The February 1 death of John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO from 1995 to 2009, gives us an opportunity to evaluate the degree to which a reform leadership can have any real impact on the fate of the US labor movement. Despite his sometime radicalism, and that of the talented men and women he advanced to positions of authority within the AFL-CIO, Sweeney’s “New Voice” team could not reverse the decline, in membership and power, of most US trade unions.

But his presidency was not a failure, because he did successfully shift the main body of American trade unionism firmly toward the left, dismantling the Berlin Wall which had for so long divided the leadership of the AFL-CIO from the new social movements, the left-wing intellectuals, and multi-racial America more generally.

By the end of Sweeney’s tenure as AFL-CIO president, and for the first time since the early Cold War, the US labor movement clearly stood on the left flank of the Democratic Party and was part of a political culture increasingly attuned not only to economic inequality, but to the justice demands put forward by women, people of color, and those of varying gender identities. Police unions and a few others remained politically and culturally retrograde, but the AFL-CIO itself had become a much more progressive institution.