On September 13, the executive board of UNITE-HERE, which organises workers in the clothing and hospitality industries in the United States, voted to leave the AFL-CIO confederation.
Instead they will join the Teamsters, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), United Food and Commercial Workers Union and others that now make up the Change to Win Coalition (CTW), which disaffiliated during the AFL-CIO convention this July and held its founding convention on September 27 in St. Louis, Missouri.
On the surface, CTW's demands seem reasonable and progressive and include focusing on organizing as opposed to giving money to politicians in an attempt to influence voting as well a commitment to hold organizing drives in a bid to recruit the lowest paid workers, such as those employed at ASDA parent Wal-Mart.
However, there have been a few worrying signs since the split which include comments from SEIU President Andy Stern stating that there was a need to build a labour movement that would be "good partners with our employer" and that "workers in today's economy are not looking for unions to cause problems, they're looking for them to solve them."
Also, the stance of CTW'S leaders in focusing largely on jobs that cannot be shipped overseas, like healthcare workers, may undermine their chances of working with international trade union bodies, which are concerned with cross-border organizing.
Perhaps it is this lack of caused the CTW to have had no vote on or expressed any opinion of the war in Iraq when, in contrast, the AFL-CIO took the giant step of voting against the war during its convention.
It remains to be seen if the CTW's split from "Big Labor" will indeed move to the left and begin organizing large swathes of the lowest paid workers in the United States or whether the split will turn out to be nothing more than an exercise in futility with workers everywhere losing out. Labor Notes, September 2005 issue at (http://www.labornotes.org/magazine/index.html) Trailblazers: some of the first Wobbly organisers Massachusetts textile strike in 1912 where 10,000 immigrall wonder workers walked out over pay and conditions. Despite beatings, arrests and a declaration of martial law, they won raises from 5-11 per cent with the lowest paid given a larger wage rise at the strikers' reauest.
This is just one example of the many strikes that their membership participated in during the early years of the 20th century, which comes as little surprise given an already rising tide of industrial struggle.
In 1904, a year prior to the IWW's launch strikes had reached 4,000 per year. Over the course of the next 14