LaborPains.org

Yesterday, at the AFL-CIO conference in Pittsburgh, UNITE HERE‘S president John Wilhelm announced that UNITE HERE will be leaving the Change to Win coalition and rejoining the AFL-CIO.

Here is a quick summary of what drove them back into the fold.

With the nasty split of the Change to Win coalition from the AFL-CIO in 2005, UNITE HERE found itself among select company, a band of six unions that followed the charismatic Andy Stern away from the safety of the Big Labor flock.   Sterns ideals were said to be attractively progressive–an antidote to what ailed Big Labor.  Aggressive unionizing, a top down approach, vision for the future, and a political focus (to rival any major party) would rule the day.  But trouble was not far off, and no amount of Stern’s dynamism created the sea change that was expected.  Instead, the move was one of the single most divisive events in Big Labor history, splitting the entirety of resources and political clout.   It was great in theory, destructive in execution.

Stern encored his performance with an attempt to split UNITE HERE (itself a merger of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union)–raiding members and leadership and seizing precious resources (read: millions of dollars in the Amalgamated Bank, the only American bank completely owned by a labor union).

It is an understatement to say this upset UNITE HERE. And so, UNITE HERE was left with one obvious solution–leave Change to Win and return to the fold.

Read more in Politico.

Image courtesy of Law_Keven.

Before a cheer-beleaguered audience on Tuesday, Senator Arlen Specter announced that a revised Employee Free Choice Act will pass this year.   He has long been the supporter, hater, leader lynch pin of the Employee Free Choice Act.

Here’s the basic run down:

• Card check is off the table, but there will be shorter periods of time for employers to consolidate their resources and gather their forces against unionization.
• If employers hold mandatory anti-union meetings on company time, then union organizers get equal time.  Employers who don’t comply will face penalties at three times today’s penalties.
• Instead of contracts both written and imposed by government mediators, mediation will take the form of baseball arbitration.  A mediator will pick between two contracts, which encourages moderate deals to be offered by both parties, in the interest of self preservation.

Read more in the Washington Post.

Image courtesy of Mika Hiironniemi.

The New York Times may have backed labor unions a time or two thousand, but they’re not stupid.  They see the writing on the wall about the future of American Labor just as much as the next guy.  Their coverage of the AFL-CIO national conference this week included this little gem from Steven Greenhouse:

[W]aiting for unions to rise to their former strength may be like waiting for Godot.

When Mr. Sweeney assumed the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s presidency 14 years ago, he also pledged to greatly expand labor’s ranks. Instead labor’s numbers fell somewhat because of many of the same forces Mr. Trumka will face, including factory shutdowns, corporations battling to beat back unions and workers’ fears that their workplaces will close if they vote to unionize.

A truer word was never spoken. If the AFL-CIO to appeal to youth and get away from its time honored-image of being “male, pale, and stale,” they’ve got more than their work cut for them. And no amount of “The Facebook,” Twitter, the Google-tube, and the inter-web can save them.

Let me ruin the ending for you, labor unions.  Godot never shows.

Image courtesy of Jim Moran.

Earlier this year, the United Steel Workers union filed a petition to staunch cheap Chinese tire imports. They claim a three fold jump in tire imports from China from 2004 to 2008 has led to a loss of an estimated 5,000 union jobs. The Adminstration has since dutifully imposed duties on tire imports from China, ranging from 25% to 35% for the next three years.

China is unsurprisingly upset and claims that the tariffs will slow down global ec0nomic recovery and that it is unfair to Chinese workers. Also not suprisingly, China is less than concerned about 5,000 unions jobs and spoke out vehemently against protectionism.  Next week, when world leaders gather in Pittsburgh for the G-20, China has made it clear that it will speak out against just this type of trade controls . . . oh yeah, and China made some explicit vague threats about starting a trade war between the United States and China over tires. A trade war will cast quite a luster on the G-20.

And who says that Administration hasn’t been following through on its promises to labor unions? Who says they’re not paying unions back for the millions in campaign donations?  The Administration is willing to start an international trade war on their behalf.

Photo courtesy of J. Ota.

