Kirkland Breaks New Ground for AFL-CIO
Ever since he took office almost six years ago, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland has been gradually getting the 13.2-million-member labor federation to adopt policies and practices far different from those established by his predecessor, the late patriarch of the American labor movement, George Meany.
This new direction has not yet significantly enhanced labor’s diminished role as a major power in the nation. Because of the shift away from heavily unionized smokestack industries, union membership continues to drop as a percentage of the total work force. In addition, employers are increasingly aggressive in battling workers and their unions, and the AFL-CIO is still suffering politically from the overwhelming 1984 defeat of its endorsed presidential candidate, Walter F. Mondale.
But after the soft-spoken Southern intellectual Kirkland succeeded the often acerbic former New York plumber Meany in November, 1979, the federation started a series of innovative changes--some notable by themselves and together capable of improving the future of organized labor. Meany, who was president of the AFL-CIO from the time that it was founded in 1955, still ranks as one of the most powerful figures in the history of American labor unions, speaking usually without challenge as the only authentic voice of organized labor. Without doubt, he was one of the nation’s most influential leaders for nearly 40 years.
And somehow Meany maintained his one-man rule of the federation by the force of his dynamic personality. Like Kirkland, Meany had no power to punish or even chastise those who disagreed with him. In fact, leaders of unions affiliated with the labor federation really have more “clout” than the federation’s president because they can pull their unions, along with their dues, out of the federation, which today is made up of 96 autonomous labor organizations.
But just listing the AFL-CIO actions since Kirkland took office shows the distance that the federation has traveled after Meany:
- From the day he became president, Kirkland has worked with considerable success to fashion a truly voluntary consensus among the nation’s union leaders, bringing a unity to organized labor that it rarely enjoyed in the past. Meany could often squelch a potential critic with no more than a scowl. The chain-smoking, slow-talking Kirkland does it with often eloquent logic, and, when that fails, he seeks--and usually finds--a compromise acceptable to him and to his critics.
- AFL-CIO convention debates were almost unheard of under Meany, even on such volatile foreign policy issues as the Vietnam War. Now, affiliated unions form their own caucuses to back their points of view, send their own representatives to foreign countries and, as they did at the convention in Anaheim a few weeks ago, vigorously debate and get policy compromises that would not even have been considered at conventions run by Meany.
For instance, with Kirkland’s help, a compromise was reached on a resolution that allows each affiliated union to decide whether to lobby Congress for or against aid to the contras who, with U.S. help, are trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.
That doesn’t mean that Kirkland is any less passionately anti-Communist than Meany was, but, as one union leader said, “if there is anything Lane (Kirkland) feels more strongly about than his opposition to Communism, it’s his drive to unite the American labor movement.”
- Kirkland’s drive for labor unity includes his effort to reduce the number of affiliated unions and strengthen them through mergers. Today there are only 96 affiliates, compared to 106 in 1979.
- Kirkland managed to bring the giant United Auto Workers back into the federation in 1981 after a 13-year split with the AFL-CIO, and he may soon get--for the first time--the United Mine Workers to join the federation.
- Until Kirkland’s administration, AFL-CIO vice presidents were almost always picked first by Meany and then automatically elected by convention delegates. But in Anaheim, there were open contests for four vice presidential seats.
A third black vice president, Gene Upshaw, head of the Federation of Professional Athletes, was elected, and campaigning has already started for the next election in 1987, with at least one more black, William Lucy of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, given a good chance to get a post in labor’s high command.
- Meany rarely met with local or regional union leaders. Kirkland, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Thomas Donahue and other top federation executives now hold regular meetings with local and regional officers across the nation.
- The AFL-CIO itself has started developing coordinated union organizing campaigns between once rival affiliates. However, such rivalries, while diminished, do continue, particularly in the public sector, where workers are being wooed both by traditional public employee unions and by industrial unions such as the United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers and the United Rubber Workers. Those unions are trying to recruit new members in the public sector to make up for the heavy membership losses that they have suffered because of employment cuts in their industries.
- The AFL-CIO is pushing affiliates to implement new concepts in union organizing such as “associate union memberships” for individual workers who are not covered by union contracts. The associate member can get benefits ranging from low-interest credit cards to group insurance, and the union maintains contact with workers who can form the nucleus for union organizing drives where they are employed.
