proposed that the A.F.L.-C.I.O. spend $188 million to create,
among other things, a Labor News Network on cable TV. ''There is no bigger
organization than the collective labor movement,'' he told me. ''Even the
N.R.A. doesn't have 13 million members. But they act like they do, and I think
that's where we fall down. We need to act like we do.''
In
a speech earlier that morning, Buffenbarger took on Stern, portraying him as an
arrogant usurper and comparing him to ''a rather small peacock.'' Buffenbarger,
of course, stands to lose clout if the A.F.L.-C.I.O. meets Stern's demands, since
the machinists might well be forced to merge with other unions, some of whom
might not see the need for a private jet. But I sensed a reason for his
resentment that went beyond simple self-interest; underneath his rhetoric, you
could detect the fault line between an industrial economy and a service
economy, between old labor and new. Buffenbarger sneered at Stern's Ivy League
education -- Stern got his degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where he
spent his freshman year studying business -- and mocked him for setting up a
blog. What Buffenbarger didn't like about Stern is that he looked and sounded
so much like management.
''He's
trying to corporatize the labor movement,'' Buffenbarger said. ''When you
listen to him talk, it's all about market share. It's about loss and gain. It's
about producers and consumers.'' He wrinkled his face when he
said this, as if the words themselves tasted sour in his mouth. ''I think he's
enamored of all the glitz and hype of the Wall Street types. He must be a fan
of Donald Trump. I think he wants his own TV show.''
Re-engineering the Union
Stern,
it's true, is about as far from a tool-and-dye man as you can get. His father
built a profitable legal practice in northern New Jersey by catering to small
Jewish businesses, helping their owners make the jump from corner store to
full-service retailer. After college, where, by his own account, he mostly
avoided thinking about classes or the future, an aimless Stern took a job with
the Pennsylvania welfare department, compiling case histories for aid
recipients. The department's social-service workers had just won the right to
collective bargaining, and a group of young idealists, Stern included, seized
control of the local union.
Nothing
in Stern's prototypically suburban background made him a natural candidate for
organized labor -- for many affluent college kids of his generation, the notion
of unions brought to mind images of dank social halls and cigar-chewing thugs
-- but this was the early 1970's, and when you had a genuine chance to scream
truth to power, you took it. Soon he went to work full time for the union.
Stern and his cadre got the pay increases and better benefits they demanded --
and went on strike anyway. ''Most of us were just playing union,'' he says now,
laughing. ''We'd watched enough movies so we could figure it out.''
Unlike
most union bosses, who rise up through the administrative ranks, ploddingly
building alliances and dispatching their enemies, Stern spent most of his
career as an organizer in the field, taking on recalcitrant employers and
bargaining contracts. In 1984, John Sweeney, then the president of the
S.E.I.U., summoned Stern to Washington to coordinate a national organizing
drive. When Sweeney ran for president of the entire A.F.L.-C.I.O. in 1995,
Stern helped run his campaign; after Sweeney won, the brash and ambitious Stern
maneuvered to replace him as head of the S.E.I.U. The ensuing drama was a
classic of labor politics. Before an election could be held, Sweeney left the
union in the hands of a top lieutenant, who wasted no time in firing Stern and
having him escorted from the building. As Stern tells the story, he vowed that
he wouldn't set foot back in the L Street headquarters unless he was moving
into the president's fifth-floor office. Six weeks later, his reform-minded
allies in the locals helped get him elected, and he became, at 45, the youngest
president in the union's history.
Having
grown up around his father's small-business clients, and having spent much of
his adult life at bargaining tables, Stern had learned a few things about the
way business works. He came to embrace a philosophy that ran counter to the
most basic assumptions of the besieged labor movement: the popular image of
greedy corporations that want to treat their workers like slaves, Stern
believed, was in most cases just wrong. The truth was that companies in the
global age, under intense pressure to lower costs, were simply doing what they
thought they had to do to survive, and if you wanted them to behave better, you
had to make good behavior viable for them.
Stern's
favorite example concerns the more than 10,000 janitors who clean the office
buildings in the cities and suburbs of northern New Jersey. Five years ago,
only a fraction of them were unionized, and they were making $10 less per hour
than their counterparts across the river in Manhattan. Stern and his team say
they were convinced from talking to employers in the fast-growing area that the
employers didn't like the low wages and poor benefits much more than the union
did. Cleaning companies complained that they had trouble retaining workers, and
the workers they did keep were less productive. The problem was that for any
one company to offer better wages would have been tantamount to an army
unilaterally disarming in the middle of a war; cheaper competitors would
immediately overrun its business.
