John Sweeney (labor leader) Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

Sweeney’s hobbies included golf and bowling. He died on February 1, 2021, at his home in Bethesda at the age of 86.

Sweeney retired as President of the AFL–CIO on September 16, 2009, and became President Emeritus. He won the “Roving Ambassador for Peace” award from the World Peace Prize Awarding Council in 2016, because of his long-standing devotion to social justice and fair employment opportunities for American workers.

In January 2005, Stern announced that the New Unity Partnership had disbanded. Its purpose had been to create discussion over the future of the labor movement, Stern said, and that goal had been accomplished.

At the March 2005 AFL–CIO executive council meeting, however, no consensus on reform emerged. Instead, the executive committee of the AFL–CIO recommended that the federation earmark half of all income for political and legislative mobilization. The executive committee also recommended rebating up to millions of dollars to unions which spent at least 30 percent of their budget on organizing. There appeared to be little support in the executive committee for mandatory mergers.

In May 2005, Sweeney formally submitted the executive council’s proposals to the AFL–CIO convention for consideration in July.

On July 22, 2005, the United Farm Workers (UFW) joined the Change to Win Coalition.

On July 25, 2005, as the AFL–CIO convention got under way, SEIU and the Teamsters announced that the negotiations had failed and that they were disaffiliating from the AFL–CIO. The same day, SEIU, the Teamsters, UFCW and UNITE HERE announced that their delegates would boycott the AFL–CIO convention.

The breakaway unions officially formed a new labor federation, Change to Win, on September 27, 2005.

Shortly after the March 2004 executive council meeting, Andrew Stern announced the formation of the New Unity Partnership (NUP). Joining Stern were the presidents of UNITE HERE, the Teamsters, the Laborers, UFCW and the Carpenters. Stern had begun working with these union leaders in the fall of 2003 to create a set of principles to reform the labor movement. Although NUP’s existence had been revealed in October 2003, the group did not announce its platform until March 2004.

Sweeney told the press he would initiate an internal discussion of Stern’s views after the November 2004 presidential election, with a goal of creating a proposal by July 2005. But Stern declared that this would be too late for consideration at the AFL–CIO’s biennial convention.

At the August 2004 AFL–CIO executive council meeting, Sweeney attempted to implement some of NUP’s criticisms by announcing the formation of a task force to investigate organizing the Wal-Mart grocery and discount department store chain. Sweeney also announced the creation of an Immigrant Worker Project to oversee the federation’s work on immigrant rights and organizing efforts.

On November 10, 2004, Sweeney announced a process and timeline for considering reform of the AFL–CIO. Sweeney said he would chair a committee composed of the federation’s 25-member executive committee which would make reform recommendations to the February 2005 AFL–CIO executive council meeting.

The growing unrest within the AFL–CIO became public when Sweeney announced on September 18, 2003, that he planned to run for another four-year term at the federation convention in the summer of 2005. When Sweeney had first been elected of the AFL–CIO in 1995, he had proposed a constitutional amendment which would bar anyone 70 years of age or older from seeking executive office. The proposed amendment was never acted on, but Sweeney promised the convention he would not remain in office beyond the age limit he had proposed.

On March 15 2000, the United Transportation Union disaffiliated from the AFL–CIO over a jurisdictional dispute. It was followed in March 2001 by the Carpenters union, which claimed that Sweeney’s organizing efforts had failed and that the AFL-CIO structure must be abandoned.

Soon after taking office, Sweeney initiated several programs intended to reverse the decline in union membership and recruit more new members, especially younger people. The AFL–CIO’s organizing and field mobilization programs were separated. The Field Mobilization department was given control over the AFL–CIO’s regional offices, which were reduced from 12 to four. Sweeney set a goal of spending one-third of the federation’s budget on organizing by 1998. An ad hoc executive council committee was established to come up with an organizing strategy for the South and Southwest, while the Union Summer program was established to recruit and deploy college-age activists. A new department, the Working Women’s Department, was created and charged with developing ways to give working women a voice and to inject that voice into the labor movement’s deliberations.

In October 1998, Sweeney renamed the AFL–CIO’s 30-year-old Human Resources Development Institute (HRDI). It was now known as the Working for America Institute. Instead of focusing on education and training for displaced workers, the department’s new mission was to promote economic development, act as a think-tank and policy development foundation, and lobby Congress on economic policy.

In May 1997, Sweeney announced four new organizing programs. The first program was an AFL–CIO-based effort to provide logistical, organizational and training support for state and local unions which wanted to create organizing programs. The second program ‘Senior Summer’, a program to leverage the labor movement’s retirees by training retired workers in organizing and political operations. The third program was the “Union Cities” effort to encourage large central labor councils to be more active and effective, and to encourage smaller CLCs to merge or work more closely to enhance their influence. Lastly, the ‘Street Heat’ program funneled funds and staff to CLCs and unions so that they could develop rapid-response teams of union members to picket and/or protest when workers were intimidated, coerced or fired.

Partly in response to the New Voice platform and partly because he believed change was, in fact, needed, Donahue began to implement some of the New Voice reforms. He diverted revenue from the Union Privilege program into a new organizing fund that would eventually pay out $20 million a year. He increased the budget of the Organizing Institute, approved plans to double the number of organizers recruited and trained each year, and obtained executive council approval to provide no-interest loans to support striking unions. Donahue also diverted Union Privilege money to train 500 activists to work in the 1996 congressional elections.

