Labor Divided

...Ironically, that struggling union recently merged with the Teamsters, and even as they were disaffiliating from the federation, AFL-CIO staffers were on the ground working with them to sign up Quebecor workers...

...In recent years, the Machinists union has organized carhaul drivers by negotiating sweetheart contracts with rogue employers—contracts that were far inferior to those at Teamster shops...

...People want to say it's all this top-down corporate stuff...

...After all, these aren't the early days of the New Deal...

...But the PC2K committee saw a few fronts where the union was advancing...

...The Organizer When I met up with Andy Stern at SEIU's Washington headquarters, he was rushing off to appear on National Public Radio's call-in show Talk of the Nation...

...That structure has been critical in winning recent contract fights at Verizon and SBC...

...Allied's owner, Ron Perelman, also controls Revlon, the cosmetics company...

...After ten years in office, Stern said, Sweeney had proved he was "not prepared to make the hard choices to shake up the status quo...

...Other Models SEIU doesn't offer the only model for growth in today's labor movement...

...Another promising program threatened by the split is Working America, the AFL-CIO's new associate member group...

...By 1973, the unionized share of the U.S...

...But in 2002, the Teamsters went through a review process similar to SEIU's PC2K effort...

...Of course, the sheer size of such campaigns alarms some SEIU critics...

...We want to be the union that wins...

...But they're taking an enormous risk...

...I learned a lot about the role of the federation in a vibrant labor movement," Acuff said...

...It's the twenty-fifth year of the Reagan era, and there is no end in sight...

...As Stern explained, "We asked members what they thought of SEIU and they said—and I'm sure they'd say this in most unions—`Really good union, really works hard, they struggle really well, they just don't win.'" One of the places SEIU was getting beaten in the 1990s was in nursing homes...

...And not just in the organizing department...

...At a time when labor desperately needs to organize, the coalition argues, there must be a rational process for planning and implementing large-scale campaigns...

...Though the trend toward mammoth organizing drives in SEIU began under Sweeney, who ran the union from 1980 to 1995, it's Stern who made them the norm...

...For now, Stern and its partners have made the most dramatic change the labor movement has seen in seventy years...

...electorate...

...And yet, the reluctance of some AFL-CIO unions to take any risks at all makes one think that perhaps the coalition's move was necessary...

...But Paul Booth, AFSCME's former organizing director and now assistant to the president, hesitated to crow too loudly about his union's accomplishment...

...later that week the UFCW quit, also...

...On the eve of the July AFL-CIO convention, the United Farm Workers also joined the coalition...

...Over the last decade, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has added more than four hundred thousand new members, and AFT Organizing Director Phil Kugler said, "the AFL-CIO has been an absolutely critical source of support...

...Some commentators have called the AFL-CIO split an oedipal struggle between Sweeney and Stern...

...And by the mid-1980s, when each was organizing director of his union, both were considered among the most progressive and innovative leaders in labor...

...AS UNION OFFICIALS arrived in Chicago on the weekend before the convention, the mood at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers felt more like a cold war arms negotiation than a clubby labor conclave...

...Today, the battle lines are more ragged, and they run right through labor's progressive ranks...

...34 DISSENT / Fall 2005...

...Then, there was a fairly simple left-right divide in labor, and the rift healed not long after Sweeney's progressive forces took power...

...Yes, the paper admitted, SEIU had once been a bottom-feeding union that snapped up everyone from laundry workers to leather workers, from jewelry makers to metal spinners...

...For example, Stern has repeatedly criticized unions in the airline industry...

...Unless unions can revive themselves, the fortunes of ordinary Americans seem likely to continue sinking as well...

...In California alone, SEIU has helped win $1.2 billion in new nursing home funding over the last five years...

...Instead, the local had mounted a statewide contract campaign, in which all its nursing home workers coordinated their bargaining...

...Where did SEIU get off telling proud unions such as the Autoworkers and Steelworkers that labor could grow but only if DISSENT / Fall 2005 27 LABOR DIVIDED they stuck to their disappearing industries...

...Yet they have come to radically different conclusions about the direction labor should take...

...With his collarless shirt and close-cropped goatee, Acuff came across as an unpretentious, almost hip, evangelist for labor...

...and a huge shift of funds into organizing...

...And the coalition is promising to mount even more ambitious multi-union campaigns at once-unthinkable targets such as retail stores and even fast-food franchises...

...The workers ended up winning dramatically better contracts...