On the front page of today’s Investors Business Daily, Sean Higgins details how labor unions have refocused their efforts on political activity in an effort to stave off extinction. The trouble, Higgins points out, is that for all the money they’ve spent electing labor-friendly Democrats in Congress, unions haven’t done much to improve their popularity with workers.

In a poll we conducted earlier this year, 82 percent of non-unionized employees said they don’t want their job unionized. And a recent Gallup poll found that 51 percent of Americans believe that unions “mostly hurt” the economy, which is a 15 percent raise in the last three years.

In response, AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka responded, “We don’t live by polls.” The trouble, of course, is that their members do live by polls–because polls represent the opinion of their current and potential members.

Our poll and the Gallup poll underline labor’s fundamental problem: no matter how much money they spend, unions are an outmoded, unresponsive, unpopular institution that’s stuck in the past.

On Friday, the Census Bureau finally announced it will break ties with ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) in the 2010 Census.  The general public’s concerns that a plethora of controversial issues discredited ACORN and would compromise the Census results finally convinced the Census Bureau to come around to seeing the light, The New York Times reports. Was it the prostitute-pimp controversy, or the few hundred other incidents that finally pushed the Census Bureau over the edge?

Image courtesy of Eschipul.

Labor’s had a tough year, but hope for the future rests in Pittsburgh this week.

As the AFL-CIO holds its national conference in the city this week, fully expecting to elect their new leader, unions are forced to contemplate their future.

But they can’t shake the feelings they’ve been here before. When John Sweeney took over the AFL-CIO with the promise of boosting membership and bring labor unions a semblance of modern relevance, they heard the same lines they will likely hear again this week.

Richard Trumka, soon to be president of the AFL-CIO,  is a man some fear has been waiting too long in the wings to make a real change.  Sweeney leaves office with many of his promises unfulfilled. Will Trumka?

As odd as it seems, a site that provides “independent and incisive coverage of the labor movement and the struggles of workers to obtain safe, healthy and just workplaces” asks itself some very tough questions about the future of organized labor.  In These Times explains:

Hope for a revived union movement has come in successive waves in recent decades, only to recede over time. When the national AFL-CIO meets next week in Pittsburgh to choose new officers, the fans in the stands will be cheering the latest change in quarterbacks. But neither handing the ball to Rich Trumka (current secretary-treasurer of the federation) or creating a united front of the AFL, Change To Win (CTW), and the National Education Association—a parallel effort now stalled by Trumka’s own election–are likely to stem union decline, by themselves. Outside the Beltway, labor’s condition continues to worsen as workers face an avalanche of job cuts and contract concessions.

Image courtesy of fusionpanda.

Stewart Acuff is the Director of Organizing at the AFL-CIO and blogger-extraordinaire for the Huffington Post.   His Huffington Post biography includes a generous quote from AFL-CIO head President John Sweeney, where Sweeney notes Acuff’s “strong leadership skills and a deep passion for the potential of unions to lift working people’s lives.”

This “deep passion” is evident in his coherent blog today on the Huffington Post.  A summary follows:

After reminding his readers of the sacrifice many union members made on 9-11, he took today’s anniversary as an opportunity to remind us all of the aftermath “of one of America’s greatest tragedies”—the disallowing of the unionization of the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration.

This is unfair, Acuff says, because unions are the ones “who stand up to the greed and arrogance of the corporations who have ripped off our country for 30 years who believe they have a right to live like kings on the backs of America’s workers.”

He moves onto health care. Health care reform is essential, he writes, because then we can “force ABC rats to pay for healthcare and allow good union employers to better compete with rat bastards.”  Rat bastards, he states, includes the Chamber of Commerce.

And right in the middle of phrases like “sweat of your brow,” “best defenders of democracy,” “Are you not your brother’s keeper,” “love one another,” and “It’s easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Acuff intones that the “Radical Rightwing” [sic] says “greed is good,”—before invoking Nazis, Fascists, Dr. King, Frederick Douglas, Sam Adams, and Jesus as a construction worker.

The piece finally ends with this little gem: “Keep on brothers and sisters. Fight on. Don’t lose faith. Don’t lose hope. History is made by people like us. Healthcare for all. Employee Free Choice Act. Let’s make history.”

Image courtesy of PKMousie.