REVIEW & OUTLOOK (Editorial): San Francisco `New' Democrats
"His agenda is our agenda," AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland declared as he introduced Bill Clinton to labor's cheering throngs in San Francisco on Monday. Did the President cringe?</br></br>The AFL-CIO connection wouldn't seem much of an asset these days. The labor confederation has lost 633,000 members in the past two years and thinks salvation lies in spending $4 million to bludgeon the President on the airwaves about Nafta. Since the last Democrat was elected to the White House, the labor movement has shrunk by seven million souls and nowadays accounts for 10% of the private sector work force.</br></br>Remember the mighty United Mine Workers? Does anybody even know there's a coal strike going on now? The UMW has become a ghetto of low productivity in its own industry, accounting for 41% of the coal miners but only 28% of the coal.</br></br>In Detroit's triennial rigadoon the unspoken question is whether the UAW intends to take General Motors down with it. The union insists on extracting a pound of flesh for each one of the 50,000 jobs GM must shed, even if it means no GM jobs for the next generation.</br></br>Only on the anticompetitive islands of the public sector does labor thrive, having picked up five million new members since 1970.