Suchergebnisse

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney recently took a strange trip. It was a short one, just a half-mile or so from the federation's sandstone fortress near the White House to a sleek, smoked-glass office building that America's fastest growing union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), was dedicating as its new head-quarters. What made Sweeney's appearance at the January dedication so strange was that SEIU—the union he led in the eighties and nineties—had stormed out of the AFL-CIO less than two years earlier and established the rival Change to Win (CTW) federation with six other unions. Back then, many feared a bitter war would break out between the two federations and that an already dwindling labor movement would disappear completely. Yet, there in SEIU's glass-walled atrium, with beatific portraits of workers all around, the breakaway union's staff applauded warmly when Sweeney was introduced. Though he didn't speak at the ceremony, Sweeney stayed for the reception and chatted with old friends in the crowd.

Provides an assessment of the AFL-CIO & Chance to Win (CTW) since the Service Employees International Union SEIU split from the former federation. It is argued that both have managed to do more than just survive. Attention is given to CTW's Joe Hansen, CTW's & SEIU's organizing efforts, & the questionable actions of CTW President Andy Stern that have some thinking he may be putting too much distance between himself & the workers. D. Edelman

Jim McNeill discusses Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss's Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement; Dan Clawson's The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements; Steven Henry Lopez's Reorganizing the Rust Belt: An Inside Study of the American Labor Movement; and Rebuilding Labor: Organizing And Organizers in the New Union Movement, edited by Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss.

In October 1973, delegates from the 113 affiliated unions of the AFL-CIO made their way to Miami Beach for the federation's quadrennial convention. Like a strange flock of migratory birds, the glaziers, the engravers, the boilermakers, and all the subspecies of American labor returned to the Florida shores they'd grown to know so well in the Age of Meany. But that fall, as the delegates headed south, their travels were disturbed by a blistering op-ed in the Washington Post entitled, "Labor's Battle with Itself." The piece had been written by Jerry Wurf, the much-aggrieved president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. During the 1950s and 1960s, AFSCME had helped shore up the house of labor by organizing hundreds of thousands of public employees, a group other unions had long neglected. But after seeing Wurf's union grow from a small band of Wisconsin state workers into one of the AFL-CIO's largest affiliates, the rest of labor honored the achievement by shamelessly invading AFSCME's public-sector turf and stealing thousands of government workers.

McNeill reviews Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement by Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss, The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements by Dan Clawson, Reorganizing the Rust Belt: An Inside Study of the American Labor Movement by Steven Henry Lopez, and Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement edited by Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss.

Circumstances responsible for the gradual fragmentation of the US labor movement, exemplified by the withdrawal of Service Employees International Union & the United Food and Commercial Workers from the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations, are investigated. Interviews were conducted with leaders (N = undetermined) from the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations & other labor unions to determine the reasons behind the divided nature of the US labor movement. Although splinter groups within the labor movement question the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organization's capacity to strengthen organizing programs, it is contended that the movements measured breakup will jeopardize key labor organization projects including Working America. Attention is subsequently dedicated to ascertaining whether the massive national membership drives are actually beneficial to the US labor movement. Regardless of the advantages & consequences of such organizing strategies, it is stressed that such large-scale membership drives have closed the distance between conservative & liberal unions. It is noted that alternative organizational strategies, eg, those employed by the American Federation of Teachers, have realized success in increasing members & suggested that the dissection of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations may have been unnecessary. J. W. Parker