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How Much Does SEIU’s Return to the AFL-CIO Matter?

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Few know more about the internal politics of the American labor movement than Harold Meyerson and he is skeptical that it matters much that SEIU has returned to the AFL-CIO, a position I happen to mostly agree with.

But what was the Change to Win split all about? It was rooted in the belief that labor needed to organize or it would die, but that was also at the core of the Sweeney ascendency, for which the activists who went on to found Change to Win had assiduously worked in 1995. When that ascendancy failed to arrest labor’s descent, the younger generation of organizers (and Wilhelm, Raynor, and Stern were all children of the ’60s) split with their elders, even though the Sweeney regime at the AFL-CIO was itself filled with children of the ’60s—and some of the spirit of the ’60s—too.

Labor’s problem was, and labor’s problem remains, that labor law has been so degraded by business and conservative interests that employers can still fire workers at the slightest sign that they may be thinking about going union, and despite the illegality of such firings, there’s no effective penalty for this form of lawbreaking. That problem has only been highlighted in recent years by the organizing successes of such professional workers as university teaching assistants, museum docents, think-tank researchers, hospital physicians, and orchestra musicians—that is, by workers whom employers can’t fire because they’re not easily replaced. Organizing workers who can be replaced is still deterrable by their bosses firing them, which is why organizing victories among such workers are still very infrequent, and why the percentage of unionized American workers is still at record lows.

Change to Win couldn’t change that, and despite the occasional heroic victory by the UAW here, or the Teamsters or the Communications Workers there, neither, really, could anybody else. American unions are at record-high levels of popularity today, particularly among the young, but the law is set against them, and American business and its elected agents are determined to keep it that way.

So, welcome back, SEIU. Like all your peers, you’ve got a lot of work—political as well as organizing—to do.

‘Tis true.

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