Four major unions decided Sunday to boycott the AFL-CIO convention, setting the stage for one or more to bolt from the 50-year-old federation in a battle over how to reverse organized labor’s decades-long decline, The Associated Press has learned.
The unions, representing about one-third of the AFL-CIO’s 13 million members, planned to announce the decision Sunday afternoon, a day before the convention opens, according to three labor officials familiar with the failed negotiations to avoid the walkout.
None of the four dissident unions planned to formally severe ties from the AFL-CIO on Sunday, officials said, but they are now poised to do so at a later date.
The protest is led by Andy Stern, president of the federation’s largest union, the 1.8 million-member Service Employees International Union. He is virtually certain to pull his union out of the AFL-CIO in coming days, with hopes of bringing his allies along, officials said.
Joining him in the boycott will be the Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers and UNITE HERE, a group of textile and hotel workers, according to the labor officials.
The four unions already had formed the Change to Win Coalition to pressure AFL-CIO President John Sweeney to undertake major changes to the federation.
Seems like the only way to rid ourselves of the DLC may be to cut off an arm or a leg… it can’t do any more damage than what the DLC is doing now. We are now being run by Lieberman and his six cronies.
Anyone, anyone Bueller?
DNC isn’t run by Leiberman, et. al., as far as I can tell. The D*L*C site looks like some of the same people who screwed up the election in Nov are still there.
In case people don’t really follow union news:
SEIU, Teamsters, UFCW, and UNITE HERE are some of the last unions we have that are even remotely willing to fight. Maybe they can finally get something done without all the dead weight of the AFL-CIO.
From what i understand, the debate is primarily over the AFL-CIO leadership’s strategy of “give a ton of money to the democrats and hope for the best” vs the opposition’s “lets spend union money on getting people unionized”
A bad sign for the democratic party, considering that they’ll be losing 1/3 of their union money. But its finally some good news for unions.
It has been the obsession with money and paid media (by comission based consultants, natch) that has vitiated the Dems- getting back to organizing and educating citizens is the best contribution the Unions could make. Three cheers for Carpenter’s and Joiner’s Union for showing the way a while back!