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AFL-CIO enters survival mode - POLITICO.com Print View

LAKE BUENA VISTA, FLA. — The AFL-CIO is in survival mode.

Over the next six months, the group will engage in an unprecedented self-evaluation that will result in a new strategic plan that leaders say could open the door to nonunion workers and alliances with old rivals.

But with union membership sinking to historic lows and their dominance in Democratic politics threatened, unions realize they must reinvent themselves to reassert their remaining influence.

“We’ve been talking about the crisis that we’re in and the fact that we need to change and I wanted to make sure that we used this process to address that and be honest with ourselves,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told reporters. “Not to play ‘I gotcha,’ but to be able to say, ‘Here’s where we’re doing things right. Here’s where we’re doing things mediocre. Here’s where we’re doing things terrible.’ We have to change so we bring the bottom of the floor level up.”

Top union leaders spent hours in their executive council meeting this week at the Buena Vista Palace Hotel in Orlando, Fla., putting in place a process that will focus on growth and innovation before their quadrennial convention in September.

Their goal: unify unions going forward and make strategic decisions that will woo new members.

Trumka’s comments are a the first time he’s so publicly addressed the need for unions to adapt in order to survive. The self-examination comes as unions face dwindling numbers — the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers last month put unions membership levels at its lowest in nearly a century —and are trying to reassert their relevance in today’s workforce.

They are also facing competition in Democratic politics. For years, they were the behemoth in organizing voters. But now several groups, including President Barack Obama’s vaunted Organizing for America, are challenging that supremacy. OFA played a significant role in the 2012 presidential race and got much of the credit for Democratic voter turnout in key battleground states.

AFL-CIO’s process is expected to include state level officials, the central labor council, nonunion workers and others to create a unified strategic plan.

“It is going to take structural changes. It’s also going to take us trying new stuff,” said Trumka, who was voted in as head of the ALF-CIO in 2009.

AFSCME President Lee Saunders echoed Trumka’s sentiment.

“I think we have to be creative,” Saunders said. “I think we have got to work with organizations that are concerned about the plight of workers whether they are a union, or not.”

Saunders said AFSCME’s top priority is still to organize new members, public sector union numbers decreased for the first time in years in 2012 after taking a hit in many states.

“We cannot afford to continue to lose membership in both the private and public membership,” Saunders said. “We’ve got to, I think, go back to the basics of organizing and mobilizing not on ly our members, but our communities

The decision to bring in non-union members into the process also highlights a shift during Trumka’s tenure at the AFL-CIO to take a major role in legislative issues like health care reform that focus on helping those beyond unionized workers who already have health care.

It also reflects a bright spot among organizers — worker centers. Entities like the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United allow employees to organize in many of the same way unions do, but without going through all of the processes to become officially unionized. It also means that the labor laws do not apply and that these groups do not have collective bargaining.

The AFL-CIO effort is being broken up into three broad areas — changing the labor movement to speak for working people now and in the future, growth and innovation and political action; creating the voice and prosperity for all in the global economy; and building genuine durable community partnerships and effective grassroots.

While the process is likely to extend beyond the union’s convention, constitutional changes to the group’s organization like allowing new ways for nonunion workers to have a more official recognition within unions, would need to happen at then.

Another major plank of the effort is also being devoted to creating a campaign-style operation beyond each election, so that they can hold lawmakers accountable on major legislative issues.

“We’re going to be in 50 states where we can do year-round mobilizing campaigns whether its for elections, legislative process, organizing, or collective bargaining,” Trumka said.

Reinvention is difficult for any institution and in many ways the unions have tried to go down this path before. In 2005, a group of unions, which became Change to Win, broke away from the AFL-CIO in an effort to focus more on organizing.

Center for Union Facts’ J Justin Wilson said unions are hindered further by a branding problem that has been exacerbated in the down economy.

“What we’re finding in more and more cases is employees feel in large part happy to have the jobs that they have and are thankful it’s there and they don’t want to have an antagonistic relationship with employers,” Wilson said.

The mobilization comes as many of the top legislative priorities for the unions — including filling the three open slots on the National Labor Relations Board — have stagnated on Capitol Hill.

Communication Workers for America Larry Cohen was visibly agitated over Senate Democrats decision to not overhaul its rules to allow political appointees like those on the National Labor Relations Board to move forward.

“We will take action against the Senate Democrats like we never have before,” Cohen threatened if NLRB vacancies aren’t filled.

Labor officials said the new mobilizing effort will be on display in the sequestration and upcoming comprehensive immigration reform battles. Trumka promised to put the full effort of the AFL-CIO behind supporting overhauling the immigration laws with a presidential-style campaign that would include phone banks, door knocks, among other things.

Unions have also started to lay out targets for the 2014 race, and plan to focus more heavily than ever before on governors races, according to AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer.

AFSCME’s Saunder said the unions are going to go after Republican governors like John Kasich of Ohio, Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Rick Snyder in Michigan and target “Republican governors who attempted to, or did in some cases like in Wisconsin take our voices away from us.”

Similar to their effort in 2012, where the AFL-CIO spent no money on television ads, the focus will be on using their super PAC Workers’ Voice to build out its ground force where they were able to tap lead activists in at least least 20,000 work sites.

Podhozer said there are close to two dozen states that will have crucial elections in 2014 with races and at least two ballot initiatives already underway in Missouri and New Jersey.