Brewing Conflict in AFL-CIO

AFL-CIO head John Sweeney may be fighting off a power struggle against his one time protege after the November elections. Andrew Stern, Sweeney's successor at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), is advocating for consolidation of many of the AFL-CIO's many unions and more aggressive recruiting as the prescription to save the labor movement.

Union membership has been freefalling for many years, with Union representation hovering around 13% of the workforce, roughly 16 million workers. Unions have had great difficulty adapting to a changing American economy that features increasing consolidation of large industries and unions competing to unionize the same workers. From the article:

Heightened corporate power has checked union growth, too. Unionization elections are typically so lopsided today that most unions have all but given up on them. Most employers pull out the stops when labor organizers appear, using everything from mandatory antiunion meetings to staged videos showing alleged union thugs beating workers, backed by streams of leaflets and letters to workers' homes. While most of these tactics are legal, companies also illegally fire union supporters in 25% of all elections, according to studies of federal data by Cornell University labor researcher Kate Bronfenbrenner. That's triple the percentage of the 1960s. So companies are often able to turn employees against a union, even though a rising number of Americans have said in national polls over the past two decades that they would join one.

SEIU, on the other hand, stands in marked contrast to the labor movement as a whole. Stern has devoted huge resources to grow SEIU, with the union now boasting nearly four times as many members as when Sweeney took over the organization and nearly twice as many members as when Stern took the reins.