After a quarrel over the future of organized labor, and heightened by declining union membership numbers, two major unions broke from the AFL-CIO labor group on Monday.
Until the break, AFL-CIO represented 13 million unionized workers. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union, consisting of a combined 3.2 million members, took quite a bit of political weight with them as well.
Claiming that the AFL-CIO spends too much of its time in Washington an the central office, and by effect, ignores the demands of the two unions (made up of six smaller unions) who want to focus more energy toward merging smaller unions into bigger unions.
“We have been disappointed over the last 10 years with the decline in membership. The AFL-CIO idea is to keep throwing money at politicians. We say no,” Teamsters president James Hoffa said. “We are going to do something new.”
Hoffa insists that more union members, not less, is essential to change the political climate he believes is undermining workers’ rights.
“Monday’s decision means that we have chosen a course of growth and strength for the American labor movement based on organizing new members,” he said.
Calling itself the Change to Win Coalition, the numbers may continue to increase as more dissenters withdraw from the AFL-CIO over the coming days, threatening to slice the labor union by a third.
The coalition includes the Laborers International of North America, UNITE HERE (the textile, garment, hotel employees), the United Food and Commercial Workers, and the United Farm Workers.
Tensions rose to a boiling point as dissident unions boycotted the 50th anniversary of the AFL-CIO’s founding.
Seventy-one year-old union president John Sweeney was disturbed by the boycott, calling it “a grievous insult to all the unions.”
Union membership suffered a sharp decline since Sweeney took the reigns of the AFL-CIO in 1995, falling from 15.5 percent of the US labor force to 12.5 percent. The total number has fallen even farther since 20 percent of the nation’s workforce was unionized in 1983. Outsourcing by major manufacturers is seen as the main reason for the decline.