The following article is based on a report  that AFSCME’s Illinois Council 31 used for training its leaders and staff:

The only way we can truly protect and advance the interests of our members is for the American labor movement to get back on the offensive and again make life better and fairer for all working people.
Without unions, workers are defenseless, but union members have declined from 35 percent of the workforce in 1954 to 24 percent in 1979 to 13.5 percent in 2000. In the private sector, fewer than 1 of 10 workers are now in unions.

And the vast majority of workers today — about 86 percent — are not in unions. The erosion of living standards and working conditions for nonunion workers spills over into the union sector, severely constraining what can be won in negotiations, particularly in the private sector, but increasingly in the public sector as well.

Public employees still make important gains in bargaining, but as private sector unionism disappears, public workers are increasingly threatened — primarily by privatization now, but soon to be followed by direct union-busting.

Using our “people power”
The only answer is to organize at an unprecedented pace — to bring more and more nonunion workers into the fold, to educate and activate them, to inspire them with the power of collective action.

We must get bigger, lots bigger, or die.

The American labor movement still has 16 million members whose collective effort is just beginning to be tapped — and whose dues can finance the widespread, determined organizing campaigns that can make us a bigger, stronger, more organized and more powerful force for justice in American society.

The best time to move decisively toward organizing is when you’re still strong. That’s what AFSCME is doing.

Our national union has already nearly met the AFL-CIO target, with 28 percent of its budget dedicated to organizing new members. Now councils, most of which spend less than 10 percent now, are being asked to devote more time and energy to organizing.

Getting members involved
And we have to “service” our members better, not worse, as more resources (time and money) are shifted to organizing. The way to do that is to get more of our members more deeply engaged in doing the work of the union.

AFSCME’s strategy involves organizing unorganized government workers and following work that has been privatized by organizing private sector workers — particularly in health care, social services, road work, food services and education.

Making a better world
We also recognize that long-term, our interests as public employees are closely linked with private sector workers. Our union was built by government workers, but with vital support from members of private-sector unions like the United Auto Workers, who understood how our strength makes them stronger.

Most of our members instinctively support working people everywhere who face injustice from their employers.

We believe unions are not just “business agents’ for their members, and only their members, but a broad and inclusive movement to achieve social justice for all working families.

This larger movement can change the rules of the game — not only on the job, but in society at large. Social-justice unionism appeals not only to members’ sense of self-interest (though it must surely do that) but to their desire to make a better world for themselves and their children. It asks more of us, but there is no other way to organize at the unprecedented pace and scale that is required today.

Can It be done?
To have the kind of union power that transformed the United States in the quarter century after World War II, we need to organize 1.2 million workers a year and go from 13.5 percent of the work force now to somewhere over 20 percent.

We know that can be done. The American labor movement went from less than 3 million members (11 percent of the workforce) in 1933 to 9 million in 1939 (29 percent) and then nearly doubled to 17 million in the next 15 years. As a result, we got weekends and Social Security, pensions and health insurance — things that in 1933 could not have been imagined.

When the breakthrough came in the public sector, it came fast — from less than 1 million unionists in 1966 (8 percent of government employees) to 6 million (37 percent) 13 years later. The result: government workers today make more with better and more secure benefits than their private-sector brothers and sisters.

The key is organizing people, small groups and then large, for collective action, over and over again, until you spark a broad social movement.