The move came as the labor federation opened its four-day national convention here. Officials of two other unions, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and UNITE HERE, had said a day earlier they would boycott the convention.

In mid-June, the presidents of the four dissident unions had formed the “Change to Win Coalition,” a bloc outside the AFL-CIO. The Laborer’s International Union and United Farm Workers have since joined the coalition. Top officials of these unions, which comprise about 40 percent of the labor federation’s membership, also said they won’t serve on the AFL-CIO’s executive council. The Carpenter’s union, which quit the AFL-CIO in 2001, has joined the Change to Win bloc too.

Before the split, the AFL-CIO had some 13 million members and 56 affiliates. The Teamsters and SEIU have a combined membership of 3.2 million.

Anna Burger, SEIU secretary treasurer and chair of Change to Win, said the group’s differences with the AFL-CIO leadership under the watch of its president John Sweeney had become “irresolvable.” When pressed by reporters to explain, UFCW president Joseph Hansen said AFL-CIO funding for union organizing was inadequate.

Only 12.5 percent of the U.S. workforce is unionized today, the lowest figure in decades. Among privately owned companies the rate is 7.9 percent. At its high point 50 years ago, when the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations merged, the rate was 33 percent.

Leaders of Change to Win claim to be more responsive to the needs of workers. But the group proposes the same basic course as the AFL-CIO leadership. Its calls to use half the federation’s budget for organizing are “more alike than different” from those of the Sweeney-led group, as an AFL-CIO statement put it. Officials in both camps favor growing union mergers—like that between UNITE, which organized garment and textile workers, and the hotel and restaurant workers union HERE—that weaken the industrial character and potential power of the unions.

“We are witnessing a fight over who gets to preside over a declining labor movement,” said an opinion column in the July 26 Wall Street Journal.

Sweeney, who was elected AFL-CIO president 10 years ago on the unfulfilled promise to reverse declining union membership, condemned the split as a “grievous insult.” As is customary, a host of capitalist politicians, mostly Democrats, addressed the opening of the AFL-CIO convention.  
 
 
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