...In too many places, and for too many years, solidarity in the labor movement has amounted to vague letters of support from one union official to another, or at best the arrival of a few token members on another union's picket line...

...SEIU has used its new money not just to enlarge existing campaigns, but to experiment with new strategies...

...SEIU recognized that nursing homes were getting squeezed by a lack of government funding for long-term care, so it proposed a deal: The union would use the political muscle of its members and community allies to try and win more state money for nursing homes...

...You get the sense that Andy Stern is congenitally incapable of accepting such arguments...

...Not long after that, SEIU sent him to Georgia, where he built a state employees local from scratch...

...Whether or not more unions leave the AFL-CIO, it has already suffered a heavy blow, losing more than four million of thirteen million members...

...THESE ARE THE kind of campaigns that the coalition believes unions must pursue if they're going to grow again—large-scale campaigns that combine sophisticated strategy, political savvy, and workplace activism...

...Stern and his partners demanded Wurf-style reform: the merger of small unions into mega-unions...

...CWA is one of them...

...Both rose through the ranks of the labor movement as organizers...

...During the 1950s and 1960s, AFSCME had helped shore up the house of labor by organizing hundreds of thousands of public employees, a group other unions had long neglected...

...In the nursing home world, for example, SEIU has explored a truce with the owners it fought so bitterly in the 1990s...

...He worked for SEW from 1999 to 2001 and has since consulted for it and other unions...

...The two sides circled one another warily in the hotel's hallways...

...Though Acuff didn't dwell on his recent differences with Raynor, he noted that it took years of work by progressives like themselves to change the union culture in Atlanta...

...Because of that strategic focus, as well as a massive commitment of resources, SEIU has had unparalleled success in organizing workers...

...Lagging not too far behind the AFT is the late Jerry Wurf's union, AFSCME, which has organized 250,000 workers in the last ten years...

...But if the split forces a deep financial retrenchment at the AFL-CIO, it's unclear whether the federation could continue to invest in Working America's growth...

...After six months of indecision, he was finally convinced to run for the job by one of his closest friends...

...Today, the AFL-CIO is helping "more unions than ever before" strengthen their organizing programs, Acuff said...

...With a sedentary reporter straining to keep up, he came back to a point he'd made on Talk of the Nation about the frustration he'd felt at the March AFL-CIO executive council meeting...

...They see the armies of staff and worry that workers have no role to play in their own fight...

...He saw it as his job to expand and strengthen those programs...

...Cohen's union work began in the 1970s, when he and a group of New Jersey state coworkers launched a campaign that brought 37,000 state employees into CWA...

...Where SEIU has grown exponentially in the last decade, CWA has struggled just to maintain its current membership...

...In 2003, SEIU, the Laborers, the Carpenters, and the soontobe-merged UNITE HERE came together in a loosely organized reform group called the New Unity Partnership...

...In the run-up to the AFLCIO's momentous July 2005 convention in Chicago, Stern put forth reform proposals that were eerily similar to Wurf's recommendations from 1973...

...I don't want to be over-deterministic," Booth said...

...What we didn't say is maybe we could change ourselves...

...With too much focus on winning," Cohen says of Stern's philosophy, "a union can turn into the AARP...

...SEIU officials aren't oblivious to these questions...

...In this case and others, Cohen argues, Stern isn't dealing with the full range of problems unions face, instead he's imposing cookie-cutter solutions based on SEIU's experience...

...On the first day of the convention, SEIU and the Teamsters announced they were leaving the AFL-CIO...

...But the coalition would not compromise...

...Only with that strategic focus, Wurf said, could the labor movement reverse its decline...

...The Machinists' raiding was so egregious that in 2003 the AFL-CIO, in a rare decision, authorized the Teamsters to launch counter-raids against the Machinists at their carhaul shops...

...By SEIU standards, the security campaign is not unusually ambitious...

...Acuff led the Georgia local until the early 1990s, when, in a move he still discusses The interviews were conducted in April and May 2005, several months before the formal split in the AFL-CIO but well after the divisions in labor had hardened...

...Thus, in 1968 the BSEIU shed its "B," and the SEIU was born...

...It was really hard to see myself in that role," Acuff admitted...

...If the AFL-CIO were truly hapless, say federation defenders, if it showed no signs of life, then they could see the need to blow it up and take a chance on experiments like the Purple Puddle...

...From Acuff's perspective, and no doubt from the perspective of the unions remaining in the AFL-CIO, the coalition is abandoning the seeds of change before they've had a chance to grow...

