Labor has to rejuvenate and take the fight to the bad guys

Date published: 7/28/2005

"E NJOY WEEKENDS? Give thanks to the Bible," declared a headline in The Free Lance-Star last week.

This explanation was news to me. Heathen that I am, I always thought we had the labor movement to thank for the weekend--as well as for other things such as the minimum wage, workplace safety protections, and prohibition of child labor.

I'm not alone on this. The consensus among labor historians is that bosses and politicians made concessions to workers after having something like the fear of God put in them--but that happened because men and women marched in streets and sat down on factory floors, not because the powerful cracked open the Good Book and realized the error of their ways.

Still, The Free Lance-Star's faith-based dissing of the labor movement pretty much captures the spirit of our times (in more ways than one). Unions are routinely dismissed as anachronisms, which is no surprise given that organized labor can lay claim to only 8 percent of all private-sector workers these days.

It's this dismal state of affairs that led the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union to bolt the AFL-CIO earlier this week.

The dissident unions are part of the Change to Win Coalition, which argues that the AFL-CIO has spent too much time and money on politics on behalf of the Democratic Party and not enough on building up union membership.

That's a losing strategy, the coalition says.

John Wilhelm, an official in UNITE HERE, one of the unions in the coalition, said in a recent forum published in The Nation magazine: "It is not our preference to leave the AFL-CIO at all. But the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."

Some union leaders, however, argue that the coalition is creating a rift in the labor movement that will benefit the enemies of working men and women.

"I think the only one who wins from this is George Bush and his minions who are trying to weaken labor unions," Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, told the London Independent.

Date published: 7/28/2005