Further Reflections on AFSCME's 40th Convention and Election
of New Leadership - A Response to Our Critics

by Gregory N. Heires and Ray Markey

Published by Labor Portside

July 10, 2012

[Moderators Note: Portside Labor on July 1 published a
response by Andrea Houtman, vice president of AFSCME
District 36, to a June 26 article, "Reflections on AFSCME's
40th Convention: Public Employees Elect New Leader in a Time
of Crisis," by Portside Labor moderators Gregory N. Heires
and Ray Markey. The following is Heires and Markey's
response to Houtman.]


In our June 26 article, "Reflections on AFSCME's 40th
Convention: Public Employees Elect New Leader in a Time of
Crisis," our intent was to give Portside readers an insight
into what happened at the convention, some background
information on events leading up to the convention and
reasons why Lee Saunders and Laura Reyes won.

The result was not a foregone conclusion. At the 2010
convention, Saunders defeated Donohue by only 4,000 votes in
the race for secretary-treasurer. The 100,000-vote margin in
favor of Saunders and Reyes was decisive. We wanted to
explore why.

We are both supporters of Lee Saunders and Laura Reyes.
Andrea Houtman, who wrote a response to our article that
Portside and Portside Labor published July 1, supported
Danny Donohue for president. She is a vice president of
District Council 36, whose executive director, Alice Goff,
ran with Donohue as the candidate for secretary-treasurer.

Clearly one would have expected a more temperate response to
the election results given the unprecedented attacks on
AFSCME members and the need for unity in their defense.
Unfortunately that is not what we got.

In our article we did not spend a lot of time describing the
role William Lucy played in supporting Danny Donohue. We
didn't do that because he retired in 2010. He was not a
candidate then or in 2012. We felt he was far less
influential this time around than in Boston, site of the
last convention.

Ray Markey started attending AFSCME conventions in 1973.
Never once in all the years after losing his election for
AFSCME president to Gerald W. McEntee did Bill Lucy have one
public word of criticism about AFSCME policies or its
internal politics. He ran as part of the McEntee-Lucy team
until he retired. When he announced his plan to step down in
2004 -- and then quickly pulled back on his decision not to
seek re-election -- he cited personal, not political,
reasons. Delegates persuaded him to run and he won along
with McEntee.

The Donohue forces, as Ms. Houtman makes abundantly clear,
wanted to somehow make this a race between Bill Lucy and Lee
Saunders. In some respects, Saunders was a surrogate for
McEntee. Thirty years had elapsed since McEntee defeated
Lucy for the presidency. As most members know, the two
formed an alliance of convenience but deep-seated personal
animosity persisted. Insiders know Lucy resented Saunders,
his former assistant, for accepting McEntee's offer to
become his assistant.

The Donohue camp attacked President McEntee for all sorts of
reasons. But it conveniently forgot that Bill Lucy was
McEntee's secretary-treasurer for all these years. The
excesses attributed to McEntee are never equally attributed
to Lucy. The Donohue backers never mention Lucy's
substantial salary, but we all know that when one got a
raise so did the other.

Lucy presented the secretary-treasurer's report at every
convention and the salary is printed in a booklet. Why did
the Donohue forces never criticize anything in those
reports? Could it be politics?

We could continue in a similar vein. But what is the point?

If Lucy had wanted to be president he should have run
against McEntee, but he chose not to. He could have waited
until McEntee retired and run against Saunders, but he
didn't. No, this was not a campaign of Lucy versus McEntee
or Saunders but of Donohue against Saunders. No matter how
much the Donohue supporters wanted, they never could change
that the election was between Donohue and Saunders. For them
Saunders represented everything they didn't like about
McEntee and Donohue was a stand-in for Bill Lucy, who
couldn't run because he had retired.

Let's talk about union democracy. Ms. Houtman made a big
deal about the issue in her attack on us. But union
democracy seemed to be a much greater concern of a minority
of Donohue supporters than the candidate himself.

Certainly, the way the Donohue forces voted doesn't seem to
show a grand commitment to union democracy. Bloc voting
appeared to be the norm.

