The Dance of Sweeney and Stern: Justice for Janitors

The Dance of Sweeney and Stern: The SEIU Takes the Lead and Divides the House of Labor (full series)
“Big” Labor in1990 | Justice for Janitors | Sweeney Ascends
Sweeney’s Understudy Becomes a Rival | Stern Pushes the Button

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Justice for Janitors and the SEIU

But while the Long Decline amid the Reagan Revolution persisted, Big Labor and its increasingly militant left wing did have a silver lining that might show a path back to power for both of them in close alignment. In the western states, the Service Employees International Union—at that time principally a union of building-services workers like janitors, doormen, and security guards—was pioneering a new sort of union organizing campaign under the banner of “Justice for Janitors,” first in Denver and later, and more prominently, in Los Angeles.

Justice for Janitors was a response to changes in the ownership and management of office buildings in major U.S. cities. Rather than buildings managed directly by owners, ownership firms hired management companies that subcontracted building services. For union organizers, this posed a problem: An owner could not dismiss himself if his workers unionized, but he could dismiss a management company if the management company’s workers unionized and made the management company uncompetitive. Compounding the union organizers’ difficulties, the janitorial workforce in these states was increasingly foreign-born, potentially lacked legal authority to work in the United States, and was seen as unlikely to join and pay dues.

But to SEIU campaigners, led by union president John Sweeney, these workers were ripe for organizing with a new strategy: the “corporate campaign.” Corporate campaigns were fueled by the Everything Leftist ideological posture that Big Labor was adopting, and the were designed to work around the problems created by secret-ballot certification votes overseen by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

In traditional union organizing, the targets and goals of the union are simple. Focusing on workers’ grievances against their particular employer, union organizers seek to secure enough support to petition the NLRB for a representation election and then win the election. In the contemporary era, unions win about two-thirds of the representation certification elections the NLRB conducts, so if the union organizers can get to that point the union is in the driver’s seat.

But this method is not foolproof, especially in highly competitive industries with transitory workforces. Transitory workforces mean that the people who heard the union organizers’ pitches and signed the petition for representation may not work for the employer when the vote is held. And in competitive industries like janitorial contracting, the costs imposed by a union contract can result in the contractor losing work or folding. Because of these constraints, the “corporate campaign” targets higher-profile brands for which the contractor works, seeking to impose union recognition as a condition of continuing to work with the brand.

How does it work? As labor-relations policy wonks Trey Kovacs and Vincent Vernuccio wrote in 2012:

[An SEIU campaign manual] recommends using a corporate campaign to “damage an employer’s public image and ties with community leaders and organizations.” The campaign’s aim is to jeopardize “relationships between the employer and lenders, investors, stockholders, customers, clients, patients, tenants, politicians, or others on whom the employer depends for funds.”

Points of leverage include hot-button issues. Businesses often prefer to avoid emotionally charged debates over racial issues, abortion, and similar political topics in day-to-day business, since they have customers on all sides of issues. For a union, emphasizing left-wing policy issues and threatening to focus more on them can be a point of leverage. For Justice for Janitors, racial solidarity and immigrant solidarity were key leverage points, both to rally workers to the SEIU banner and to convince building managers to agree to a model contract.

Winning contracts in Los Angeles elevated Justice for Janitors to near-legendary status for the SEIU and its leadership, especially union president Sweeney. Union activists since the campaign was won have praised it as a model for contemporary unionism, with some comparing it to the United Auto Workers’ “sit-down strikes” of the 1930s that organized the Detroit Three automakers. Marxist scholar Robin D.G. Kelley wrote of the campaign a few years after it was launched:

From its inception, Justice for Janitors committed itself to anti-racism and mass mobilization through community-based organizing and civil disobedience. Heirs of the sit-down strikers of the 1930s and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, organizers waged militant, highly visible campaigns in major cities throughout the country. . . . Justice for Janitors succeeded precisely because it was able to build links to community leaders, forging alliances with black and Latino organizations, churches, and progressive activists throughout the city.

For left-wing labor activists, Justice for Janitors was a just-so story. Here was an organizing campaign won against the public-policy swoon of Reagan-Bush, in a “racialized” community, by uniting with left-wing allies, and without the ugly ideological compromises of the Gompers-Meany-Kirkland eras. It even featured Gandhi-MLK style satyagraha, as police broke up a nonviolent 1990 demonstration in Century City. The Left wot won it, and the Left believed that bringing the Justice for Janitors model to other industries and other regions would win the future for Big Labor and an American left tired of making deals with right-deviationists.

Exit Kirkland

Organized labor entered 1995 in a state of flux. While in 1992 Bill Clinton had broken a three-term Republican streak in the White House, two years later Newt Gingrich and his Republicans broke Democrats’ 40-year hammerlock on the majority of the U.S. House of Representatives, limiting President Clinton’s ability to make legislative changes to benefit union organizing. Worse for Big Labor, Clinton had completed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), going against labor’s demands.

And AFL-CIO chief Lane Kirkland was old. President Clinton reportedly offered to pension him off with the post of U.S. Ambassador to Poland in honor of his work with the anticommunist Solidarity trade union of then-Polish President Lech Walesa. Kirkland turned Clinton down. He intended to run for another term heading the union federation.

But he had problems on his left wing. Gerald McEntee—president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) government worker union—announced in May that he and 10 other union leaders would not support Kirkland’s re-election. Leftist union leaders resented Kirkland’s foreign efforts, which often supported anticommunist movements in alignment with the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations’ foreign policies.

They also blamed him for failing to sufficiently respond to the Long Decline, highlighting his absence during the debate on unsuccessful legislation to compel employers to dismiss replacement workers hired during a strike in the first two years of the Clinton administration. (Under the National Labor Relations Act rules prevailing at the time and at present, employers may permanently replace workers deemed to be striking for economic reasons.) Union bosses vowed disruptive strike waves to compel passage of the legislation, which the National Right to Work Committee dubbed the “Pushbutton Strike Bill,” but ultimately it died to little fanfare.

The National Right to Work Committee responded to the defeat of the bill and the election of the Republicans to congressional majorities in 1994 by supporting introduction and floor debate on legislation to abolish compulsory union fees nationwide, though it did not secure majority support.

With the policy winds against him and a near-majority of internal AFL-CIO electoral votes pledged against him, Kirkland announced his retirement. His secretary-treasurer, Thomas R. Donahue, ascended to the interim presidency and campaigned for a full term as president.

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In the next installment, labor’s left wing runs John Sweeney to lead the AFL-CIO.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-dance-of-sweeney-and-stern-part-2/