The AFL-CIO's divorce.

Byline: The Register-Guard

A divorce is a painful way to celebrate a 50th anniversary. But that's what happened this week when a coalition of unions led by the Service Employees International Union and the Teamsters walked out on the AFL-CIO's convention in Chicago.

It's the deepest schism since the American Federation of Labor expelled the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1937 - a rift that was not healed until 1955 - but the result could be a re-energized labor movement.

The dissident unions, calling themselves the Change to Win Coalition, had grown impatient with AFL-CIO President John Sweeney's emphasis on political action. Sweeney took charge of the federation in 1995, the year after Republicans gained control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Under Sweeney, the AFL-CIO became an adjunct of the Democratic Party, hoping to create a more labor-friendly political climate.

The futility of Sweeney's approach is the Change to Win Coalition's strongest argument. Only 8 percent of workers in private employment now belong to a union, down from 12 percent when Sweeney became president. Republicans who owe nothing to organized labor control both chambers of Congress and the White House.

SEIU President Andrew Stern is the public face of the Change to Win Coalition. The SEIU's strategy has been to pour half of its resources into organizing efforts and to adopt the CIO's New Deal-era goal of forming unions representing workers in entire industries rather than in particular crafts. Under Stern's leadership the SEIU has added 900,000 members to its ranks in the past decade, most of them in the nation's growing service industries.

Stern and his allies demanded that the AFL-CIO focus on organizing efforts of the type that have caused the SEIU to grow, building labor's political power from the bottom up. They quit when no compromise with Sweeney could be reached - taking with them a quarter of the AFL-CIO's membership and a sixth of its budget.

A fundamental principle of organized labor is that unity brings strength - and the split may lead to labor speaking with more than one voice. Worse yet would be the emergence of rival labor federations that compete by poaching each other's memberships or attempt to gain strength at the other's expense. The result would be a further weakening of the labor movement.

But preserving unity in a losing cause is no way to improve workers' lives. Something needed to be done to reverse labor's slide, and if Stern's coalition can find ways to protect and create a worker-friendly economy in a fast-changing global marketplace, a reorientation of the labor movement could follow. A second union umbrella organization that is more focused on the workplace than on political action may be just what the labor movement needs.