Leadership Development and Organizing: For What Kind of Union?

Abstract

This essay examines the circumstances that have elevated rebuilding the labor movement to the highest priority and yet most difficult chal lenge confronting organized labor today. It is the basis on which "orga nizing the unorganized" has become the clarion call of the New Voice reform team that assumed leadership of the AFL-CIO in 1995. But orga nizing for what kind of union? The author describes the attributes of three organizational archetypes: the service model or business union, the mo bilization or activist model union, and the participatory or social move ment union. Obviously, few existing unions fit neatly into or can be accurately described by a single construct, but as prototypes they offer a framework for analyzing unions and to distinguish the strategies associ ated with and the forms, role, and development of leadership within each type. It is this latter point—the nature of leadership, its relationship to the form of union, and how it can be developed in the process of rebuilding the labor movement—that is the focal point of this discussion.