Split of Top Unions Raises Debates on Labor Day

"This could well consume the energy and efforts of 200 organizers," he said. "It is unconscionable, particularly given President Stern's promise not to engage in raiding. The fact that in 2005, with labor under corporate assault, under government assault, that a union would have to deal with an unconscionable action like this is hard to fathom."

The Teamsters charge that the AFL-CIO is conducting an egregious attack on its membership. Ronald E. Ault, president of the AFL-CIO's Metal Trades Department, is pressing to effectively shift members from the Teamsters and SEIU to other unions that have remained in the AFL-CIO.

"The vindictive behavior of the AFL-CIO leadership is outrageous," said Teamster spokeswoman Leigh Strope. "Workers are being told that they cannot work if they are Teamsters."

Stern contends that the level of intra-union conflict is relatively low key since the split, and he remains very optimistic. "This is a Labor Day of hope," he said. With the first convention of the Change to Win Coalition scheduled to start Sept. 27 in St. Louis, he said: "We are at a moment of hope and excitement."

Sweeney, who fought to prevent the split, was far less sanguine. The labor chief contends that employers have already become emboldened by the split, and more willing to challenge union organizing drives and to reject union demands at the bargaining table.

The fracturing of labor "has led to the popping of champagne corks at the White House, at Wal-Mart corporate headquarters and on Wall Street," Sweeney said in a speech honoring Labor Day.

"The single best good jobs program in this country is a union card," Sweeney said. "Over 90 percent of union workers in the private sector have medical insurance through their jobs. Three-quarters of union workers in the private sector have a defined benefit retirement plan through their jobs versus only 16 percent of non-union workers."

The decision of the SEIU, the Teamsters and the UFCW to leave the AFL-CIO has provoked a debate among union activists, corporate strategists, academics and others over whether the move will be damaging or will shake up an institution desperately in need of new policies and new initiative.

Richard B. Freeman, an economist at Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research, says that competition is very likely to benefit labor, which is in decline in almost all industrialized countries. If nothing else, he said, it will force leaders to consider new strategies to replace approaches that have failed to pull union membership out of a long nosedive.

A number of business and conservative leaders say, in contrast, that they will be the winners and labor the losers. "This will have a short-term effect on organized labor to advance its agenda on Capitol Hill, and help us," Randel Johnson, vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits, at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the Bureau of National Affairs. "We're obviously pretty happy that the people we fight are at each other's throats," Ryan Ellis, who works on labor issues at Americans for Tax Reform, told BNA.