Robert J. Haynes, the new president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, is in his Beacon Street office in Boston, expounding on one of his favorite themes–the changing face and expanding role of organized labor in this state and in the country–when he gets buzzed for a phone call. He had told the receptionist to hold all his calls except one, so we both know who’s on the other end of the line: Senate President Thomas Birmingham.
He takes the call at the table in his office where we’ve been talking, making no attempt to retreat into more private quarters. Afterward, he declares whatever I could hear of the conversation off-the-record. “I’d appreciate your confidence about that phone call,” he says. But it’s not revealing too much to say that the topic of discussion was the courthouse bond bill, which has been hung up in the Legislature since last year. At issue is a bread-and-butter item for unions: “project labor agreements,” which set the terms of employment on major construction projects. Because of differences between the House and Senate, funding for repair of the state’s dilapidated courthouses has stalled, with labor getting the blame.
That bit of legislative haggling dispensed with, Haynes returns to his broad, inclusionary theme.
“The union movement’s been evolving from a strictly political and legislative endeavor to a much more community-oriented [one]. I think where the labor movement’s going now is forming coalitions, working on social justice issues, economic justice issues, or whatever, rather than strictly labor votes on the kind of thing I was just on the phone about,” says Haynes. “The face of the labor movement’s changing; the leadership of the labor movement’s changing. We’ve gotta figure out how to be the voice of all workers. We’ve been evolving into that kind of model over the past couple of years–the whole issue of organizing, organizing women and people of color, ethnic minorities, low-wage workers. That’s the new direction, and we’ve got to be reflective of that community.”
This contrast between interest-group politicking and a more expansive vision speaks volumes about the task the state AFL-CIO has set for itself, and about the new leadership team charged with carrying it out. Declining numbers have made it harder for unions to protect their members’ immediate interests, even their jobs. But labor has seldom been a more potent political force than it was in the congressional elections of two years ago. Though representing a smaller proportion of Massachusetts workers than ever, the state AFL-CIO has never been more committed to a broad social agenda–and to injecting that agenda into this year’s statewide electoral campaigns.
Haynes is himself a study in contrast. At age 48, the dome of his head is so bald that it shines, but there’s no hint of gray in the thick tufts of brown hair above his ears. His wardrobe of dark suits, oxford shirts, and wing-tip shoes makes Haynes look more like a plant manager than the ironworker he was. But he carries himself with a tradesman’s swagger, and his sharp tongue has been only partly curbed by 11 years as secretary-treasurer, the state federation’s number-two position. Garrulous and outspoken, Haynes is seen as brash, especially in contrast to the mild-mannered, avuncular Joseph C. Faherty, who stepped down as AFL-CIO president July 1. But Haynes is also the most business-like of unionists. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration, and he has always campaigned for union office not on his militancy, but on his managerial competence.
Kathleen Casavant, the state federation’s first female secretary-treasurer and one of just a handful of women unionists in leadership of state federations around the country, presents her own set of contrasts. Hired by a textile union as a bookkeeper 20 years ago, Casavant, 46, has been the rising star of a declining union. High-energy and cheerfully confrontational in her organizing efforts for UNITE (the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees), she has been diplomatic, as well as forceful, in bringing the perspective of women unionists to the councils of organized labor.
Whether these new leaders are up to the challenge of juggling interest-group and greater-good politics remains to be seen. And if the business community is worried about labor’s attempt to increase its influence, few are coming right out and saying so.
“With a new chief executive officer, you would expect the volume to be higher,” says Brian Gilmore, executive vice president of Associated Industries of Massachusetts. “It’s not surprising. The volume will be higher.”
But Haynes and Casavant, both still in their 40s, could be pumping up the volume for a long time.
“Bobby is extraordinarily young,” notes Jim Braude, former executive director of the Tax Equity Alliance of Massachusetts, of which organized labor is an integral member. “The history has been to pick a labor leader near the end of his tenure. But Bobby’s going to be president of the AFL for two decades, unless he commits some horrible sin.”
Haynes and Casavant certainly aim to make their mark on the state’s labor movement–and on Massachusetts politics as well. And they are starting already, with this year’s governor’s race.
