“You Have To Shake Up the Status Quo”: Marilyn Sneiderman’s Struggle To Transform Labor

There are few occasions to offer a look back on a person’s contributions to a movement, and too often such reflections from others come after they’re no longer with us. But Sneiderman is still around and still has plenty to offer, particularly to a younger generation of organizers (and journalists) coming into the labor movement who might have little knowledge of the seismic upheavals of the past 50 years. The attempts to push back the tide of decline, to counter right-wing pushes and to provide a different narrative of the American working class to the one that we sadly have to hear far too often these days have mostly been left out of the neat narrative of decline.

Sneiderman’s story is a window into the attempts to transform organized labor in the past few decades, a time with few major triumphs but plenty of trials.

“Part of the theme for the rest of my whole life is being very active in the union, but also fighting the union constantly,” she says, ​“trying to change the union.”

Sneiderman’s first experience at the labor council was being surrounded by men who patronizingly told her and her colleagues, ​“Now, girls, this is a serious meeting.”

Later, at the AFL-CIO, Sneiderman was put in charge of rethinking labor councils. AFSCME’s president at the time, Jerry Wurf, had been a civil rights activist, a reformer and a critic of hidebound labor leadership, but she recalled him saying, at AFSCME’s first women’s conference, ​“it shouldn’t matter who mans the workshops.” Being a woman in labor was still an uphill battle — and racial equity had only come so far.

Much of the labor movement was even more complacent at the time — the mid-to-late 1970s — unaware how bad its decline would get and unwilling to compromise or change. But by the early 1980s, Sneiderman was working on programs to engage the whole worker — not simply in the workplace, but in the home, the community, to connect with the civil rights and feminist struggles ongoing in the country. From there, she went to the faculty of the AFL-CIO’s George Meany Center, working on programs to expand new organizing and to engage more members directly in their unions, hoping to build a labor movement that would fight for all working people.

And then came the call from the Teamsters.

Even compared with other unions, Teamster culture is deeply macho and tied to identity — being a Teamster is a particular way of being a man. Sneiderman put a lot of work into understanding it and figuring out how to tailor political education to the members’ daily grind. They also changed the education program: it had been a series of fly-by trainings, but they instead began to train members to be ​“local education coordinators,” people who would be trained by the international union to do the training themselves. 

“That was a very successful program,” Margolies said. ​“It was building a cadre of people to help with the change. And then the other thing was to change the materials. We were thinking that was a way for us to codify the change that we wanted to make and maybe last longer than our tenure.”

“If you want to shake up the status quo, you have to shake up the status quo,” Sneiderman says. ​“But how you do it, these are really good questions to think about.”

It’s not enough to simply call oneself a reformer — as the current struggles within the Teamsters should remind us. You have to figure out how to work with people who oppose you, to win others over to your side — a principle of good organizing but one that faction fighters often forget. 

Being able to leave seeds throughout the union that can bear fruit whether or not your particular faction maintains power is another lesson from Sneiderman to remember, because the status quo will resist being shaken and will shake back with everything it has.

Joe Alvarez was one of the people Sneiderman recruited to come work with her at the AFL-CIO in what had been the ​“field services” department. They renamed it to reflect its goal: the Field Mobilization Department. Alvarez had been a rebel within the labor movement in North Carolina; a Cuban immigrant, he described himself as a ​“revolutionary” who began organizing in the 1970s. He was organizing textile workers in the union that eventually, through several mergers, became UNITE (today, one more merger later, it is UNITE HERE) and he became its national political director, leading the fight to stop the North American Free Trade Agreement before Sneiderman brought him to the AFL-CIO. 

Before Sweeney’s election, ​“The president of the AFL-CIO was in Poland promoting anti-communism instead of fighting NAFTA,” he says. Afterward, the new administration ​“was a coalescing of the folks that had actually been slugging it out in the labor movement and had increasingly come into positions of power and influence inside labor.” At the first meeting of the new department and regional directors, the new leadership, he recalls, saw ​“not only the level of diversity that was in the room, but also the histories of the people in the room, many of which had been long. It was a combination of folks who were organizers and social movement folks, social unionists, and usually the same people were both.” 

“When I was at the Meany Center, Virginia Diamond and I wrote a whole new mission statement for labor councils, ​‘organizing on behalf of all working people for social justice,’” Sneiderman says. Then, when she joined the AFL-CIO, she built a program called Union Cities, an attempt to rethink labor councils and strengthen ties with nonunion workers. Once again, she was challenging entrenched leadership at the labor councils, pushing them to do real organizing in the community. 

“We had this belief that if you want to transform the movement, it’s got to be not only in sectors, but also where people live and work,” she says. It had to be geographically-based organizing, bringing people together across a city to win demands together.

