(The following article by Kim Chipman was circulated by Bloomberg News on May 10.)
DETROIT — The AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. labor federation, and Change to Win, a rival group formed by five dissident unions last year, agreed to work together on plans to mobilize their members in this year’s mid-term elections.
The AFL-CIO and Change to Win said they reached a tentative agreement to form a committee in which they will pool their resources, members and money to influence the outcome of federal and local elections this year.
The two groups combined represent more than 10 million American workers.
“The entire labor movement is united by the desire to make working people’s issues the country’s priorities this election year,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and Change to Win Chairwoman Anna Burger said in a joint statement Tuesday.
This will be the first time the federations have worked together on a national level since three unions — the Service Employees International Union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers — pulled out of the AFL-CIO in July and formed Change to Win.
Unite Here, which represents hotel, restaurant and textile employees, and the United Farm Workers quit the AFL-CIO months later.
The unions formed their splinter group because they said the AFL-CIO focused too much on politics and not enough on attracting new members. The rift came as private-sector union membership dipped below 8 percent, the lowest since the 1920s.
SEIU President Andrew Stern, who spearheaded the formation of Change to Win, said at the time that he wanted to keep working with the AFL-CIO on political efforts. The groups, though, wound up bickering over what form such cooperation should take.
Stern told reporters at a news briefing last week that he underestimated how difficult it would be for the two federations to come to an agreement about how to work together politically.
Both federations Tuesday said an agreement was finally reached because too much is at stake in the 2006 congressional elections for labor not to have a united front.
The new effort calls for the organizations to coordinate their resources when there’s consensus about the merits of a candidate, Change to Win spokeswoman Carole Florman said.
Change to Win includes seven unions representing 6 million workers, while AFL-CIO is made up of 54 unions representing about 9 million workers.