Beyond the ‘politics of personality’
It’s March 3, and the banquet hall in the JFK Library in Boston is packed with unionists and their allies, milling about, standing in line for a plate of cold cuts, salad, ravioli. The event is the state AFL-CIO’s public policy forum, and the candidates for governor, Democrat and Republican alike, have been invited. Only Treasurer Joe Malone, who is fundraising in California, declines to either appear or send an emissary. Acting Gov. A. Paul Cellucci is represented by Angelo Buonopane, director of the Department of Labor and Workforce Development.
The Democrats appear in person. Attorney General Scott Harshbarger arrives early, makes the rounds stiffly, and departs. Former state senator Patricia McGovern is introduced around by Kathy Kelley, president of the Massachusetts Federation of Teachers, who calls McGovern “a good friend for many years.” Former congressman and ambassador Brian Donnelly shakes a lot of hands, but perhaps not as many as one might expect, given his billing as the kind of lunch-bucket Democrat this labor crowd is supposedly yearning for.
Once the program gets underway, it’s time for the candidates not to get up and speak, as is the usual custom on the campaign trail, but to sit down and listen. The program is a series of presentations by union experts and sympathetic academics on public policy issues ranging from economic security to health care, from tax policy to workforce development. The state federation commissioned nine policy papers months earlier. Executive summaries are handed out that night; the full papers, bound in a 60-page document entitled “Work and Family: Putting People First,” are in print a few weeks later.
The novel conception here is that candidates have to earn the right to make their pitch to labor. Only those candidates represented at the issues forum are invited to a debate at the federation’s educational conference on Cape Cod in May–their real chance to woo the 65 local-union presidents and central labor council chieftains who make up the Committee on Political Education, the federation’s endorsing body.
“The labor movement has come to the conclusion that the politics of personality don’t work too well for our interests,” Haynes explains. “We need to control the agenda. Otherwise, we’re only successful in electing candidates. We’re pretty good at that. But then there’s a disconnect between the election and what happens afterward.” The issues outlined in the Work and Family papers, he says, are what union members–and non-union workers, for that matter–have on their minds. “We’re hoping candidates will pick up and run with it, really talk about what working people care about.”
If they do, say the labor leaders, not only will the candidates win labor’s support, they’ll win their races.
“What we’re telling politicians is, these are winning issues,” says Rich Rogers, the federation’s political director. “Democrats are crazy to run on tax cuts. You can’t outflank the Republicans on issues like that.”
Nothing in this new approach strays dramatically away from Samuel Gompers’s famous admonition to “reward our friends and punish our enemies.” But it does flesh out what it means to be a friend of labor, taking it beyond personal ties, or even toeing the line on a handful of legislative votes each year.
“This way we get beyond ‘he’s a good guy, she’s a good gal, I grew up with him.’ It’s much easier to hold someone accountable,” says Mark Erlich, an official with the New England Regional Council of Carpenters. Even rallying behind the eventual Democratic nominee becomes more satisfying, he says, because “going through the process transforms the candidacy. We can have an impact on the candidate and the candidacy. The only way to maximize the potential [of the labor movement’s influence] is this issue-oriented process.”
Just what effect the process is having is hard to say. But it is intriguing that, in a single week in May, Cellucci withdrew from the issues forum, which labor took as a rejection of its platform (“We’re going to be going after this guy big time,” says Rogers), but came out in favor of an increase in the minimum wage–a key piece of the AFL-CIO’s economic-security plank. “I think they have had an effect,” says Gilmore, of the Associated Industries of Massachusetts.
And while the AFL-CIO’s June endorsement of Harshbarger, despite union leaders’ mixed feelings about the candidate and his labor record, in some ways seemed an old-fashioned exercise in picking the strongest horse–the Democrat who has the financial and organizational might to topple Cellucci–it is no accident that labor’s nod went to the candidate who boldly declares, “Labor’s agenda is my agenda.”
“What we pushed for was the best person who could get our story out. That’s why he was picked,” says Faherty. “He’ll push our message–and not just for union people.”
Whatever effect the working-families issues agenda does have on this year’s Massachusetts elections, you can be sure unionists from around the country will be taking notes.
