Kirkland Faces Stiff Battle for AFL-CIO Helm
Touching off what figures to be a fierce, historic battle for the leadership of America’s struggling labor movement, 73-year-old Lane Kirkland announced Tuesday that he would seek another two-year term this fall as president of the AFL-CIO.
Almost immediately, a group of powerful labor leaders representing 11 unions fired back with an announcement that they would oppose Kirkland and put together their own slate of candidates for the AFL-CIO’s highest offices.
“We believe that new, bold and effective leadership is needed, and we believe it’s there to be found,” said Gerald W. McEntee, president of the massive American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the spokesman for the dissident group.
The struggle for the leadership of the 13.3-million-member AFL-CIO comes against the backdrop of a long-term decline in the organization’s political influence and in the percentage of the U.S. work force it represents.
“There’s a real reason why organized labor is taking a beating, and it has a lot to do with the fact that the leadership is out of touch,” said Charles B. Craver, a labor law professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and author of the 1993 book “Can Unions Survive? The Rejuvenation of the American Labor Movement.”
Craver noted that organized labor today represents fewer than one out of every six American workers, down from more than one out of three in the mid-1950s. Meanwhile, despite the presence of a Democrat in the White House, the AFL-CIO has continued to suffer bitter legislative defeats, including the 1993 passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Among other things, the AFL-CIO’s setbacks have been attributed to the contraction of many of the manufacturing industries that once were union strongholds. In addition, many unions were slow to make inroads among women and minority workers, who account for much of the growth in the labor force.
And critics fault the old-line leaders of the AFL-CIO with failing to make a compelling case to persuade American workers to support the labor movement.
Kirkland is only the second person to serve as president of the AFL-CIO, having succeeded George Meany 16 years ago. The professorial Kirkland was briefly challenged by two other union presidents before being elected to the first of his eight consecutive terms, but since then he has faced little public opposition from the leaders of the nation’s major unions until recently.
“There have been backstage rivalries . . . but there’s never been anything this out in the open in the AFL-CIO before,” said Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago labor lawyer who has written extensively about the labor movement.
For a historic precedent, Geoghegan pointed back to the mid-1930s, when the Congress of Industrial Organizations broke away from the American Federation of Labor and formed a rival organization. The groups reunited in 1955, establishing the current AFL-CIO.
While some experts recently have discounted the chances of a successful challenge to the tradition-bound leadership of the AFL-CIO, the dissident group’s prospects are bolstered by the support of the presidents of the nation’s two biggest unions, AFSCME’s McEntee and Ron Carey of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
In all, the 11 unions represented in the dissident group have as many as 6.5 million workers, nearly half of the AFL-CIO’s membership. “When you have a base of 6.5 million people, that’s an awfully good start,” McEntee said in a telephone interview from his union’s headquarters in Washington.
The goal of the opposition group, McEntee said, is to “open up” the labor federation’s decision-making process beyond the circle of union leaders on the AFL-CIO’s 35-member executive council. He said he plans to seek the support of the roughly 50 union presidents in the federation who do not serve on the council.
“There is no precedent for this,” McEntee said. “These are unchartered waters, but I think it’s great for the American labor movement. . . . There’s nothing wrong with a struggle, and we’re still together on the main issues,” such as worker-safety and pay issues.
McEntee, who said he would not be a candidate for president or secretary-treasurer, the No. 2 job, on the dissident group’s ticket, predicted that the entire 35-member slate would be named before the AFL-CIO’s executive council meeting in August. Other than Kirkland, no other candidates have entered the running for president or secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO.
The open battle for the leadership of the AFL-CIO began following Monday’s surprise retirement announcement by Secretary-Treasurer Thomas R. Donahue, Kirkland’s partner at the top of the AFL-CIO hierarchy for the last 16 years.
Many of the dissident union leaders had hoped Kirkland would step aside at the October convention, enabling the 66-year-old Donahue to serve one or two two-year terms while the AFL-CIO coalesced behind a long-term successor.
But in a letter to fellow members of the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council, Donahue said he had been “injected into a debate in which I have made it clear I will not participate. I said to you and to all the members of the council in February, that I felt ‘middled,’ that I was not a candidate for the presidency of the federation, that no vacancy existed and that I have supported and would support Lane.”
When asked at a Tuesday news conference if he would seek reelection, Kirkland tersely replied: “If nominated, I will stand. If elected, I will serve.”