The
traditional way for a union to attack this problem would be to pick the most
vulnerable employer in the market, pressure it to accept a union and then try
to expand from there. Instead, Stern set out to organize the entire market at
once, which he did by promising employers that the union contract wouldn't kick
in unless more than half of them signed it. (Getting the first companies to
enter into the agreement took some old-fashioned organizing tactics, including
picket lines.) The S.E.I.U. ended up representing close to 70 percent of the
janitors in the area, doubling their pay in many cases, from minimum wage to
more than $11 an hour. Stern found that by bringing all of the main employers
in an industry to the table at one time, rather than one after the other, he
was able to effectively regulate an entire market.
Stern
talks about giving ''added value'' to employers, some of whom have come to view
him, warily, as a partner. At about the time Stern took over the union, his
locals in several states were at war with Beverly Health and Rehabilitation
Services, an Arkansas-based nursing-home chain. The company complained that
cuts in state aid were making it all but impossible to pay workers more while
operating their facilities at a profit. Stern and his team proposed an unusual
alliance: if Beverly would allow its workers to organize, the S.E.I.U.'s
members would use their political clout in state legislatures to deliver more
money. It worked. ''I do believe Andy's a stand-up guy,'' says Beverly Health's
C.O.O., Dave Devereaux.
At
the same time Stern was employing inventive labor tactics to work with business,
he was also using new-age business theory to remake the culture of his union.
When Stern came into power, the S.E.I.U. represented a disparate coalition of
local unions that identified themselves by different names and maintained
separate identities. This was the way it had always been, which was fine in an
era when employers and unions were confined to individual markets. To Stern,
however, this was now a problem. If his members were going to go up against
national and global companies, they were going to have to convey the size and
stature of a national union. ''You know your employer is powerful, so you want
to believe you're part of something powerful as well'' is the way he explained
it to me.
Stern
hired a corporate consulting firm versed in the jargon of the new economy and
undertook a campaign to ''rebrand'' the union. He used financial incentives to
get all the local branches of the union to begin using the S.E.I.U. name, its
new logo and, of course, its new color. In some respects, the S.E.I.U. now
feels very much like a Fortune 500 company. In the lobby of its headquarters, a
flat-screen TV plays an endless video of smiling members along with
inspirational quotes from Stern, as if he were Jack Welch or Bill Gates. The
union sold more than $1 million worth of purple merchandise through its gift
catalog last year, including watches, sports bras, temporary tattoos and its
very own line of jeans. (The catalog itself features poetry from members and
their children paying tribute to the union, along with recipes like Andy
Stern's Chocolate Cake With Peanut-Butter Frosting.)
In
all of this, Stern's critics in other unions see a strange little cult of
personality. Another way to look at it, though, is that Stern understands the
psychology of a movement; workers in the union want to feel as if someone is
looking out for them. When he and I walked into the S.E.I.U. campaign office in
Miami shortly before the presidential election, the union's activists greeted
him with hugs or shy smiles. Stern took a moment to chat with each member. ''I
got to have my picture taken with you once before, you know,'' one man told him
proudly. ''You mean I got have my picture taken with you,''
Stern replied with the timing of a politician.
As
the S.E.I.U. was soaring in membership and strength during the late 90's, much
of big labor was seeing its influence further erode. And there were those who
thought the S.E.I.U. wasn't doing enough for the movement as a whole. Cecil
Roberts, president of the mineworkers, personally challenged Stern to follow
the example of the mineworkers' legendary leader John L. Lewis, who helped
build up the entire labor movement in the 1930's. But Stern demurred. Just
running the union was taking all of his time, and what was left he wanted to
spend with his son, Matt, and his daughter, Cassie. There would be time later,
when his children were older, to think about reshaping the future of American
labor.
Then,
all at once, Stern's personal world collapsed. A little more than two years
ago, Cassie, 14, who was born unusually small and with poor muscle tone, became
ill after returning home from a routine operation, stopped breathing in her
father's arms and died. In the aftermath, Stern's 23-year marriage to Jane
Perkins, a liberal advocate, unraveled. He rented an apartment in northwest
Washington and shed most of his furniture, hurling himself into his work at the
union. He is very close to his 18-year-old son, but his son splits his time
between his parents' homes. On weeks when Stern is alone, he told me, he looks
forward to stopping by the Dancing Crab, a local bar, to eat dinner alone and
read the paper. ''I'm in a very transitional moment of life,'' he says.
