In October 1973, delegates from the 113 affiliated unions of the AFL-CIO made their way to Miami Beach for the federation’s quadrennial convention. Like a strange flock of migratory birds, the glaziers, the engravers, the boilermakers, and all the subspecies of American labor returned to the Florida shores they’d grown to know so well in the Age of Meany. But that fall, as the delegates headed south, their travels were disturbed by a blistering op-ed in the Washington Post entitled, “Labor’s Battle with Itself.” The piece had been written by Jerry Wurf, the much-aggrieved president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. During the 1950s and 1960s, AFSCME had helped shore up the house of labor by organizing hundreds of thousands of public employees, a group other unions had long neglected. But after seeing Wurf’s union grow from a small band of Wisconsin state workers into one of the AFL-CIO’s largest affiliates, the rest of labor honored the achievement by sh...

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FOOTNOTES:

• [1] In 2003, SEIU, the Laborers, the Carpenters, and the soon-to-be-merged UNITE HERE came together in a loosely organized reform group called the New Unity Partnership. By the spring of 2005, that partnership had evolved into the more formally structured Change to Win Coalition and had grown to include the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers. On the eve of the July AFL-CIO convention, the United Farm Workers also joined the coalition. This September, in St. Louis, the coalition is set to hold its first convention, and the group will, thank goodness, select a new name.
• [2] The interviews were conducted in April and May 2005, several months before the formal split in the AFL-CIO but well after the divisions in labor had hardened.