A Strategy for Labor

This is a defining moment for the American labor movement—a moment ripe with opportunity and terror.

On the hopeful side, the AFL-CIO is finally moving again. The “new voices” leadership team of John Sweeney, Richard Trumka, and Linda Chavez-Thompson—which ran for office because, in Sweeney’s words, “organized labor is the only voice of American workers and their families, and because the silence [under Lane Kirkland] was deafening”—is making good on campaign promises to increase labor’s organizing expenditures; improve its public relations program and its political work; build the capacity of regional bodies (state federations, central labor councils); reach out to women and minorities; and remake the federation’s own organization, starting with the appointment of younger, smarter, more aggressive unionists to top staff positions. And as reform roils inside the AFL-CIO, labor is gaining a new public face. The “Union Summe...