...Although coalition critics say this puts too much emphasis on high-level strategy and too little on grassroots energy, Stern and his allies insist they're striking the proper balance...

...It is this record that emboldened Stern to press so hard for reform in the AFL-CIO and helped him draw a number of unions to SEIU's side in what would become the Change to Win Coalition.* In the months before the AFL-CIO convention, the coalition argued that the plunging percentage of unionized workers in America—down to just 8 percent in the private sector—made drastic change absolutely necessary...

...Booth disagreed...

...How is it, they wondered, that this janitors union, which grew by luring public employees and health care workers, could tell other unions to focus narrowly on their traditional sectors...

...Thirty percent of airline workers are in unions, triple the rate in health care and building services...

...This September, in St...

...The strength of the Labor 2004 program was that all the unions were on board," Ackerman said...

...In "United We Win," a discussion paper the union circulated in February 2003 to spur the AFL-CIO reform debate, SEIU acknowledged that many of the problems it sought to fix in the labor movement "can be found in our own organization...

...I probed not so much for each side's argument against its rivals—at the time, tempers were flaring, and it seemed a less than fruitful line of questioning— instead, the leaders were asked to give a candid analysis of their own organizations and to tell how they thought the faltering movement should move forward...

...The problem is it happens to work better than what most people are doing...

...How exactly did Sweeney and Stern, collaborators in the creation of SEIU's organizing machine, end up on opposite sides...

...By the spring of 2005, that partnership had evolved into the more formally structured Change to Win Coalition and had grown to include the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers...

...Since Stern took charge in 1996, SEIU has organized more than 800,000 new members, far more than any other union...

...But CWA has had less success in using its mobilization structure to organize new members...

...Its ongoing effort to organize Comcast, the fiercely anti-union cable company, has sputtered...

...You guys should get some free Revlon products," Stern laughed, "along with a contract...

...They say they have the will, therefore they will grow, and the unions they leave behind will not...

...Since 2001, SEIU has reached agreements with nursing homes in ten states and has organized twentyfive thousand new nursing home members...

...if it succeeded, the owners would increase members' pay and let non-union workers join the union without a fight...

...And in early August, when the AFL-CIO proposed a plan that would allow the locals of departed affiliates to remain active in central labor councils, the coalition issued a testy response saying it found the plan unacceptable...

...The Mobilizer In many ways, Larry Cohen, the new president of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), and Andy Stern are remarkably similar...

...For far too long, many—perhaps most—unions have seemed content to march quietly on into oblivion...

...Louis, the coalition is set to hold its first convention, and the group will, thank goodness, select a new name...

...Later, the council played a key role in hounding local congressional representative Newt Gingrich from office...

...To understand the reasons for and the implications of these mysterious divisions, I interviewed leaders from the AFL-CIO and from five unions with varying positions on the reform debate.* They range from SEIU's Stern to Communications Workers president Larry Cohen, who offers perhaps the starkest alternative to the Change to Win agenda...

...By almost all accounts, the Sweeney administration has significantly improved the AFL-CIO's political program...

...So, at the committee's urging, the 2000 SEIU convention passed a dues increase that by 2004 was, along with membership growth, generating at least $300 million a year in added revenue for the union...

...Too often, Cohen charges, Stern and the coalition haven't looked honestly at the problems other unions face...

...And so, when the delegates arrived in Miami Beach in 1973, they gave short shrift to his reform proposals—and once they got home, they went right on raiding AFSCME's turf...

...In Connecticut, where SEIU's nursing home members belonged to a single New England–wide health care local, the union had departed from the standard practice of negotiating contracts one nursing home at a time...

...rumors swirled about last-minute deals being cut in rooms far above...

...Their responses are of interest to more than just a small coterie of union officials...

...For as labor has declined, so have the prospects for America's workers...

...Acuff believes the organizing department, which Sweeney created when he took office, is just beginning to reach maturity...

...The American economy was changing— manufacturing was shrinking, corporations were consolidating—and labor had to change as well...

...The friend, Acuff recalled wistfully, was Bruce Raynor, then the southern-region director of the clothing workers union, now the president of UNITE HERE and a key leader of the coalition dissidents...

...And those mega-unions, instead of "chopping each other up" in a competition for members, should each focus on organizing a particular industry or sector...