Contrast District Council 37, whose executive board
supported Lee Saunders, to Donohue's local, CSEA. Donohue
received around 40,000 votes and Saunders a little over
70,000 from DC 37. (On the floor of the convention Donohue
said he would receive 45,000.) That seems pretty democratic
to us. Yet CSEA Local 1000 cast all of its 202,958 votes for
Donohue. Is that union democracy in action? Maybe someone
should take a closer look at how delegates are elected
there. As far as we know, not one Donohue supporter
forcefully and publicly suggested that anything should
change.

Houtman charged that the Saunders campaign "created an
atmosphere of irrationality that doesn't belong in the labor
movement" and accused the convention chair of being biased
and heavy-handed. In fact, it was the Donohue supporters who
created a hostile environment in Los Angeles.

As the convention drew closer to the day of voting and the
Donohue forces began to sense they were going to lose, they
started to put their end game into action. They became
disruptive and continually challenged the chair on the same
point over and over again. One delegate from Chicago got up
and said the election was being stolen. Answering this,
Saunders supporters began to take the floor and support the
chair by demanding that order be restored. A delegate from
Puerto Rico got up and, speaking in Spanish, said the
Donohue forces were trying to "sabotage" the convention. A
number of Saunders supporters who were not delegates but
guests thought that Donohue's folks were just throwing
buckets of mud out hoping that something might stick in the
event that they decided to go to federal court to challenge
a Saunders victory. But to do this the election had to be
close and it wasn't: Saunders won by 100,000 votes.

Another point on union democracy: Of the 3,800 AFSCME
locals, only 16 are in administratorship and most of these,
according to the Judicial Panel decisions printed in a
booklet given out to delegates at the convention, were for
financial improprieties. Is there another union in the AFL-
CIO that has a lower number or percentage of locals under
administratorship than this? We should note that CSEA
critics of Donohue fault him for overlooking or reacting
slowly to improprieties within Local 1000.

As we see it, many of the progressive supporters of Donohue
allowed their ideological blinders to get the best of them.
They mistakenly saw in Saunders a labor bureaucrat who
appeared to be shaped and manipulated by an old guard labor
boss (to use that disparaging mainstream media and right-
wing term). This, in our estimation, is a position that
lacks critical analysis.

True, McEntee often took a hard line on leftist AFSCME
members in his early years. But need we point out that we
are now in a different historical era? The Cold War is over.
With the breakdown of the labor--capital accord, the radical
right now feels it can wipe out the entire labor movement,
not just target leftists within the unions as it did in the
past.

What's undeniable is that AFSCME - think of its opposition
to the Viet Nam War-- has consistently been at the forefront
of the labor movement in the fight for civil rights and
social and economic justice. The union has sunk millions of
dollars into grassroots campaigns and funded progressive
think tanks. McEntee, together with John J. Sweeney of SEIU
and Richard Trumka of the UMW, led the campaign to oust Lane
Kirkland, the Cold War warrior of the U.S. labor movement,
from the presidency of the AFL-CIO in 1995, moving the labor
federation to the left.

A decade later, AFSCME led the fight against privatization
of Social Security, which George W. Bush later acknowledged
as the greatest defeat of his presidency. Labor played a
crucial role in the elections of Bill Clinton and Barack
Obama. One way to view today's assault on public employees
is that the Republican governors are finally truly answering
the call of the radical right to get rid of the unions and,
specifically, the unionized workers responsible for
providing the services of the welfare state. The viciousness
of this attack has forced the union to shift to the left.

While we believe issues such as union democracy concerned
Donohue supporters more than the candidate himself, we also
believe Ms. Houtman's defense of Donohue' record on bread-
and-butter issues rests on weak ground.

Danny Donohue, of course, has a record--and it is not a
pretty one. No matter how many excuses Ms. Houtman makes,
the contract he signed containing triple zeros, furloughs,
increased member payments into their health and pension
funds without even getting a no-layoff clause was a disaster
for 450,000 New York State employees as well as CSEA
members. That is why five of the six District Councils in
New York State refused to support Donohue.

As we write this article, CSEA members are being laid off
all across New York State. Just recently, members of a
smaller statewide union, the Public Employees Federation,
threw out its leadership in an election that reflected
widespread anger and disaffection over a contract forced
upon the workers thanks to the CSEA pattern.

Ms. Houtman says Donohue wasn't present for most of the
negotiations, suggesting that the contract was the fault of
his negotiating team. That's a ludicrous assumption by
itself. By distancing Donohue from the contract, she has
also unwittingly indicted her own candidate. What in the
world is the president of a union supposed to do if not take
part and lead the negotiating team? This is a union we are
talking about.

