At first, it was not universally embraced. When Donahue presented a membership benefits program to the 1985 AFL-CIO convention based on his committee's recommendation, “several local and national union officials who are supposed to carry out the program say they have grave misgivings about it,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “They worry that labor’s goal of bargaining collectively will be blurred by a special category of members whom the union wouldn’t fully represent and probably couldn’t count on in a strike.”