When union membership began its rapid drop in the 1980s, many labor leaders began looking for new ways to stem the downward tide. The two main tactics they settled on were inward-looking: union mergers to boost membership and labor-management cooperation schemes and contract concessions to try to save jobs.

The number of mergers rose from 31 in the 1970s to 35 in the 1980s and 42 in the 1990s, the bulk of them led by just five unions. While this produced some giant conglomerate unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), and the United Steel Workers (with about two dozen jurisdictions in which steel workers were a tiny minority), it brought no real gains to the movement as a whole. And labor-management cooperation simply defanged what was left of the largely unofficial union resistance of the 1960s and 1970s. Decline continued apace.

In 1995, after two decades of slumping real wages, a decade and a half of membership loss, and a decade of brutal work intensification some called “lean” and others “mean,” the complacent cold warriors who had run the AFL-CIO since its founding forty year earlier faced their first open challenge for the top leadership in the labor federation’s history. Calling themselves the “New Voice,” the challengers promised change: more organizing, independence in foreign policy positions, and greater racial and gender diversity in both leadership and membership — in short, a renewed labor movement.