SAN FRANCISCO, CA – In Chicago’s cavernous Navy Pier convention
center, delegates were lined up at the four microphones scattered across
the floor. San Francisco’s Nancy Wohlforth stood at mic number 2.
She’d been waiting for this moment for two years.

The mic went live, and she
stepped forward. Wohlforth is a slight woman, but her voice cut through
the hubbub of the little conversations across the floor, stopping them
dead. With the intensity and anger of a twenty-first century Mother Jones,
she began to give her fellow delegates a dose of straight, unvarnished
truth.

“All we hear are the
lies and deceit of the Bush administration,” she called out, “that
put us in Iraq on a false pretext, and keep us in Iraq for absolutely
no good reason except to enrich his cronies in Halliburton,” Her
voice rising, she pointed to a group of Iraqi workers who’d braved
the long, dangerous road from Baghdad to get to the AFL-CIO convention.

“I'll tell you what
they want,” she thundered. “They want an end to the U.S. occupation.”
Applause broke into her speech. “They want it now, and not yesterday.”
The applause got stronger. “Because as long as we are there, they
can never really achieve self-determination and build a truly democratic
state.”

She brought the house down.

Wohlforth, whose face breaks
into sharp angles around flashing eyes, is a piece of San Francisco in
Washington, DC. As secretary-treasurer of the Office and Professional
Employees union, she’s now one of the highest-ranking labor leaders
in the country. She heads Pride at Work, the national organization of
gay and lesbian union members. For two years, she and her anti-war cohorts
in US Labor Against the War fought the long battle that finally put the
Iraq war on center stage at the AFL-CIO’s Chicago gathering.

But just as the labor movement
was taking this historic step in opposing the war, it was also sacrificing
its own unity in an orgy of internal strife. The day before Wohlforth’s
speech, three unions left the federation, not over international politics,
but over disagreements on how to respond to the decline in labor’s
political and economic power. The war may seem far away from these more
concrete concerns, but many labor activists, looking at the blood on the
floor after the convention ended, connected the dots. What labor needs,
they concluded, is less internal division, and more courage and political
vision.

In an interview after the convention
with activist Alan Benjamin, Wohlforth called it “a very bad day
for the labor movement.” From her observations, most union members
don’t understand why it had to happen. “Even I am having a
hard time understanding what it's all about,” she said, “and
I've been in the labor movement for a very long time.”

For labor activist Bill Fletcher,
while the debate caused profound rifts, it never came to grips with labor’s
basic problem: “We have to be prepared to talk about something we’ve
been afraid to say out loud – that capitalism is harmful to the
health of workers,” he said in an interview. “Something is
fundamentally wrong with the priorities of this society, and we have to
be courageous enough to say so.”

At the debate’s end, the AFL-CIO passed a resolution, calling for
the “rapid withdrawal” of US troops from Iraq. For progressive
trade unionists, it was a bright moment, but one that came in dark times.
San Francisco’s Tim Paulson connected the dots for his fellow delegates
between the war and the problems facing workers closer to home. According
to the city’s central labor council secretary, “all this money
that is being spent on bombs and occupation could have been used for health
care, jobs, and infrastructure. It could have been used for the things
that working men and women value. That's what we believe in.”

Nationally, unions face a serious
crisis of declining numbers. Just after World War 2, unions represented
35% of US workers. By 1975, after the Vietnam War, it had dropped to 26%.
Today only 12% of all workers, and 8% in the private sector, are union
members. They’re mostly concentrated in the urban areas on each
coast, and the former industrial belt of the Midwest, leaving workers
in large parts of the country on their own in dealing with their employers.

Declining numbers translate
into a decline in political power and economic leverage. California (with
one-sixth of the AFL-CIO’s members) and New York have higher union
density than any others. But even here, labor is facing an all-out war
with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Measures on the governor’s
special election ballot threaten to cut to shreds the ability of California’s
powerful public worker unions to engage in any meaningful political action.