Often,
when Stern talks about his daughter, he wanders off, without really meaning to,
into a story about a union member he has met somewhere who reminds him of
Cassie, or whose own daughter -- ''someone else's Cassie'' -- is stuck in a
failing school. The recollections bring him to the brink of tears. It is as if
he can't help conflating the fate of workers with the fate of his daughter.
Time has become a paradox for him; on one hand, he has more of it than ever
before, and yet, he can't escape the panicky feeling that time is running out.
''When
Cassie died,'' Stern said, ''it was like: 'I'm 52 years old. How many more
years am I really going to do this? Why am I so scared to say what I really
think?' '' If he were a religious man, Stern told me, he might think that it
was not a coincidence that he was given, through his loss, so much free time and
clarity at the very moment when organized labor was in crisis. He says it would
be comforting to believe he has been chosen for a mission. It is clear, from
the way he says this, that part of him believes it anyway.
Big Labor's Big Brawl
Stern's
plan to rescue the American worker begins with restructuring the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
Since the 1960's, a lot of struggling unions have chosen to merge rather than
perish, to the point where there are half as many unions in the federation
today as there were at its height. Stern argues that this Darwinian process, so
lamented by labor leaders, is in fact healthy, and hasn't gone far enough.
Unions, he says, work best when they're large enough to organize new workers at
the same time as they fight battles on behalf of old ones, and when they
represent a large concentration of the workers in any one industry. Smaller
unions lack the muscle to organize entire markets the way that the S.E.I.U. has
been able to do with janitors and home health care workers. At the same time,
some unions have desperately scrambled to maintain or increase their
memberships -- and thus their revenue -- by signing up workers well outside
their core areas. So the United Auto Workers ends up representing graduate
students, and the machinists represent park rangers. This is self-defeating,
Stern argues; all it does is divide labor's strength.
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.
The
basic strategy is to take the same principles Stern demonstrated organizing New
Jersey's janitors and make them the model for the entire American labor
movement. If only two or three large unions represented all the nation's health
care workers, they could go into a growing market -- Reno, say, or Albuquerque
-- and bargain with all the hospitals at the same time. Labor would be able to
focus on setting standards for entire industries, as opposed to battling one
employer at a time.
Stern's
plan has incited fury within a lot of smaller unions, whose members don't seem
to think the movement needs a self-appointed savior. The proposed
reorganization would sweep away a lot of small unions as if they were debris on
the factory floor. ''Andy is impatient, and he sprang this on his peers without
any discussion,'' says John Sweeney, Stern's former mentor. ''I think he needs
to stand still for a minute and listen to what other people think, and learn
from other experiences as well.''
You
would imagine, given how often Stern's critics have called him arrogant, that
he'd be used to it by now, but clearly the word still stings him. He is a man
who prides himself on his emotional connection with janitors and nursing aides,
and he almost cannot bear the suggestion that he thinks he's smarter than
everyone else. Stern prefers to see himself as a man who gets along with all
kinds of people, whether they drive the limousine or ride in the back. (''I
actually was the most popular person in my high-school class,'' he once told
me.)
During
an airport layover, I saw him open his laptop and peruse the Unite to Win blog.
(Stern actually contributes from time to time to three separate blogs,
including Purpleocean.org, an
S.E.I.U. site designed for like-minded people who aren't even in a union.)
Stern established the online forum so that everyone in the labor movement --
whether supportive of his plan or opposed to it -- could tell him exactly what
they thought of his ideas. They haven't held back. ''Sometimes I really hate
this,'' he said in the airport lounge, wincing slightly. ''I don't like seeing
my name there and people calling me an arrogant idiot.''
Even
Stern's allies admit that his ultimatum to big labor is a little high-handed.
John Wilhelm, co-president of the union that represents hotel, restaurant and
garment workers, is supportive of Stern, and Wilhelm is said to be considering
a challenge to Sweeney when he runs for another term as A.F.L.-C.I.O. president
this year. But he said he disagrees with Stern's idea of merging unions against
their will. Because Stern's union is so powerful, Wilhelm told me, Stern
doesn't always feel the need to tread as softly as he might. ''Frankly, he
doesn't have to be as diplomatic as others do,'' Wilhelm said. ''There's a thin
and perhaps indiscernible line between a person who comes across as arrogant
and a person who tries to tell the truth even when it's unpleasant. And the
truth about our labor movement is unpleasant.''
