Challenging the Consensus

A few years back, acknowledging its losses in membership and power, the AFL-CIO launched a fairly serious critique of its policies and operations. If it did not come up with a lot of terrific answers, it did ask a lot of the right questions.

Missing from that critique was any discussion of labor’s foreign policy, an absence that was not surprising. The late AFSCME leader, Jerry Wurf, once said he could challenge George Meany on any domestic issue but not on Vietnam. The tendency ...