Labor debates the future of a fractured movement
Chicago – The two giant unions that quit the AFL-CIO say their exodus will help revive the labor movement. But Greg Devereux, one of the 800 delegates at the union convention here, was not buying it.
“A lot of people are still stunned and angry about it,” Mr. Devereux, a Washington State delegate from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said Tuesday. “A lot of people view it as destructive and selfish.”
His friend Ken Allen, a delegate from Portland, Ore., wearing the kelly green shirt of the state, county and municipal employees, said: “What they did will absolutely hurt. It will hurt our political program, and it will hurt our organizing programs. These unions hold themselves as a model for organizing, and how does it help the rest of the labor movement when they pull out?”
Though absent from the convention hall on Navy Pier, officials from the two dissident unions – the Service Employees International Union and the Teamsters – say that breaking away will give their unions new energy and focus that will spur growth.
In announcing the rupture on Sunday, Anna Burger, the service employees’ secretary-treasurer, said, “Today will be remembered as the rebirth of union strength in America.”
Comments like those rankled many delegates and generated a debate, inside the hall and out, about whether the schism could somehow help labor end its prolonged slide. The service employees, the Teamsters and two other unions threatening to quit – the United Food and Commercial Workers and Unite Here, which represents apparel, hotel and restaurant workers – assert that by going their own way, they can organize more workers through new, intense forms of cooperation.
Follow
