Labor Pains

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State of the Unions

By Jess Sullivan

Union labor leaders cheered loudly last November as Gov. Schwarzenegger’s special election crashed and burned.
     But few of the local faithful in the organized-labor front are savoring victory or resting on their laurels. While they were preoccupied with the state-wide election threat to some important union issues, events 2,000 miles away in the Midwest sent shockwaves through unions across the country. Those shockwaves have begun to rumble through local union halls.
     The 50th anniversary of the AFL-CIO was honored in June 2005 with a raucous annual convention at Chicago’s historic Navy Pier. But the mood was hardly festive. Service Employees International Union, the Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and several other major unions, amounting to one-third of the membership, jumped the AFL-CIO ship to start a coalition known as Change to Win (CTW). It was a move representing a potential loss of tens of millions of dollars in dues.
     “The split was at the very top ranks. People at the bottom had very little input. Most people did not even know it had happened,” Sacramento State professor Duane Campbell says. “Here, it could have some huge impacts. So far in the state there have been a few small rifts, but they were very minor.”
     In the Sacramento region, the potential for major fallout from the split is very real.
     “For us, it’s not an academic debate — we do not have that luxury. Either we stay together, or we cease to exist,” says Grantland Johnson of the Sacramento Central Labor Council. About 75 percent of the Council’s af?liates are tied to CTW.
     Some changes are already foreseeable. Local unions are echoing the CTW theme of focusing more on the worker than on top-level union negotiation.
Continued...

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