...Founded in late 2003 to offer a union perspective on current events to unorganized workers in electoral battleground states, Working America proved so popular that the federation has kept canvas operations going in states from Virginia to Oregon...

...It's a much harder job, he said, to organize "people at living, breathing corporations, where management will fight back, and where the only hope you have is a real steward system where people are mobilized...

...According to Farmer, who was brought in to beef up the organizing department in 2002, "We realized we were taking on major corporate interests, and if we were going to do that, we needed to be as well-armed and well-equipped for the task as we possibly could be...

...Yet that 30 DISSENT / Fall 2005 LABOR DIVIDED one campaign would probably bust the entire organizing budget of all but a few unions in the AFL-CIO...

...Then the Teamsters came to believe— along with other coalition unions—that successful organizing wasn't just about building capacity...

...Three years ago, SEIU kicked off the campaign in Los Angeles and Minneapolis and has since expanded it to eight more cities...

...During the DISSENT / Fall 2005 29 LABOR DIVIDED three-year Quebecor fight, Acuff's department helped a struggling union—one that hadn't organized aggressively in decades—mount a global pressure campaign that got the Montrealbased firm to agree to remain neutral in future organizing elections...

...As this article went to press in late August, it seemed likely that two more coalition members, UNITE HERE and the Laborers, would also leave the federation...

...It was even reputed that in the feverish final days before the convention, Sweeney, a born peacemaker, had agreed to step aside if the coalition would ease some of its demands...

...In the same week that SEIU left the federation, it began tussling with DISSENT / Fall 2005 33 LABOR DIVIDED AFSCME over ten thousand home care workers in Riverside, California...

...Cohen finds that argument misleading at best...

...Not without reason, delegates from many AFL-CIO affiliates read Wurf's article as a scathing attack on their sacred, if no longer sturdy, institutions...

...Keeping the Faith Stewart Acuff, the organizing director of the AFL-CIO, is the son of a Baptist minister— "Southern Baptist," he stresses—and when he speaks it is still with the accent of the west Tennessee towns where his father preached...

...an end to unions' organizing outside their core industries...

...SEIU is organizing the guards at Allied, and Stern, ever the organizer, began bantering with her...

...But under the AFL-CIO constitution, even with changes made at this convention to better enforce jurisdictional boundaries, it's not clear the federation would have the power to prevent such infighting...

...But given the good work that's being done, they believe it's reckless to split the AFLCIO...

...As Jerry Wurf noted long ago, increasing the organizing strength of unions does little good if the AFL-CIO can't stop unions from chopping each other up in a mad scramble for the same workers...

...The only real solution, they argue, is for the federation to stop such raids before they start...

...In the 1992 presidential election, voters from union households accounted for just 19 percent of the U.S...

...After his appearance on NPR's Talk of the Nation, Stern declined an NPR limo and decided to speed-walk the half-mile back to SEIU...

...Back then, Raynor insisted that the Atlanta labor council, which functioned as the withered local arm of the AFLCIO, could be revitalized if a fiery leader from a progressive union took charge...

...And this is one area where the AFL-CIO is clearly besting its coalition rivals...

...But in recent years, SEIU had focused its organizing efforts only in those sectors where it had significant membership...

...Hoffa, concerned about that and other setbacks, appointed a commission to make recommendations for improvement...

...It's a multimillion dollar effort that the union can fund for years if need be...

...in reality, it's much more like the meltdown of an extended family...

...To make change in labor, he said, "You have to plant the seeds and then tend them and nurture them...

...Unlike a traditional campaign, where the organizers might appeal to guards from one workplace or one employer, SEIU is looking to win citywide contracts that will cover every officer in every firm...

...This is a far more serious fight than the one that erupted ten years ago when Sweeney forced the first ever contested election for the AFL-CIO presidency...

...Stern notes that more than ten unions represent airline workers and argues that splitting workers among them has diluted their strength and made them an ineffective force...

...But after seeing Wurf's union grow from a small band of Wisconsin state workers into one of the AFL-CIO's largest affiliates, the rest of labor honored the achievement by shamelessly invading AFSCME's public-sector turf and stealing thousands of government workers...

...If those unions have been so ineffective, Cohen asks, then why is the airline industry one of the most heavily unionized in the nation...

...And as he worked more widely in CWA, which had been founded as a militant CIO union, Cohen saw that some other locals had similar member-mobilization programs...

...Like so many people at the AFL-CIO, Acuff got his start in labor with SEIU...

