With Rovegate and the Roberts nomination dominating the headlines, stories about turmoil within organized labor have been relegated to the latter pages of most newspapers. That will all change on Monday, when two of the largest AFL-CIO unions, SEIU and the Teamsters, announce that they are severing ties with the federation. From the New York Times:

Leaders of four of the country’s largest labor unions announced on Sunday that they would boycott this week’s A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention, and officials from two of those unions, the service employees and the Teamsters, said the action was a prelude to their full withdrawal from the federation on Monday.
Leaders of the service employees union, the food and commercial workers union, the Teamsters and Unite Here, which represents apparel, hotel and restaurant employees, said they were shunning the convention because, in their view, the federation under the leadership of its president, John J. Sweeney, has been ineffective in halting the decades-long slide of organized labor.
Deepening the rift, the leaders of the four dissident unions, as well as the leaders of the laborers and the United Farm Workers, said that as a protest they were giving up their seats on the federation’s executive council and would not seek re-election at the convention this week.
Two of the unions said they would take a further step.
Officials from the Service Employees International Union and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters who insisted on anonymity because a formal announcement had not been made said their unions would announce on Monday, the day the convention begins, that they were quitting the federation. The service employees, with 1.8 million members, and the Teamsters, with 1.4 million, are two of the biggest unions in the A.F.L.-C.I.O. They contribute $20 million each year, or about one-sixth of its budget.
In addition, Joe Hansen, the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, indicated that his union would probably also leave, despite Mr. Sweeney’s efforts to persuade them to stay.

The conventional wisdom is that the split is bad news for democrats, and there is evidence to support that claim. Organized labor is a major source of funding and manpower to democratic campaigns, particularly on a local level, and a split could complicate those efforts. In the long run, however, this is exactly what the AFL-CIO needs. To understand what I mean, one needs only to look at the history of organized labor in the United States. From Trapper John’s primer on the AFL-CIO:

The American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations is the federation of almost all labor unions in the United States. It got its start in the late 1800s when Samuel Gompers, chief of the cigar-makers union, convinced his fellow craft unionists not to merge into “one big union” (as the Industrial Workers of the World, or “Wobblies,” urged), but to create a federation where broad labor policy could be formulated and where internal differences could be mediated. This federation, the AFL, was comprised primarily of skilled trades unions, and saw itself as the “aristocracy of labor.”

As the 20th Century progressed, more and more un- or underskilled workers sought to organize, only to find the AFL resistant to assisting their desire for respresentation. Part of the problem was a fundamentally different understanding of the lines along which workers should be organized –the tradesmen of the AFL had always associated by craft, while it made more sense to organize the growing industrial union movement by workplace. Eventually, the strain between the craft unions and industrial unions grew too great, and in 1935, John L. Lewis, president of the Mineworkers, founded the Congress of Industrial Organizations along with the Steelworkers and Autoworkers (UAW). Over the next 20 years, the CIO unions grew strong, but by 1955 both the AFL unions and CIO unions felt the strain of the rift in labor. Too often unions were wasting time and resources fighting each other rather than focusing on common goals. In 1955, Walter Reuther, head of both the UAW and CIO, and George Meany, a plumber and president of the AFL, brokered a merger of the competing federations into a single “House of Labor.”

The 1930’s split allowed for the organization of industry, which has been the heart and soul of labor ever since. John Lewis and the other leaders of the CIO opened labor’s doors to millions of new workers. Today, unions like SEIU and UFCW (the union trying to organize Wal Mart) follow the lead of pioneers like Lewis; challenging the labor establishment to reinvent itself once again. Remember, SEIU is the fastest growing union in a federation where any growth is phenomenal; its methods and ideas ought to be emulated and expanded. The current leadership of the AFL-CIO, however, feels threatened by SEIU and its President, Andy Stern. These leaders are allowing their personal agendas and animosities to stand in the way of a stronger labor movement. In response, SEIU and its fellow unions in the CWC have taken the understandable step of disassociating with the federation. The result will be a major rivalry between the AFL-CIO and the CWC as the two organizations vie for dominance in the world of labor. This competition will benefit organized labor as a whole (and, in turn, the Democratic Party) as each organization expands its efforts to increase union membership.

This much is clear, labor must reverse its decades long decline in order to be a major force within American society in the future. Progressives understand the crucial role that organized labor plays in a capitalist society. In the age of Enron and Worldcom, the union is even more important. Could this split hurt the democratic party in the short run? Yes. The consequences of failing to act, however, will be far worse.