MS. KESSLER-HARRIS: Thank you, Joe. Our first respondent will be Nelson Lichtenstein, who teaches at the University of California, at Santa Barbara, and who not only is professor of history there but is also the director for the Center of Work, Labor and Democracy, an apropos title given the talk we've just heard.

Some of you know Nelson Lichtenstein as the author of Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit. Others of you know him as the author of Labor's War at Home, his first book, which was about the CIO in World War II. Some of you may know him from some of the articles that he's been writing recently in places like Dissent magazine and―am I right, The Nation? Labor Forum, right. It was Dissent that I saw. And you may also know that he is the author of State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. He's currently working on a collection of essays on Wal-Mart and its role in the current global crisis.

Nelson?

(Applause)

MR. LICHTENSTEIN: Thanks a lot. The collection's out―Wal-Mart:Tthe Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism (New Press). You can buy it from Wal-Mart (Laughter) at $12.89, or something, and Amazon for $13.05. You can choose which one you want to buy it from.

Well, this is great to be here. I'm really delighted, because this is exactly the kind of audience that we need, and the audience is the important thing: a mixture of academics and people who are in the trenches. And Joe's talk is big and bold. This is the kind of thinking that we need, because he raises all the big questions and puts them forth in a compelling fashion. Hopefully, I can keep my response down to about 10 minutes, so Alice, I’ll be really fast.

I agree with many things in his talk. For example, I do agree that union density is a symptom of the problem; it's not the answer. And Joe is right that mere density does not forestall trouble even in highly unionized industries such as the airlines, automobiles, or the grocery sector. The collective bargaining difficulties that have beset the unions in these industries were a product of larger forces in the economy. High union density alone has hardly been enough to defend the interests of the unions and workers there.

Of course, the labor law is rotten, terrible. We could all go on about that. But in a broader historical sense, Joe is right that the law itself has not been decisive to those key instances when the union movement has surged forward. The labor law provides a larger kind of legitimization for the labor movement, as in the 1930s for labor and the 1960s for a racially inflected public sector union movement. A well-developed and well-enforced labor law crystallizes a certain kind of consciousness which workers at the worksite and at the ballot box have achieved. Thus codified, the law becomes a protection, a shield that allows the labor movement to defend itself against the counterattack that inevitably comes after a major social breakthrough. And it enables trade unions to make incremental gains even during those years when the corporations and the state begin to get their act together and figure out how to contain the labor movement. But the essential point that Joe makes is correct: You always need a moment of upsurge to revive and refresh the movement and then establish a new legal framework which can be defended in the generation-long era of relative quiescence that follows.

The other thing is, and here I agree with Joe in part, is that we have a worldwide decline in trade unionism. In Europe and parts of Asia, not to mention North America, union density and power has been in decline. The retreat has not been as great as in the United States, but this is a global phenomenon. But I would take exception to an implication that normally flows from these dismal indexes of worldwide union decline. The labor movement is hardly impotent, and during the last 25 years or so, it has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to play a key role in democratizing society, indeed a revolutionary role in some instances. We know what they are: South Korea, South Africa, Poland, Indonesia, Taiwan, Spain, even Serbia. In some instances, the unions were able to institutionalize themselves in a profound sense―one need only think of Spain, South Korea and South Africa―while in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, this did not happen.

The point is that the labor movement does not have to be large or even have the capacity to shut down production to play a vital role in the life of a nation. In France, union density is actually lower than in the United States. But the recent successful demonstrations there over a government effort to erode employee layoff protections demonstrated that when labor allies itself with other sectors of society―in this case the highly politicized youth and the left-wing parties―the unions can speak for a large slice of civil society.

Now, let me be a bit provocative. I do not think that what we call globalization, a change in the structure of the political economy in the world, is actually a major cause of labor's contemporary problems. Of course, it’s true that in some highly competitive manufacturing sectors, jobs can and are being shipped off to Mexico, China or someplace like that. In labor-intensive manufacturing, that's absolutely the case; in apparel and textiles, U.S. trade unionism has been decimated as a result of this kind of globalization. That's true.

But looking at this from a larger perspective, there's always been change in the political economy. The great upsurges of the 1930s were based on a new configuration of the political economy, a new structure of industry, which had only come into being between 1890 and 1910. That was a shift which made some forms of unionism, some forms of popular struggle, obsolete. Craft unionism in the basic industries, for example. And if you were living then, you could have mourned all that. But this shift in the structure of U.S. industry created the basis for a new kind of unionism and a new kind of struggle. It took a generation, at least 20 or 30 years, from the pre-World War I era in which the innovative mass production techniques generated such great productivity breakthroughs, until the late 1930s when millions of workers in those same industries could unionize and dramatically raise their standard of living

Thus today, the shift in the structure of the political economy has created a situation in which the forces of democracy in general and the trade unions in particular have not succeeded in figuring out where are the new nodes of power, the new links in the production chain where labor can exert its leverage, both economic and ideological.

For example, in the United States the modern labor movement never succeeded in organizing banks, fast-food restaurants, or large parts of the private sector service industry. I know that Sue Cobble has shown the extent to which mid-20th century restaurants were indeed organized, but that was quite a different world from that of contemporary fast-food restaurants, which the unions have not even attempted to organize.