So this might not be such a
good time for labor to split ranks, but that’s just what has happened.
On the first day of the AFL-CIO convention, two unions quit the labor
federation – its largest union, the Service Employees International
Union, with 1.8 million members, and the 1.1 million-member International
Brotherhood of Teamsters. Following the convention’s end, one more
union pulled out – the United Food and Commercial Workers.

All three are large and important
unions in northern California. SEIU locals include 790, which represents
public workers from San Francisco to Stockton, 535, a statewide union
for social service workers, and United Healthcare Workers, one of the
largest union locals in the country. Teamster locals throughout the Bay
Area represent workers in trucking and transportation, warehouses, food
processing plants, and numerous other private companies. The United Food
and Commercial Workers is the union in grocery stores and meatpacking
companies.

The three unions that withdrew
from the AFL-CIO have organized a new labor coalition, called Change to
Win, which also includes other unions which have notpulled out, at least
not yet,. UNITE HERE is one. The union’s Local 2 has been involved
in an epic struggle with 14 of San Francisco’s largest, most luxurious
hotels. Other UNITE HERE locals represent workers in the garment and laundry
industry. Change to Win also includes the United Farm Workers, the Laborers
International Union, and the Carpenters (who pulled out of the AFL-CIO
several years ago.)

This is a very contradictory moment in the life of US unions. Public attention
has focused largely on this split among unions, yet the impact of the
debate on the war will reverberate for years. The generation of anti-war,
solidarity activists who were young marchers during Vietnam, and rank-and-file
militants during the Central American interventions, today are leading
unions. Some of them may have forgotten, or chosen to forget, those roots.
But many have not. Like Wohlforth, they’re tired of seeing their
movement remain quiet when the US military is used to prop up an economic
system they’re fighting at home. The labor movement may be awash
in internal dissention over its structure, but it is growing surprisingly
single-minded over the Iraq war.

Brooks Sunkett, vice-president
of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), gave one in a train of
passionate speeches on the convention floor, saying that the government
had lied to him when it sent him to war in Vietnam three decades ago.
“This war seems very similar to that war,” he declared. “Lies
were told to me then, and lies are being told to me now.” Henry
Nicholas, a hospital union leader in the American Federation of State,
County and Municipal Employees, told delegates that his son, who has served
four tours of duty in Iraq, is now threatened with yet another.

With no one voicing dissent,
speaker after speaker rose to condemn the war and occupation, and to demand
the return of the troops. The debate was the high water mark in an upsurge
that began sweeping through US unions before the war started two years
ago. From the point when it became clear that the Bush administration
intended to invade Iraq, union activists began organizing a national network
to oppose it, US Labor Against the War. What started as a collection of
small groups, in a handful of unions, has today to become a coalition
of unions representing over a million members.

Watching from the visitors’
gallery were the Iraqi union leaders to whom Wohlforth had pointed. One
of them had traveled to the US two months ago, with five other union activists,
to plead the case of Iraqi workers. For 16 days they traveled to more
than 50 cities, urging their US union counterparts to take action to end
the occupation.

In May two of the Iraqis, Hassan
Juma’a and Faleh Abood, leaders of the General Union of Oil Employees,
arrived in the Bay Area. They won standing ovations at San Francisco longhore
union halls, from SEIU’s big public worker local in San Jose, from
refinery workers in Martinez, and from almost every Bay Area labor council.
These experiences were repeated from Los Angeles to Seattle.

The USLAW network organized
the tour of the Iraqi unionists, to provide them a chance to speak directly
to US workers. “We believed strongly that if unions in our country
could hear their Iraqi brothers and sisters asking for the withdrawal
of US troops, they would respond in a spirit of solidarity and human sympathy,”
said Gene Bruskin, one of USLAW’s national coordinators. “We
were right.”

The debate at the convention
was the answer to the call. Starting in San Francisco, 18 resolutions
calling for troop withdrawal poured into the AFL-CIO from unions, labor
councils, and state labor federations across the country. As the convention
began, however, AFL-CIO national staff tried to substitute another resolution
that called for ending the occupation “as soon as possible.”
This was the language used by the Bush administration.

