Organized labor has been declining steadily for the past two dedicates. Can John J. Sweeney, elected last year as the president of the AFL-CIO, reverse the trend?
EIGHT stories above the ground in Washington, D.C., in an office just a few blocks from the White House, John J. Sweeney smiles at the suggestion that he is dangerous subversive.
It is a suggestion he has heard many times since at least last October, when the Bronx native was elected president of the AFL-CIO. Sweeney marked the day of his electoral victory with a typically militant bit of street theater – an impromptu march up Manhattan’s Fashion Avenue [Seventh Ave.], protesting wages and work conditions in the garment industry.
More recently, Sweeney has earned the election-year enmity of the Republican party, because of the AFL-CIO’s unprecedented, multi-million dollar campaign of TV and radio commercials, criticizing the GOP’s candidates and the anti-organized labor policies of the Rep. Newt Gingrich-led Congress.
In retaliation, the GOP has attacked Sweeney as an evil labor boss answerable to no-one, with a stranglehod on American business. In a newly-produced Republican party video, Sweeney’s face hangs menacingly over a gloomy, anti-business skyline. It has been suggested that in this election season’s advertising campaign, John Sweeney has been cast as Willie Horton, 1996.
To this, Sweeney responds with a disarming smile and a backwards tilt in his office chair.
“Now, really,” he responds, grinning, “Do I look like the devil?”
Perhaps not. Actually, Sweeney, 63, looks like a portly, white-haired uncle, with a pink Irish face and quick green eyes. He offers no apology for the anti-GOP advertising campaign, a campaign which has prompted one Congressional Republican, Bill Paxon of New York, to threaten anti-libel lawsuit against TV stations which carry them. Congressman JOhn Boehner (R-Ohio) has given Sweeney a starring role in his `Washington Union Boss Watch’ policy papers, and Rep. David Funderbunk R-North Carolina), has labeled Sweeney a communist.
Sweeney brushes off the threats as hollow (his pet name for his Congressional opponents is “Newtie and the Blowhards”) and as for the names he has been called, he responds, “they’re only names.”
“Obviously, we’re hitting some raw nerves,” he says, referring to the attacks against him. “This is all indication of how we’re delivering the message and telling the truth about what’s happened in this country and in this Congress.”
His list of “what has happened” is a litany of defeats for the American labor movement – rollbacks in workplace safety rules, weaker overtime laws, the rapidly-growing trend towards hiring temporary employees and the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“Workers are under assault like never before, and it requires us to respond like never before,” says Sweeney’s second-in-command, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka.
“Frankly, we got scared to death,” says Sweeney. “We saw the Gingrich Congress evolve and unfold their program and we got scared. We decided that this was only the tip of the iceberg, and we’d better react soon.”
Sweeney is the first to admit that the American labor movement has been in freefall decline for at least 15 years. With only 10.4% of private-sector employees belonging to a union (down from 16.8% in 1983) the very concept of a labor union is considered by many as obsolete. Sweeney disagrees, and has a catalog of reasons why, including the statistic that real adjusted wages have dropped 11 percent since 1978.
“Do you know who is the largest private-sector employer of people in this country?” he asks, citing a U.S. News &World Report study on the rising trend on hiring temporary workers. “It’s not G.E. or Coca-Cola or General Motors – it’s a company called Manpower Inc., which is a giant `temp’ angry. How can anyone look at that and say that labor unions are not needed?”
SWEENEY’s earliest appreciation of the labor movement took place on 91st Street in Rockaway beach, a working class holiday resort in the borough of Queens, when he was a child. The Sweeney family rented a summer bungalow there, and Sweeney’s father – a city bus driver, and a member of the Transport Workers’ Union under the legendary County Mayo labor leader Mike Quill – credited each summer’s stay in the Rockaways to the progress of organized labor.
“We lived in a walkup apartment in the Tremont section of the Bronx, and in the summertime it was great just to get out to this modest little bungalow in the Rockaways,” says Sweeney. “With every extra day we could stay down there, with every holiday my father got through the union, he would breathe in the salt air and say, `God bless the TWU and God bless Mike Quill.'”
Sweeney was one of three children born to County Leitrim immigrants James and Agnes, who was a domestic worker for a wealthy family in Manhattan. He speaks warmly of a childhood which was shaped by three things – his family, the local church, and the union.
“It was such a different time,” he says. “I just remember there being such strong values from the church and my parents, and those values affected my own education on social justice and issues related to social policy. We had a good family life, in a very modest home, with very hardworking parents. We didn’t have the drug problems or the crime there is today. I remember going down to Harlem on a Sunday to visit our cousins, and you did so without any concern for your personal safety.
“In those days, there was just a much stronger feeling of a social compact,” says Sweeney. “There was the feeling that, if you worked hard, you could get your decent share, you were able to afford certain things, you could get your kids educated. You may have been been poor or a member of the working class, but there was still this feeling of hope.”
Sweeney got his first taste of being a union man after graduating from high school – he got a union job digging graves at cemetery in Westchester. He and his brother Jim worked there, and the job helped Sweeney pay his way through Iona College, where he got an economics degree.
After graduation, he worked for IBM. The lure of labor came calling however, and Sweeney was offered a position with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. He jumped for it, even though the move represented a cut in pay, from $90 a week to $60. He recommended his brother Jim as his replacement at IBM, where Jim remained for 30 years.
For Sweeney, it was the beginning of a long and successful life in labor. He left the ILGWU for a branch of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and was soon president of the New York janitors’ and building workers’ local. After a series of successes, he was elected president of the international in 1980. It was this position which won him the most acclaim within the labor movement – at a time when union membership was shrinking, the SEIU doubled in size over a 15-year period under his leadership.