And unions have done relatively poorly in organizing retail, which is today a far more strategic sector of the economy than ever in the past. On the other hand, the unions have been remarkably successful in organizing secondary school teachers and some in higher education. And so too is health care a frontier for union growth. Clearly, these latter two are important and strategic sectors of the modern political economy.

I think that for a labor movement to be powerful again―what's crucial is, does the labor movement succeed in organizing those strategic, powerfully linked sectors of the economy which give to the labor movement the weight and leverage to match its numbers? Today, I would argue―and I'm working on Wal-Mart―that from about 25 years ago until today, we've had this enormous shift in power and productivity in the retail sector. The new centrality of retail is a product of the bar code, containerization, and computerized telecommunications, which has transformed the big box retailers like Wal-Mart into the kinds of companies that now occupy the commanding heights of the economy. Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and all the rest are not just big in terms of their revenue, but they are strategically powerful, and they sort of hold the whip hand over manufacturing. That's part of what's going on.

But of course, there are millions of people in this new retail sector, and the issue is how do we organize them? How do we make Bentonville, where Wal-Mart is headquartered, as it were, the Detroit of our day.

In earlier years I used to have an almost romantic attachment to the tool and die shop at Ford’s huge River Rouge complex in Dearborn. Not only was the Rouge the most important place in American industry, because that's where you really made the dies for Ford, but this industrial locale was the venue in which all the Communists, Socialists, and other radicals had their greatest influence in mid-20th century U.S. industry. And I was thinking, what is equivalent to that today? It's the David Glass Technology Center in Bentonville where there are a thousand ultra-smart programmers who are working at the absolute, vital heart of the Wal-Mart operation. They do the crucial planning, the data mining, the technical work necessary to knit the company supply chain together from China to Peoria. Of course it's beyond our ken now to organize these highly strategic workers at this moment in history, but in fact these information technology technicians are the tool and die people of the 21st century. If they come to be organized, that is where the strategic power lies also.

So the point is to talk about a transformation in the global economy and seek out those places where labor has an advantage and where can labor best put its resources.

Now, here we get to the question of rights talk versus industrial democracy. I agree with Joe that rights talk can be a tricky proposition. In my book, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, I argued that the political right can and does seek to adopt and deploy contemporary rights talk. The National Right to Work Committee uses a discourse of individual rights to subvert union power and worker solidarity all the time. They argue for free speech for employers all the time, because it is a sort of rights talk. And the courts have been a willing accomplice, undermining the idea of solidarity and the sources of union organization.

But to then say that OK, we should replace rights talk with industrial democracy would be a mistake. Industrial democracy is an important idea; at various moments, it's been an idea which has motivated politics in this country, clearly. Both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt had to give a tip of their hat to this idea, which then legitimized the struggle of millions of worker-citizens. And one could argue that the seminal book by Adolph Berle and Gardner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, was really an argument not so much directly for industrial democracy but for democratizing the major corporations, which I think in part became the ideological basis of the New Deal. So Joe is right that the idea of industrial democracy has a tremendous resonance.

But my fundamental point on this question is that some phrases, some discourse, some ways of thinking about things are now in fact history, and you just can't recapture them. And industrial democracy does today, unfortunately, have an antique and obsolete flavor. It's hard to think of an equivalent, contemporary phrase or word. And in fact, what happened to industrial democracy as an idea over the period from the 1930s on is that first it became translated into "collective bargaining." That became the meaning of it, and then later on, it was transmuted into a kind of labor/management cooperation, a kind of pluralistic industrial relations that people like Clark Kerr and Daniel Bell saw as essential to stability and Cold War liberalism. As a result, industrial democracy has lost it meaning, its radical democratic edge. And I don't know how we could recapture that.

But rights talk is still vital, and it's remarkably vibrant even today. It has roots in the very foundation of this nation, and I think it was tremendously refreshed in the 1960s, and so I think that is where we should go. And let me give you an example of why and how from the world of Wal-Mart.

The UFCW, you know, has now been fighting Wal-Mart for more than a decade. It has conducted numerous organizing campaigns, and in places like Las Vegas and in numerous stores from Quebec to South Carolina, the UFCW has enlisted in its cause hundreds and thousands of heroic workers. And throughout this decade-long effort, the UFCW has found that Wal-Mart has been systematically and overtly violating the U.S. labor law and the orders of the NLRB. The company is an authoritarian organization, virtually Maoist in its efforts to construct an ideological regime that admits no internal opposition. I could go on about that― (Laughter)―I mean the ideology of Wal-Mart has that flavor to it. You know.

The UFCW wanted the NLRB to issue a nationwide stop-order against Wal-Mart, a directive that would penalize the company and forestall, at all of its stores, the kind of vicious union-busting that was Wal-Mart’s standard operating procedure. But the union did not get it, in part because Bush won the 2000 election and put his people on the NLRB. But the larger point is that during all this time when the UFCW was demonstrating that Wal-Mart was an absolutely brutal employer, the Wal-Mart executives would say―what does the larger public think about all this? Is there any reason for shame, or for a negative pubic response to all those violations of the U.S. labor law. And the answer was, “No.” Instead Wal-Mart executives would say, "We do have a democratic internal structure. It's kind of communal, Christian, really, and of course small-town and rural―that's what we have. And furthermore, unions may be good for somebody but not for us, and we have our own way of solving internal problems. It is called the "open door." So that was it.