“Massachusetts has done the most formal shifting to an issues base” of all the state labor federations, says Jennifer Duffy, senate and gubernatorial editor of the Cook Report, a national political newsletter. “The national [AFL-CIO] will be watching. Maybe they’ve found the magic.”
The labor movement is dead. Long live the labor movement!
That the Massachusetts AFL-CIO should be dreaming up new ways to throw its political weight around is remarkable in itself, given how scrawny organized labor has become. Nationally, the story of labor’s declining membership is well known. In the mid-1950s, unions represented 35 percent of American workers. Union membership declined gradually throughout the ’60s and ’70s, falling to roughly one-quarter of the workforce in 1980. Since then, the drop has been precipitous. In 1997, only 14.1 percent of wage and salary workers were union members, the lowest percentage in 50 years; in private nonagricultural industries, unions represented just one worker in 10.
Union strength has held up in Massachusetts only marginally better. In 1996, unions represented 15.4 percent of Massachusetts workers. Massachusetts ranked 21st among the states in union “density,” as it’s called (New York is first, with 27 percent of employees in unions). The Commonwealth actually trails the national average in private-sector unionization, with only 9 percent of non-government employees represented by unions, compared to 10 percent nationwide. In manufacturing, Massachusetts lags even further; its 10.2 percent unionization rate ranks 36th among states.
The state AFL-CIO boasts a membership, through its 700 affiliated local unions, of 400,000, but that figure is suspect, if only because it’s been thrown around loosely for more than a decade. The Bureau of National Affairs, which analyzes federal census data on union membership, estimates total union membership in Massachusetts at 415,000. But not every union is affiliated with the AFL-CIO. The Massachusetts Teachers Association, a political force in its own right, is the largest non-AFL-CIO union in the state, with 83,000 members. Still, especially since the once-outlawed Teamsters were taken back into the fold, the AFL-CIO does provide a political umbrella for most of the state’s organized workers. (That umbrella would have opened even wider if the proposal to merge the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, the parent unions of the two teachers’ unions in Massachusetts, had not been voted down by the NEA this summer.)
Organized labor has retained its influence in Massachusetts in part because of changes in political style and substance–changes made by two strikingly different labor leaders. The state AFL-CIO of 20 years ago–it was then called the Massachusetts State Labor Council–was an old-boys’ club, weak and ineffectual. Politically and culturally, the federation was dominated by building-trades and defense-industry unions, and had an image not unlike the hard-hatted construction workers who brawled with anti-war protesters over the Vietnam war. In the state Democratic Party, labor was allied with urban-ethnic machines and Ed King conservatives, and openly hostile toward the suburban reform wing of the party.
Arthur Osborn, who became president of the state council in 1979, embodied that era, but also took the first steps toward change. A former Raytheon technician and union leader, Osborn ruled the organization with an iron hand for 11 years. For a brief moment, a trace of liberalism appeared in the person of Paul Quirk, a public-employee unionist and Dukakis Democrat, who became secretary-treasurer (at that time, the only full-time federation office) in that same election, the sole survivor of an insurgent ticket that opposed Osborn’s “unity” slate. Quirk hired Lou DiNatale, then a sharp young political operative and now senior fellow at UMass-Boston’s McCormack Institute of Public Affairs, to professionalize labor’s political operations. But Quirk was ousted in 1981, replaced by George Carpenter of the International Union of Electric Workers, a former shop steward at General Electric in Lynn. DiNatale was soon shown the door, as well.
“Artie Osborn was the last of the stone-stupid labor leaders,” says DiNatale, charging Osborn had a “petty” streak that kept him from expanding his allies. But Osborn knew how to take labor’s fate into his own hands. He made the presidency a full-time, paid position – initially, by taking over the staff job of political director. This made Osborn both the titular and the day-to-day head of the federation–the “Mr. Big” of Massachusetts labor, in the words of longtime Boston Globe labor reporter Wilfrid C. Rogers.
Osborn also made the first tentative steps toward alliances with community organizations like Massachusetts Fair Share. But in those days, labor worked only in coalitions of its own making. Inspired by the AFL-CIO-sponsored Solidarity Day demonstration in Washington in 1981, a wide range of Massachusetts activists began to organize a Solidarity Coalition to continue the fight against Reaganite budget cuts. But, protective of its own prerogatives and suspicious of left-wing elements in the ragtag group, the state AFL-CIO formed its own Solidarity Coalition.
