While the departure of a couple of major unions and the boycott of the AFL-CIO’s 50th anniversary convention by them and several others dominated the news coverage of the event, a number of other significant and far-reaching actions by the remaining delegates eluded the national media’s reporting.
Putting rumors of labor’s demise aside, the delegates remaining at the July 25-28 meeting in Chicago got busy. They passed a strongly worded anti-war resolution that puts the American labor movement on record as demanding the immediate end of the war and occupation in Iraq (see story page 5); launched a multimillion dollar national campaign against Wal-Mart, the poster boy of bad corporate behavior; resolved to focus resources and energy on building organizing, year-round political and legislative mobilizations and global worker organizing; and
mandated diversity in labor’s national leadership.
Still, the disaffiliation of the SEIU and the Teamsters, and a week later the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), and the boycott by UFCW, UNITE-HERE and the United Farm Workers (UFW), hung like dense fog over the convention hall, dampening the celebration of the AFL-CIO’s 50th anniversary and obscuring the road ahead.
The AFL-CIO program
The AFL-CIO leadership presented the convention with an extensive and ambitious program to expand organizing and political action, seeing both as interdependent activities for building the labor movement. For the last five years the federation has been goading its member unions to devote 30 percent of their resources to organizing. (The ILWU made that its policy at its 2000 Convention.) And while several million workers have been organized over the years, the loss of union jobs due to downsizing, outsourcing and bankruptcies has resulted in fewer union
members overall.
So the AFL-CIO Executive Committee proposed, and the convention delegates adopted, a two-pronged strategy. The federation will help its member unions increase their capacity to organize, especially outside the National Labor Relations Board process that is stacked against workers. And it will rampup efforts to change public policy to restore the right to organize and bargain collectively that has been whittled down ever since the passage of the TaftHartley Act in 1947 and accelerated under George W. Bush.
The federation will create a $22.5 million Strategic Organizing Fund.
ILWU International President James Spinosa, International Vice President, Mainland Bob McEllrath, International Vice President, Hawaii Wesley Furtado, International Secretary-Treasurer Willie Adams, and Coast Committeeman Joe Wenzl with AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, right.
Two-thirds, or $15 million, will be returned as rebates to unions that meet organizing standards. The other $7.5 million will go to assisting strategic organizing campaigns important to the entire labor movement, providing expert technical support, campaign research and organizer training.
On the political front, the federation plans to move from focusing on biannual get-out-the-vote efforts to building year-round capacity for informing and mobilizing members on legislative and public policy issues. The program will focus on uprooting anti-worker politicians at all levels, turning back right-to-work-for-less and paycheck deception laws, and fighting attempts to destroy defined-benefit pensions and health care programs. New efforts
will be made to recruit, train and elect union members to public office.
The federation will also step up its efforts to bring more diversity to union leadership at all levels. To accomplish this it will increase training and leadership development at the local levels, do more to recruit a diverse pool of young people into the Union Summer and other programs, and establish as policy that each union’s delegation to the AFLCIO generally reflect the racial and gender makeup of its membership. The AFL-CIO also will work to include more racial and gender diversity on its Executive Council.
Disaffiliation and its effects
The unions disaffiliating from the AFL-CIO—the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters (IBT), and a week later the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)—and the unions that sided with them, boycotting the convention but not disaffiliating—UNITE-HERE, the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA), and the United Farm Workers (UFW)—joined under the moniker the “Change to Win” coalition (CtW).
All the leaders of the CtW unions restated their contention that the fundamental principle behind their actions was that they wanted to put
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AFL-CIO and “Change to Win” —continued from page 1
limited power and found its most effective role was in political action—uniting the labor movement around
common legislative issues and getting unions to work together to lobby for these issues on the national and state
levels.
The AFL-CIO also provided its member unions with a civilized procedure for settling disputes—particularly disputes over jurisdiction when two or more unions clash over the right to represent the same workers.
There are now two labor federations in the United States—the AFL-CIO and Change to Win (CTW). This is nothing new or unusual for the labor movement, as unions have often split from the AFL-CIO over politics, tactics, and even personalities.
This is something the ILWU knows quite well. The ILWU actually started as an AFL union in 1934, as the West Coast chapter of the International Longshore Association (ILA). In 1937, the West Coast longshoremen broke from the ILA and joined warehouse workers to form the ILWU under the CIO banner. In 1949, the ILWU quit the CIO and remained an independent union for the next 39 years. The ILWU joined the AFL-CIO in 1988, after members approved the affiliation in a union-wide vote.
Over time, the labor movement has always found there is much more that unites them in common cause then
divides them. There is every indication that the AFL-CIO unions and CTW unions will continue to work together where there is common ground and will avoid the destructive jurisdictional fighting of the past. ◆
What the alphabet names mean
An acronym is a short cut label formed by taking the first letter of each word in the full name. IBM is an acronym for International Business Machine. MCC is short for Maui Community College. HMSA is an acronym for Hawaii
Medical Service Association.
Many unions are more commonly known by their acronym then by their full name. Did you know that ILWU is short for International Longshore and Warehouse Union? Following are the full names and acronyms of the
unions mentioned in the stories on page one and this page.
Some unions have “international” as part of their names because they have members in the United States and Canada.
1. AFL-CIO - American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organization. About 9 million members in 53 unions.
2. CTW - Change to Win. About 6 million members in 7 unions.
3. IBT - International Brotherhood of Teamsters. About 1.4 million members in transportation, freight-related and
other industries.
4. ILA - International Longshore Association. About 60,000 longshore workers on the East Coast, Great Lakes and Gulf States.
5. ILWU - International Longshore and Warehouse Union. About 45,000 members, in longshore, warehouse, sugar,
pineapple, hotels, and other industries.
6. LIUNA - Laborers’ International Union of North America. About 800,000 members, mostly construction laborers.
7. SEIU - Service Employees International Union. About 1.3 million members, mostly in health care, public employees, and building service.
8. UBC - United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. About 520,000 members. Construction carpenters, millwrights, floorlayers, roofers, drywallers, and forest related.
9. UFCW - United Food and Commercial International Workers. Represents workers primarily in the food industry in the US and Canada. About 1.4 million members.
10. UFW - United Farm Workers of American. About 7,000 members, mostly migrant farm workers who harvest such crops as grapes, lettuce, strawberries, etc.
11. UNITE HERE - Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. About 450,000 members in apparel, retail, laundry, distribution centers, hotels,
restaurants, and food service.