The top ranks of labor leadership are turning over quickly. It’s worth asking what, if anything, it means.
The last few months have seen some unexpected and significant changes in high profile labor leadership. The news on May 12th that Marc Perrone, the long-serving leader of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), was stepping down would be a momentous enough story all by itself. UFCW is one of only five unions in the country with a membership of over one million, and Perrone’s retirement was not announced in advance. Similarly, the defeat of long-time SEIU Local 1199 President George Gresham the week before is noteworthy even without any additional context. SEIU 1199 is a local that is bigger than most international unions, and Gresham had been in office 18 years.
But these two changes underscore a trend: large union leadership is turning over at an unusually brisk pace. Such changes can create risks. In this perilous time, however, it’s best for labor to lean into change; embrace it and use it to re-energize and revitalize our unions.
Let’s go to the numbers: Of the 25 largest international and local unions in the country, 15 of them (60%) have had a new leader in just the past three years. 18 of the 25 (72%) have seen new leaders take office since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is… not usual. If you looked at these same 25 unions in 2020, prior to the start of COVID, you’d have found only six had brought in new leaders in the previous three years. In 2020 the average tenure of a leader was 8.2 years. Now it’s 4.8. In 2020, eight of the 25 had been in office more than ten years. Now it’s just three.
There’s no obvious answer why this is happening. It’s tempting to draw dramatic conclusions: the members are demanding change! Perhaps, but the data doesn’t support that. In some cases –– SEIU 1199, mentioned above, the Teamsters, and the United Auto Workers come to mind –– the turnover was definitely connected to member dissatisfaction with the existing leadership. Sean O’Brien of the Teamsters and Shawn Fain of the UAW both won tightly contested elections against the union’s current political establishment.
In other unions, the change seems to have been less contentious, or, if there was internal political tension, it hasn’t made it into public view. Maybe the stresses and strains of leading a union through the pandemic and the return of Trump have played a role. Nor is there necessarily a generational transition in effect here. While some of the new leaders, like Brian Renfroe of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), are under 50, others, like Claude Cummings, Jr. of CWA and Kenneth Cooper of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) are in their 60s and 70s.
Whatever the cause, though, it’s happening. Union leadership is turning over fast. What does it mean?
Change has its costs. The old adage that it’s not what you know but who you know is as true for organized labor as it is anywhere else. Many of labor’s new leaders have probably never met each other before and have less well established relationships with the political and civic leaders labor partners with. How will that impact coordinated planning on organizing, bargaining, or politics? Will new leaders feel an urgency to prove themselves, tempting them to strike out on their own to make their names? That would explain much of the behavior of new Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, who stands out among labor leaders for his seeming chumminess with Donald Trump. He gets a lot of attention for it, and a lot of understandable criticism from those who see the Trump Administration as an unremitting foe of organized labor.
There’s a tendency on the Left to regard inside-baseball relationships among labor leaders as a de facto form of selling out, trading away militancy and democratic power for being able to go to the cool parties, but it’s not an either-or situation. It’s helpful for union leaders to trust each other, to have some shared experiences. It’s also helpful for union leaders to have connections with politicians, leading news figures, and so on. Those connections are surely fewer now, and less deeply rooted, than just five years ago. That’s not great, especially when unions need to be doing all they can to protect workers and their families.
But while there are surely downsides to rapid turnover, we’ve also seen good things. At the beginning of the year, SEIU took the momentous step of rejoining the AFL-CIO, from which it had acrimoniously split 20 years before. While there were those who hoped the 2005 split would create conditions to spur organizing growth, it never quite worked out that way. The return of SEIU to the AFL-CIO means unions will find it easier to coordinate their efforts and to speak with one voice. I’m not privy to any of the inside story of how that happened, but you have to figure it made a difference that President April Verrett of SEIU and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler are relatively new in their current roles and had little to do with the unpleasantness in 2005. That made it easier for them to come to an agreement without either of them feeling like they were losing face or backing down from previous stances.
Similarly, as I write in my forthcoming book, Who’s Got the Power: The Resurgence of American Unions, the UAW’s powerful and successful 2023 Stand-Up Strike probably would not have happened without the fresh thinking that Shawn Fain and his team brought to the union’s top ranks when they took power earlier that year. A leadership more tied to the past might not have been willing to embark on such an aggressive and ambitious strategy.
With the Trump administration harming so many people in so many ways so very quickly, it would be understandable for organized labor to want to hunker down, dig in, and try to weather the storm in a protective crouch. A larger cohort of longer-serving leaders might make that easier. But that’s the wrong way to go.
Even though unions are in great danger right now –– Trump may yet succeed in eliminating all vestiges of collective bargaining for federal workers, for example –– it’s time for them to lead.
Organized labor is the best hope America has to fend off fascism, especially the present American version, which elevates unaccountable billionaires like Elon Musk. Any effort to fight fascism has to make sure it includes a struggle against the growing power of billionaires and their corporations. Unions are uniquely positioned to do this. We know this, in part, because of a fascinating study recently released by Aaron Sojourner and Adam Reich, based on data from the authoritative American National Election Study (ANES). It’s not news that labor unions are more popular than they’ve been in years, but what Sojourner and Reich show is that this popularity is happening alongside an epic collapse in public support for big business.
For fifty years starting in the early 1960s public opinion of labor unions rose and fell in near-lockstep with big business. When one was popular, so was the other. I can’t help but wonder if much of that was because, for many Americans, labor unions and big business were seen as two sides of the same coin, both parts of the American economic establishment, and that their popularity was essentially downstream of Americans’ faith in that establishment.
But in 2016, in the wake of the Great Recession, in the wake of Scott Walker’s blistering attack on unions in Wisconsin and the Occupy movement in 2011, and as Donald Trump took center stage in the American political consciousness, approval of the two diverged for the first time ever. Opinion of big business has continued to decline; it’s at the lowest point in the history of ANES data. Opinion of labor unions, on the other hand, has never been higher. The gap between the two, which was never more than five percent for fifty years, is now sixteen percent.
In that context, the influx of new leaders to labor’s top ranks is a tremendous opportunity.
Most Americans know little about unions. Barely one in ten belongs to one, and in many parts of the country the number is more like one in twenty. Younger workers, especially, are also unlikely to have a parent or other close family member who was a member of a union. They aren’t taught much about unions in school, and representations of unions on film, television, and in books are still rare.
And yet, unions are incredibly popular. I submit that popularity signals support for the promise of unions as much as it does for what they currently do. Even people who don’t know much about unions can see the importance of working people having a voice on the job. People look around and see corporate abuses of power everywhere –– against immigrants, against the environment, against, well, everyone –– and know unions can stand up against that.
We’ve seen signs of this already. The tremendous support –– in conservative states! –– for the 2018 #RedforEd strikes. The strong popularity of the UAW and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023. More recently, the public has responded strongly to union leaders calling out the depravity of ICE’s secret police tactics not just with words but with action. The arrest of SEIU’s David Huerta last month, for example, while standing up for immigrant workers, made national news and was overwhelmingly understood to be a politically motivated immoral act.
There is a tremendous hunger in the land for leaders to stand up to the bullies and billionaires of the Trump regime. Labor’s new leaders should accept the call. They have the opportunity to tell labor’s story anew, to an audience eager to hear it. They can position labor as the bedrock of resistance to oppression, and in doing so show all Americans the vital necessity of organizing for power in their workplaces and across the country.