Prevailing with the public
But the state federation–and Osborn–really learned their political lessons in the initiative-petition wars later that decade. In 1988, under the memorable, if unenlightening, slogan of “Question 2, Bad For You,” labor fought off a challenge to the state’s prevailing wage law. It was the first truly grassroots political campaign labor had ever run, and the first time the unions had to make their case not to the Legislature, but to the public.
“Question 2 represented a turning point for the labor movement,” says the carpenters’ Erlich, who helped run the campaign’s field operation. “Our real power came from our members, and this was the first attempt to tap the source of labor’s power.”
And in 1990, Osborn chaired the campaign against Question 3, the tax-rollback initiative. That campaign was the most broad-based progressive coalition ever assembled in Massachusetts, and labor–both the AFL-CIO and the Massachusetts Teachers Association–provided money and muscle in substantial amounts. “Without Arthur, [the] Question 3 [campaign] never would have happened,” says Braude.
Later that year, Osborn stepped down from his post, and Joseph Faherty, then an executive vice-president of the federation, served out the last year of Osborn’s term before getting elected on his own. The former Boston Edison union chief was a marked contrast in style and temperament to the hot-headed Osborn. Though one associate calls him “as conservative as they get,” Faherty was determined to open up the state federation, especially to the women and minorities who, in hospitals, nursing homes, and other health-care and service industries, were the labor movement’s only source of new members. He expanded the federation’s executive council to 57 members, and actively recruited women onto the board.
“We’re reaching out to what the labor movement really looks like,” says Faherty. Under his tutelage in 1995, Kathy Casavant of the needletrades union became the first woman among the state federation’s three executive vice-presidents, representing industrial and service-sector unions; not long afterward, Kathy Kelley became the second, representing public employees. Seven other women unionists serve on the 57-member executive council and Casavant, who is also on the board of the 10-year-old Women’s Institute for Leadership Development, a group that trains women for union leadership posts, heads a women’s committee that Faherty urged her to form.
“The problem now is to have people of color,” says Faherty. Only one executive council member–Phil Duck, a leader in the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees–is a minority.
Faherty also reached out to coalition partners in the community in a more open, less paranoid way than in the past. Notable in this regard is the AFL-CIO’s alliance with ACORN–a group that had fought the building-trades unions bitterly in the 1980s over construction jobs for inner-city minorities–to push for Boston’s living-wage ordinance.
Much of the same is expected from Haynes, who will now serve out the remaining 15 months of Faherty’s term before running on his own next year. As secretary-treasurer since 1987, Haynes was effectively Faherty’s partner for years. And though more outspoken and combative in personality than Faherty, Haynes subscribes to the same inclusive brand of unionism.
“He’s from the trades, but he’s excited by the new face of labor,” says Celia Wcislo, president of Service Employees International Union Local 285, which represents workers at Boston Medical Center, among others. “Bobby, for the first time, came to my [local’s] convention, and here we are, all these women, and people of color. He said to me, ‘Wow, this is what we’re talking about. This is the face of the labor movement.’ When he got up to speak, he started out, ‘I know I’m male. I know I’m pale.’ And I called out, ‘Yeah, but at least you’re not stale!’ ”
An ironworker in wing-tips
Robert James Haynes–known to one and all, in the tradition of construction sites and shop floors everywhere, as “Bobby”–grew up in a public housing project outside Central Square in Cambridge. His father was a housepainter–that is, until a piece of shrapnel, lodged in his head from World War II, shifted, causing a stroke. Bobby, one of eight children, was 13 years old when his father became a paraplegic, and his family became dependent on veterans and disability benefits.
In the summer of 1968, between terms at Boston State College, where he was studying chemistry, Haynes worked at a construction site helping ironworkers. The next year, he left school to work construction full time, becoming an apprentice ironworker in 1973. He worked on the South Postal Annex and the Federal Reserve Bank, among other downtown construction projects, and became active in his union, Local 7 of the Ironworkers Union. He also went back to school, getting a business degree from Boston State. “I thought it would help me win a leadership position,” says Haynes.
