For a few years in the mid-1990s, AFSCME President Gerry McEntee (1935-2022) repositioned American labor and restored some of its clout.
Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo
Gerald McEntee, then-president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), greets attendees at the AFCSME convention in San Francisco in July 2008.
Gerry McEntee, who was president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) from 1981 to 2012, will likely not go down in history as a great union leader. He will, however, rate a very positive couple of pages for his decisive interventions in the politics of American labor during the mid- and late-1990s. McEntee, who died earlier this month at age 87, played a key role in pushing a stultified AFL-CIO to embrace a more contemporary and vibrant liberalism, and in making the labor movement considerably more effective in the electoral arena.
McEntee was not, strictly speaking, a man of the left, though the AFSCME he inherited from his predecessor as president, Jerry Wurf, was a union of the left. That had largely been Wurf’s doing. In 1964, as head of AFSCME’s powerful New York City locals, Wurf ousted the union’s longtime president, Arnold Zander, becoming in the process that rarity in labor’s highest circles, a successful insurgent. In his first days as president, Wurf discovered and ousted the operative whom the CIA had secretly installed at AFSCME to do the agency’s bidding while nominally serving as a foreign policy staffer. In short order, Wurf quickly aligned the union with both the civil rights movement and the growing movement opposed to the Vietnam War—the latter alignment in complete opposition to the hawkish zealotry of the AFL-CIO.
At the same time, Wurf invested heavily in organizing. Along with teachers’ union president Albert Shanker, Wurf really built what had been the nation’s weak public sector unions into powerhouses—waging strikes and engaging in kindred agitation to the point that cities, counties and states granted their employees the right to collective bargaining. It was one such campaign, waged by the Black sanitation workers in Memphis, to which Martin Luther King, Jr. lent his support, during which he was murdered.
Like Bernie Sanders, Wurf had Brooklyn in his voice and socialism in his heart. The two big wall hangings in his office were photos of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas. Under his leadership, AFSCME formed a de facto coalition with the United Auto Workers, the Machinists and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers to oppose the Cold War obsessions of Federation Presidents George Meany and then Lane Kirkland’s AFLCIO, making floor fights over such matters as labor’s support for Ronald Reagan’s Central American interventions a regular feature of the Federation’s conventions.
When Wurf died in 1981, he left his successor one of the largest unions in the nation, with more than one million members. McEntee wasn’t the candidate of the left to succeed Wurf; that was Victor Gotbaum, Wurf’s successor as the head of the New York City locals. But McEntee had the votes, and Gotbaum did not. And throughout his tenure as AFSCME’s president, McEntee didn’t alter the trajectory Wurf had set: AFSCME continued to oppose the Meany-Kirkland hawkishness and to cultivate its deep ties with the civil rights movement and with the Black political leaders and community groups that were key players in urban politics.
But during McEntee’s first dozen years as president, AFSCME’s restiveness with the AFL-CIO grew only more intense. Kirkland continued to emphasize an anti-communist foreign policy even after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist in 1991, even as the Federation played a steadily diminishing role in American politics. McEntee’s discontent, and that of many of his fellow union presidents, was heightened by the first meeting the AFL-CIO executive council had with the first Democratic president in a dozen years. When Bill Clinton invited them to the White House to tell him their priorities and concerns, Kirkland spent nearly the entire meeting outlining what he thought was an acceptable U.S. foreign policy towards Poland. There left no time to bring up such concerns as labor law reform.
Then, in the 1994 election, Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives, which they had held unbroken since the election of 1954—even through the Republican presidencies of Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and the first Bush.
Whereupon something in McEntee snapped.
Under Meany and Kirkland, the AFL-CIO had been cool to the civil rights activists, the women’s movement, environmentalists, and anti-interventionists.
