A call for unions to come together

Charles Dharapak / Associated Press

From left: AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and John Sweeney, who handed the reins to Trumka when he retired as the president of the labor federation, stand on stage Tuesday at the AFL-CIO conference at the David L. Lawrence center in Pittsburgh.

By Michael Mishak (contact)

Thursday, Sept. 17, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Pittsburgh — As Richard Trumka assumed the presidency of the AFL-CIO Wednesday, he issued a sweeping call for reunification to a number of unions that left the nation’s largest labor organization in a bitter split four years ago.

“To truly succeed we need an AFL-CIO that speaks for all union members — a movement that’s both united in name and united in purpose,” Trumka said, to thundering applause. “Today, our message is: Come back, and we’ll build that strong labor movement, together.”

The dissident unions were listening. Unite Here, the international hotel and casino workers union, is expected to rejoin the AFL-CIO. An announcement could come as early as today, when its leader, John Wilhelm, the onetime head of the Culinary Union in Las Vegas, will address the convention here.

In doing so he sends a tremor, if not an earthquake, through the American labor movement, spurning Change to Win, the rival federation he co-founded in 2005 with the promise of an organizing revolution.

Egos appear to play as much of a role as ideological differences in the divisions and attempts to unify the camps.

Experts, meanwhile, are split on whether bigger really would be better.

Some said the labor movement should seize the moment, especially with the prospects of health care and labor law reform on the horizon. They characterized Change to Win as a loose federation of unions without a deep reach into the grass roots at the state and local levels.

“A strong labor movement could be essential to redefining the economy in a recovery,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor expert at UC Berkeley. “Unions fighting each other is never productive, and in this environment, there is a deep cost.”

Others said competition keeps the movement vital, crediting Change to Win with developing innovative organizing strategies that boosted membership rolls for old-line unions.

“The labor movement needs to work together again,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, an organizing expert at Cornell University. But, she added, progress could come outside an official reunification. She cited the two federations’ successful political coordination, both in last year’s presidential election and in this year’s fight for union-friendly legislation.

The move, while changing the national labor landscape, will have little impact on Las Vegas, where the Culinary Union has worked with the Nevada AFL-CIO under a so-called solidarity charter since the split.

Whether other unions will follow Wilhelm’s lead and rejoin the AFL-CIO is unclear, but labor leaders have sent strong signals. The carpenters union recently left Change to Win, and the president of another affiliate, the laborers union, has expressed his desire for reunification.

The AFL-CIO represents about 8.5 million union members and another 3 million members at its Working America affiliate for people who don’t have a union at work. Before the Unite Here and carpenters defections, Change to Win represented about 6 million workers.

Trumka, the AFL-CIO president, says he has been actively negotiating with Change to Win unions, as well as the National Education Association, which is independent of both federations.

For its part, Change to Win said it respects Unite Here’s decision to leave but dismissed talk of a larger defection. Spokesman Greg Denier insisted the coalition’s core members remain committed to the federation. He said the group’s mission of mass organizing along industry lines is “as valid today as it was four years ago” and that the focus has yielded membership gains for its affiliates.

In some ways, Unite Here’s departure is not surprising — and, in part, stems from a clash of egos. Wilhelm has been feuding with Change to Win co-founder Andy Stern for the better part of a year. He accuses Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union, of capitalizing on a power struggle inside Unite Here, itself a merger of the hotel employees and apparel workers unions.

With Unite Here factions at loggerheads, Stern invited both sides to join the SEIU. Former Unite leader Bruce Raynor took him up on the offer, leading 150,000 members of the merged union into a new affiliate of the service workers. Unite Here and the SEIU are now engaged in a legal fight over union assets and organizing jurisdiction.

Stern has said the Unite faction had a right to break away from, as he put it, “a marriage that has gone bad.” And on Wednesday the SEIU issued a statement calling on Trumka to help resolve the dispute with Unite Here and pledged to work with the AFL-CIO to further labor’s legislative goals.

The SEIU leader, however, has drawn the ire of other labor leaders for what they see as raiding, with Trumka publicly denouncing the service workers for their role in the Unite Here fight over the summer.

In his speech Wednesday, Trumka promised AFL-CIO unions the protection of 1,000 organizers to guard against raiding — and, at times, other labor leaders made sneering references to the SEIU in their floor speeches here.

Still, Elaine Bernard, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard University, said the reunification debate misses the point.

“The labor movement has a problem in helping 21st-century workers understand the value and power of collective action,” she said. “Instead of a phony focus on structural unity, labor needs a real focus on mobilizing members. Labor has to look out, not in.”