Delegates at the convention
in the USLAW network then called for substituting the phrase “rapid
withdrawal” of the troops. Knowing a fight was in store, and suddenly
unsure of their ability to win it, AFL-CIO staff agreed. When the proposal
for rapid withdrawal was put on the floor, Paulson made clear that “when
you say ‘rapidly,’ that would be the same as ‘immediately’
-- and that is why we are going to support this resolution.” The
new language was adopted with the votes of an overwhelming majority.

The resolution marks a watershed
moment in modern US labor history. It is the product of grassroots action
at the bottom of the US labor movement, not a directive from top leaders.
The call for bringing the troops home echoes the sentiments of thousands
of ordinary workers and union members, whose children and family have
been called on to fight the war. A growing number, now a majority in US
unions, believe the best way to protect them is to bring them home.

The war in Iraq never had much
credibility as an effort to find weapons of mass destruction, since none
were ever found. The administration’s claim that it is fighting
to bring democracy to Iraqi people inspires a similar disbelief. After
five years of administration attacks, none but the most diehard of Bush’s
supporters have much faith left in his pro-democracy pronouncements.

Over the last year, however,
the Iraqis themselves have provided a new way of looking at the occupation’s
anti-democratic impact. American military authorities, they told US union
members, have banned labor organization in oil fields, factories and other
Iraqi public enterprises. Meanwhile, Bush political operatives have begun
to engineer the sell off of those enterprises to foreign corporations,
with a potential loss of thousands of jobs – and the income needed
to rebuild the country.

“This is not liberation.
It is occupation,” said Ghasib Hassan, a leader of the Iraqi Federation
of Trade Unions, one of the unions that sent its members to speak in the
US. “At the beginning of the 21st century, we thought we’d
seen the end of colonies, but now we’re entering a new era of colonization.”

Rapid withdrawal means more
than just bringing US soldiers home. Calling for it puts American workers
on the side of Iraqis, as they resist the transformation of their country
for the benefit of a wealthy global elite.

The debate over Iraq highlights an important problem, however. Union members
are becoming more sophisticated, and better at understanding the way global
issues, from war to trade, affect the lives of people in the streets of
US cities. But the percentage of union members is declining, and the organization
they need to put that understanding into practice is getting smaller.
Deeper political awareness alone will not change the world.

In the months leading to the
convention, therefore, Iraq was not the main subject of debate in unions.
In fact, it was often submerged in a much different discussion, where
participants mostly talked about a crisis of survival. The proposals for
changing the direction of US unions, which finally culminated in the split,
had very little to do with foreign policy, and much more with the structural
problems that keep unions from acting effectively.

The best local example of the
issues at stake is the yearlong saga of San Francisco’s hotel workers.
Inspired by the idea of unions in many cities around the country sitting
down at the same time with giant hotel operators, hotel workers nationally
are demanding a common expiration date for all their labor agreements
– in 2006. Most have won it – San Francisco is the main holdout.

The city’s Multi Employer
Group refuses to agree. They represent hotel operators, including multibillion-dollar
corporations like Hilton, Intercontinental, Starwood and Hyatt, who manage
hotel properties around the country and the world. They understand that
if the union orms a common front of workers in city after city, they’ll
be able to win a new standard of living that individual local unions can’t
achieve on their own.

Hotel workers are also trying
to avoid the bitter experience of grocery workers in Los Angeles two years
go. There 40,000 workers struck the grocery chains of Safeway, Albertsons
and Ralph’s throughout southern California for five months. In the
end, however, they were forced to accept substantially lower wages and
conditions because the chains kept stores open, making profits, in the
rest of the country. The lesson for unions here was that regional bargaining
with huge multinational companies no longer works. What was lacking was
solidarity – the ability to act together.