And did they suffer anything from this kind of arrogance? No. Union organizers were pissed off, but everyone else didn't pay much attention to Wal-Mart’s denial of Wagner Act industrial democracy to its many hundreds of thousands of hourly "associates."

But at the very same time the UFCW was beating its head up against the brick wall of Wal-Mart intransigence, the Impact Fund in San Francisco, which is a public interest law firm, was putting together their gender discrimination class action lawsuit against Wal-Mart. You know it: Dukes versus Wal-Mart. The case generated tens of thousands of pages of depositions, stories, narratives documenting Wal-Mart gender discrimination. I've been reading all these. Hundreds and hundreds of women who were clearly discriminated against are saying, "I want my rights!" They want the courts to enforce against Wal-Mart Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. A new standard of employee rights has been created in the last 40 years, a powerful standard. And Nancy MacLean, in our audience, has written a wonderful book about that.

And is Wal-Mart worried about this suit? Yes! It has traction. They are worried about that. In fact, what they claim is, "Oh, but we're tremendously―we're great on gender questions. We've established the following 15 committees to recruit women into management and abolish the glass ceiling." You know, they spend money on advertisements about some woman who used to be a cashier and now runs a billion-dollar part of the corporation.

So the charge of gender discrimination, racial discrimination as well, has enormous traction in our society. It's not an abstract issue. Indeed, it requires organizations—the NAACP or NOW or the trade union movement—to make those rights live, to recruit the litigants and then push the cases through the courts and in the court of public opinion. I don't want to give that up. I think that's what can work against even a giant corporation like Wal-Mart. It can force management there to revise its business model and put billions of dollars in the purses of more than a million women.

So I think the union movement understands that workers rights are human rights, and not just in the United States. When we were in south China last year, it was very clear that despite much Chinese governmental opposition, hundreds and thousands of NGOs were using a discourse of rights to embarrass the powerful and make some modest improvement in the lives of millions of workers, mostly young women, who worked in the dynamic export sector there. Indeed, there are probably 25,000 NGOs in the world today, of which about 5,000 concern themselves with human rights and worker rights in one way or another. They have a certain legitimacy. And I'm for building on that, I'm for building on that legitimacy and linking it to the fate of the trade union movement. And I think that is possible.

To conclude, we must recognize what are the new strategic heights of the world economy. I'd say, for example, that among other venues, they are the warehouses of Amazon.com and of Wal-Mart. The latter has about 120 distribution centers, where almost 100,000 people work, mainly young men. And, of course, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and Shenzhen in south China are the new nodes of capitalist exchange. If we recognize the importance of these new structures and at the same time put forth an ideology of rights that resonates with millions of people, then I think we may have a way forward.

Thank you. (Applause)

MS. KESSLER-HARRIS: Our second respondent is Dorothy Sue Cobble. In addition to being my friend and former colleague at Rutgers, where Sue teaches in the School of Labor and Management Relations and is a member of the Department of History, Sue is a prize-winning author of, well, several books. The two I want to mention are Dishing It Out, which is about waitresses in the restaurant industry (for those of you who didn't know why Nelson was on tricky ground there), and most recently of The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights, a book that traces feminism within the labor movement in the '30s, '40s and '50s, up until the 1980s. She's now editing a volume, which I gather is in press, called The Sex of Class:U.S.Labor Movements in a Global Era.

So Sue? (Applause)

MS. COBBLE: I want to start by thanking Joe for striking such a frank, yet constructive and generous tone in his paper. It sometimes seems increasingly difficult these days to talk across difference. As my daughter's college counselor advised her last week, she said, "Just find your tribe, dear, the group that shares your values and hunker down."

But that's exactly the wrong advice, I think, if we're going to rebuild unionism and create a new progressive majority movement in the U.S. Joe's paper models for us the spirit that can help us talk across difference, so I want to thank you, Joe, for setting the stage so well for the panelists and also for the conversation to follow.

I'll begin with some of my points of agreement with what Joe has presented, then I'll move to where we part ways. I share Joe's desire to strengthen worker institutions and enhance worker power. I share his skepticism about reaching that goal without a firm recognition of the need for democratic process and power sharing within organized labor. Those at the top can't go very far without the vision and knowledge of those in the ranks, so even without the moral critique of top-down militancy, I'm skeptical of its practical benefits and promise.

I also applaud Joe's emphasis on the need for a broad historical and global context for understanding our current moment and his penchant for seeking structural, not personal, explanations. I often tell my students, after reading Joe's recent work on how the 1970s set the stage for the de-unionization of the '80s, that it was not just Reagan's fault―that the large industrial unions fell like bowling pins, one after another, as capital launched its assault.

And yes, I think much self-organization did occur among workers even without a supportive legal context. At the same time, though, a supportive or at least neutral state, including the law, was necessary before these movements could be sustained and institutionalized.

I finally agree with Joe that rights discourse does have its limits. As Joe suggests, it is a flawed tradition when it's disconnected from power, when it's delinked from broader political and economic transformation, and when individual rights gets positioned in opposition to collective rights rather than as a necessary partner.

But let me move on to where we differ, and here I'm picking up on a number of things that Nelson mentioned. I want to offer a kind of counter-narrative to Joe's trope of labor decline. And I think there's at least three trends that push against his narrative.

