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Labor's problems touch you and me
CHICAGO (Creators Syndicate) -- When asked his reaction to two giant unions, the Service Employees and the Teamsters, quitting the AFL-CIO on the opening day of the 50th anniversary convention of American labor's merger, Tim Leahy, the secretary-treasurer of the Chicago Federation of Labor, put it in personal terms: "I feel like a child of divorce." Wendell Young, recently retired after 44 years as president of his Philadelphia food workers local, sees trouble ahead for the labor movement: "This split is going to hurt us." Bill Burga, president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, agrees: "We've got problems in the immediate future." With just 8 percent of private-sector workers now belonging to organized labor, the exit of two of the biggest unions -- with a handful of others expected to follow -- could qualify as the organizational equivalent of a civil war in the leper colony. You can be sure that American labor's fratricidal week led to the popping of champagne corks at the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and George W. Bush's White House. That organized labor makes real differences for its members is irrefutable. The median weekly income for a non-union worker, last year, was $612. The union worker's weekly earnings were $781, or 28 percent more. The Latino worker who belongs to a union earns 59 percent more than his non-union Latino brother. Non-union workers were 45 percent less likely to have a job that provided health care than a union worker. Union workers were more than four times more likely to have a guaranteed pension than their non-union neighbors. The industrial unions -- steel and auto -- won their members pay and benefits that indirectly raised the income of American workers. Bosses determined to keep unions out often sought to show their workers the advantages of non-union employment by bigger paychecks and longer vacations. But organized labor, at its best, has had an agenda beyond wages and paychecks. To the displeasure of conservatives and many capitalists, labor used its political clout to successfully back public policies that addressed the shortcomings and cruel indifference of a free market: child labor laws, unemployment insurance, retirement security, workmen's compensation, the 40-hour work week. Labor also consistently backed a richer and fuller non-work life through adequate funding of public schools, public parks and recreation, public transportation, public libraries and affordable health care. These are truly the people who brought you the weekend. Anyone who was fortunate enough, as I was, to work on any of the epic civil rights laws of the 1960s that made racial segregation illegal and guaranteed the right to vote and buy a home to all Americans knows that union political muscle and savvy were indispensable to the legislative success of the movement. In recent years, organized labor strongly pushed for both the Family and Medical Leave Act, which grants employees up to three months of unpaid leave after the birth or adoption of a child or to care for a seriously ill spouse or family member, and the Americans With Disabilities Act, which has enabled 40 million Americans with disabilities to become full participants in public life. Why does labor's split-up thrill Republicans? Just consider the state of Oregon, which John Kerry carried over George Bush by only 77,332 votes. The Oregon AFL-CIO -- working with all unions, including the Service Employees, Teamsters and the food workers -- put together a model get-out-the-vote operation. The voter turnout among union households in Oregon in 2004 was an astounding 91 percent. Labor was the difference for the Democrats. But under federal election law, no union that is unaffiliated with the AFL-CIO can participate in any political program to educate or mobilize members of AFL-CIO unions. The able president of the Oregon AFL-CIO, Tim Nesbitt, is himself a member of the now-disaffiliated Service Employees union. Fully 40 percent of Oregon unionists belong to one of the international unions that has already disaffiliated from the AFL-CIO or is expected to shortly. You wonder why Karl Rove is smiling? Maybe the split within labor will lead to more intensive and or successful organizing of workers and a growing labor movement. I hope so, because labor has been so critically and historically important in so many of the epic struggles that have made the life of the American family and nation more humane and more just.
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