...And the Teamsters were experiencing that firsthand in the carhaul industry, one of their core jurisdictions...

...JIM McNEJLL, a writer in Washington, D.C., was managing editor of In These Times, editor of Racine Labor, and has written for the American Prospect, the Chicago Tribune, and the Baffler...

...That grassroots mobilization was critical to SWOC's success, said Cohen...

...Wurf had already earned a reputation as a brash, some said arrogant, leader, one who too often frayed the fraternal bonds of labor...

...Of course, given SEIU's history, more than a few unions—especially AFSCMEwere peeved to hear Stern preaching Wurf's gospel...

...If you take a group of unions out of that, then you're not having a unified message, you're not having a unified game plan—you have a weakened labor movement...

...Both began their careers as social service workers in the northeast...

...As at SEIU, the commission advocated a dues increase so the union could build its capacity and run more aggressive campaigns...

...Stern arrived at NPR a little late and was hurriedly signing in at the front desk when he spotted the red "Allied Security" badge on the sleeve of the security guard...

...In the private sector, he said, "there's an awful lot of will that's frustrated by overwhelming power...

...In fact, the AFL-CIO had made quite a few concessions to the coalition in the weeks leading up to the convention...

...Many people in and out of labor are baffled by the alliances that have formed...

...It's actually a very complicated combination of worker militancy and comprehensive corporate campaigning...

...32 DISSENT / Fall 2005 LABOR DIVIDED Now, especially at its long-established Baby Bell locals, CWA has a strong member-mobilization structure in place...

...The piece had been written by Jerry Wurf, the much-aggrieved president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees...

...As the state workers bargained their first contract, they created the "Committee of a Thousand," a group of employees from offices throughout New Jersey who kept their co-workers mobilized during negotiations...

...Instead they've chosen to "throw rocks at other organizations...

...Of course, Stern and the PC2K committee realized that if SEIU wanted to conduct more campaigns on that scale, the union would have to vastly expand its budget...

...But by pulling out roughly onethird or more of the AFL-CIO's members—and revenues—the coalition could greatly weaken labor's political operation, warns AFL-CIO political director Karen Ackerman...

...It's the allure of such campaigns that explains the unlikely alliance between the coalition's more liberal unions, such as SEIU and UNITE HERE, and the more conservative unions such as the Carpenters and Teamsters...

...Until some restraints have been put back on private power, he doubts the coalition unions will have much more success organizing than their AFL-CIO counterparts...

...He began with the union in the early 1980s, organizing nursing home workers in east Texas...

...Stern considers such criticism a caricature of SEIU's organizing model...

...Soon after he took office, Stern convened a group of local SEIU officials called the President's Committee 2000 (inevitably abbreviated as PC2K), and worked with them to come up with plans for improving the union that would be voted on at SEIU's 2000 convention...

...With a majority of AFL-CIO affiliates unwilling to accede to the coalition's stringent demands, and some accusing it of a "naked power grab," the dreaded split could not be averted...

...workers...

...Perhaps, Cohen suggests, the biggest problem confronting airline workers today isn't the number of their unions, but that their industry—in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and in the face of soaring fuel prices—is going through an unprecedented crisis...

...They called themselves the State Workers Organizing Committee, or SWOC, consciously adopting the initials—and the progressive principles—of the CIO's Steel Workers Organizing Committee...

...As an example, he points to the organizing agreement won this spring at Quebecor, the world's second largest printing company, which employs twenty-four thousand U.S...

...One of the worst offenders in that turf war was an old AF of L affiliate called the Building Service Employees International Union...

...It was in SWOC that Cohen's workplacecentered philosophy was forged...

...Advocates of splitting say organizing is just a matter of will," remarked Booth...

...Under Acuff, the council became an activist machine...

...work force had been declining for two decades and Wurf was appalled that so many unions were "fighting each other for the right to represent workers rather than working together to organize the unorganized...

...To Cohen, "the union is in the workplace...

...Booth, echoing Cohen, suggested that AFSCME has been able to grow for the same reason SEIU has: it does the bulk of its organizing in the public sector...

...Stern and his allies, say critics, are taking a terrible gamble at the worst possible time...

...Stern later claimed that the federation's inclination to tell unions they "should" reform—not that they "shall" reform— was the ultimate sticking point...

...Jeff Farmer, the organizing director of the Teamsters, acknowledged that "we're different from SEIU in so many respects...

...In the run-up to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the council worked with community groups to win strong pay for construction workers and fair treatment for residents displaced by the construction...

