Bad news for those of us who've been rooting for new leadership at the AFL-CIO, as the UAW, one of the crucial remaining swing votes, yesterday endorsed John Sweeney for another term. This leaves little chance of a change in leadership this time around, as Thomas Edsall writes, and is prompting a shift in focus to the next choice the reformers have to make - should they stay or should they go:

While Sweeney, 71, now appears certain to win, the nation's largest union, the Service Employees International Union, is more likely to follow through on threats to bolt from the AFL-CIO. "The challenge here is to make sure we have a labor movement that can change people's lives," said SEIU President Andrew L. Stern, noting that all of his union's locals are voting on a proposal that would authorize the union to sever its ties to the labor federation...The dissident unions, calling themselves the "Change to Win" coalition, had been counting on the UAW to give them new momentum, and lift the collective membership of their unions to well over 5 million. There are about 13 million members in the 58 unions that make up the AFL-CIO, so it takes unions with a total of 6.5 million members or more to win a leadership fight. At the moment, the dissident unions have just under 5 million members. Stern said beating Sweeney had been a long-shot proposition from the beginning. "It's always been hard to imagine defeating an incumbent leader," Stern said. "John Sweeney has probably always had the votes." Unite Here President John Wilhelm, who was widely viewed as the most likely person to run against Sweeney, contends that winning majority support for restructuring will precede any leadership change. He said he has spent his "entire life in the House of Labor," but he did not rule out joining Stern and leaving the AFL-CIO.

This a sad development for Americann workers, and it's a shame that for now, an AFL-CIO guided by a reformist vision of what was the New Unity Partnership and by more inspired leadership has become a much more distant possibility. Hopefully John Sweeney will continue to feel and respond to the pressure to build a federation which leads its member unions to revived power by prioritizing aggressive organizing facilitating effective cooperation, and encouraging tactics which work. The AFL-CIO, unfortunately, has not been working for a long time, in part because too often its approach has looked more like the narrow approach of the old AFL than the agressive broad-based approach of the CIO. There's plenty to fear about a potential breakaway from the federation. The kind of union raiding which the reformers have identified as a challenge to labor's effectiveness could become uglier were some or all of these unions to move outside of the structure of the AFL-CIO. And the red-baiting and purging of early post-war period can be pinned in part on the division between the AFL and the CIO. But that said, the same competition between the federations also sparked a great deal of tremendous organizing which, if not for the CIO's existence as an independent organization, might very well never have taken place. Unions like SEIU and UNITE HERE have a model which is working, though certainly imperfectly, and it's a model which has has achieved some impressive successes despite the failure of the federation to effectively serve the functions they've rightfully called for it to execute. If pulling out means a renewed ability to marshall resources for maximum efficacy in organizing, to build stronger coalitions with other progressive organizations with shared worldview, to more effectively hold politicians accountable (good cop, bad cop, et al), and to press the AFL-CIO from the outside to reform, it could be more than worthwhile. The narrow lense through which this has all been read in the Times and Post and such, unfortunately, is "Labor = Democratic Turnout Machine" and ergo "Division in labor = peril for Democrats." This slant is both short-sighted and wrong-headed. What the Democratic party needs, and should be doing much more to foster, is a reversal of the decline in American union membership. Any change that leads to more effective organizing broadens the Democratic constituency. Internal debate about how to make that happen is certainly healthy; if a split is effective in making union membership a reality for the millions of Americans who want it, then that spells great things for the Democratic party. If it can't accomplish that, then it's already a terrible move. But there's no reason to assume that two federations would be fatally less effective at political turnout than one. The Democratic politicians who really have a reason to be afraid are the ones coasting on their partisan affiliation without keeping promises to American workers. If these newspapers are committed to assessing what a split would mean for the Democratic party, first they'll need to engage the conversation on what it means for the labor movement.