>A splintered labor movement would be a boon to
>Corporate America and the GOP. While unions continue to shrink as a
>share of the U.S. workforce, they still sign up hundreds of thousands
>of new members every year. Warring camps could undercut those efforts
>if unions raid each other for members, as officials on both sides
>threaten to do.
This is conventional wisdom but I'm not sure it's true, as if organizing is a zero sum game. But the threat of raiding might actually force unions to do a better job and organize harder to prevent other unions from beating them to the punch. To give an example, SEIU and the California Nurses Association have been beating the shit out of each other for most of the last decade, yet hospital organizing in the state has kept expanding. Maybe it would have been faster without the fight but maybe not. The AFL and the CIO both grew quickly after the original split inthe 1930s as they raided each other hard.
There are pluses and minuses to allowing raiding, so we will see whether the costs outweigh the benefits after any split.
Nathan Newman