The Machinists are threatening to leave the AFL-CIO if the reform movement accomplishes its goal of a New Unity Partnership. Tom Buffenbarger in a recent interview in Business Week Online. It’s part of a cover article on Andy Stern that is terrific. Kudos to Aaron Bernstein. Here’s a couple of the juicy bits: “I’m one who thinks that maybe the AFL-CIO’s time has come and gone. I believe there needs to be a debate about where we’re going and the real role of the AFL-CIO, but its role in my view is just to be a conduit for debate. It has no business taking a role in my union.” “The AFL-CIO is supposed to be a loose federation. It should come together to speak with a unified voice, mostly on politics. Now it worries about immigrants and a whole array of things except for those in labor movement. It has lost its focus.” I haven’t paid too much attention to Buffenbarger’s comments on this until reading the interview, but he is dead-on – centralizing and “unifying” the movement is just more of the wrong thing. One of the best points he makes is that his union is paying $4 million a year to the AFL-CIO and still fighting jurisdiction battles all the time with the Carpenters, who left the federation (and their per capita tax obligation) in 2001. As he says, he wants “the same deal” as Douglas McCarron’s Carpenter’s union. So much for unity.
