5 Major Activist Unions Unite

Frustrated with the AFL-CIO’s direction, the presidents of five major national unions representing about a third of U.S. union members on Wednesday formed a coalition aimed at restoring power to the waning labor movement through a series of aggressive, coordinated organizing campaigns.

The move was widely viewed as the first step toward a split in the 50-year-old AFL-CIO, a federation of 57 national unions that has been losing membership and power for decades. Four of the five union leaders have openly discussed leaving the larger body, complaining that its leadership is stodgy and defeatist.

But they said Wednesday that they had no immediate plans to bolt and wanted to keep the focus on their new group, called the Change to Win Coalition.

“This is a historic occasion for working people,” said Bruce Raynor, president of Unite Here, a garment and hotel workers union that won a key strategic victory this week in its contract settlement with major Los Angeles hotels. “I hope and believe it will spark a change in the labor movement that will change the face of America.”

Other members of Change to Win are the Service Employees International Union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers and the Laborers’ International Union of North America. The group includes some of labor’s most innovative and successful unions and represents 5 million workers, about 35% of the AFL-CIO. The 1.8-million member SEIU is the largest union in the giant federation.

If a split indeed goes forward, the implications for local labor are huge. The dissident unions represent more than half the members of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, including thousands of militant, recently organized immigrant workers. The county federation, a local body of the AFL-CIO, would be financially crushed if it lost dues from those unions.

AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney, who has been trying to hold the national federation together through months of acrimonious debate, urged members of the new group not to leave.

“Workers are under the biggest assault in 80 years,” he said in a statement issued after the announcement of Change to Win’s formation. “Now is the time to use our unity to build real worker power, not create a real divide that serves the corporations and the anti-worker politicians.”

Sweeney’s strongest ally in the federation, Gerald McEntee, president of the 1.7-million member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, was more blunt in criticizing the new group.

“Forming this coalition is a step in the wrong direction,” he said, “because it’s the first step toward a truly divided labor movement.”

Members of the new group said they would stay in the AFL-CIO at least until late July, when delegates from all affiliated unions will meet in Chicago to vote for leaders and bylaws. Sweeney is expected to win a third term, despite pressure from the dissident unions for new leadership.

The five unions in Change to Win will ask convention delegates to approve their principles and revise the AFL-CIO constitution in ways that would force all affiliated unions to meet certain standards on organizing.

“We need to ensure that every link in our movement is strong,” said Laborers’ president, Terence O’Sullivan.

But the odds of passing such reforms are slim, the union leaders acknowledged. Several hinted that they might leave the federation at that point.

“Every union has to then make its own decision about what it has to do,” said SEIU President Andrew L. Stern, who set the ball in motion in November by threatening to pull his union out of the AFL-CIO if radical changes weren’t made.

Stern has since been joined by Unite Here, the UFCW and the Teamsters in contemplating a split. O’Sullivan of the Laborers said Wednesday that he hadn’t discussed the option with his union’s board.

Some compared the announcement of the new alliance to the first steps by John L. Lewis in the mid-1930s to break away from the American Federation of Labor. Lewis, president of the mineworkers union and an advocate for a new approach to organizing, built support while in the AFL before leaving in 1935 to create the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

The break sparked a frenzy of organizing from unions in both groups, and the labor movement flourished, said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at UC Santa Barbara. The groups reconciled in 1950.

But a comparison could also be made to 1968, when United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther pulled the union out of the AFL-CIO, Lichtenstein said. Hoping to create a more dynamic labor movement, Reuther formed an alliance with the Teamsters and several smaller unions. But there were internal problems, and Reuther died in a plane crash in 1970. The separate movement fizzled two years later, Lichtenstein said.

In the current battle, auto worker leaders have sided with Sweeney’s team.

Apart from whatever happens with the AFL-CIO, Lichtenstein said the new coalition’s success would depend largely on whether its message captures the imagination of workers outside the small and steadily shrinking labor movement. Unions represent about 12% of all workers, and less than 8% of those in the private sector, compared with more than one-third of the workforce 50 years ago.

“Unless there is a social and ideological resonance to this that goes beyond their close friends, I think this will just lead to a fragmentation of the labor movement,” Lichtenstein said.

“There has to be a gravity to it, a sense of momentum, and I haven’t seen that yet,” he said. “It’s hard to get into a fighting spirit over something like lethargy.”

Change to Win members said they were already working on joint organizing efforts. In one, the Teamsters and Unite Here are trying to unionize workers at Cintas Corp., a provider of uniforms. The food workers union and the Teamsters are coordinating organizing efforts at City of Commerce-based 99 Cents Only Stores.

Several union presidents spoke of greater coordination and larger, more aggressive and extensive campaigns, but did not elaborate. O’Sullivan of the Laborers said the organizing and political directors of all five unions would meet soon to look for opportunities to work together. He added that union leaders in the group agreed not to raid each other’s membership.

The group includes one of labor’s fastest-growing unions, the SEIU, which has organized thousands of janitors and healthcare and child-care workers in recent years, including many hard-to-reach immigrant workers.

Unite Here, formed last year by the merger of the hotel workers and textile workers unions, saw two ambitious long-term campaigns pay off this week. In one case, the union signed a deal with national hospital laundry operator Angelica Corp. that will allow it to attempt to organize the company’s nonunion plants.

In the other deal, brokered by Los Angeles Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa, prominent Los Angeles hotels agreed to sign a contract expiring next year, fitting the union’s plan to line up hotel contract expirations across the country for 2006.

But the dissident unions have seen their share of failures as well. The months-long strike by UFCW supermarket workers in Central and Southern California failed last year, and the Teamsters union was unable to organize workers at national trucking firm Overnite Transportation Co. despite years of effort.

Stewart Acuff, organizing director for the AFL-CIO, said he didn’t see how the new organization would be any more effective. He said he had helped 18 unions change in ways that the dissidents said were needed to be effective. He also noted that he had helped to coordinate numerous multi-union organizing drives, including the current effort with Cintas.

It is unclear how the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor would deal with a split.

Just before he died of a heart attack last month, county federation chief Miguel Contreras was looking for ways to keep local unions together no matter what happened at the national level, according to people who worked with him. Martin Ludlow, a Los Angeles councilman who was named to replace Contreras, declined to comment Wednesday on how he would handle such a break.