So Stern made it official. If Sweeney is reelected as head the AFL-CIO, the SEIU, Stern's union and the confederate's largest member, will disaffiliate. In terms of Labor, that's a big, big, deal. In addition, the SEIU, along with the Teamsters, UNITE-HERE, the Laborers and, potentially, the UFCW and Carpenters, released their vision of what the union movement should look like. It's an important document if you want to understand the current conflict, and I encourage you to download it (warning: PDF). The basic conflict is one between organizing and political work with Sweeney and the AFL-CIO's "mainstream" subscribing to the philosophy that the political environment and legislation has to change before unions can return to effective organizing while Stern and friends believe the organizing can succeed now and the political atmosphere can only be created by a resurgent labor movement. The nut graf, as Nathan Newman recognizes it, is here:
Our unions share a common commitment to uniting millions more workers with us as the top priority on the labor movement's agenda. As the recent election shows, even our maximum political efforts fall short for the simple reason that we are too small. We believe that our movement can and must organize and grow on a mass scale today, because that is the only way to bring true change in the direction of our nation.
We are confident that American labor's resources are sufficient — if properly aligned and leveraged — to serve as the economic and organizational foundation for a new movement to successfully organizing the millions of workers who hold out hope for the American Dream...Our unions stand for investing the maximum resources possible to build a movement of working people that can confront and restrain corporate power in both the workplace and the community. We do not believe our nation's political course can change fundamentally unless more working people belong to unions. We believe that the only way to generate truly meaningful political outcomes is to empower working people through organization. A pro-worker political consensus in America will emerge only when millions more American workers belong to unions.
It's possible, if the paycheck protection proposals being offered by Arnold and others pass, that Stern's vision will become a legal necessity, and that'll be the end of that. And who knows, maybe that'd be a good thing, and would, in retrospect, be the worst victory Republicans have ever won. It'd essentially end the largest source of contention and controversy in the movement and force Labor to spend all its cash on organizing which, if it ended up working, would mean scores of newly progressive, newly motivated, newly activated voters.
