Chicago Tribune, June 16, 2005, Thursday

Copyright 2005 Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Copyright 2005 Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune

June 16, 2005, Thursday

HEADLINE: 5 AFL-CIO unions form dissident group

BYLINE: By Stephen Franklin

BODY:

In the largest blow to labor solidarity in decades, the heads of five major unions Wednesday announced their own coalition and attacked the AFL-CIO for failing to halt labor's downward slide.
"Our world has changed. The world that all workers live in has changed, but quite frankly the labor movement has not changed to meet the changes," said Joe Hansen, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union.
The new group, the Change to Win Coalition, is made of up the UFCW, Teamsters, Laborers, Service Employees International Union and Unite Here, the union formed by the merger of the hotel workers and needle trades unions.
Together the dissidents' unions represent 5 million of the 13 million union members linked together by the AFL-CIO. The heads of the five unions, speaking at a press conference in Washington, said they would immediately begin coordinating their political and legislative efforts.
But they did not disclose how much they would spend on their joint efforts, or what kind of infrastructure they would set up.
The reply from AFL-CIO officials and union leaders opposed to the dissidents' effort ranged from anger to dismay that organized labor should be sweating through such a dispute when, they say, it is fighting for its life.
Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, issued a statement calling the coalition a "step in the wrong direction because it's the first step towards a truly divided labor movement."
"Disunity only plays into the hands of workers' worst enemies at a time when working families are under attack," said a statement from John Sweeney, the AFL-CIO's 71-year-old president, who is up for a re-election at the AFL-CIO convention scheduled for July in Chicago.
Sweeney, who, ironically, rode to power on a reform drive a decade ago, has become a major target of the dissidents' criticism. They say he has not been a forceful leader or one willing to take the kind of steps needed to breathe new life into organized labor.
Though the dissident leaders detailed their gripes with the AFL-CIO, they were less than clear or unanimous about whether their unions would quit the AFL-CIO or if the new group would rival the 50-year-old organization that has loosely held the nation's unions together.
At best, it appears likely that the AFL-CIO's four-day convention in Chicago will become a battle between two deeply divided camps.
"We are going to the convention to fight like hell," said Hansen of the UFCW. "And if we come out of Chicago with the status quo, then we'll take the appropriate action and you don't have to think too hard to know what that would be."
Indeed, Hansen said that his union's leaders, meeting this week in Chicago, had given him approval to bolt the AFL-CIO if necessary.
Similarly, Bruce Raynor, president of Unite Here, said he has the authority to lead his union out of the AFL-CIO.
Teamsters union President James P. Hoffa said his union's top leaders would bring up the issue at a meeting just before the July convention.
Andy Stern, the president of the 1.8 million-member SEIU, who first threatened last year to take his union out of the AFL-CIO, said his union's leaders gave him approval recently to do so. The SEIU is the largest union in the AFL-CIO.
In the case of the Laborers, however, union President Terry O'Sullivan repeated a previous vow that his union would not be leaving the AFL-CIO.
The fight boils down to a debate over what is the most effective way to revive organized labor, which today accounts for about 12.5 percent of the nation's workers. Unions represented nearly one out of three workers in the 1950s.
The dissidents mostly want greater emphasis on organizing, while others say any organizing increase has to be coupled with politics. In turn, the dissidents reply that unions' much beefed-up political efforts in recent years have neither helped them nor put their candidates into office.
In a showdown last March in Las Vegas the dissidents failed to gain enough support among fellow union leaders for a plan to return up to 50 percent of the money that unions send to the AFL-CIO to unions to pay for their own organizing.
Unions send about $ 120 million in dues yearly to the AFL-CIO.
In a clear conciliatory gesture, the AFL-CIO recently approved greater funding for organizing and political activity while also trimming its own staff to make up for the spending changes.
But the dissidents say the changes fall short.
Though there have been peacemaking efforts on both sides, the debate among union leaders has grown personal, and bitter, stirring a widespread feeling that it may take some time to heal the wounds.
"At the end of the day, I hope that more level heads will prevail," said Dennis Gannon, head of the Chicago Federation of Labor, on Wednesday.
The division in the unions' ranks tends to follow job lines.
The dissidents largely do not have the backing of unions representing factory, public service, trade or professional workers, noted Rick Hurd, a labor expert at Cornell University.
And while doubting that the coalition's efforts would produce any "immediate payoffs" for the five unions, Hurd suggested that the effort at least represented a change.
"Let's give them credit," he said. "What have unions got to lose?"
CHANGE TO WIN COALITION
What: Five unions, with five million members, form a coalition to break away from AFL-CIO, which has 13 million members.
Purpose: Concentrate on organizing new members in unions' core industries, and force the AFL-CIO to impose higher standards on its 57 union members.
Who: Teamsters, Laborers, Service Employees International Union, United Food and Commercial Workers and Unite Here.
Financing: not disclosed.
Major Questions: Will the unions bolt the AFL-CIO? Will the AFL-CIO's July convention in Chicago turn into a battle of divided camps?
--By Stephen Franklin