It did. In 1979–the first election year for the union since he finished his apprenticeship–Haynes planned to run for recording secretary. But at a union meeting, the local’s secretary-treasurer gave a report, proposing a dues increase to cover rising expenses that Haynes found baffling. Fresh from business school, Haynes grilled the hapless officer about his budget. Exasperated, the official told him “to sit down and shut the fuck up,” Haynes recalls. “I told him, ‘I’m not going to sit down and shut up until I get some answers.’ The fucking place went nuts.” So Haynes, age 29, ran for that job instead, visiting every construction site and spending long hours on the phone soliciting votes. He won.
“He represented the future, much as he does today,” says state Senator Stephen Lynch, who was in Haynes’ apprenticeship class and followed him into leadership of Local 7. “He ran the local more like a business than anybody had done before.”
Haynes ran a strikingly similar campaign eight years later, this time against state AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer George Carpenter. “I made the same argument: A million-dollar business ought to be run like a business,” he says. “I challenged him as an incompetent manager.” Carpenter had developed a costly plan to buy a building for federation headquarters, and Haynes, who had since gotten an MBA from UMass-Boston, tore it apart.
Haynes rounded up support from local unions until he was close to a majority. Then he went to see Joe Bonavita, head of AFSCME Council 93 and a major player in the state AFL-CIO, and laid a list of his supporters on the desk. “I told him, ‘I’m going to win this with you or without you. With you, there won’t even be an election,'” Haynes recalls. And there wasn’t: Carpenter withdrew and Haynes was elected by acclamation. He was 38.
A year later, Haynes was hip-deep in the prevailing-wage crusade, only to be personally stung by that campaign’s worst blunder. The vote-no campaign aired a commercial that featured an ironworker, Alan Carpenito, who told how financially devastating it would be for him and his family to lose the law’s wage protection. Then, on Friday before the election, the Boston Herald published a front-page story revealing that Carpenito, far from living hand-to-mouth, was the owner of five houses. It was a devastating setback, and the brash young secretary-treasurer was directly implicated in the choice of poster-boy. “I recruited him,” says Haynes. But Haynes defends his union-brother still–“He did nothing wrong; he didn’t lie to anybody”–blaming the fiasco on the media consultant who scripted the commercial without regard to whether it reflected the spokesman’s actual circumstances.
But a big win heals all wounds. “There wasn’t any backlash” against him or others involved in the incident, says Haynes. “But we certainly learned a lesson.” When it came to the anti-Question 3 campaign two years later, he says, “we were really careful who we put on TV.”
When organized labor gets organized
Haynes and Faherty applied all the lessons they had learned from the referendum campaigns to electoral politics in 1992, helping to roll back Weld’s veto-sustaining power in the state Senate, and in 1994, putting all their resources into the cause of re-electing U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Then, in 1996, came the call from the national AFL-CIO’s newly installed regime led by John Sweeney for a jihad against vulnerable House Republicans–including Peter G. Torkildsen of Danvers and Peter I. Blute of Shrewsbury–backed by $35 million in union funds.
The controversial part of the Sweeney plan, besides its brazenly open character (“They might have been smarter to just do it, and not talk so much about it,” observes Ron Elving, political editor of Congressional Quarterly) was $25 million in union-sponsored radio and television ads attacking targeted Republican incumbents. “At this time two years ago, attack ads had been running for six-and-a-half months,” says Torkildsen, who is gearing up for a third electoral encounter with John Tierney, only this time with Tierney as the incumbent congressman. Torkildsen estimates the national AFL-CIO spent $800,000 against him.
Nationally, the effect of the AFL-CIO’s “Labor ’96” campaign was mixed, at best. Just a handful of targeted Republicans lost their seats and the House remained in Newt Gingrich’s hands. Some unsympathetic commentators, including the Globe‘s John Ellis, saw the effort as an abject failure, succeeding only in making labor new (or worse) enemies. And there is little question that labor’s muscle-flexing fueled “paycheck protection” initiatives, which would prevent unions from spending dues money on politics without each member’s explicit consent, such as the one that was defeated in California in June.