When
I first started talking to Stern about his controversial plan last summer, he
seemed to regard it more as a provocation to big labor than as a proposal that
might actually be adopted. He talked as if he were resigned to the idea that the
S.E.I.U. would ultimately break from the federation. But as the next meeting of
the A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive board in March draws near, there seems to be in
union headquarters around the nation the faintest stirrings of a revolt.
Stern's ideas have become the basis for an entirely new debate about the future
of labor, and now several unions have offered their own, more modest versions
of a reform plan in response. The biggest surprise came in December, when James
P. Hoffa, president of the famously old-school Teamsters, weighed in with a set
of recommendations quite similar to Stern's.
Increasingly,
the question for Stern is not whether he is prepared to leave the
A.F.L.-C.I.O., but how much of his plan has to be enacted in order for the
S.E.I.U. to stay. It is a question he evades. ''What I won't do,'' he said,
''is pretend we made change. It's not worth having this fight or discussion if,
in the end, you can't look people in the eye and say we really have taken a big
step forward.''
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. Stern's reform plan for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. includes a $25
million fund to organize Wal-Mart's workers. But as a retail outlet, Wal-Mart
doesn't really fall within the S.E.I.U.'s purview. What Stern says he is deeply
worried about is what he sees as the next generation of Wal-Marts, which are
on his turf: French, British and Scandinavian companies whose entry into the
American market threatens to drive down wages in service industries, which are
often less visible than retail. ''While we were invading Iraq, the Europeans
invaded us,'' Stern says. Most of these companies have no objection to
unionizing in Europe, where organized labor is the norm. But when they come to
the United States, they immediately follow the Wal-Mart model, undercutting
their competitors by shutting out unions and squeezing paychecks.
Take,
for instance, the case of Sodexho, a French company that provides all the
services necessary to operate corporate buildings, from catering the food to
guarding the lobby. In Europe, Sodexho is considered a responsible employer
that works with unions and compensates its employees fairly. In the United
States and Canada, where the company employs more than 100,000 workers,
Sodexho's policy is to discourage its employees from joining unions. As a
maneuver to get Sodexho to the bargaining table, last year the S.E.I.U.
resorted to taking out ads in French newspapers, shaming the company's
executives in their own country, where the idea of scorning unions is
considerably less chic. Stern says Sodexho has started negotiating.
Stern's
big idea for coping with this new kind of multinational nemesis is to build a
federation of unions, similar to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. except that its member
unions would come from all over the world. As Stern explained it, a French
company might not be so brazen about bullying American workers if it had to
worry about a French union protesting back home. The point, he said, is to
force companies like Sodexho to adhere to the same business standards in New
York and Chicago as it does in Paris, by building a labor alliance that is
every bit as global as modern capital.
At
first, this global vision sounded a little dreamy to me, as if Stern might have
been watching too many ''Superfriends'' reruns. Then he invited me, just before
Christmas, on a one-day trip to Birmingham, England. The occasion was a meeting
of Britain's reform-minded transportation union. Tony Woodley, the union's
general secretary, flashed a broad smile and threw his arm around Stern when
Stern arrived, after flying all night, to give the keynote address. Two
S.E.I.U. employees were already on hand; it turned out that Stern had
dispatched them to London temporarily to help Woodley set up an organizing
program.
As
we drank coffee backstage, Stern and Woodley told me about the case of First
Student, a company that in the last few years had become the largest, most
aggressive private school-bus company in the United States. The company had
become a target of S.E.I.U. locals in several cities because it wouldn't let
its drivers unionize. ''We keep seeing these things about them in the union
newsletter,'' Stern said. ''And it starts nibbling at your brain. I said: 'Who
are these people, First Student? What's going on here?' And then we do a little
research, and we find out what idiots we are. This is a major multinational
company. They're 80 percent unionized in the United Kingdom. So we write a
letter to the union here, and we say, 'Can you help us?' ''
Woodley
sent British bus drivers to Chicago to meet with their American counterparts.
Then the American bus drivers went to London, and lobbyists for the British
union took them to see members of Parliament. They also held a joint
demonstration outside the company's annual meeting. Woodley told me that First
Student -- known as First Group in Britain -- was now making a bid for rail
contracts there, and his union intended to lobby against it unless the company
sat down with its American counterparts in Florida and Illinois.
