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John Gray

As the number of its members continues to dwindle, organised labour in the United States is caught up in the most destructive internal struggle since American workers agreed to fight for a common cause half a century ago.

The AFL-CIO, the powerful umbrella organisation of American labour unions, has lost more than 33 per cent of its members and more may be on their way out.

The turmoil recalls the open rebellion of miners' leader John L Lewis, who led dissidents from the American Federation of Labour in 1935 to form the Congress of Industrial Organisations.

It took 20 years for the AFL and CIO to rejoin forces.

This time, the rebellion has been led by Andrew Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union, which was until August the largest and the most successful union in the labour federation.

Mr Stern and his  Change to Win coalition are supported most notably by the 1.4 million members of the Teamsters union and its leader, James Hoffa, and a handful of smaller unions.

The New York Times said the split was fuelled by 'stagnant living standards for many workers, by the ascendancy of the service sector and by labour's lack of success in politics and in unionising workers'.

But none of those problems is new.

The simpler and perhaps more accurate explanation is that of sheer ambition on both sides of the split.

Of  Mr Stern's ambition there is no doubt. He took direct aim at the head of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney, an old friend and colleague and the man who attracted  him into the labour movement.

Mr Stern dismissed the AFL-CIO as 'pale, male, and stale',  warning also that 'our employers have changed, our industries have changed, and the world has certainly changed, but the labour movement's structure and culture have sadly stayed the same'.

In ideological terms, it is hard to see much difference between the two. What has driven the dispute is the  decline in union membership. When the AFL-CIO was formed in 1955, more than 33 per cent of  workers belonged to unions. The level has now fallen to 12.5 per cent. If public-sector jobs are discounted just 8 per cent of workers are organised.

Both sides are committed to more organising in the hope that they can swell the ranks of signed-up union members.

On that front Mr Stern has attracted  attention because of his success in expanding the  Service Employees International Union to 1.8 million members and his proposal to merge small unions into larger  units.

His immediate target is the huge empire of the Wal-Mart superstores and, if he were to win that fight, he might change the face of American labour.



Unions lose members and common cause as infighting divides the  labour movement