- In 1983, Kirkland overturned the AFL-CIO’s traditional system of endorsing presidential candidates. Previously, unions would support different candidates and then fight among themselves to get their endorsed candidate nominated by the Democratic Party. Official AFL-CIO endorsement would come only after the major political parties selected their nominees. Now, if two-thirds of the unions agree on a candidate, as they did with Mondale, the federation helps its candidate win the nomination, thus giving the federation more clout within the Democratic Party.
- The federation hopes next year to double the more than $50 million raised by labor political action committees in 1984, concentrating on an estimated 40 critical House seats instead of the more than 80 that labor focused on in 1984. There will be a similar concentration of effort in critical Senate elections.
- Meany strongly opposed mass demonstrations by unions or their allies. Kirkland led just such a demonstration on what he called “Solidarity Day One,” Sept. 19, 1981, in Washington. Several more mass demonstrations have been held since then to show that labor is at least trying to unite its forces with allies on both the political and economic fronts.
Kirkland may not reverse labor’s losses of recent years, but if he doesn’t, it will not be due to his lack of imaginative, often daring leadership.
SAG’s New President
The Screen Actors Guild may not be a better union under its new president, Patty Duke, but it almost surely will be free of some of the harsh internal friction generated during the four-year tenure of outgoing President Ed Asner.
Not everyone has expected such a change. During the heated election campaign that concluded two weeks ago, Morgan Paull, head of a dissident group called Actors Working for an Actors Guild, said that, if the members elected Duke, they would “just get an Ed Asner in skirts.”
Apparently, he was wrong.
In fact, Charlton Heston and other prominent dissident members frequently attacked the liberal Asner during his presidency and tried without success to defeat Duke, who, with Asner’s support, won the election easily.
But now the dissident organization may go out of business because, on many issues, Duke seems to agree as much--if not more--with the philosophy of the dissidents as with Asner’s.
Paull says if “she does the things she says she will, (we) will disband. But we will wait for a few months to see if the (SAG) board of directors goes along with her.”
How do the Asner and Duke philosophies differ? Asner has supported a plan to get the guild to endorse political candidates. When the idea was rejected by a SAG committee, Asner dropped it. He says he was never naive enough to think that the plan would be quickly adopted by the union.
Asner argues that, “if unions are to receive help from politicians, it will come only as a result of the idealism of the politician or as a result of financial campaign help and endorsements from unions.”
Duke, on the other hand, sides with the dissidents. “I do not agree that the guild should make political endorsements. It would just be too tough to get a consensus (on a candidate) among our 58,000 members.” She hardly sounds like a militant union leader.
Another difference: Asner, star of the now defunct “Lou Grant” television series, frequently speaks out publicly in support of other workers and their unions, particularly during strikes. He believes strongly that, in general, unions and workers should help each other in disputes with management.
Once again, Duke seems more in tune with the philosophy of Actors Working for an Actors Guild, which, as its name implies, believes that the union should work for actors and not spend time or money helping non-actors.
Duke, winner of an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1963 for her role as Helen Keller in “The Miracle Worker,” says that her new administration’s top priorities will be the problems of actors and of SAG. If there is any time left, she says, she will discuss requests for her assistance from other unions with the SAG board of directors.
A third difference: Asner never hesitated to air his liberal views on national and international issues, and his critics said he did not always adequately explain that he was usually voicing his personal opinion and not that of SAG.
Duke, in contrast, said her personal views on controversial questions will remain just that--personal and private--except for two issues:
“I will continue to give my support, as an individual, to the women’s movement, particularly the Equal Rights Amendment. And I will be active in the effort to get a freeze on nuclear weapons because of my own feelings and those of my son, MacKenzie Astin, who is now 12 but who for more than three years has been terrorized by nightmares of a nuclear war.”
Duke’s conciliatory approach may end some of SAG’s internal friction and eliminate the dissident faction. But it isn’t clear whether SAG will be a more effective union for its own members or for other workers under her more conservative administration than it was under the leadership of the controversial, outspoken Asner.
