Lane Windham is associate director of Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and spent nearly twenty years working in the union movement.
In 1995, new AFL-CIO director John Sweeney had an ambitious plan to organize millions of new union members. As labor’s fortunes continue to decline 30 years later, understanding what went wrong in the Sweeney years may offer clues as to the path forward.
In the tumultuous 1970s, women and people of color streamed into unions, strikes swept the country — and employers launched a fierce counter-attack.