In August 1996, Sweeney created a Corporate Affairs Department. The department included three new centers: the Center for Workplace Democracy (to deal with labor-management partnerships), the Center for Worker Ownership and Governance (to deal with pension and investment issues) and the Center for Strategic Research (to assist affiliates with research in comprehensive campaigns). The department also was given responsibility for collecting statistics and conducting research on collective bargaining.

In 1995, Sweeney and a small group of other national union presidents approached AFL–CIO president Lane Kirkland and asked that he retire. Dissatisfaction with Kirkland’s leadership had grown in the early 1990s. There were a number of issues: Failure to pass labor law reform in President Bill Clinton’s first term, failure to stop the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), failure to achieve health care reform, failure to pass legislation banning the permanent replacement of strikers, and failure to shift public discourse in a more liberal, pro-union direction. The fact that Kirkland was traveling in Europe while the U.S. Senate was considering the ban on permanent replacements was seen as all too indicative of his real priorities. Most frustrating of all was Kirkland’s lackluster response to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. He seemed blatantly uninterested, even hostile, to plans calling for a more aggressive political program.

The opposition to Kirkland came to a head at the mid-winter AFL–CIO executive council meeting in Bal Harbour, Florida, February 19–20, 1995. Since the start of the new year, Sweeney had twice held meetings with Kirkland to tell him that key members of the executive council were disappointed with his leadership and that he should step down in favor of secretary-treasurer Thomas R. Donahue.

On May 8, 1995, Donahue announced he was resigning as secretary-treasurer effective at the October AFL–CIO convention. The next day, Kirkland announced he was running for re-election.

At the AFL–CIO convention in New York City, a record-breaking 1,047 delegates gathered to determine the AFL–CIO’s future. When the votes were finally counted on October 25, 1995, John Sweeney had secured the support of 34 unions representing 7,286,837 members, or 57 percent of the AFL–CIO’s membership. As a result of New Voice efforts, the number of delegates from state federation and local central labor councils rose from 186 at the 1993 convention to 488 in 1995.

By 1993, SEIU had more than one million members. It was the first AFL–CIO union to reach the million-member mark in more than 20 years. But while Sweeney had emphasized the organization of new members, about half of its growth had come through merger. Sweeney initiated other changes at SEIU as well. The union began pushing for stronger federal laws in the area of health and safety, sexual harassment, and civil and immigrant rights. It also advocated for legally-mandated paid family leave, health care reform and a raise in the minimum wage. Internally, Sweeney devoted nearly a third of the union’s budget to organizing new members and pushed for stronger diversity in the union’s ranks.

In 1980, Sweeney was elected president of the national SEIU. Sweeney continued to serve as president of Local 32BJ until mid-1981, and drew a salary as a consultant to the local until 1995. Under Sweeney’s tenure, SEIU made rapid gains in membership. The union began the decade with about 625,000 members. However, Sweeney began pushing for rapid expansion into new sectors and base areas. SEIU joined with the National Association of Working Women to organize office workers, and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) to organize nursing home workers. The union also dramatically expanded its reach among maintenance workers in the health care field and business offices.

In 1976, John Sweeney was elected president of Local 32B. He resigned his position as contract director. Three months after taking office, Sweeney led the 45,000 members of SEIU out on a surprise strike against the New York Realty Advisory Board a day before the union’s contract was due to expire. After 17 days, the union won a new contract with significant wage and benefit increases. In 1977, Sweeney merged Local 32B with Local 32J to form Local 32BJ. In 1979, Sweeney led the maintenance workers of Local 32BJ out on strike again, and won additional contract improvements.

In time, Sweeney met Thomas R. Donahue, then a union representative with the Building Service Employees International Union (BSEIU, now the Service Employees International Union or SEIU). Donahue asked Sweeney to leave the ILGWU, and he became a contract director with BSEIU Local 32B in 1960. BSEIU changed its name to the Services Employees International Union in 1968. In 1972, Sweeney became assistant to the president of Local 32B in addition to his existing duties as contract director. He was elected to the executive board of Local 32B the same year. In 1973, Sweeney was elected vice president of the local.

After graduation, Sweeney became a clerk at IBM. But his commitment to the labor movement led Sweeney to take a two-thirds cut in pay to become a researcher with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in 1956 (now UNITE HERE).

Sweeney enrolled at Iona College in New Rochelle in 1952. Sweeney worked as a grave-digger and building porter to pay his tuition, and joined his first union at this time. In 1956, he graduated with a degree in economics.

Born in The Bronx, New York, Sweeney was the son of James, a city bus driver, and Agnes, a domestic worker, both Irish immigrants. Sweeney’s family moved to Yonkers in 1944, where Sweeney attended St. Barnabas Elementary School and graduated from Cardinal Hayes High School. Sweeney’s father took him to numerous union meetings, and it was there that Sweeney began his lifelong commitment to the American labor movement.

John Joseph Sweeney (May 5, 1934 – February 1, 2021) was an American labor leader who served as president of the AFL–CIO from 1995 to 2009.