The younger Donahue worked as a Best & Company department store elevator operator, a school bus driver, a bakery worker, and a doorman at Radio City Music Hall.
His strongest influence was considered to be in three areas: the campaign against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), rejuvenation of the union movement, and advancing Catholic social teaching on workers' rights.
[8] However, an editorial in The Washington Post said that "It's not Ross Perot but the labor movement that's the central force in the campaign to kill NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The New York Times reported that "within the labor movement, the campaign against the accord extends far beyond the industrial unions…" 'Our self-interest is very similar,' said Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
"[8] Beyond the AFL-CIO, Donahue oversaw what The New York Times described as the federation's "lobbying, petition drives and $3.2 million in billboard and radio advertising.
[13] Donahue built a working coalition between the AFL-CIO and leading environmentalists, notably the Sierra Club and the National Toxics Campaign.
Nine years later, an Economic Policy Institute briefing paper on NAFTA's effects pointed out that "the rise in the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and Mexico through 2002 has caused the displacement of production that supported 879,280 U.S. jobs.
The New York Times summarized its message as: "American unions have fallen 'behind the pace of change,' and should adopt innovative methods for representing their members and for attracting new ones."
Its importance was due to its long-term impact on American trade unions The Times in a front-page story called it a "frank study" and "the first of its type in the history of the nearly 35-year-old AFL-CIO."
[5] In his formal role as a North American Commentator to the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace, Donahue summarized his ideas in a presentation he gave at an international symposium in Rome on the topic of Laborem exercens, Pope John Paul II's encyclical on human work.
However, Donahue also expressed his conviction that "what the Pope takes for granted as a right of association freely exercised, guaranteed in a democratic society, is often trampled upon in this country and others.
And one must conclude that it is trampled upon in pursuit of the profit motive and in an effort to exclude workers from any voice in ownership, or management, or indeed, from any effective participation in the fixing of the conditions under which they will labor".
[25] "The American labor movement has always been involved with the well-being of workers in other lands," Donahue wrote in a 2000 letter to the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine that set out his views of the AFL-CIO's international role.
[26] The major areas of Donahue's international work, both as AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer and during his retirement, have been the struggle against South African apartheid and his activism on behalf of Cuban workers.
"[27] Donahue was later leading advocate of Cuban workers' rights in his role as chair of the Committee for Free Trade Unionism (CFTU).
He has also noted that "the CFTU has been active in recent years in attempts to assist workers in Cuba struggling to assert that right – in the face of their government's insistence that only one union, guided by the Communist Party, can represent them, and against the background of continuing imprisonment and harassment of those who think otherwise.
After meetings in Belfast, the delegation met in London with the British Trades Union Congress to press further the case for fair employment principles in Northern Ireland.
He was also named a recipient of the annual Bell and Thrush Award by the Irish American Historical Society in recognition and was appointed as the 1997 Grand Marshal of the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Washington, D.C.
Early in 1995, leaders of a broad cross-section of the labor federation's unions encouraged Donahue to challenge incumbent AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland.
In August 1995, Donahue was elected interim president by a two-to-one margin over Sweeney in a vote by the AFL-CIO's governing body, its Executive Council.
While Donahue remained open to the idea of expanding the number of unions represented on the governing council, he declined to solicit votes on the basis of such a concept.