> Young people who want to get trained as organizers through the AFL-CIO go to the Organizing Institute. Working America is not conceived of as a union but as "the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO," working with non-union workers. It's kind of naive for people to have expected to work with such an organization in an election year as critical as this one and not do electoral work. What else does the AFL-CIO do, anyway? If you want to do actual workplace union organizing, you go with one of the individual international unions -- or eventually a local -- not the federation. The federation is not responsible for organizing, and can't be as long as the affiliates are bound to squabble with one another over jurisdiction. The most it does is enforce Article 20, which basically says that whatever union gets there first has dibs on organizing the workers.
That's right, rip those young people a new asshole for not understanding the nuances of the AFL-CIOs connections to the Democrats. Of course, some people honeslty look at the AFL-CIO and expect it to be about union organizing. These youngsters will probably be disillusioned pretty quickly by shit like this, which is rationalized by enlightened labor geeks who think they know everything.
> Does Chuck have anything but third-hand information on this situation? I have my doubts.
Your contempt for these young people and towards me for conveying this information is typical of labor zealots who scare way people who want to honestly organize workers, but don't want to do it your "correct" way.
Shit, no wonder labor is on its back.
Chuck0