Public Employees’ Union to Rebuild Ranks, Political Clout

The nation’s largest public employees’ union, long known for its political muscle, launched a three-day organizing convention in Los Angeles on Friday that officials said underscores a new commitment to recruit members.

The gathering of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, comes as organized labor faces up to disappointing membership growth and a crushing disappointment at the polls last November. AFSCME President Gerald W. McIntee was closely aligned with former Vice President Al Gore and pushed the AFL-CIO to make an early endorsement of Gore in 1999.

Now he says the union needs to rebuild its electoral clout, promising to enlist at least 100,000 workers for the 1.3-million-member group in the next three years.

“Let’s put it this way,” McIntee said. “We’re the largest union in Florida other than the teachers. If we had 20,000 more members in Florida, Al Gore would be president and not George Bush. Numbers are power in politics. And so we’ve got to build the labor movement.”

Union officials have been talking up organizing since John J. Sweeney was elected chief of the AFL-CIO six years ago. Yet, other than an encouraging blip in 1999, union membership has continued to shrink or stagnate as a share of the work force. Unions represent about 9% of private-sector workers and 35% of those in the public sector.

Paul Booth, AFSCME’s former organizing director and now an assistant to McIntee, said change comes slowly to unions: Most resources are controlled by locals and district councils, not the international headquarters. It can take years for staff and members to buy into the need to spend time and money to recruit new workers, he said.

In 1998, the union increased dues to create an organizing fund, and the international office now spends about 26% of its budget on organizing, Booth said. Expenditures vary on the local level, however, with some spending little or nothing to recruit new members. The Los Angeles district, which recently hired the County Federation of Labor’s former organizing director, Jon Barton, as its chief, is among the most active.

The convention, which runs through Sunday at the Wilshire Grand Hotel, is part pep rally, part training session for about 1,300 AFSCME officers and members from across the country. It includes street-level accounts of successful organizing campaigns, as well as tips to force beneficiaries of political campaigns to be more responsive to unions.

McIntee attributed that political accountability strategy to winning campaigns in Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland, where the union played a key role in gubernatorial elections.

The union chose Los Angeles for its first organizing convention because it is one of the few bright spots in the labor movement today. Organized labor has come off a three-year spate of organizing, negotiating and electoral successes.

Although the County Federation of Labor’s endorsed candidate for Los Angeles mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, lost a hard-fought election this summer, his rival, James K. Hahn, also was friendly to labor. Hahn won some union endorsements, including that of AFSCME.

McIntee met with Hahn on Thursday and with City Council President Alex Padilla on Friday to discuss ongoing contract negotiations that affect about 8,000 AFSCME members, including clerks, parks and recreation assistants and park managers.

The negotiations have been difficult, and McIntee urged the mayor and council to prod negotiators toward a resolution. “We would like to leave here with the understanding that Los Angeles is a labor town,” McIntee said in an address to the City Council on Friday, as nearly 2,000 AFSCME activists in green T-shirts cheered at a rally outside.