Today, the nation's major labor unions announced a new National Labor Coordinating Committee that brings together the AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and, for the first time in a major federation, the National Education Association, as well as all their affiliates, representing some 16 million American workers (full list of participants after the jump). It's a big deal for the labor movement.
I had a chance to speak with David Bonior, the former congressman and longtime labor champion who has been heading up the effort to bring the major unions back together since January. Bonior reports that the unions achieved major agreements on labor's legislative and political goals, on organizing issues -- some of the major issues that originally led to the split between the AFL-CIO and Change to Win -- and have been making progress on governance mechanisms. (The following questions are not exact transcriptions.)
What is the end goal of this process?
The creation of a single national labor federation. That's what we originally started to do and that's where I believe we'll end up. This will be a federation that will represent over 16 million workers and their families, that's not including retirees, and it'll play a significant role n the legislative, political, and economic life of the economy.
How does this effort to come together jive with recent strife among unions like UNITE-HERE or the conflict between SEIU and CNA?
History is filled with disagreements among affiliates and certainly between federations -- the CIO and the AFL had a twenty year disagreement -- but the common view of the folks who were at the table is that in solidarity we are at our strongest, working together on our common agenda ... which we pretty much all agree on. Getting the structure in shape to make that all happen again is what we're all working on now.
The priorities mentioned in the press release include the Employee Free Choice Act, health-care reform and getting the economy fixed. Some people, like Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, worry that the first priority might undermine the latter two.
It's very important to have a strong labor movement in any democracy; a democracy without a labor movement is inherently weak. It's been, historically, labor movements in this county that have driven efforts to reform health care, and I think that [the two issues] work in tandem with each other. It's not just important to restore our economy, because restoring it to what we had was not good for working and middle-class Americans. Just to go restore the economy to what it was would be continuing the backward trend from the way of economic justice. What we want to do is go forward.
What does this federation mean in a broader view of the American labor movement?
We're in a very historic time, historic in the sense of the opportunities that we have to move forward because of the economic crisis that we're in; historic because of the political change in the federal government; historic because of the changing economy that we're already in, the green energy based economy ... and also historic because the message that workers have is being well received. [The] climate … couldn't be better for the message that working people are offering. We have all of those opportunities, and reunification is important because we can walk through the door as a group and accomplish things based on those four pieces ... I believe that indeed will happen.
-- Tim Fernholz
