(The following column by Daniel Howes appeared on The Detroit News website on July 31.)
DETROIT — Teamsters boss Jim Hoffa understands business well enough to know that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result isn’t a winning strategy, whatever the enterprise.
Nor is blindly tying your union’s political fortunes — and those of your 1.4 million members — to a single party struggling to regain control of Congress or put its man in the White House. That’s pretty much what John Sweeney’s AFL-CIO has done with the Democrats, and it’s partly why Hoffa helped lead organized labor’s biggest insurrection in decades.
“We intend to support people who are in office or running for office who support our agenda, be they Republican or Democrat,” Hoffa told me, acknowledging that economics and the business of growing his union trumps political solidarity with the national Democratic Party.
It’s about time. Hoffa and Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, led their 3.2 million members out of the AFL-CIO last week because the federation was determined to spend more of its members’ money on politics and less on organizing.
If organized labor has any chance of surviving in the globalizing early 21st century — unions today represent barely 8 percent of the nation’s private-sector work force — it should focus more intensely on selling the benefits of its “product” to would-be members and a lot less on grand alliances whose politics risk belittling and alienating broad swaths of middle America.
“People care about having jobs,” Hoffa says. “They care about surviving in America. The jobs that are being targeted by corporations are good-paying manufacturing jobs. We’re concentrating on areas that cannot be exported.”
Hoffa’s gambit is about two things — the economics of the union’s dues base and the need for the nation’s largest unions to craft a more flexible business model that can respond to the dynamism of the global economy. Or keep withering.
He says the rebel unions, now working under a new umbrella organization called the “Change to Win Coalition,” will continue to spend money on politics “in a more accountable way” even as they boost spending on organizing in “core industries” that appear more resistant to globalization.
Which brings me to the United Auto Workers. President Ron Gettelfinger declined to join Hoffa and Stern & Co. and instead remained in the AFL-CIO, a decision that suggests the status quo is good enough for a union facing major upheaval in its own core industry — Detroit’s automakers.
Is it? The UAW has an abysmal organizing record in the industry that bears its name. It can claim no new members in foreign-owned auto plants and only last-minute efforts to save jobs at suppliers.
But it can summon the muscle to kick Toyota-driving Marines out of its parking lot (when there’s a war on) or stand squarely behind the Dem-du-jour even though the states where new plants are opening tend to be Red.
Republicans buy cars and trucks, too. Some might even join unions, if they’re welcomed.