Immigration News: October, 2005 - Volume 12

Unions: AFL-CIO

Four unions representing a third of the AFL-CIO's 13 million members, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (1.4 million members), United Food and Commercial Workers (1.4 million members), Service Employees International Union (1.8 million members), and Unite Here (450,000 members), boycotted the July 2005 convention in Chicago. The Teamsters and SEIU withdrew, taking a fourth of the AFL-CIO's members and $20 million, a sixth of the AFL-CIO's annual $120 million budget (unions pay $7.23 per member per year to the AFL-CIO).

The UFCW withdrew from the AFL-CIO after the convention. Just before the Chicago convention, the UFW joined the Change to Win Coalition but did not leave the AFL-CIO. Seven Change to Win unions met in St. Louis in August 2005 to plot their course.

The SEIU is the most successful organizer among unions, adding 700,000 members in the past decade by organizing, for instance, janitors and home health care aides. The Change to Win Coalition said it wants to target workers whose jobs cannot easily be moved overseas, such as hospital and home health-care workers, hotel and casino employees, waste haulers and public employees. For example, the SEIU in July 2005 launched a campaign to organize 8,000 janitors employed by Houston-based ABM, the nation's largest cleaning contractor, promising to pressure pension funds in order to pressure ABM to recognize the SEIU as bargaining representative.

AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney, who was re-elected without opposition, accused the dissidents of betraying the core labor concept of solidarity and predicted that their exodus would sabotage a comeback for organized labor. Most analysts said that there was widespread frustration with the failure of AFL-CIO unions in organizing and politics. The catalyst for the defections from the AFL-CIO was Sweeny's preference for cooperation and solidarity between unions as opposed to the dissidents' demands for forced mergers between smaller unions and aggressive organizing.

The CIO broke away from the AFL in 1935, and the AFL and CIO merged in 1955. A half century later, despite a doubling of the labor force, there are fewer union members than there were in 1955. About 12 percent of all US workers belong to unions, but only eight percent of private sector workers. The 54 unions that remain in the AFL-CIO are divided, with some favoring the current structure while the Change to Win Coalition favors a much more powerful central body.

The departure of several large unions from the AFL-CIO led to a re-examination of union effects on wages. A major factor increasing household income over the past quarter century was the entry of married women into the labor force. In the late 1990s, a combination of more jobs and higher wages increased household incomes further. However, productivity increases do not necessarily translate into higher wages, especially for less-skilled workers employed in firms whose products compete in global markets, as in manufacturing.

In August 2005, some 4,400 mechanics earning $36 an hour at Northwest Airlines went on strike. Northwest hired 1,900 replacement workers at $27 an hour and continued operating by outsourcing some repair work, and other Northwest unions did not support the striking mechanics. As the strike continued, it seemed clear that Northwest management planned carefully to operate without the unionized mechanics, showing once again the declining power of strikes.

Wal-Mart, with 1.6 million employees world wide, including 1.2 million in the US, is the target of US and foreign unions. Some Wal-Mart employees in Germany, Brazil and Argentina are union members because they are at places that had unions when Wal-Mart bought them. Unions in countries with Wal-Mart stores announced joint efforts to unionize Wal-Mart employees, and Union Network International (www.union-network.org/) announced a similar effort in August 2005 to organize private security guards.

Steven Greenhouse, "Amid Difficulties, Leaders of Labor See Opportunity," New York Times, September 5, 2005.