But the Democrats, with labor’s help, came closer to retaking the House than it looks now. “The Republicans saved their majority in the last two weeks,” says Charles Cook, editor and publisher of the Cook Report. They did so, he says, only by throwing presidential nominee Bob Dole overboard and urging voters not to “give Clinton a blank check.”
“The labor stuff was very, very effective,” says Cook. Just as important, in Cook’s view, was how the campaign bolstered the AFL-CIO’s standing in the Democratic Party. “Labor was at risk of losing their seat at the table,” says Cook. “They bought it back.”
In Massachusetts, labor’s plan worked as advertised. Both Republican congressmen were unseated–Blute even after he had been dropped from the national AFL-CIO’s list of priority targets in June. Indeed, Jim McGovern’s win in the 3rd Congressional District, without the kind of AFL-CIO air attack conducted against Torkildsen, is evidence of labor’s contribution on the ground.
“The union movement in Massachusetts was essential to my victory in 1996,” says McGovern. “Organized labor weighed in on my campaign in a way that was absolutely critical. I won because I had a good field operation and because labor delivered their vote. They really energized their base.”
One reason labor could deliver its vote is that the state federation took to heart a lesson from the AFL-CIO’s national polling, which showed that what union members wanted was information, not marching orders. “They don’t want to be told how to vote,” says state political director Rogers. “So we flooded members with information, handed out fact sheets on Blute and Torkildsen. We have confidence that if our members have got all the facts, they’re going to vote our way.”
“The right way,” adds Haynes.
Not standing still
Asking the heads of affiliated unions and other observers what they expect the team of Haynes and Casavant to bring to the leadership of the AFL-CIO, the word that pops up more than any other is “energy.” Haynes is a guy who rarely sits still. The Medford resident, who’s married and has a 14-year-old son, rises at 5:30 every morning to put in three or four miles of brisk walking. And he doesn’t wait for the labor movement to come to him.
“He’s spent more time on picket lines and rallies” than any previous state leader, says Wcislo. “He really likes to go where the action is, and where the members are.” Erlich adds: “Bob is going to bring an enormous amount of energy to his position. He’s excited about the future, and I think you’re going to see that excitement translate into a high level of visibility.”
The same could be said about Casavant, a Taunton resident (her husband is a high school art teacher, and they have a teenage son) and bookkeeper for what was then the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union who worked her way into organizing, contract servicing, and political action. Having watched her union shrink from 21,000 members in New England to 6,000 now, Casavant is fiercely committed to organizing new workplaces and working in coalitions with community groups. “She doesn’t wait around seeing what deal she can cut,” says Wcislo.
“My philosophy is, if you put 20 people in a room you have to do an ‘action,’ ” says Casavant. “You’re going to see a lot of that with me around. Let people know we’re here.”
Letting people know you’re here is one thing. Convincing the pols and the public that the AFL-CIO is not just one more special interest–one that’s simply learning how to use its muscle better–is another. In 1996, the way labor projected–and the media covered–its political resurgence was as Big Labor vs. Big Business. “That may make union leaders feel good, but most American workers don’t feel they have a dog in that fight,” says Janice Fine, a labor and community organizer and MIT doctoral candidate. “It still feels like two special interests battling it out. We need labor to project itself as the working class fighting for the general interest of the community against big business fighting for the particular interest of the corporation.”
Even the work-and-family agenda will have little effect if it is seen as simply putting a general-interest gloss on traditional union interests: maintaining prevailing wage, stopping privatization, putting the reins on charter schools.
“A stand-alone labor agenda is not going to go anywhere,” adds DiNatale. “Unions have to re-establish a presence in the community. They’ve got to make a union member look like a full member of society, not a member of a sect.”
That’s just what Haynes says he wants to do.
“I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. We’re not just representing the 400,000 men and women in the AFL-CIO. We’re the voice for all workers. If non-union workers don’t have us, they don’t have anybody to stand up [for them], try to protect their lifestyles, try to protect their families. We are it. There is nobody between us and the continued erosion of the American dream.”
Robert Keough, a free-lance writer in Brookline, is a regular contributor to CommonWealth.