Split of Top Unions Raises Debates on Labor Day

A year ago, labor leaders were relishing the prospect of a major bid to organize their toughest adversary, Wal-Mart.

More than any other corporation, Wal-Mart epitomized all the difficulties facing organized labor in a global marketplace. The company kept wages low and unions out, while applying relentless pressure on a huge network of suppliers to lower their own wage costs, and, in many cases, to ship jobs and production overseas. The fight itself could revive the stagnant movement, and a victory would convert the image of labor from loser to winner, leaders believed.

"Wal-Mart provides a chilling example of the damage that low-wage, non-union corporations can wreak, and their business model is going to set the standards for our children unless we do something now," Andrew L. Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), wrote in 2004. "Wal-Mart is the sewer pipe through which good jobs are being flushed."

But a major rift in the AFL-CIO that produced two warring camps in late July has almost certainly derailed that mission and threatened other important labor initiatives. And on Labor Day, union activists, corporate leaders and officials of both political parties are watching closely to determine whether the nation's largest labor federation will emerge from the split stronger and energized, or divided and weakened.

For the past 50 years, since the AFL-CIO was formed in 1955, the percentage of the workforce represented by unions has steadily declined from more than 35 percent to 12.5 percent last year, including only 7.9 percent of the private-sector workforce.

"We have seen that the unions are very fragmented now," said Wal-Mart spokeswoman Christi Gallagher. "We just don't feel like [labor's threatened campaign] . . . is anything we need to be concerned about."

Three of the largest unions in the country, the SEIU, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), have left the AFL-CIO to form a competing organization, the Change to Win Coalition. The battle pits John J. Sweeney, 71, the president of the AFL-CIO, against Stern, his one-time protege.

AFL-CIO officials say the planned multimillion dollar Wal-Mart campaign is almost certain to be scuttled because the major beneficiary would be one of the defecting unions, the UFCW. Top officials had tentatively agreed to collectively set aside $25 million to $50 million a year to create a special Wal-Mart organizing fund.

"It's a major question whether affiliates who stayed in the House of Labor will want to pursue a huge investment in a campaign for a union that is no longer in the House of Labor," said Stewart Acuff, director of organizing for the AFL-CIO.

The split has other consequences. Without the AFL-CIO to act as referee in fights between competing unions, there is a threat that the opposing camps will raid each other's memberships, forcing money and resources to be invested in fights over organized workers instead of organizing the vast majority who are not in unions.

The defection of the three major unions has already intensified a bitter organizing fight over California home health care workers that pits the SEIU against the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The AFSCME has accused the SEIU of conducting a wholesale raid on workers the two unions had agreed would be organized by the AFSCME, while the SEIU contends that the AFSCME local was not living up to its obligations to win better wages and fringe benefits.

Acuff was outspoken in his criticism of the activities of Stern's SEIU in California.