Their goal, Alvarez says, ​“was to rebuild a vigorous labor movement from the ground up.” Labor councils and state federations were one target, because ​“overwhelmingly the central labor councils were these sleepy organizations that would have Labor Day picnics and would endorse candidates for office and then not do anything.” They pushed instead for real organizing and for political action that stretched beyond endorsements of local Democrats — for work beyond ​“blue no matter who.” 

Instead, he says, they worked to build labor political operations that could support and elect real labor candidates for public office. And they remained focused on building alliances outside of the workplace, with racial justice and immigrant workers’ organizations that had been held on the outside in earlier eras at the federation.

Once again, Sneiderman was part of a struggle to turn around the Titanic, and it turned out that the Titanic was inclined to keep sinking once it began. ​“The labor movement was in awful shape and going downhill, and all of a sudden, I’m head of the national field operations, which was a really powerful spot,” she says. ​“There’d never been a woman in that spot before, I think I was 39 at the time. I walked into the field office and these guys looked at me and said, holy shit, you’re bringing diversity.”

Organizers of color, Black and immigrant organizers, women, brought to the table experiences that white men hadn’t had in the workplace, and the dedication it took to keep fighting through entrenched racism and sexism to get to the positions they had. And the issues they took on have, if anything, come to greater political prominence in the decades since.

Two of the moments Sneiderman remembers with particular pride echo in today’s politics. One was the ​“Battle in Seattle,” the protests outside of the World Trade Organization in 1999, famous for ​“Teamsters and turtles” sitting down in the streets together and demanding a different kind of globalization, a different kind of trade policy. 

“I remember getting all these national union presidents to sit in the streets; it’s like stuff that this crew wasn’t used to,” she says. ​“I remember standing in the streets in Seattle saying, movement is here. This was in my lifetime. You felt it.”

The other moment was the immigrant worker freedom ride in 2003. The freedom ride, Alvarez says, was part of the larger sea change at the AFL-CIO around immigrant rights. ​“There had been people inside the labor movement fighting for that stance, but it actually became the policy of the labor movement,” he says, to support and fight for immigrant workers. And then 9/11 and the subsequent crackdowns halted some of that momentum. In their department, he remembered, there was a real effort to restart that momentum, and the freedom ride was born from that planning. Workers filled 18 buses from 10 cities and traveled the country campaigning for protections and rights on the job. 

“It was a form of civil disobedience because everybody on the buses, nobody would bring ID,” Alvarez says. ​“So there was no way, if we were stopped, to differentiate those who were undocumented immigrants and who were not, and we had mobilized wide support among faith communities and among elected officials to be able to defend us at any stops that we might have.”

“That was, again, trying to totally shift what was happening in the country and dramatically intervene,” Sneiderman says, yet she feels that today its story has been lost. 

Trade and immigration: the issues on which Donald Trump careened to power. If more of the labor movement had been on board in the 1990s and early 2000s, would the United States look different today?

There is a tendency, he notes, to look back on labor history and divide it into good guys and bad guys: Carey was a good guy, Jimmy Hoffa bad, or vice versa depending on which side you’re on. ​“It’s too simple,” he says. There were people who cut deals with the reformers but weren’t really on board; there were stand-up, principled guys who were loyal to the old guard. It’s not enough, he says, just to make sure that the right people are in leadership. ​“There’s got to be a movement that puts them there so that [the movement] is not just relying on them being good people.”

Alvarez takes the long view. ​“I’ve learned that the Federation, it’s not like you change it and then check off that box and then move on. It goes through waves.” The five or six years in which he worked with Sneiderman and others drove some tremendous changes, and then the wave receded, before coming back prior to Trump’s 2016 win, and more recently.

“There was a whole generational change in labor, the labor movement looks much more like the working class than it did at a time where the main diversity was whether the white guys were bald or white haired,” he says. ​“Marilyn stands out as a leader who not only recruited disruptors but spent a lot of her time and effort trying to figure out how to defend and maintain the space for disruptors.”

Because of their fights, the labor movement has begun to prioritize leadership development. At the time he was coming up, Alvarez recalls, ​“Some labor leaders would say, ​‘Why do I want to prepare my opposition? Why do I want to grow people that are going to run against me?’ ” While some might privately still think this way, he notes, these days national unions have put some money and effort behind the idea of developing young, diverse leadership to build for the future.

“I would say that dozens of the best organizers I know who are leading amazing transformative work around the country would all call Marilyn a key mentor in their lives,” KB Brower, who worked with Sneiderman at CIWO and the Bargaining for the Common Good Network, tells me. She recalls times sitting on what Sneiderman calls her ​“goddess porch” — her personal space in a house where she raised three sons — talking about how to navigate the labor movement as a woman.

