Division of Labor
Thomas Edsall of the WAPO reports that a break up of the nation's largest union, the AFL-CIO, is drawing closer:
The Service Employees International Union yesterday took the first concrete step toward breaking up the AFL-CIO, the nation's central labor federation. The SEIU executive board, at a meeting in San Francisco, authorized union leaders to quit the federation. As many as four other unions -- the Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers, Unite Here and the Laborers -- could follow suit, pulling out 5 million of the AFL-CIO's 13 million members. The conflict could become a major battle at the AFL-CIO convention at the end of July in Chicago, with both camps so angry that prospects for a peaceful resolution appear unlikely.And why does the SEIU want to go their own way?
The five dissident unions, which together represent about 40 percent of the AFL-CIO's membership, have been calling both for the replacement of President John J. Sweeney and for changes in the structure and powers of the 58-union federation. The major complaint against Sweeney is that he has not stemmed the loss of union members. He has overseen a politically stronger labor movement, but the unionized share of the workforce has continued to decline, falling to 12.5 percent overall last year, and 7.9 percent in the private sector.Unfortunately, as the economy moves to one where knowledge and information, rather than raw materials and physical labor, are the valuable factors of production, union membership will continue to decline. Add on top of that ever greater competition from low cost manufacturers from overseas and the fact that most information and knowledge workers have no interest in what unions have to offer (and rightly so), and we'll be looking at 5% representation in another ten years. I'm no fan of Sweeney, but I can't believe that the decline in the share of workforce is his fault.
The political fallout of this demerger would seem to be harmful primarily to the Democratic Party. The AFL-CIO has, as mentioned above, become more politically powerful even as it membership base has declined. Even if the SEIU and the other dissidents continue to support the Democrats - where else are they going to go after all? - the labor movements will, by definition, be less unified in their demands, if not their actions.
Finally, it is interesting to note that the rhetoric of the pending split:
The SEIU executive board yesterday approved a resolution declaring: "There comes a point where if we can't reach agreement on basic principles, we should each move on and devote our time and resources to a strategy we believe will help working people win -- while still working together on political and community issues we share."The statement bears more than a passing resemblance to those made by celebrity couples that part ways.
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