In short order, McEntee became the first prominent union leader to say that the unions had to replace Kirkland. Some of his peers were muttering about this, but McEntee was a gruff guy who was more than happy to publicly and repeatedly call for Kirkland’s ouster. In the closing weeks of 1994 and the first of 1995, leading up to the executive council’s regular winter meeting in the tony confines of Bal Harbor, Florida, McEntee began lambasting Kirkland and building support for ousting him among his fellow presidents. The council’s meeting—the first in decades to produce actual news—featured angry accusations from Kirkland’s opponents and counter-accusations from his supporters, whose ranks included many of the building trades unions, as well as the teachers, who at the time were as cold-war-obsessed as Kirkland himself. Kirkland made clear that he’d fight to cling to his office at the Federation’s upcoming convention later in the year.
This was a fight in which the entire liberal community had stakes. Under Meany and Kirkland, the AFL-CIO had been initially cool to the civil rights activists, and even when its suspicions had waned, it remained cool to pretty much every other movement that had arisen in the Sixties, most particularly the women’s movement, environmentalists, and those who sought to curtail our interventions in Central America. That had limited the Federation’s work with the rest of the nation’s liberal forces, and that limit had taken a toll on any number of electoral outcomes. In the smaller world of pro-labor ideologues, the fight was also one between the two groups into which the Socialist Party had split in the early 1970s: the center-right Social Democrats USA, who staffed Kirkland and kindred union leaders and reinforced their anti-left sectarianism, and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (later the Democratic Socialists of America) to which Wurf, Machinist President William Winpisinger and numerous union staffers and activists belonged.
In the spring of 1995, as the guest speaker at the annual dinner of Chicago DSA, I centered my talk on the challenge to Kirkland. I noted that there was a pernicious assumption that the AFL-CIO presidency was a lifetime gig—that since the AFL had been founded in 1886, the organization and its successor, the AFL-CIO, had had a grand total of four presidents combined (well, aside from a fifth who lasted for just one year around the turn of the century). During that time (1886-1995), I noted, there had been 20 presidents of the United States. There had been eight popes, and I began to point out that they didn’t elect a new pope until—at which point, there was no need to finish the sentence. (This was in the pre-Benedict days when popes didn’t bail.) Paul Booth, a key aide to McEntee, attended the dinner, and in short order, McEntee began using these lines as well.
McEntee could never have prevailed had the challenge to Kirkland been fought strictly on ideological lines. But the rigidity of the Kirklandites, their failure to work with other progressive forces and for other progressive causes, was diminishing labor’s already-shrinking political clout and costing the Democrats the control of executive offices and legislative bodies— including, suddenly, the House. That was more than labor’s leaders could stand. After a failed effort to recruit AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Tom Donahue to run against his boss, McEntee turned to SEIU President John Sweeney, whose tenure at SEIU had been marked by a commitment to organizing that paid off in his union’s exceptional growth, at a time when other unions had largely abandoned organizing altogether. Sweeney had also been open to other progressive causes and groups, and to further emphasize his rejection of the Meany-Kirkland line, he actually joined DSA in the midst of his campaign. Finally, Sweeney had better ties to other union presidents than the sometimes-bumptious McEntee.
In an AFL-CIO presidential election, which takes place during the Federation’s quadrennial conventions, every union casts its weighted vote—weighted by the number of its members, which translates into the level of dues it pays to the Federation. A union with a million members, then, casts a million votes—which effectively means it casts all of them the way that the union’s president wants them casted. Thus, AFSCME was going to cast its million-plus votes for Sweeney, as were a number of other large unions. As Kirkland did the math in the months leading up to the convention, he realized he wouldn’t prevail, and resigned, catapulting Donahue into presidency for several months before the convention was to take place.
Elevating Donahue to the post of secretary-treasurer had been one of Kirkland’s very few excellent decisions. Donahue was distinctly more progressive and attuned to the changing contours of liberal and Democratic politics than Kirkland had been. But having encountered Donahue’s steadfast refusal to run against Kirkland when asked, McEntee (and Sweeney, who’d also implored Donahue to run) had turned to the SEIU president, and by the time Donahue stepped in for Kirkland, Sweeney had not only entered the race but had put forth an ambitious, progressive platform. He’d already won the support of many other union leaders.