First, I do agree that collective bargaining unionism, particularly in the industrial sector of the economy, has been in free fall in the last quarter century in the U.S. and in most of the older industrialized countries. But as industry has moved to the South and the East, to Mexico, India, China, so has industrial unionism. And if we're going to think globally about unionism, we need to include developments in the newly emerging economies as well as in the older.

According to James Dougherty's 2004 Historical Dictionary of Organized Labor, the decline in union membership in the Western industrialized countries has been more than offset by the rise of unionism elsewhere―India, Africa, Latin America, China, Southeast Asia. I don't have figures on work stoppages globally, but I'd also be interested in broadening our discussion there to include the newly industrialized countries.

A second point: In the U.S., not only has public-sector unionism remained robust; it peaked in the early 1980s and then has remained relatively stable since then, still at 37 percent. But in addition, we are in the early stages, I think, of the rise of a new service unionism.

It's important to remember that the industrial union movement emerged on the national stage in the 1870s, but it took some 60 years to organize manufacturing, and it's always amazing to me that it happened just like that, in four years, bingo, the Big Three in auto go down, 1937 to 1941. So it may take at least that long to organize the new mass retailers.

But collective bargaining service unionism is expanding, as we know, both in the private and public sectors, and I think in part due to the revival of the strategy of marketwide organizing and taking wages out of competition. This was not the approach that was used in the fragmentary airline industry, for example. And there's lots of examples here in the 1990s, health care workers joining unions by the thousands―just last month 50,000 daycare workers organizing in Illinois.

But third, and perhaps of greatest significance in terms of pushing against this trope of labor's decline, is that workers' self-activity in collective organizing is expanding outside of the traditional collective bargaining framework. There's lots of examples. I'll just mention one: the hundred-plus worker centers that now exist across the country, and the new labor and civil rights movement that is emerging among immigrants that these centers in alliance with trade unions helped spark.

If we limit our discussion of worker power to the strike and of worker organization to collective bargaining unionism, which is essentially what union density figures measure, then I think we will miss much of the story of today's labor movement. The labor movement has never been synonymous with collective bargaining.

Workers have always pursued a variety of means to achieve and advance their goals―from the political organizing and lobbying to secure the eight-hour day in the late nineteenth century or the Fair Labor Standards Laws of the 19th century and early 20th century, to the unemployed councils of the early 1930s, to the lawsuits and media campaigns on behalf of clericals conducted by Nine To Five in the 1970s, or the class-action discrimination suits against Wal-Mart that Nelson mentioned, to Working America, part of today's AFL-CIO.

So again, I think it is important to distinguish the rise and fall of collective bargaining unionism from the rise and fall of the labor movement.

Joe's second question is what will it take to rebuild labor. I've written elsewhere about this, and I don't want to go into a lot of detail here. I've written about the fundamental changes in the nature of work, the rise of interactive service occupations, the growth of a more mobile contingent or nonstandard work force, and I’ve tried to figure out what the implications are of these changes for rethinking union institutions, norms and practices, and also for revisioning labor law.

I do think in this context it's important to note that if indeed we care about industrial democracy we will need to figure out representational structures that encompass more than a single workplace. Workers are increasingly mobile, moving from job to job. They need organizational forms and union benefits and forms of membership that can move with them, that can accommodate this new reality.

In other words, I sometimes think we need as much attention to the institutional arrangements and representational structures that the newly organized workers will call home, as we do to the organizing strategies that add these members to the union rolls.

In my short time remaining, I want to turn to the final issue raised in Joe's paper, what kind of ideological frame will best serve the movement. Or put another way, what languages of labor might not only inspire mobilization but best provide strategic guidance.

Joe has emphasized what he calls "the shortcomings of the rights-based formulation and the need to link human rights to an updated worker democracy tradition." Let me suggest a somewhat different emphasis. I want to focus more on the benefits of a fuller engagement with human rights, in particular with labor's own human rights traditions.

Here I want to draw specifically on labor's own rights language and the way workers themselves articulated a rights tradition. This labor rights tradition, I think, has a usable past for labor movements today, in part because human rights always was intertwined with the struggle for democracy, political and industrial. Workers never embraced a narrow rights tradition; rather, they articulated an expanded and class-inflected rights rhetoric, one where individual and group advancement were joined.

Workers rarely had the luxury of ignoring power. Neither did they fall prey to the notion that individual legal rights were sufficient. Real legal rights could not be secured without the achievement of economic and social rights. I'll give three brief examples of labor's own rights traditions and why I think these historical formulations are still of value today.

I'll begin with Gompers, and it's not just because we're in the Gompers Room. Gompers had much to say about labor's human right and much which I think can be fruitfully appropriated for the present moment. Take his 1920 speech in Carnegie Hall, as he debates the governor of Kansas over whether striking miners can be forced back to work. "The right to self-ownership," he proclaims, "is an inherent and natural right. No man can own the labor of another because that labor power is inseparable from the self. It is a human right." He goes on, "It is also a fundamental constitutional right as enshrined in the 13th Amendment."

"Labor is not a commodity," Gompers famously proclaimed, challenging the so-called market laws of supply and demand, and no employer has "even an implied property right in the labor of another."

