Half Changed World

So, just in time for the 50th anniversary of the merger of the AFL and the CIO, it looks like the American labor movement is splitting apart again.  Four unions have announced that they are not going to attend the annual AFL-CIO convention this week, and two of them — SEIU and the Teamsters — have formally withdrawn from the Federation. 

I don’t know whether this is a good thing, and don’t think we’ll know for years, if ever.  With hindsight, I think everyone agrees that the original breakoff of the CIO — the Congress of Industrial Organizations — from the AFL was a good thing, bringing new life to a morabund labor movement.  But it’s not clear whether any amount of fresh energy and organizing techniques can revitalize the labor movement today.  All the growth in the economy is in jobs that are painfully difficult to organize under the best of circumstances, and the laws are increasingly stacked against unions.  Opponents of the split fear that it will just make unions weaker when they need every advantage that they can get.

(I had some good friends from college who trained as organizers through the Organizing Institute, and I considered doing it.  I ultimately decided that I didn’t have what it takes to encourage people to become union leaders, knowing full well that the odds were high that they’d be fired as result.  Yes, it’s illegal, but companies do it all the time — the worst penalty they can wind up owing is back wages, which doesn’t amount to much for low-income workers anyway.)

My understanding is that the unions in Change to Win think that the AFL-CIO spends too much of its money and energy fighting for legislative changes and not enough organizing new members — and that the political efforts will always be wasted until there are more union members.  The AFL-CIO leadership thinks that it needs to fight in Washington for policies that make organizing efforts productive; it’s also made steps towards increasing the focus on organizing, and thinks that the leaders of Change to Win are more interested in self-aggrandizement than anything else.

This split could have huge implications for American workers, but you couldn’t tell that from scanning the blogosphere.  According to the Annotated New York Times, as many bloggers have commented on Brooks’ fluff piece on flying with children as on the lead article about the split.  The only interesting discussion I’ve found is in the "House of Labor" section at TPM Cafe, led by Nathan Newman, formerly of LaborBlog.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2005 at 9:15 pm and is filed under US Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.