United Airlines taught unions
a similar lesson. The carrier dumped its pension plan on the Federal government
earlier this year, and retirees saw their benefits slashed. The airline
industry is divided up among eleven different unions (four at United alone).
With such division, it’s hard for workers to win. If they all belonged
to a single union, and almost all airline employees were organized, it
would be much easier. Workers could refuse to accept the dismantling of
the retirement system they spent decades building. If one company went
bankrupt (as United threatened to do), its workers could easily be absorbed
by other airlines – if there was only one union and one contract.

In wages, benefit cuts, and
lost pensions, California workers have paid a high price for sticking
with an outmoded way of organizing themselves. On the other hand, the
San Francisco’s dockworkers' union, the International Longshore
and Warehouse Union, beat a lockout of its members three years ago. They
won because in the 1930s and 40s, the union was very smart about the same
issues. Longshore workers used to be considered bums and derelicts. After
the San Francisco General Strike of 1934, they won the ability to negotiate
a single contract with all the shipping companies on the west coast, covering
all the ports. As a result, longshore wages are now among the highest
of US industrial workers. Solidarity worked.

Last year, therefore, many
unions began making proposals for changing the way they operate. The discussion
started in San Francisco, at SEIU’s August convention, when President
Andy Stern called for deep structural change. Then, after labor lost the
2004 presidential election, the union issued a 10-point proposal called
Unite To Win. It immediately stirred intense controversy, and other unions
responded.

The most controversial item
of the 10 points would give the AFL-CIO the authority to require small
unions to merge into ones large enough to have strength to bargain and
organize. The federation would also make sure that workers in the same
industry would no longer be split among many unions. “Take the airline
industry,” said Stern in an interveiw, “where unions are divided
by craft, by companies, by union and non-union. We have to look in the
mirror and be honest. When we divide the strength of workers, and we don’t
have a united strategy, workers pay the price.”

Many unions disagreed violently
that they should be forced to merge. Eventually, however, the debate collapsed
into an argument over money. Unions who formed the Change to Win Coalition
want the AFL-CIO to rebate half of the money they contribute in dues,
to fund strategic campaigns to organize new members. AFL-CIO President
John Sweeney (himself a former president of SEIU, and Stern’s mentor)
said the federation should increase spending on organizing, but put even
more into election campaigns. In reality, both sides advocated increasing
the resources for both organizing and political action – the difference
was over the proportion going to each.

Was the issue worth splitting the labor federation?

Eliseo Medina, vice-president
of SEIU for the union’s western region, says yes. “No one
is going to save us,” he said in an interview, “no politician
or public official, no matter how well-intentioned. We can only save ourselves.
To do that, we need to reach out and bring a lot more people into our
movement. Politics is part of the solution, but we must also mobilize
the millions of workers who would join a union if given the opportunity.

“We felt we need to rebate
50% of per capita back to unions willing to organize in those core industries,
or about $50 million. The AFL-CIO was only willing to go as high as $15
million, with the rest of the resources allocated to politics. That was
a clear-cut difference – what they proposed was just not sufficient
to do the job.”

Others were not so sure. Some
simply opposed dividing labor’s strength while it is under attack.
But others felt the debate hadn’t gone far enough. Bill Fletcher
is one of the latter. After the reform administration of John Sweeney
was elected in 1995, he became the labor federation’s director of
education, and later Sweeney’s assistant. Forced out over his radical
politics, he’s become an outspoken critic of the slow pace of change
in US unions. “Our unions suffer from a profound conservatism, a
failure to recognize the kinds of changes that are going on, and therefore
our need for a very visionary movement,” he said in an interview.
“Most of the present leaders really should retire. They’ve
made certain wrong assumptions about the politics and economics of this
country. Unions are not accepted by the governing elite. They’re
not accepted by capital.”

Fletcher and others argue that
while fighting at high volume about the money that should go to hiring
organizers or running election campaigns, there’s too little debate
over direction – where labor is headed. The debate over Iraq at
the AFL-CIO convention adds substance and politics to a discussion dominated
by dollars and structure.