This language of self-ownership of the inviolability of the person, of the inseparability of labor power from the self, is a powerful framework for challenging the rising abuse of worker bodies everywhere as human trafficking and new forms of coerced labor proliferate in an unregulated global market.

Here is language that links labor rights with women's rights and migrant rights, and provides a labor basis for the struggle for bodily integrity and the right of all workers not to have their selves or their labor demeaned and commodified. It is a human rights tradition that is―and I'm using James Gross's phrase here―"incompatible with servility."

Take another passage from Gompers's writings on the right to strike, the right to organize, the right to bargain collectively. "Free labor," he said, "cannot exist without the freedom to withhold that labor or to give it freely." There is no real or "actual liberty of contract"―that's a phrase that makes its way into the preamble of the Wagner Act―"without an equality of bargaining power." In other words, the achievement of individual rights and of individual freedom is only imaginable in the context of the equalization of power.

A second brief example: the labor feminists I've written about in The Other Women’s Movement. By mid-century, they and others in the progressive wing of the CIO spoke of industrial democracy, but they also spoke of social rights by which they meant the right to the social provisions and benefits which would make it possible for them not only to have first-class industrial citizenship but to care for their families. They, along with allies like Eleanor Roosevelt, helped offer an expansive reading of human rights in the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights―one which included the right to organize and to form unions. They also expanded the worker rights discourse to include the right to equal pay and the right to be free from discrimination. So they linked rights and democracy, rights and social justice.

Third and last, we can see these labor traditions, I think, reasserting themselves in the present. Rights rhetoric has always been crucial in inspiring worker movements, and labor's language of rights and empowerment, both individual and collective, remains inspirational today.

Globally, there are countless examples of the wisdom and appeal of joining rights and empowerment. Consider the phenomenal success of SEWA, the Self-Employed Women’s Association of India, now a licensed trade union. It promotes collective association, but it also recognized the need to heal the individual psyche and address the specific psychology of the dispossessed and the deferent.

In the U.S., most dramatically, we can see the power of labor's human rights tradition in the now national movement emerging among immigrants, a movement which most recently has called for a general walkout on May Day by immigrant workers. It is a movement for political and industrial citizenship, but it is also a movement that must carry its rights literally in the body and defend the fundamental personhood of the undocumented as they move across borders and from job site to job site. The slogans? "Jobs and Justice" but also "No Human Being is Illegal."

In conclusion, labor's strength and its renewal, I think, is to be found in its own traditions. We in the academy and in the movement can do no better than pay attention to where workers' self-organization is already occurring and to listen to the languages that workers themselves are speaking.

Thank you. (Applause)

MS. KESSLER-HARRIS: Now we're going to hear from Stewart Acuff.

Stewart has been an organizer for almost 30 years. And in addition, he's a labor organizer for almost 30 years. He spent five years as a community organizer, and he spent 10 years at SEIU. He was also president of the Atlanta Labor Council for about 10 years and since 2002 has been organizing directly here at the AFL-CIO. So it's a pleasure to welcome Stewart. (Applause)

MR. ACUFF: Thank you very much. Thank you all very much. I want to thank Joe McCartin for his thoughtful analysis, but before turning to his paper, I just want to say how deeply honored I am to be on this panel. My fellow panelists are amongst the top labor historians in the country, and it's not just their scholarship that's impressive but also their passion, their commitment and their activism. To be perfectly honest, I have to tell you that I approached this meeting tonight and this opportunity with a great deal of humility.

We've worked very hard to lift the labor movement and revitalize the labor movement, but we have so much further to go, and we don't have all of the answers. This panel, and indeed, all of you in this room, shows how much we in the labor movement could gain by forging a closer relationship with historians who understand and care as deeply as you do about labor's historic mission to achieve workplace democracy and social justice.

I want to start by just mentioning a few things I especially liked about Joe's paper. On the opening page, he clearly recognizes the severity and impact of the human rights crisis in America’s workplaces. He makes a compelling case that the problems besetting labor are economic and global, going far beyond the workplace crisis. And he reminds us that democracy in the workplace and in the society and in our unions is one of the most serious casualties of the failure to protect workers' rights.

I agree with Joe's analysis about the role of structural and global economic changes undermining worker power. In fact, workers in America are caught in a terrible squeeze, a policy trap that is shrinking our middle class, ruining futures, devaluing works, victimizing kids and pushing our country towards corporate domination.

On the one hand, the corporations and their right-wing allies have off-shored and outsourced good-paying manufacturing jobs, contracting out and de-industrializing America. And as we all know, technological changes have changed our employers and our workplaces and, on the other hand, they have destroyed any effective right to organize for workers in America.

I won't go into all the details. We've heard it before, and everyone knows here, but the NLRB election process is hopelessly and completely broken, victimizing workers who try to take collective action.

I believe that we have a responsibility to struggle to change that and to create a climate and environment in which workers don't have to risk their job, risk their future, and risk their family just to form a union. Joe was right. One of the things that we don't talk about enough is the decline of union density across the developed world.

