Last Union Breakup Led To More Organizing

WILL THE BREAKUP make a difference to the union movement? That the question as the Change To Win faction led by SEUI president Andy Stern splits off from the AFL-CIO.

The last time the unions broke up was in the 1930s when the breakaway group, then as now, wanted to crank up organizing, according to Carl F. Horowitz.

In 1935, a group of unions, led by Mine Workers President John L. Lewis, formed a dissident faction within the American Federation of Labor. The unions in this new Congress of Industrial Organizations not returning to the fold were expelled a couple of years later. The CIO, free to pursue its preferred strategy of direct confrontation, changed the course of labor history. Using the sit-down strike, they organized large numbers of workers in the rubber, steel, auto and other mass-production industries.

By the time the CIO had returned to the fold in 1955 they had changed the face of the US labor union movement.

Now, of course, the labor leaders want to organize headline companies like �Wal-Mart, Comcast, Clear Channel and Toyota,� as AFL-CIO president John Sweeney told the AFL-CIO convention. They question is: Can the AFL-CIO or Change to Win deliver?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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