We hear a lot about the foreign policy of the United States at the moment, but how has the Bush Administration’s domestic agenda impacted on working people in the United States?

Well, we are stuck, as well as the economies of many other countries, because of the downturn. President Bush continues to blame September 11 for the economic problems that we’re having. We believe, however, that it was the tax-cuts that he implemented immediately after he took office, and that none of those tax-cuts have filtered down to the workers. We’ve seen job losses. We have seen companies shutting down. We have seen an administration that really has not put any effort into stopping the economic slide in our country and that is run by someone who really is not attuned to the needs of workers in this country. He has corporate friends, he has oil friends, he has people who certainly don’t need the money, and they seem to be the ones who get his attention.

Environmentalists, of course, are concerned because he is pulling down some of the laws and some of the protections that we had regarding the environment, and letting companies get away with more pollution and more abuses of environmental laws.

We have seen over 500,000 jobs lost in the airlines industry and the food industry and many of the type of jobs that cater to the airline industry, and they have not been replaced. There is no claim by the administration that jobs have been created, and if they have been, it’s on the lower wage end of entry-level positions.

So he has not been a friendly President to labour. He has, in fact, worked diligently to try to pull down many of the laws and many of the protections for workers that we have fought for for years.

Has September 11 distorted domestic politics? Is it hard for you to have your voice heard in that sort of environment?

People are afraid to speak out because they will be considered un-American or that they are not patriots and that they in fact are enemies of the people in the United States or that they are for terrorism. The other big problem is that our own Democratic Party who often speak for workers and who often speak for those that cannot speak for themselves has been relatively silent. Again, because any time that they speak out against the President’s policies they are labelled anti-American, they are labelled as unpatriotic to America, and so their voices have been silenced.

We learnt, of course, in a very sad way in the November elections of 2002 that we didn’t have a message. The Democrats and labour did our job, we pulled our vote out to a great extent in greater numbers than we’ve had in previous elections. But there was no real united voice for the people who opposed President Bush’s policies.

Has there been some sort of payback for the union movement since then?

Very much so. We have had some changes in labour laws which make it very cumbersome and time-consuming for unions. The Secretary of Labour, Elaine Chow, is certainly not a friend of labour. She creates more problems than she would help resolve for us. She went to visit the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO in February 2001 and told us that she didn’t necessarily agree with us, as we did not agree with her, but that she would try to work with us in those areas where we could. Within a couple of days the President took away six Executive Orders that President Clinton had implemented in protection of Federal jobs and Federal workers and certain project labour agreements in construction, and he eliminated them. I mean, without a conversation, without any kind of reasoning other than he wanted to destroy that kind of protection that workers had had under President Clinton.

You and John Sweeny came to the leadership of the AFL-CIO with an agenda or organising and union renewal. How successful have you been in implementing that agenda?

One of the things that we have done is to change the culture within the ALF-CIO. In the past it has been servicing members rather than organising. So many unions did not have organising budgets. Many unions have changed that. They have restructured themselves and are now in some cases spending 30-40% of their budget on organising. They recognise that if we don’t organise we die. So we have been quite successful, although with economic downturn in America we have lost jobs. So whatever we gain we seem to lose and stay in the same place. But at least we have not continued to erode. We have 13 and a half million members, and we’ve pretty much stuck on that, and we’ve organised 400,000 to 500,000 a year.

Many of the unions are going into new types of organising, into new areas that have never been organised before – like home healthcare workers. Unite, which is a textile union in America is organising workers in the linen service industry. There’s very little textile work in America any more, it’s all gone overseas or across the border. So now they have decided to organise a new industry which is linen service. Everybody wears uniforms, everybody has to wash those uniforms, so Unite made that their main target in the last few years. The Service Employees’ International Union gained 135,000 members last year. They have organised industries where there is a predominance of women.

There has also been organising in areas where there are undocumented workers in our country. It is an underground system that just breeds new people coming in every day, because these are the jobs that Americans don’t want; these are the jobs that are the heaviest, the dirtiest, the lowest paid jobs and mostly it’s the new immigrants and undocumented immigrants that take those jobs.

So some of the unions have changed and some have not changed. Those that have not changed or do not have the ability to change are merging with other unions rather than to just completely go out of business. We used to have 78 unions in the AFL-CIO, now we have 68.

You’ve had organising strategies that are not necessarily driven by occupation but by other factors like among ethnic groups or in cities. How successful has that been?

It has been very successful. We believe that we’ve had great coalitions and partnerships within communities that have given us those opportunities. In the past, labour pretty much organised itself – it didn’t ask for help, didn’t go out to the community and say, “We need your help.” Now we do, because we were growing smaller and we need the support of the community. So the new organising tactic is that we literally organise the community – the religious community, the environmental community, civil rights, women’s rights – all these different groups that 99% of the time believe in the same things that we believe in – a living wage, decent work, decent conditions, decent wages. They work at it in different ways – a women’s group of course believe in pay equity, so does the labour movement; African Americans earn more if they belong to a union than if they’re not in the union. So we all reach to a level of believing and working for the same thing, so why not do it collectively? That’s one of the things that has worked very well for us.

How hard is it to get unions to work together on projects like that? What role does a peak body like the AFL-CIO play?

AFL-CIO Secretary/Treasurer Richard Trumpka works very closely with the unions to try to establish multi-unions organising efforts. If we are going to go into a school district that has not been organised – the teachers belong to the American Federation of Teachers; the bus drivers might belong to the Transport Workers’ Union; the maintenance people may belong to one of the building trade unions, and then the support staff – the cafeteria, the janitors or custodians, the paraprofessionals might be another unit.

So they try to put together a deal where two or three unions go in it together. We help fund half of it, they fund the other half, so that we’re not fighting against each other, that we’re helping each other. We did that in Puerto Rico. We’re doing that in Missouri where there are three unions in fact organising the same workers. We’ve done it with success. We have met success and people are saying we should do it more often, and working very closely to try to get that done.

How useful is this conference to you?

What I’ve seen is an energy by women to help women not only organise into union - because as the theme of the convention says, women need unions, unions need women – but more so to leverage women into positions at higher levels within the unions. The voice of women has not been completely heard. We talk about gender balance when we have conventions. We should be talking about gender balance when it comes to the membership we represent. And the leadership that represents those members should look like the people that we organise. It should look like the people that we’re trying to bring equity and justice for.

We have had a wonderful, wonderful reception here by the Australian labour women and we know that it’s been a tremendous effort by them. We feel very happy at being here.