Off of yesterday's post on John Sweeney's letter re: affiliation with Central Labor Bodies by non-AFL-CIO unions, a couple of people in the know mused whether SEIU's pull-out from the Federation would be treated like the Carpenters or not.
One perspective: "You missed one critical phrase in the letter," wrote one labor insider. He pointed to the following sentence: "The Constitution and rules further provide that these subordinate bodies are composed exclusively of nationally affiliated unions, directly affiliated local unions, and a limited, and specified, group of other affiliated and subordinate bodies..."
From that he posed the following point: "Judging from an earlier letter about the Carpenters, the AFL-CIO plans to go after SEIU locals and offer them the ability to disaffiliates [from] the SEIU and become directly affiliated locals of the AFL-CIO, pending sufficient numbers to charter a new international. Some unions opposed that and want to ability to affiliates these locals with their own internationals."
Translation: the vultures are beginning to circle. Could get messy as everyone tries to pick off the weak of the herd.
But, then, there's this observation from another long-time insiders: "Maybe Sweeney hopes an SEIU pullout would be handled differently than the Carpenters' pullout. The Carpenters remained affiliated with many (or most?) of the building trades councils around the country. Unlike the state and locals feds, though, the building trades councils have considerable power over jurisdictional disputes so presumably the other building trades were not interested in kicking out the Carpenters and opening themselves up to possible raids."
I dunno. Seems like there's plenty of workers to organize out there--are raids really the best use of resources, short of a powerful argument that workers are being poorly represented by their existing union?
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