Of all the labor rallies and picket lines Sweeney was on, he credits as his biggest success the one he was on in the early 1960s at which he met his future wife, Maureen. The two have been married since and live with their children, John (26) and Patricia (24) in the Washington, D.C. area.
But it was Sweeney’s union successes which prompted other labor leaders to nominate him in 1995 for the presidency of the AFL-CIO, an umbrella group representing 13 million workers in 78 different unions.
The group’s first president was the legendary George Meany, who was a regular guest of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and who was very active in American elections.
With the 1980s and the presidency of Lane Kirkland however, the union became less influential. The scholarly Kirkland was more accustomed to drafting policy papers than leading street battles, and his presidency coincided with the years of labor’s greatest decline.
By 1994, Sweeney said, “A majority of the leadership felt very strongly that we couldn’t tolerate our trend of declining membership and political losses, which resulted in very harmful legislation being passed.”
A major hurdle though was that Kirkland retired and handed the presidency to Thomas Donahue, another Bronx-born son of Irish immigrants, who had been Sweeney’s lifelong mentor. Donahue’s detractors charged that a totally new leadership was needed, and that Donahue, a member of the Kirkland old guard, would have to go. Sweeney was nominated to run, and with his activist reputation (Sweeney once succeeded in shutting down traffic on Washington, D.C. bridges during a janitors’ strike), he enthused the AFL-CIO rank-and-file.
“It was very difficult for both Tom and I, and it tool a personal toll on the relationship between us,” recalls Sweeney, his voice growing more quiet as he talked about his old friend. He adds with regret that the two have not spoken much since Donahue’s defeat.
AFTER his victory, Sweeney moved fast to implement a complete overhaul. He earmarked $20 million – a third of the AFL-CIO’s annual budget – to be used for organizing new members over a two-year period. He created new management posts to create leadership positions for women and minorities, as part of his plan to do away with the concept of the labor movement as the bastion of white males. And he implemented his most controversial campaign – the above-mentioned advertising and lobbying effort against Republican party candidates.
Sweeney’s GOP detractors argue that he is leading an anti GOP campaign contrary to the wishes of his own members. More union members voted for Republican party candidates in 1994 than ever before – a total of 39 percent, up from 30 percent in 1990. Sweeney counters that the voters behind that year’s `Republican revolution’ did not intend to vote for what he calls the “radical” policies of Gingrich &Co.
“Our members who voted for the Gingrich people didn’t vote to see their Social Security or their Medicare attacked,” says he. “They voted out of their own frustration, they voted against the establishment. But now, they see what this Congress is all about.”
Sweeney argues that none of the AFL-CIO’s 78 member unions have objected to the ad campaign, and he cites this summer’s victory in the minimum wage battle as a positive result.
“Those ads are very effective,” says Sweeney. “If you look at the minimum wage issue, we went into 30 [Congressional] districts where there were candidates, both Republican and Democrat, who were opposed to the minimum wage hike, and we barraged them with TV ads. Half of those 30 candidates changed their minds, and the minimum wage hike was passed.” Sweeney also argues that being a Republican is not necessarily incongruous to being in support of labor. He estimates that 25% of the AFL-CIO’s members are Republicans. In his newly-published book, America Needs a Raise, Sweeney calls the act of becoming a Republican “the ultimate act of upward mobility.” Still, he admits the growing gap between GOP members and organized labor. “We’d love to talk to some progressive Republicans interested in workers’ issues,” he says. “But there aren’t very many left.”
He’s quick to add that he is not entirely happy with the Clinton administration either, particularly because of Clinton’s championing of NAFTA. “There’s never going to be a candidate we agree totally with,” he says. “You just pick the better one.”
He does speak highly of Clinton on at least one issue – the peace process in Northern Ireland. Sweeney was among the many business and labor leaders who accompanied the President on his Irish trip last winter. “I see a role for labor [in Ireland] in terms of our interest in peace and human rights,” says Sweeney. “It’s unfortunate the way the ceasefire has broken down, but it’s undeniable that this president has shown an unprecedented interest in gaining peace there.”
As regards his fellow Irish Americans, Sweeney laments that many of them, as far as the labor movement is concerned, have “lost their way.”
“There’s probably more Irish in management now than there is in labor, which is not a bad thing,” says Sweeney. “But I think many of our Irish American business leaders have lost their way. We have some of them heading incredibly profitable companies who have very antiunion and anti-worker attitudes.”
Referring specifically to Irish America magazine’s annual list of the `Top 100′ Irish Americans in business, Sweeney says, “I would challenge the leaders of corporate Irish America to remember their roots. The Top 100 Irish business leaders would probably reflect a lot of the anti-union attitudes found in corporate America today, and I would challenge them to reassess that.”
He remains optimistic, and is very proud of the fact that, of the four presidents of the AFL-CIO, three of them – himself, Donahue and Meany – were Irish Catholics from the Bronx. “I guess it goes to show that the Bronx is a very special place, especially the Irish Catholic Bronx,” he laughs.
Although he is not yet a year in office, Sweeney’s strategies have led labor experts to declare an historic shift in union tactics. It’s too early to tell, but analysts have said that Sweeney’s aggressive organizing could lead to a resurgence in the movement.
“We’ve got to think long term,” he concludes. “We’re not going to double our [AFL-CIO] membership in the next two years, but we’ve got to start turning the trends of downsizing and declining wages.”
Behind his desk, Sweeney points to a bronze bust of President John F. Kennedy as he speaks of the need for closing the gap between the highest and lowest ranking workers in society.
“I like to use a favorite quote of his,” says Sweeney, pointing to the bust. “Kennedy liked to say, `A rising tide lifts all boats.’ When a company, or a society is doing well, we should all share in that growth. I’m optimistic that we can start moving back to that ideal.”
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the September/October 1996 issue of Irish America. ⬥
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