Two Key Unions, SEIU and Teamsters, Leave AFL-CIO
by Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Yesterday's
announcement by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and
the International Brotherhood of Teamsters that they were quitting the
AFL-CIO was no less stunning for its absence of theatricals. What we
know is that the split – which is likely to grow as several other
unions announce their own disaffiliations over the next couple of weeks
– sunders a union movement that is already weaker than it has been
since the 1920s. What we don't know is whether the new organization
that the SEIU, the Teamsters and their allies will form in the coming
months can and will do anything to bolster the power of America's
indispensable, if enfeebled, labor movement.
For now,
it's a lot easier to see the damage than it is to foresee the gain.
Both sides acknowledge that the labor political operation that AFL-CIO
President John Sweeney has crafted over the past decade is the sine qua
non of progressive politics in the United States, and the split clearly
imperils that program. Yesterday the departing presidents – SEIU's Andy
Stern and the Teamsters' Jim Hoffa – made clear that they want to
support the political operation even though they're leaving. Hoffa said
he'd instructed his locals to keep paying dues to the local AFL-CIO
bodies, the central labor councils, that coordinate labor's
get-out-the-vote drives.
The
split comes, moreover, just as the AFL-CIO was gearing up a long-term
campaign to organize Wal-Mart. But the lead unions in this campaign are
the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which is boycotting the
convention and is widely expected soon to announce its own
disaffiliation, and the SEIU. Yesterday, though, one lone SEIU official
with particular responsibility for the Wal-Mart campaign still was
working the floor of the AFL-CIO convention, even though his union was
just then quitting the federation.
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