We agree that the climate is critical. In fact, as we've said repeatedly, we neither can nor do we want to wage our struggle outside the context of a broad progressive movement that is focused on a more just society and a more just economy. And much of the energy for social justice has been focused on the pursuit of human rights here and abroad. Americans know what we mean when we talk about human rights. Workers know what we mean when we talk about human rights. Nelson Lichtenstein gave us a great opportunity, in 1997, when he first challenged us to talk about our struggles in the context of human rights. Lance Compa and Human Rights Watch gave us a huge opportunity in 2000, when they published a 300-page document called Unfair Advantage, documenting the fact that the United States of America is out of compliance with internationally accepted human rights standards for failing to protect the right of our own people to freely form unions.

That human rights perspective helped us explain to unions and organizers and to workers what has happened to us. When we finally said, "It's time that we admit we have lost this right, we can no longer go to workers and say you have a right to form a union," it was irresponsible to make that. And that human rights perspective gave us the opportunity to explain what has happened to us.

The human rights perspective validates the abuse workers feel in their workplaces: the abuse workers feel, the intensive abuse workers feel during organizing campaigns, but also the daily indignities of every-day life of workers in jobs in America. The human rights perspective importantly validates what workers know is happening to them and haven't been able to express. And it resonates.

And it provides, the human rights perspective provides a powerful lens for necessary allies―politicians, clergy, people of faith, civil rights activists―to see what happens in our workplaces. And I would argue that the human rights perspective and framework provides a powerful clarity in viewing the hypocrisy of our government and our society. When you say we can go all over the globe about everybody else's human rights crisis, but we have a human rights crisis in America's workplaces, people understand what you mean.

We know that we have a global struggle on our hands. And allies in other unions across the world understand what we mean when we talk about the human rights crisis in America. The human rights framework allowed us to get 11 Nobel Peace Laureates to sign a global call to workplace rights in the week leading up to International Human Rights Day on December 10th. And that group included, not a labor advocate as long as I've known him, and I've known him a while, Jimmy Carter from Georgia; it included the Dali Lama; it included Lech Walesa and John Hume.

We have seen Americans and others across the world fight and struggle collectively in pursuit or defense of their rights, including human rights. I've been powerfully moved by that in my life. I'm from west Tennessee. I was 13 years old in 1968, on April 4th, when Dr. King was assassinated. I'd been powerfully moved by watching that struggle for racial justice in Tennessee and across the South.

But to get back to the point, the number one obstacle to growth in the labor movement is vicious employer opposition. To fail to fight that would be irresponsible on the part of the American labor movement. And to fail to engage that struggle with the strength of every fiber of our being and all the passion we can muster would be irresponsible.

Joe's right. I was privileged to lead a team in Texas in the early 1980s and organize 12 Beverly Enterprises Nursing Homes, but we lost the 13th. And I will never, as long as I live, forget sitting on the bed in the Center Texas Best Western Hotel, talking with the eight members of that committee about what was going to happen to them the next day after that losing election. If you've ever been through that experience, in Center, Texas, a town of 1,200 people, seven black women and what they were going to do now with their lives, you'll understand how important this struggle to restore any effective right to organize is to this labor movement and in this country.

So while it is inadequate, while it is not enough, the human rights framework is important and the struggle to restore the right to organize and freely form unions is critical. This is what we're doing on this issue.

I want to thank Joe for his very warm and gracious remarks about what we've done in 2003 and 2005 on International Human Rights Day and the weeks leading up to International Human Rights Day. In fact, this past year, the week of December 10th was the largest labor mobilization in 15 years in America before the immigrant rights movement, and that is a real movement which is inspiring all of us as we watch it.

Last year on December 10th in New York City, as we prepared for our International Human Rights Day demonstration, we confronted Lifespire at a campaign that AFSCME had to win card-check and neutrality the day before the demonstration to make Lifespire the poster child for violation of human rights in New York City. They agreed to card-check and neutrality, and now 1,500 workers who care for developmentally disabled people have a union there.

In St. Louis on December 9th, we kicked off the Peabody campaign with a demonstration of about 1,500 people, including 500 mine workers from across the Midwest and as far away as Virginia, as well as mine workers from Australia. In addition, we marched through the streets of Portland with 3,000 people linking organizing rights to the global economy and a just global economy and fair trade. In Milwaukee, we listened to construction workers talk about their struggle to form a union.

We have a bill, legislation in Congress now, the Employee Free Choice Act, which would do three things. It would allow workers to form a union by the simple act of signing a card or a petition, and would take the horrible six-week or six-month campaign of employers pounding on workers daily out of the picture. You want a union? You sign a card. The union is certified at 50 percent plus one. The second thing it would do is it would allow for triple-damage penalties on employers who fire workers, and for the first time it would allow us to go to federal court and get an injunction against an employer, instead of always being the one on the receiving end of the injunction.

And the Employee Free Choice Act would do a third important thing; it would say the boss cannot run away from the union. If you cannot negotiate a contract within the first year of union certification, you can go to arbitration and a contract would be imposed.

Well, you say, "Stewart, that sounds great, but George Bush is president and Tom”― oh, not Tom DeLay―"Dennis Hastert is running the House, and Bill First is still running the Senate."

Let me tell you. There are 213 co-sponsors on this legislation in Tom DeLay's House of Representatives. There are 42 in Bill Frist's Senate. We can win this fight if we prosecute it like we expect to win it. And that's what we intend to do―to prosecute it like we expect to win it.

We've used this rights framework in the context of campaigns. Monday, we'll deliver a letter signed by 400 members of the clergy in St. Louis to Peabody headquarters, calling on them to agree to card-check and neutrality.