It was Danny Donohue's primary responsibility as CSEA
president to negotiate that contract. Yet Ms. Houtman seems
to think it was only a minor part of his job and, worse, not
even his responsibility. By contrast, Saunders personally
led contract negotiations when he was at DC 37. And he did
it in a democratic way, relying on a negotiating committee
that collected input from union locals and added creativity
to the negotiating process by allowing local leaders to make
presentations on the opening day of negotiations.

Ms. Houtman tells us Danny Donohue built CSEA into the
biggest AFSCME local in New York State. Absolutely not true.

CSEA was a state employees association when it joined AFSCME
and was in the process of being raided by other unions. The
Public Employee Federation split from them and formed its
own union. When CSEA joined AFSCME, it was not only the
biggest local in New York State but also the biggest local
in AFSCME.

We have spent most of this article replying to some of the
major points that were raised by Ms. Houtman. But one of her
suggestions that seems especially out of line is that
somehow a Danny Donohue win would have been a victory for
progressives. That assertion -- an unsubstantiated hope,
actually--is an example of how liberals and leftists are
often guilty of projecting their values onto political
candidates.

It seemed absurd to us that Saunders could be attacked as a
bureaucrat while somehow his opponent could be portrayed as
an insurgent, a voice of reform. Hasn't Donohue spent about
three decades on the AFSCME Executive Board? Where was the
reformist voice --a call for more transparency--when he
voted for 27 union budgets?  Shortly before the convention,
The Wall Street Journal reported, much to the delight of
(and perhaps thanks to) the Donohue camp, that McEntee used
a private jet. Where was the outrage over this before?

Lee Saunders is a progressive with a proven record. While he
was DC 37 administrator he cleaned up corruption, helping to
send over 30 corrupt union officials to jail and removing
from office many more. He established a code of ethics for
union officers and top staff, hired an ethical practices
officer and established an ethical practices committee.
During his stay, he oversaw a robust process in which
members and delegates debated whether to adopt a one-person,
one-vote electoral process or continue with the union's
delegate-based system for electing the leadership (which the
union did). The union newspaper reported on local union
trusteeships and criminal cases, practically unheard of in
the labor media. Donohue failed to support the reformers
within DC 37 during the corruption crisis. Is that the
behavior of a reformer?

Saunders negotiated a terrific contract with the anti-union
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. This after the previous DC 37
executive director, Stanley Hill, had agreed to a double
zero contract among other givebacks.

Saunders helped restore financial order to DC 37 after its
treasury had been looted along with the treasuries of many
DC 37 locals. He was tireless as well as successful in his
fight to improve the salaries and benefits of over 100,000
DC 37 members. He won a strong contract, which provided two
4 percent raises and an additional 1 percent that locals
could allocate as they please. (How's that for economic
democracy?) Saunders helped librarians in the New York
Public Library Guild Local 1930 negotiate a 16 percent raise
for a professional title whose wages had deteriorated over
the years, threatening the competitiveness of what's
arguably the country's most prestigious library system.
This--protecting and improving the living standards of
workers--is part of what progressive labor leaders do--and
in many ways it is the most important.

What about politics? Ms. Houtman says with regret that Danny
Donohue wasn't for a labor party. She can't be serious. Not
only was he not in favor of a labor party, but he also
geared his campaign towards getting the support of the
estimated 30 percent of AFSCME members who vote Republican.
Most Saunders supporters consider Donohue to be a
conservative Democrat at best.

The reason Donohue didn't have much success is that the
delegates didn't believe the Party of No was willing to cut
a deal with them--and they were right. What's more, they
know very well that both parties are attacking them. Whether
the attacker is Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin or
Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, they wanted
someone who will fight back. That person was Saunders.
AFSCME's 40th Convention signaled the end of the McEntee-
Lucy era. Lee Saunders and Laura Reyes won and this is a
victory for all workers.

[Labor Portside moderators Gregory N. Heires and Ray Markey
attended AFSCME's 40th Convention in Los Angeles. Heires is
a long-time trade-union writer. Markey is a former president
of the New York Public Library Guild Local 1930, one of more
than 50 locals in AFSCME DC 37 in New York.]

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