For their part, the Kirkland forces regrouped around Donahue, which meant that the new president was saddled with most of labor’s old guard, with their old guard perspectives, as his supporters. At the one debate between Donahue and Sweeney, the SEIU president affirmed the necessity of labor sometimes being disruptive to advance workers’ interests (at question was a janitors’ sit-down led by SEIU’s Stephen Lerner on one of Washington D.C.’s bridges), while Donahue made clear his distaste for the practice.
When the Federation finally met in convention in New York that fall, Sweeney won the election. The new regime came as a welcome shock to the American left. Within a year, the Federation sponsored a conference at Columbia University at which Sweeney spoke, where left academics put forth all matter of progressive analyses and prescriptions for the labor movement—an event that would have been completely unthinkable under Meany or Kirkland. Sweeney hired Richard Bensinger (these days serving as senior adviser to the unionizing Starbucks baristas) as the Federation’s organizing director, who launched an organizing school for union activists and bolstered a program in which college students interned at unions. Sweeney hired Barbara Shailor to rid the Federation’s international program of its post-Cold War cold warriors and reorient the program to helping workers across the globe. He hired Marilyn Sneiderman to bolster the nation’s local labor councils and strengthen their voice, buttressed by those of allied progressive movements, in local government.
In short order, labor began punching above its weight in national, state and local elections, and in funding the best public opinion research to inform its efforts.
Some of those programs had long-term benefits, particularly in closing the gap between American labor and the rest of 21st century liberalism. But the one thing they did not and could not do was arrest labor’s ongoing decline, its half-century of shrinking membership in the private sector, its inability to organize in the face of nearly universal employer opposition—most of it illegal but not really penalized under the drastically weakened terms of labor law. It’s not been until the past 18 months, with the unionization efforts of the young (disproportionately college-educated or college-bound) and the determination of the Biden Administration to restore labor law to its original help-the-workers purposes, that we’ve seen serious private-sector organizing victories.
But there was one Sweeney-era program that did succeed, and that was McEntee’s program: electoral politics. When Sweeney became president, McEntee was appointed chair of the Federation’s political committee, where his first act was to hire longtime union campaign activist Steve Rosenthal as the Federation’s political director. With a larger budget to fund labor’s election campaign work, new and better coordination among unions and with other liberal groups also getting out the vote, and a genuine uptick in enthusiasm from union activists when it came to walking precincts and calling from phone banks, McEntee and Rosenthal began expanding and reconceptualizing labor’s political work. In short order, labor began punching above its weight in national, state and local elections, and in funding the best public opinion research to inform its efforts. The gains the Democrats made in the 1998 midterms, which they were widely expected to lose bigtime, attested to the McEntee-Rosenthal effect.
That effect led to the election of numerous progressive Democrats, but there were never enough of them to arrest the party’s drift towards neo-liberal policies, even those that directly imperiled workers. McEntee’s tenure coincided the Democrats’ desertion of domestic workers’ interests in favor of Wall Street-spawned trade accords and deregulation, even though most House Democrats opposed those policies. McEntee understood that the Democratic presidents who served during his own presidency—Clinton and Obama—weren’t labor guys, though they were still far friendlier than their Republican opponents. The success of the Federation’s invigorated political programs was not that it restored a vibrant labor-liberalism but that at times it sufficed to keep Republican union busters from destroying unions altogether.
The problem was not due to the programs’ failure to work but to the catastrophic shrinkage of union membership in many states, particularly those of the once-industrial Midwest. As well, the Democrats embrace of such neoliberal follies as trade agreements that let offshoring run amok stepped clumsily on the unions’ messaging and credibility. Even so, union members in the white working class still vote Democratic at a consistently higher rate than their non-union counterparts. If the levels of unionization in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania were anywhere close to what they were 30 years ago, there really would still be a blue wall standing east of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon line.
McEntee was never a notably inspirational, much less transformational, leader of America’s working class. But for a few years in the 1990s, he played a critically important role in repositioning American labor and revitalizing, as best as anyone could, labor’s political clout. For that, he deserves our thanks.
Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.
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