Faced with huge economic pressures, declining membership due to the Great Recession and venal, vicious employers who stop at nothing – including rampant labor law-breaking, political manipulation and corporate bankruptcy – to squash workers and destroy unions, organized labor is remaking itself.

The key to understanding the changes, started almost a decade ago by the Service Employees, but championed now especially by the AFL-CIO, the nation's major labor federation, as well as the Service Employees International Union, one of the largest unions, is that leaders want labor organizations to truly be a labor movement, and to represent workers, not just unions. There is a big difference.

It is a difference symbolized by Working America, the 3-million-person AFL-CIO organization for workers who won’t, or can’t, join union locals. It is symbolized by recent federation charters to the National Day Laborers Network and the Taxi Workers Alliance, two groups of workers traditionally considered hard, if not impossible, to organize. And it is symbolized by 2-million-member SEIU creating four “mega-unions” within itself, one for each of the major groups of workers it represents.

It's also the determination of AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler and SEIU President Mary Kay Henry to have labor intensively reach out and link up with groups of workers who need unions the most, even if they can’t be formally organized right now: African-Americans, women, Latinos and young workers.

“The government has been captured by corporate interests,” says University of Richmond law professor Ann Hodges.  “We need a labor movement to balance that. “But workers need to drive the change and the collective action. The labor movement has to again become a movement of the people – out there in the streets fighting for labor rights.”

That’s what the AFL-CIO wants to become, says Craig Becker, now one of its top two general counsels and a former National Labor Relations Board member.  Before joining the board, Becker was the top lawyer for several unions, nationally and in his hometown, Chicago.

One big reason is political, Becker explains. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which opened the gates for a tsunami of corporate cash flooding into politics, “says you can’t address money in politics after the fact.  If the court is saying corporations are people, then we need to foster organization of real people.”

“The old model” of unions and locals “no longer fits” in the era of “Wal-Mart, Manpower and McDonald’s,” he adds.  “Labor law hasn’t changed quickly enough and labor unions haven’t changed quickly enough” to adapt. “So now the labor movement has to be part of a social movement – a democracy movement.”

That means labor organizations must pool resources to organize, or form coalitions with, the new groups of workers. The fed is trying to do that in the field and online, with interactive web forums before its September convention in Los Angeles.  

There, federation Trumka expects to cement in even more of the changes. It won’t be easy. Some unions, Becker admitted, resist the changes. They point out, correctly, that they still must service existing members and prefer that.

Meanwhile, SEIU pioneered new forms of organizing and a new structure under former President Andy Stern. But reorganization into four mega-unions drew revolt from its largest local, on the West Coast, which was deprived of tens of thousands of members. The local’s leaders also said Stern jammed a sweetheart contract with a health care chain down its throat. Those United Health Care Workers West split off.
 
Organizing must be from the bottom up, says Mark Schneider, a top counsel for SEIU. He notes the recent walkouts by fast food workers nationwide. SEIU has supported those one-day strikes in Chicago, New York, Detroit, St. Louis, D.C., and elsewhere. It isn’t trying to actively organize those workers yet, but the workers themselves demand their employers let them organize without the boss interfering.

“The average fast food worker toils 24 hours a week” for just above the minimum wage “and half of them are victims of wage theft,” Schneider says. “They can’t even buy the burgers they make. So how do they organize?  It’s easy.  They’re pissed off and they don’t have a lot to lose.”

Workers themselves are easily replaceable, and cannot, by themselves, force fast food restaurants to raise wages. SEIU’s answer: Launch political campaigns to raise the minimum wage or replace it with a living wage.  “You’re taking labor costs out of the equation” in bargaining, making it easier for workers to organize, he adds.  

The AFL-CIO’s emphasis on politics over organizing drove SEIU and six other unions out of the federation in 2005 to form Change To Win. Three have since returned. A fourth, the Carpenters, is independent.
   
Now, as labor remakes itself into a labor movement, organizing seems to be again at the fore – even if the newly organized can’t join a traditional union.