Step up new worker organizing, says McElroy

If the labor movement is to grow and if workers are to get the kind of representation they deserve, unions have to retool, restructure and redirect their energies, says AFT president Edward J. McElroy. A key target: new professional workers who don’t fit the mold of traditional nine-to-fivers.

McElroy was the keynote speaker at the AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees (DPE) conference “Organizing Professionals in the 21st Century,” held near Washington, D.C., March 14-15. The conference, which was produced in collaboration with the Albert Shanker Institute, brought together leaders and organizers from many of the 25 international unions that belong to DPE—the professional employee division of the AFL-CIO. Together they reviewed the latest research as well as specially commissioned studies for the conference, and they brainstormed about the future.

It is a future that must include organizing professional and technical workers as a top priority, said McElroy. This occupation group, he noted, is projected to grow faster and add more workers (6.5 million by 2012) than any other. These professionals are diverse—ranging from nurses, educators and scientists to skilled construction workers, mechanics, public employees, professional communicators and technology workers. Although they are becoming a predominant part of the workforce, the way their work is structured—not constrained by one work site or a 9-to-5 schedule—calls for new approaches to our union structures and operations, said McElroy.

The AFT has been the fastest-growing organizer of professional employees, noted McElroy, who chairs the DPE. The need for unions to reach out to new workers couldn’t be more pressing, he said, noting the well-publicized (although not always accurately depicted) struggles within the AFL-CIO over declining membership and the future agenda of the organization.

“We need to avoid a tendency to polarize,” said McElroy. Some are arguing over whether we will be “a political movement or an organizing union movement. Both are essential. The question is, how do you get the resources to do both?”

The concerns and priorities of new workers may be very different from those of current union members, McElroy told conference participants. Unions have “to be clear and true to ourselves in deciding what fails and succeeds” in organizing these workers. “We have to fit the organization that we redesign to those potential new members instead of trying to stuff new members into an old design.”

Speakers who preceded McElroy provided the springboard for the AFT president’s comments about the future of professionals in the labor movement.

They include Rand Corporation senior economist Lynn Karoly and Richard Hurd, a professor of labor studies at Cornell University.