In our Comcast campaign, Comcast cable with CWA and IBW, the deepest penetration we've got with that company is a group of religious leaders calling on Comcast to agree to recognize workers rights to form a union.

We're organizing immigrant construction workers in Phoenix and in Milwaukee, and the main leverage we're using there is community and political pressure. Political support developed through a voice at work campaign, a campaign to build support around the workers, is one of the most important kinds of leverage that we're exercising today.

We know that we have to do much better at global unionism. We know that we have to do much better at global campaigns. That's why the support of the Australian unions, and the CFMEU [Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union] is so important to the Peabody campaign, and why they are mobilizing this week and next week in Peabody mines across Australia in support of American workers in Peabody mines here.

And steelworkers inspired us all when they negotiated in their global contract with Goodyear, the first card-check and neutrality that they got. And the UAW, when they negotiated card-check and neutrality with Daimler-Chrysler, which has allowed them to organize 8,000 heavy-manufacturing workers in the Deep South, mostly in North Carolina but also in Tennessee and Alabama.

Joe is right. Organizing is about power. It is always about power and always has been about power. And that is why we cannot afford to walk away from the most important vehicle for power for workers in America, which is politics. And that is why we have to link, why we have to link our goal of growth and organizing to what political power we have left. Political power is how we will pass the Employee Free Choice Act. Political power is how 300,000 homecare workers have organized in the last seven years in America. Political power is how construction workers organize and public employees organize.

I would argue to you this evening that the most important private-sector campaign in America has been the CWA effort to organize Cingular Wireless, where they got card-check from the largest employer in their most important economic sector and now have organized 20,000 workers that five years ago many of us in this room would have said could not have been organized.

And so the organizing program of the AFL-CIO is directly linked to the understanding that we have lost any effective right to organize. And to combat that, we have the campaign to change the law and change the climate. We have the effort to help unions change to allow them to organize anyway, in spite of the law, and the campaign to help unions understand how to organize outside of the law, the law that does not work, and to run big campaigns that have the potential to change the dynamics of an entire sector.

And so we are working with CWA and IBW just now, to take the Cingular campaign and use it as a springboard to Verizon Wireless, the second-largest employer in that industry. We are working, as I said, on the campaign to organize immigrant construction workers in Phoenix, Arizona. Last year, the ironworkers organized the largest employer in their craft west of the Mississippi and right now, with our organizers, are working on the second-largest.

One of the most-inspiring campaigns of the last 10 years is the Farm Labor Organizing Committee campaign to organize 7,000 farm workers in North Carolina. I mentioned the campaign of Peabody. I would remind you that the UAW has organized 48,000 heavy-manufacturing workers in the South, not only in Daimler-Chrysler facilities but also in the auto parts industry.

I'm almost finished.

I agree that organizing isn't enough. And I agree that winning back the right to organize isn't enough. One of the things that distinguishes us from those who split with us is that we realize what's happened to workers in our labor movement in the last 25 years as a result of an intentional strategic public policy to weaken unions and redistribute wealth and power―and that we need a full-blown political and legislative and policy and global-action effort for change. But we cannot win if workers in this country are not free to rebuild their power. We have a global struggle here. And a political and public policy struggle.

But how could we ever expect to win if workers in the most powerful country on Earth don't have the right to organize their power and wield their power? Thank you very much. (Applause)

MS. KESSLER-HARRIS: OK, we have about 10 minutes left for questions and comments, and so what I think I'm going to do is go right to you. Let's try to keep it brief, a comment or a question, and then we'll come back to the panelists for a final word before we close. So the floor is now open.

MR. AL BILIK: My name is Al Bilik of AFSCME. Just a couple of comments. One, that I think it's too easy to pass off the issue of declining numbers of members in our unions as a worldwide phenomenon. We have to keep in mind, I think, that while we have found a great deal of difficulty in asserting ourselves as a political movement, in other countries the recent issue, the recent events in France, for example, point out that while their membership levels in French unions have declined―perhaps as much as ours have, maybe not as much―but they've declined considerably, that has not necessarily reduced the power of the labor movement itself as an institution. The unions themselves are very strong; they're able to go to the streets with very little provocation. But most important, they've learned, the hard way, how to apply their strength on the political level.

For example, the issue, as we know, that brought them to the streets most recently had to do with the probationary period of young new employees. It's the kind of issue that we have been fortunate to have addressed in bargaining. We put it into our contract. Say, after you've been there for six months or a year, or during that period the employer has freedom to fire the individual. After that, you've got some rights under the contract. The French learned to use their political power, and so they vested it in law. They did the same thing with paid holidays, with paid vacations, and a whole host of other benefits that we have struggled in the very narrowest of ways to achieve for ourselves through collective bargaining.

MS. KESSLER-HARRIS: I hate to interrupt, but could we make this a little shorter so we can give other people a chance?

MR. BILIK: OK, fine. Another very quick point, and that is that the public sector has, in the United States, has produced for us an illustration of how effective organizing can be achieved. We have 37 percent, 38 percent of all public employees organized. Even the air traffic controllers, who many people say the treatment of back in the Reagan days was the beginning of our apparent demise, they are back organized. They were organized again a year later, after the Reagan experience. And they're a strong union today.

