July 25, 2005

Big Labor is cracking up...

Talk about rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. Several large unions, dissatisfied with the leadership of the AFL-CIO are dropping its membership.

The Service Employees International Union, with 1.8 million members, plans to announce Monday that it is leaving the AFL-CIO, said several labor officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the developments.

The Teamsters union also was on the verge of disaffiliating, and would likely to be the first to follow SEIU's lead, the officials said. Two other boycotting unions were likely to leave the federation: United Food and Commercial Workers and UNITE HERE, a group of textile and hotel workers.

Union membership in the U.S. has dropped drastically from one in three private-sector workers fifty years ago to about 8% of the total private-sector labor force. And the unions think they can reverse this trend if they just "reorganize". Despite the scare tactics of the unions, the current U.S. unemployment rate is a mere 5.0% and there seem to be noticable absence of "Hoovervilles" out there.

I was raised in a union household and it seems to me that the unions should focus more of their resources on the legitimate interests of their members rather than protecting their own bureaucracy and wiring the bulk of their dues directly to the DNC.

UPDATE: 4:45pm
Captain Ed weighes in:

"That redirection of efforts means that less money will come to the Democrats. More importantly, it presents an opportunity for new national leadership to come to the fore for the labor movement. That leadership will not have the long-standing relationship to the Democrats that have sold labor and the unions to the Democrats for two generations. The Republicans have an opportunity to at least neutralize the Democratic hold on labor, if not swing a significant portion of it to the GOP.

Together with the new Republican inroads in the African-American community, this new refocusing of labor on organization and the split in the national movement means that the Democrats face the very real possibility that they will spend a generation in the minority."

Posted by: Gary at 11:59 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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