I
asked Woodley, who looks like Rudy Giuliani with more hair, why he would use
his own union's political capital to help the S.E.I.U. He nodded quickly, in a
way that suggested that there were a lot of people who didn't yet understand
this. He explained that it worked both ways; his union was suffering at the
hands of multinationals, too, and Stern would be able to return the favor by
pressuring American companies doing business in Britain. Moreover, Woodley went
on to say, if European companies get used to operating without unions in
America, it might be only a matter of time before they tried to export that
same mentality back to Europe. ''I don't expect miracles,'' Woodley said. ''I
don't expect international solidarity to bring huge companies to their knees
overnight. But we've got to do a damn sight more than we're doing.''
Stern
invited the top executives of about a dozen unions from Europe and Australia to
a meeting in London this April, which will be the maiden gathering of what he
says he hopes will become a formalized global federation. He recently met with
union leaders in Beijing too. Most labor experts assume that the Chinese unions
are tools of the business-friendly government, but Stern says he came away
believing that they are as jolted by the global economy as workers in America.
''You have to understand, they're just seeing something new,'' he says. ''These
are public unions that are used to health benefits and real discussions, and
suddenly they're meeting these huge corporations -- like Wal-Mart -- that,
because the executives can make a phone call to someone in the local
government, won't even talk to them. It's all new.''
There
are, however, painful questions inherent in globalizing the labor movement. At
a recent meeting with his executive board, Stern mused out loud about the
possibility of conducting a fact-finding mission to India, along with
executives from one of the companies outsourcing its jobs there. Perhaps that
could be a first step, he thought, toward raising the pay of Indian workers who
have inherited American jobs.
Then
Stern stopped himself and considered a problem. Sure, there was an obvious
logic to unionizing foreign phone operators or machinists: American workers
won't be able to compete fairly for jobs until companies have to pay higher
wages in countries like China and India. But how would it look to workers in
America? How would you avoid the appearance that you were more worried about
the guy answering the phone in Bangalore than you were about the guy he
replaced in Iowa? John Kerry and other Democrats had been railing against the
C.E.O.'s who outsourced American jobs -- and here was Andy Stern, considering
joining forces with those very same C.E.O.'s to make sure their Indian workers
were making enough money.
''The
truth is that as the living standard in China goes up, the living standard in
Ohio goes down,'' Stern said. ''What do you do about that? Are we a global
union or an American union? This is a hard question for me to answer. Because
I'm not comfortable with the living standard here going down. This is a
question I think we need to think about going forward, but I don't think that
means we should be scared.''
The
idea of a global union isn't entirely new. But the concept has never been
translated into a formal alliance, and experts who study labor think Stern may
be onto something important. I realized during our brief time in Birmingham why
Stern seemed ambivalent about whether the A.F.L.-C.I.O. approved his reform
plan, or whether his union even stayed in the federation. In a sense, no matter
how the conversation is resolved, it is bound to lag a full generation behind
the reality of the problem; it is as if the unions are arguing against
upgrading from LP's to compact discs while the rest of the world has moved on
to digital downloads. Even if the leaders of big labor do kill off half their
unions and reorganize the rest, all they will have done, at long last, is
create a truly national labor movement -- at exactly the moment that capital
has become a more sprawling and more obstinate force than any one nation could
hope to contain.
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. Could it be that the Social Security system
devised in the 1930's isn't, in fact, the only good national retirement program
for today's wage earner? Is it possible that competition is the best way to
rescue an imperiled public-school system?
''I'm
not convinced that you can do this from the inside,'' Stern told me at one point.
Just as he is willing to strike out from the A.F.L.-C.I.O., he doesn't rule out
a split from the Democratic Party. ''I feel like we have to do everything we
can within our power to get both the labor movement and the parties in this
country to represent workers the way they should,'' he said. ''And if we can't,
then we have to decide what our strategy is. Do we spend all our money running
ballot initiatives and forget about candidates? Do we look for people to create
an independent worker party? I don't know.''
Stern
isn't the only Democrat in Washington making this case -- but he may be the
most powerful and connected. Among his friends and allies he counts at least
two billionaires: the financier George Soros and the philanthropist Eli Broad,
who is talking with Stern about ideas to reform Los Angeles schools. Stern was
one of the founding members of America Coming Together, the largest private
get-out-the-vote effort ever assembled. His top political aide, Anna Burger,
who is the S.E.I.U.'s secretary treasurer, recently took a seat on the board of
the Democracy Alliance, a network of wealthy liberal donors. How Stern wields
this influence -- and his union's money -- can have a real impact on the
direction of the party.