In the public sector, we have learned a couple of things. One, wherever we have the right to organize, we succeed in organizing. Essentially, it's because public employers, when they're participants in the process of creating rights for us, act in a neutral fashion when our workers try to organize. And that way we're able to achieve success, because workers want unions, private and public. And as far as we're concerned in the public sector, that's the answer for us. In fact, as Stewart's admonition about the right of workers to organize free from oppression from their employers, they'll organize―in the United States and elsewhere.

MS. KESSLER-HARRIS: Thank you. Other questions, comments? If not, let's turn to….

MR. McCARTIN: Let me make a quick response to that. And that is that Al's right, of course, about much of what he says, but although 37 percent of U.S. public-sector workers are organized, the density is almost double that in Canada. We have the right to organize public-sector workers here, but we haven't been able to expand that base since, you know, 1980.

MR. BILIK: I forgot to say that we only have the right to organize about half of them in the public sector. In half the states, there is no opportunity to organize. You probably have at least 60 percent of those who are organizable in the United States.

MS. KESSLER-HARRIS: Jennifer?

MS. JENNIFER KLEIN: I want to come back and sort of defend Joe's notion of using a language of democracy. It certainly doesn't negate using the language of rights, but I would like the commentators to just, you know, reflect on the way in which rights still become the language in which the individual says, "I should get this," you know, whether it's based on citizenship or just the notion of my personhood.

Whereas Joe's saying part of what's important about the language of democracy is that also entails claims for participation for a voice for autonomy, and it's not just about a right that you get, but also that everybody has to participate, and that's part of the power equation. And then also his point about solidarity, that is the solidarity claim. So I wonder if you can kind of reconcile the points he made about the importance of human rights language with the important aspects of democracy.

MS. KESSLER-HARRIS: Perhaps the panelists can use that question to sum up the question, because I think Jennifer's caught the heart of the controversy on the panel. So if each of you wants to address that question of the potential conflict, at least, between notions of solidarity and the use of power, and the individual notions of human rights as a rallying cry.

MR. LICHTENSTEIN: Just very quickly. Our enemies have made those dichotomies. They said, you know, rights versus solidarity, you know, democracy versus rights. Our enemies have done that, and they will do that. That's not a reason that, I mean, that's no reason that we shouldn't try to link them.

I guess I would just put it this way, that yes, obviously, the two can't be divided. How could you have a rights regime with no democracy, and how could you have a democratic regime with no rights? It's impossible.

I guess it was, but I do think that Stewart and others, that right now at this moment in sort of the transitional way you make the argument, the rights should be given priority at this moment. I mean, obviously, that has resonance. Industrial democracy, you know, it doesn't resonate at this instant.

MS. KESSLER-HARRIS: Sue, do you want to go next?

MS. COBBLE: Yes. The point I was making was simply that the labor's rights tradition is not a tradition where rights are narrowly conceived or separated from collective participation, that the argument was that actually individual rights are not achievable without solidarity and collective participation, so that they were intertwined.

I think the individual rights tradition is important because actually there's limits to the traditions of solidarity and collectivity, and that when that gets based on sameness and homogeneity, that also can be a problem. So the notion of individual empowerment, particularly for people who don't feel entitled and empowered, is really important.

MS. KESSLER-HARRIS: Stewart?

MR. ACUFF: I'll be very brief. I reject the notion that the language of rights is somehow inherently individualistic. I think in our country we've seen many, many cases, not just the civil rights movement, of average people and workers asserting their rights in a very collective fashion and fighting for their rights in a very collective fashion in the labor movement and outside the labor movement.

I welcome the language of democracy. I agree with Nelson. How can you have rights and not democracy? And I can't add much more to that that is different from what I said earlier. I just fundamentally reject it, that it's inherently individualistic.

MS. KESSLER-HARRIS: Joe, you've got the last word.

MR. McCARTIN: OK, thank you, Alice. First, before I say the last word, let me say that I was blown away by the comments, the insights that people share, the passion behind them, the kind of spirit of this dialogue, and I couldn't have imagined any more fruitful kind of session than we've managed to have here.

In sum, I would say it should not be a question of either/or―either the language of rights or the language of democracy. It must be the language of both rights and democracy, and what I was arguing for here, and I was really being provocative, I think, in trying to put it that way, so it might be misconstrued that I'm arguing that we need to jettison the rights language. I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing something different, I think. That language is important. It has very great utility to it. It's rooted in labor's own tradition, as Sue points out. It's rooted in the civil rights movement, as Stewart points out. We need to continue to own that language, and we need to employ it aggressively.

But we also need to recognize what it doesn't do for us, where it's weak. And we need to supplement its weaknesses by resurrecting another way of talking, also deeply rooted in labor's traditions, a way of talking, I think, that Jennifer touches on in framing her question that way, about majority rule, about solidarity, which don't get articulated quite as well, I think, through rights talk language.

So I would just say, in sum, that those of us on this panel, I think, agree on much more than we disagree about. And there's something very hopeful in that. This is a really important discussion, and the kind of ideas that we're beginning to thresh out here are at the root of what we need to do if we're going to rebuild the labor movement.

So I want to thank my panelists for being so generous and so insightful in their comments, all of you, and thank you, Alice.

MS. KESSLER-HARRIS: And thank you, all of you. (Applause)