Mass defection from the AFL-CIO

[Hamish McBagpipe]

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Teamsters, Service Employees bolt from AFL-CIO in U.S. labour split.


The AFL-CIO – the main U.S. labour group – suffered a setback on Monday when two large unions quit.

The Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union announced they were withdrawing their 3.2 million members from the AFL-CIO in a dispute on the future direction of the labour movement. The move will withdraw about a quarter of the AFL-CIO's 13 million members.

The Teamsters and the SEIU have joined with five other unions to form a new labour group, dubbed the Change to Win coalition, with a stated goal of reversing the decline in union membership.


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The splinter group believes that organizing, trying to increase the numbers, will save US labor. Fundamentally, the dispute is over money forwarded to the AFL-CIO that was used for political, social, and activist causes. As I described in the previous post, this idea to reach out to traditionally non-union groups to generate interest is more in line with how labour movements in other countries have been more successful. The splinter group, of a whopping 3 million members (US/Canada basically), thinks this idea either hasn't worked or the money should have been spent on organizing.

This could be the beginning of revitalized labor movement intent on bringing into the fold, as I mentioned previously, the large low wage service sector through mass organizing. Or it could mean the death knell of the US labor movement as the two factions cannibalize each other. That is, the two groups, instead of organizing new bargaining units or becoming a more socially active widespread movement, end up raiding each other to bits. Unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO normally have to have a very good reason to be allowed to invade anothers turf. We could see some very nasty interunion battles.