Other
union leaders can spend their money on Buffenbarger's news network if they
want, but Stern seems bent on leveraging his money against the party
establishment. Last year, while he campaigned as many as six days a week for
Kerry and other Democrats, Stern nevertheless undertook a series of actions
that infuriated party leaders. First, with his encouragement, the S.E.I.U.'s
locals voted to endorse Howard Dean before the primaries. Then Stern gave more
than $500,000 to the Republican Governors Association because, he said, some of
the G.O.P.'s gubernatorial candidates had better positions for workers. As if
that wasn't provocative enough a signal, Stern chose the moment of the
Democratic convention in Boston to remark publicly, in an interview with The
Washington Post, that it might be better for the party and the unions if John
Kerry lost the election.
Stern
told me he had been partly inspired, oddly enough, by the example of Stephen
Moore, the arch-conservative ideologue who, until recently, ran the Club for
Growth. The club, which is anathema to both Democrats and moderate Republicans
in Washington, raises millions from corporate anti-tax crusaders, then spends
it not only against Democrats (Tom Daschle was a prime target) but also against
Republican incumbents who aren't deemed sufficiently conservative. Moore has
infuriated some Republican leaders, who say he divides the party, but the Club
for Growth has helped push the party to the right, putting moderates on the
defensive and making Republicans think twice before they cast a vote against a
tax cut.
Stern
invited Moore to speak at an S.E.I.U. meeting in Chicago a few years ago --
which is roughly the equivalent of Michael Moore being asked over to the
National Rifle Association for lunch. Now Stern has begun to emulate the club's
model; last year, the S.E.I.U. ran its own candidate, a union ally, against the
Democratic House speaker in Washington State, because the speaker voted against
a health-benefits package for home health care workers. The union's challenger
lost -- but only by about 500 votes. ''I think we need to spend more time
running candidates against Democrats,'' Stern says matter-of-factly.
This
approach holds some risk for a union boss. Most of Stern's members, after all,
are lifelong Democrats. Will they be O.K. with a leader who's willing to
entertain an overhaul of Social Security? Would they support Stern if he
crossed the teachers' unions and came out for school vouchers? Stern seems
convinced that his members want new solutions to these problems, not dogmatic answers,
and he is betting that they're more loyal to him and the union than they are to
the party. He seems poised to fill a space -- between the world of organized
labor and the world of social and economic policy -- that hasn't been filled
since Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers, advised the Kennedys
and Lyndon Johnson on civil rights. ''There's been no analog to Andy in the
last 30 or 40 years in America,'' says Simon Rosenberg, who heads the New
Democrat Network and is running for Democratic Party chairman. ''There's been
no labor leader who has emerged as a thought leader as well.''
This
spring, Stern plans to convene an eclectic group of Democrats to begin
outlining a new economic agenda. ''We don't want it to be the same old people,''
Stern told me. ''We want people who might say, for example, 'Maybe
privatization isn't such a terrible thing for people,' even if that's not what
the Democratic Party thinks. Or, for example, 'Wal-Mart isn't the worst thing
for the economy after all.' '' He laughed heartily at that one. ''We need to
shock people out of their comfort zone and make them think.''
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
question that Stern's detractors ask is this: What is Andy Stern really after?
Does he long to be the Reuther of his day, phoning presidents and holding forth
to rooms full of reporters?
''I
don't like politics,'' Stern said more than once. ''After the last election, a
lot of people called me and said everything from 'You should run for president'
to 'You should be chairman of the D.N.C.' And neither of them had the slightest
bit of reality or held any interest for me.'' That Stern can mention this
casually -- that someone suggested he not merely phone a president, but run for
president -- would indicate that he is as susceptible to self-glorification as
the next guy, and maybe more so. But if what Stern really wanted was to run the
world, he could surely spend his nights in more powerful company than that of
the bartender at the Dancing Crab. When I asked what he envisioned himself
doing in his 60's, Stern said, ''I hope I find someone to fall in love with and
travel with and watch my son have grandkids.''
His
adversaries will say this is disingenuous, but, as so often happens in public
life, they may be misunderstanding the human factor that compels Andy Stern.
Everyone who knows him well will tell you that he is driven by an authentic
passion for workers. And yet, at the same time, it doesn't take a psychology
degree to see that he lives these days in a state of suspended agony. Stern
gives the impression of having been shaken loose from conformity by the death
of his daughter and the end of his marriage; nothing can hurt him more than he
has already been hurt, which breeds in him the kind of abandon that can be
dangerous to the status quo.
This
is how history often changes; it's the people who are running from something
worse who are willing to hurl themselves into walls that others won't scale.
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?
Matt
Bai, a contributing writer, covers national politics for the magazine.