Union divorce ain't pretty Juan Gonzalez
Two big unions that broke away this week from the AFL-CIO are moving quickly to launch a new national labor federation by September.
"We're looking at Ohio or another Midwest battleground state for the founding convention," a top source in the breakaway group told me yesterday.
The regular convention of the AFL-CIO was set to draw to a close today after yesterday's reelection of John Sweeney to his fourth term as president.
But the entire convention - even its call for the "rapid" withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq - was eclipsed by the organization's worst split in more than 60 years.
The two breakaway unions, the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union, represent nearly a quarter of the AFL-CIO's 13 million members.
The United Food and Commercial Workers, with 1.4 million members, were expected to announce by the weekend that they, too, were leaving to join the new labor federation.
A fourth AFL-CIO affiliate, UNITE-HERE, which has 440,000 members in the textile and restaurant industries, is likely to join the breakaway group as well.
In addition, the 500,000-member carpenters union, a group not currently part of the AFL-CIO, is expected to soon join the new federation.
The dissidents say they will seek to recruit other unions that remain in the AFL-CIO, such as the laborers and the farmworkers, by offering them the chance to hold dual membership.
This is clearly a colossal split, one with repercussions far beyond the labor movement.
It leaves politicians in both major parties, and civil rights, environmental and women's groups all wondering how competing labor federations will affect local and national elections.
And it leaves both the national AFL-CIO and many of its local labor councils and state labor federations facing huge deficits because of the lost dues.
Getting divorced, as always, is a lot more complicated than getting married.
In UNITE's case, the union's biggest asset is threatened. That's the Amalgamated Bank, the only union-controlled bank in the country.
At least one union allied with Sweeney has already pulled more than $50 million out of the bank, and others are expected to follow suit once UNITE leaves the federation.
So one of the first actions this week of the Teamsters and Service Employees International Union was to shore up the bank's finances.
"We're certainly encouraging all of our affiliates around the country to move their money into the bank," a top SEIU leader told me.
There's also the question of the AFL-CIO's credit card. Under the credit card program, the federation gets about $50 million annually from banks. Half of that is rebated to individual unions, depending on how many members utilize the cards.
What will happen now to the rebate for the breakaway unions?
"It's a problem," a top AFL-CIO official. "We'll have to negotiate a solution at some point."
And the financial problems go hand-in-hand with the political ones that will play out in every city in the country.
Take, for example, New York's annual Labor Day parade. The breakaway unions have long played key roles in the parade.
Brian McLaughlin, president of the New York Central Labor Council and a Sweeney ally, told me yesterday he has no intentions of changing things this year. Both the AFL-CIO and non-AFL-CIO unions will march together in the parade.
And an upcoming labor movement campaign against Wal-Mart stores in New York City will include both sides, McLaughlin said.
Yes, there's a deep division between national labor leaders, say McLaughlin and other local union heads. But corporate America would be making a mistake to celebrate too early.
American workers face so many problems that unions are needed now more than ever.
This split is about the best way to achieve a stronger labor movement.
Sooner or later, McLaughlin believes, labor leaders will resolve their differences, and then "everyone can get back together."
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