Brower also points to her women’s brunch, a yearly gathering that puts young women in a room with powerful women in labor, community organizing and politics. In 2023, I attended just days after the October 7 attacks, as Israel was ramping up destruction in Gaza, and listened to Sneiderman speak, honest and raw, about what was happening to a roomful of people who held likely widely divergent views, and hold that space with the trust she built over decades. Sneiderman’s background with Avodah, the Jewish social justice service organization, helped lay the groundwork for that moment and helped her support young Jewish leftists over the past year; it has also helped Brower as she moves into faith-based organizing. 

I was there to visit Sneiderman and Lerner, having just returned to the United States after months away. I arrived on a Friday and we lit Shabbat candles and talked about navigating this moment in politics, as Jews and as labor people who organize with those whom capital has chosen for us rather than simply the people we like. I was frustrated, near despondent, when I arrived, but that conversation warmed me, and watching Sneiderman navigate those challenges in real-time the next morning gave me the hope that I would need over the next year of atrocities.

Maurice BP-Weeks, the co-founder of the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE), also calls Sneiderman mom. They met when he worked for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment; he attended a meeting that Sneiderman had organized for what would become CIWO, and she immediately took him under her wing. ​“She has had basically every single job in organizing,” he says. When he was launching ACRE, he recalled sitting up late with Sneiderman, talking through ​“all of the good and the bad of being a director, which I had never been. ACRE would not have existed without her.”

“One of Marilyn’s many gifts is seeing the gifts in other people,” Brower says. ​“She, more than anyone I know, embodies that kind of adage of ​‘organize yourself out of a job.’ ” She’ll encourage people to step up, and she shies from the limelight — it’s a practice that helped her navigate the big swinging egos of the labor movement for decades, but it also means that it can be hard to get her to talk about herself. (It takes me a lot of nudging, and I’ve known her for a decade.) That encouragement has meant that she has built and handed off departments, organizations and now an academic center; it means that, Brower says, ​“I am constantly just trying to be the person that Marilyn says I am. My aspirational self is the person Marilyn tells other people that I am.”

The Bargaining for the Common Good Network, Sneiderman’s latest project, supported through CIWO, brings together so many of the threads of her history: it is about using union power to win demands that improve life for the whole community, about building demands across neighborhoods and cities and sharing them nationally. It has been, Brower notes, a strategy born from rank-and-file reformers taking over unions like the Chicago Teachers Union, and democratizing structures for participation and leadership.

“My entire life, I believed that to build power, we need strong, healthy, visionary unions, and they need to be in deep transformational relationship with community organizations,” Sneiderman says. And so the network built on the leadership of people like former Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis and the Caucus of Rank-and-file Educators (CORE), bringing issues like housing and immigration, even climate justice, to the bargaining table and forcing city governments to acknowledge the crises over which they presided.

“It was a concept that a couple of unions had adopted and really run with,” Brower says, when Sneiderman brought her in to work on an early convening for the idea of ​“bargaining for the common good” in higher education. ​“I never would’ve guessed nine years ago that we would be where we are now.”

“Marilyn works at two levels,” Brower continues. ​“She has deep relationships with labor movement leaders and believes in their capacity to lead this work and transform the movement, and also knows that it’s workers, member leaders on the ground leading the work, that is the way that our movement is actually going to transform.”

To Sneiderman, talking about setbacks, losses and failures is a key part of that transformation. Her question, she says, has been, ​“How do we bring together folks who are really pushing the edges, willing to talk about what worked, what failed, and then how do we strategize together to go forward?”

“Strategic leadership is not just about when we charge,” Alvarez notes. ​“It is also when we have to make orderly retreats to conserve our capacity.” And despite the retreats of recent years, he suggests that the bigger change has been the growing understanding that labor’s goals are not just contained in a contract — that there is a broad social and political agenda that the labor movement must take on.

It is not easy to address the failures. The grief, Sneiderman says, is intense. ​“I feel a lot of pride in the work that we did and in the risks that I took. And I feel like, oh my God, I had that opportunity and we made inroads and it wasn’t enough.” It is bittersweet for people to tell her now that they realize they should have supported those efforts at change before things got so bad, even if the excitement around bargaining for the common good has once again given her hope.

Her decision to retire from CIWO and pass on leadership too has been consistent with her principles: she does not want to hold onto power for its own sake. 

“I feel like some of us stay on too long,” Sneiderman says. ​“There’s always this fear, especially of older women, we become invisible. I don’t think I’m going to become invisible. I hope not. I’m so happy to strategize, to help, to coach, to mentor, to do whatever I can, but it’s really important to let others lead.”