Labor needs that deeper discussion
desperately. Lost, for instance, have been the high ideals of organizing
and defending immigrant workers, which gave hope to millions of the undocumented
after the AFL-CIO’s convention in Los Angeles in 1999. There a similar
upsurge from labor’s base forced another change in basic policy
onto the convention’s floor. Unions rejected their former position
of support for employer sanctions, the provision of the 1986 Immigration
Reform and Control Act that makes it a federal crime for an undocumented
immigrant to hold a job.

John Wilhelm, now UNITE HERE
copresident, declared that supporting sanctions had been a big mistake.
Others agreed. Yet today two bills are moving through Congress that would
actually strengthen employer sanctions. Both would establish huge new
guest worker programs, like the bracero program of the 1940s and 50s,
bringing immigrants to the US under temporary visas to supply the labor
needs of big corporations. Immigrant rights advocates have traditionally
opposed these programs as exploitative – virtual involuntary servitude.

One of those bills, the Kennedy/McCain
Bill, is being supported by some of labor’s national political operatives,
with no discussion in union locals and among rank-and-file members, over
its impact on labor and immigrants. Meanwhile, the most progressive immigration
bill in Congress has no guest worker and beefed-up enforcement provisions.
Although it’s supported by the Congressional Black Caucus, it has
received almost no attention from unions.

Two years ago, UNITE HERE initiated
the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. In contract negotiations, Local 2
has defended immigrant rights while demanding that hotels taking down
the defacto color line against African American workers. This is the kind
of change in unions many members would like to see – a real agenda
based on principles, an honest attempt to put them into practice, and
street heat to change the terms of a poisonous political environment in
Washington.

Instead, even in progressive
unions, what you get is Washington beltway deal making. As Fletcher says,
debate has to get much sharper.

And in the meantime, unions in San Francisco, and its labor council, have
to survive. No one knows quite what to expect, as labor gets ready for
a new season of political and economic strife. San Francisco has a more
difficult problem than most – Josie Mooney, the executive director
of the city’s big public workers union, SEIU Local 790, is the council’s
president. So far, Mooney hasn’t tendered a letter of resignation,
and according to Medina, “we need to continue working together at
the local and state level, and hope the AFL-CIO takes the same position.”
he says.

Around the country, unions
have close relationships they hardly want to cast aside. Further, most
councils are very dependent on the dues income from unions who now belong
to CTW. If they are forced to function without it, they’ll have
to lay off staff and cut back on activity.

Councils do most of the heavy
lifting during elections, like the one coming in California in November.
Union members troop down to council phone banks, walk precincts at night
or on weekends in mobilizations organized by councils, and even decide
who are labor-friendly candidates in council meetings. In the building
trades, the project labor agreements that cover giant construction projects
like airports, schools and bridges are commonly signed with a council,
and require participating unions to belong.

If this structure blows apart,
unions have a lot to lose. As many see it, in a fight between elephants
the ordinary people who do labor’s work have to avoid getting squashed.
Sweeney has already issued one statement, however, which some AFL-CIO
staff scornfully call “the company line.” It says unions that
withdraw from the federation can’t continue to participate in local
councils as full, dues-paying delegates with a vote.

Tim Paulson is waiting for
the dust to settle. “I really see what will happen next as an extension
of the debate we’ve had so far,” he said hopefully in a recent
interview. “Our SEIU, Teamsters and UFCW locals were part of the
labor movement before the convention, and they’re still our brothers
and sisters now. I think we ought to offer our national leaders an anger
management program.”

Working together with unions
that have left the federation is not unprecedented. It happened when the
Teamsters and United Auto Workers withdrew in the 1960s. The Carpenters
Union, the largest union in construction, left a few years ago, and still
participates in most Bay Area labor councils. The AFL-CIO-affiliated American
Federation of Teachers cooperates with the independent National Education
Association – in San Francisco, their two affiliates merged several
years ago to form the United Educators of San Francisco.

“I think we’re
just going to go on doing what we’ve always done,” Paulson
predicts. “We have too much at stake in increasing solidarity among
workers to throw it all on the scrapheap now.”

Unions have a good reason to
keep it together. Arnie’s watching in the wings.