Since some want more labor articles, here’s one from the UTU website concerning the power struggle in the AFL-CIO involving the Teamsters (including BLET and BMWE):
Labor’s inner war
LAS VEGAS – The era of bad feelings has descended on American labor, according to this report by Harold Meyerson published by the Washington Post.
The executive council meeting of the AFL-CIO that concluded here yesterday leaves the union movement divided into two angry camps, with three major unions considering leaving the federation. A coalition of unions led by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Teamsters – the federation’s biggest and third-largest unions – failed to persuade their colleagues to back a Teamster proposal to rebate a sizable chunk of the AFL-CIO’s budget to member unions with serious organizing programs. The coalition won the support of unions representing roughly 40 percent of the AFL-CIO’s 13 million members, but AFL-CIO President John Sweeney got majority backing for a program that directed more resources to the federation’s political program than to organizing.
Many of the unions supporting Sweeney argue that electoral work is paramount, that without friendly elected officials unions won’t be able to win the changes in labor law that will enable them to grow again. The unions aligned with the SEIU say that until labor organizes more members, it won’t be able to win on Election Day. “We can’t change labor law until we organize a lot more people,” John Wilhelm, president of the hotel division of Unite Here (the clothing and hotel workers union), said at a forum in Los Angeles last month.
There’s not a union leader here who doesn’t acknowledge that labor needs to expand both its political and organizing programs. That labor’s leaders couldn’t reach a compromise on a trade-off this week suggests there are other tensions in play. Certainly a number of the leaders in the 40 percent grouping are deeply frustrated at the continuing d
This is an easy one. Read the last sentence of the first paragraph and the entire second paragraph.
The idea is to be united in the political process. Elections, elections, and elections. The unions are spilt on how to spend their money and time. Spend money on recruiting new members for the union or spend money on electing politicians favorable to unions. New members could show the strength of unions to the politicians and thus help elect the favorable politicians.
Well yes is the answer, rail labor news should be reported, this is general labor news, it should not be reported on this forum! The above has no direct tie to railroading. But, since you decided to report non-related labor news let me through this gem throw this at you:
Opinion: Why Republicans should love Unions
(The following column by David K. Shipler appeared on the Los Angeles Times website on March 6. It is an excerpt from his latest book, “The Working Poor: Invisible in America.”)
LOS ANGELES – If Republicans were true to their stated principles of smaller government, free-market economics and the “ownership society” touted by President Bush, they would do something quite alien to their traditional practice: They would support the spread of labor unions instead of trying every trick to foil workers’ efforts to organize.
Unions have almost disappeared from the private sector, where they represent merely 7.9% of workers. Government employees are better organized, at 36%, but overall union membership in the country has fallen to its lowest level since the Depression — about 12.5% of all workers, a steep decline from 35% half a century ago.
This makes pro-business conservatives happy, but it shouldn’t, because it throws a monkey wrench into the machinery of capitalism.
Republicans who believe that the source of economic well- being is the private sector, not government programs, cannot shrink government in a just way until the private sector functions well for workers at the bottom r