CHICAGO
-- When asked his reaction to two giant unions, the Service Employees
and the Teamsters, quitting the AFL-CIO on the opening day of the 50th
anniversary convention of American labor's merger, Tim Leahy, the secretary-treasurer
of the Chicago Federation of Labor, put it in personal terms: "I
feel like a child of divorce."
Wendell Young, recently retired after 44 years as president of his Philadelphia
food workers local, sees trouble ahead for the labor movement: "This
split is going to hurt us."
Bill Burga, president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, agrees: "We've got problems
in the immediate future."
With just 8 percent of private-sector workers now belonging to organized
labor, the exit of two of the biggest unions -- with a handful of others
expected to follow -- could qualify as the organizational equivalent of
a civil war in the leper colony. You can be sure that American labor's
fratricidal week led to the popping of champagne corks at the Wall Street
Journal editorial board, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and George W. Bush's
White House.
That organized labor makes real differences for its members is irrefutable.
The median weekly income for a non-union worker, last year, was $612.
The union worker's weekly earnings were $781, or 28 percent more. The
Latino worker who belongs to a union earns 59 percent more than his non-union
Latino brother. Non-union workers were 45 percent less likely to have
a job that provided health care than a union worker. Union workers were
more than four times more likely to have a guaranteed pension than their
non-union neighbors.
The industrial unions -- steel and auto -- won their members pay and benefits
that indirectly raised the income of American workers. Bosses determined
to keep unions out often sought to show their workers the advantages of
non-union employment by bigger paychecks and longer vacations.
But organized labor, at its best, has had an agenda beyond wages and paychecks.
To the displeasure of conservatives and many capitalists, labor used its
political clout to successfully back public policies that addressed the
shortcomings and cruel indifference of a free market: child labor laws,
unemployment insurance, retirement security, workmen's compensation, the
40-hour work week.
Labor also consistently backed a richer and fuller non-work life through
adequate funding of public schools, public parks and recreation, public
transportation, public libraries and affordable health care. These are
truly the people who brought you the weekend!
Anyone who was fortunate enough, as I was, to work on any of the epic
civil rights laws of the 1960s that made racial segregation illegal and
guaranteed the right to vote and buy a home to all Americans knows that
union political muscle and savvy were indispensable to the legislative
success of the movement.
In recent years, organized labor strongly pushed for both the Family and
Medical Leave Act, which grants employees up to three months of unpaid
leave after the birth or adoption of a child or to care for a seriously
ill spouse or family member, and the Americans With Disabilities Act,
which has enabled 40 million Americans with disabilities to become full
participants in public life.
Why does labor's split-up thrill Republicans? Just consider the state
of Oregon, which John Kerry carried over George Bush by only 77,332 votes.
The Oregon AFL-CIO -- working with all unions, including the Service Employees,
Teamsters and the food workers -- put together a model get-out-the-vote
operation. The voter turnout among union households in Oregon in 2004
was an astounding 91 percent. Labor was the difference for the Democrats.
But under federal election law, no union that is unaffiliated with the
AFL-CIO can participate in any political program to educate or mobilize
members of AFL-CIO unions. The able president of the Oregon AFL-CIO, Tim
Nesbitt, is himself a member of the now-disaffiliated Service Employees
union. Fully 40 percent of Oregon unionists belong to one of the international
unions that has already disaffiliated from the AFL-CIO or is expected
to shortly. You wonder why Karl Rove is smiling?
Maybe the split within labor will lead to more intensive and or successful
organizing of workers and a growing labor movement. I hope so, because
labor has been so critically and historically important in so many of
the epic struggles that have made the life of the American family and
nation more humane and more just.
