Labor chief sees workersâ€™ revolt

The special-election upset in Massachusetts that gave Republicans a critical extra vote in the Senate was a “working-class revolt” driven by fears and anger in the recession and a wake-up call for both labor union and elected federal officials, the former chief of the AFL-CIO said in a recent talk at his alma mater in Westchester County.

John Sweeney, a 1955 graduate of Iona College, returned to the New Rochelle campus where he majored in economics as guest and keynote speaker at the Hagan School of Business Executive for a Day program. The Bronx-born son of a New York City bus driver and a domestic worker, both Irish immigrants, Sweeney is president emeritus of the 11.5-million-member American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations, retiring last year after four terms as AFL-CIO president.

Noting many students in the audience likely planned business careers, Sweeney nonetheless made a recruitment pitch for the labor movement to which he devoted nearly 55 years, starting with a $65-a-week job with the International Ladies”™ Garment Workers Union. “With all that”™s going on in this country, with the economic crisis, we need all the help we can get,” he said.

Sweeny offered a summary of the crisis: “Economic situation: bad. Effect on America”™s workers: worse.”

Workers”™ wages have been depressed to 1973 levels, while executive salaries and bonuses “have skyrocketed,” he said. “We now have the widest wage and wealth gap of any industrialized nation.” He said that gap “bedevils and separates us.”

Sweeney said the average top corporate executive makes 400 times what the average American worker makes. The AFL-CIO”™s Executive Paywatch reported a CEO of a Standard & Poor”™s 500 company was paid, on average, $10.9 million in total compensation in 2008, citing data from The Corporate Library, an independent corporate research and ratings firm.

Sweeny derided a corporate culture of “unbelievable greed” and those who think “that it”™s OK for corporate executives to make millions while others are struggling just to make ends meet.”

Lacking funds in the deep recession, “Tens of thousands of young men and women from working-class families are dropping out of college education,” Sweeney said, and those who do graduate have difficulty finding jobs.

The union chief said health care reform is “essential to economic recovery.” With the recent victory of Republican Scott Brown in the special Senate election in Massachusetts, pending health care legislation could be greatly scaled back or eliminated, he said.

Labor wants the public insurance option that was dropped from Democratic reform proposals, he said. The AFL-CIO, Sweeney said, has “big problems” with the Senate health care bill, especially with its proposed tax on insurers for high-premium or so-called “Cadillac” plans. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted that in 2016, 19 percent of workers who have insurance through the workplace would fall under that category. Opponents of the excise tax argue that insurers and employers will try to bring their plans below the Cadillac premium threshold by raising deductibles and co-payments for employees.

Sweeny said labor opposed the tax on Cadillac plans “because they cover hundreds of thousands of middle-class American families who drive Chevies.” Unions won some of those health care plans from employers in exchange for wage concessions, he said.

In the wake of the Republican victory in Massachusetts, “I think we”™re so close to getting some form of national health care that I think we should revisit it and get something that would be acceptable to Congress and would be acceptable to the American people,” he said.

The cost of health care reform was a big issue in the Massachusetts election among both employers and workers, Sweeney said. The AFL-CIO”™s own Election Day poll of exiting voters found that two-thirds still favored their state”™s universal health care coverage but were concerned about the proposed federal tax on Cadillac plans and whether they would pay a share of other states”™ health coverage.

Sweeney said polled voters did not feel that President Obama “is trying to do too much. In fact they feel he”™s trying to do too little.” He said 61 percent said the government”™s recession policies had helped Wall Street and big banks but not Main Street America.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in a statement called Brown”™s victory “a giant step backwards for working families.” He said the election results should remind candidates in the November federal elections that frustrated Americans urgently expect results from Washington on jobs, health care and financial regulation.

“What happened in Massachusetts was a working-class revolt,” said Sweeney. Unions “should have had a better handle on where Massachusetts voters were” on the issues, he said.

Sweeney said Republicans”™ gain in the Senate also threatens the labor movement”™s other legislative initiatives in Congress, including trade-law and immigration reform and the Employee Free Choice Act, a measure affecting union-forming at companies that was first introduced in 2005 and has been strongly opposed by business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“It will be tough. We will have a long fight. We have a lot of work to do,” Sweeney said.