...Raynor was right...

...The federation had to merge its small and failing affiliates so that just twenty or thirty large and powerful unions remained...

...THE PERCEIVED unwillingness of the AFLCIO to confront that problem is perhaps the key reason the coalition unions believed they had to break with the federation...

...And how did Stern, poster boy for the new model 28 DISSENT / Fall 2005 LABOR DIVIDED labor movement, wind up in the same camp as Teamsters president James P. Hoffa, the very embodiment of labor's old guard...

...with a trace of disbelief in his voice, he ran for the presidency of the Atlanta central labor council...

...If they understood it, and don't want to do it, that's fine...

...SEIU's associate member program, known as the Purple Ocean, has gotten such a lackluster response that union insiders have begun calling it the "Purple Puddle" instead...

...SEIU and its allies, he argues, are losing their focus on the workplace...

...There is no small irony in the fact that today perhaps the strongest proponent of Jerry Wurf's vision for labor is Andy Stern, the brash, some say arrogant, president of SEIU, which is now the largest and fastest-growing union in North America...

...Like a strange flock of migratory birds, the glaziers, the engravers, the boilermakers, and all the subspecies of American labor returned to the Florida shores they'd grown to know so well in the Age of Meant' But that fall, as the delegates headed south, their travels were disturbed by a blistering op-ed in the Washington Post entitled, "Labor's Battle with Itself...

...To bring the various security companies to heel, SEIU researchers have been poring over their finances looking for weaknesses...

...I know it's possible to swim against the tide and to make some progress, but by and large the tide is stronger than the swimmers...

...As the guard chuckled, a manager popped out from behind a door and looked suspiciously at Stern, who was soon whisked away for his interview...

...People being militant and mobilizing and fighting back" on the job isn't enough to contend with the economic forces buffeting workers' lives, according to Stern...

...It's that kind of progress that the coalition unions dismiss so cavalierly, say AFL-CIO loyalists...

...Then they added one last stinging caveat: AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, Stern's predecessor at SEIU, would have to go...

...At the time, they were at the tail end of a disastrous threeDISSENT / Fall 2005 31 LABOR DIVIDED year strike against Overnite, a trucking firm the union tried unsuccessfully to organize...

...By 2004, that number had jumped to 26 percent...

...Now, the coalition unions must prove that the noise is more than a death rattle...

...Already, there are signs the split could exacerbate the problems it was intended to solve...

...Labor's situation had grown so grave, the coalition insisted, that the AFL-CIO must adopt its reforms immediately or SEIU and other unions would leave the federation...

...Too many unions, he said, "want to glorify trying and struggling and mobilizing and fighting the good fight...

...Too often, the arguments against the split seemed to consist of little more than the ritual repetition of the word "solidarity," as if the incantation of the term itself could ward off labor's ills...

...I think people want to demonize it on one hand and trivialize it on the other," he said...

...The PC2K committee began by conducting independent polls of SEIU members...

...But Cohen notes that the vast majority of SEIU's organizing victories have come in the public sector, where there is much less opposition to unions...

...At the meeting, Stern complained, one labor leader after another said, "We can't grow until we change the laws, we can't grow until politicians behave differently, we can't change until corporations behave differently...

...While being interviewed in his Washington office, Acuff tended to spread his arms wide as he spoke, as if preaching from a pulpit to a large congregation, not addressing me alone over his conference table...

...However, the Teamsters and the coalition see that as a woefully inefficient solution...

...The campaign at Allied—part of a nationwide effort to organize security officers at various firms—is typical of SEIU's increasingly sophisticated organizing drives...

...Starting at the Miami Beach convention, Wurf argued, the AFLCIO had to get serious about wide-ranging reform...

...In Atlanta, as in so many cities, the labor council post had often been held by officials more interested in leisure than leadership...

...At least that's what BSEIU was called before its leaders realized they could supplement their sagging janitorial membership by poaching AFSCME's public employees...

...Already, the coalition is applying these methods in the joint Teamsters-UNITE HERE drive to organize Cintas, the uniform company...

...Thanks to the coalition, labor is at least making some noise again...

...In less than two years, Working America has signed up roughly one million members nationwide...

...At the same time, the union's communications staff has circulated unflattering information to the press about the non-union firms...

...Almost everywhere, SEIU was locked in an ugly war with nursing home owners that kept it from winning decent contracts for current members and slowed its organizing of new ones...