AFL-CIO Loses Half a Million Latinos,
Defectors Claim
Marc Heller

The nation's largest umbrella group of labor unions, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations, lost more than half a million Latino workers when its biggest members quit in July, according to estimates provided by some of the unions.

The fallout became evident in recent weeks, as both the AFL-CIO and the unions that left said they plan to boost organizing efforts among Latino workers, the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. work force.

"I think this is good news for immigrants in general and Latinos in particular," said Eliseo Medina, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, the biggest union to leave the AFL-CIO, with a membership of 1.8 million. An estimated 235,000 of that number are Hispanic. The SEIU has the largest Latino membership of any union, labor leaders say.

Officials at the SEIU and other members of the Change to Win coalition say they can organize workers with the money they would otherwise send to the AFL-CIO. That's $35 million for the SEIU, Medina said. The SEIU has been especially active in Texas, where it aims to organize about 8,000 janitors and other workers in Houston.

But the AFL-CIO is stepping up its own efforts, starting with what a spokeswoman claimed is the first-ever attempt to count the number of Hispanic workers who belong to the organization's 54 unions. In a resolution adopted July 25 at its annual convention — just as the SEIU and others were quitting — the AFL-CIO also adopted a resolution requiring the number of women and people of color among delegates to be in proportion to the number in the general membership.

"We're asking for a count now," said the spokeswoman, Esmeralda Aguilar. But other unions' estimates of their Latino membership are "totally false," she said, adding that AFL-CIO lawyers have demanded that non-AFL-CIO unions retract their estimates.

Aguilar declined to predict how the splintering of the AFL-CIO may affect organizing efforts among Latinos but said she worries that unions will raid each others' ranks for members. The SEIU has already begun organizing public sector workers, stepping into the territory of the AFL-CIO's American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

While the two sides disagree about the direction of unions, there is no doubt that Latinos play a key role, said Zaragosa Vargas, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of “Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917-1933.”

Latino populations are growing in the Northeast and Southeast as well as in the Southwest, he said, and in 15 years Latinos will comprise a quarter of the U.S. work force.

"The future of the American labor movement depends on unionizing Latinos and bringing them into its ranks," he said.

Vargas said unions can target Latino workers by focusing on issues such as immigration, which he said has helped the SEIU build its Hispanic membership. "Sadly, the AFL-CIO has not shown a commitment to fully integrate Latinos into its union ranks by organizing, educating and bringing them into the American labor movement to achieve economic rights," he said.

A significant portion of the 108 million workers in the United States do not belong to unions.

The United Farm Workers, with 27,000 members in California and a handful in Texas, Florida and other states, joined Change to Win but did not bolt the AFL-CIO. "We joined to get more resources to organize," said spokesman Marc Grossman. The union's membership is nearly 100 percent Hispanic, he said.

Unions say the benefits of membership for Latinos are obvious, with Latino union members making 59 percent more than their non-union counterparts.

But one of the chief advocates for Latino union membership, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, faces challenges because the breakup will cut the funding LCLAA receives from AFL-CIO, said a spokesman, César Moreno. "That, more than anything, is going to weaken what we can do," he said.

(Marc Heller is the Washington correspondent for The Watertown (N.Y.) Daily Times. He may be contacted by email at mheller@wdt.net)

© 2005, Hispanic Link News Service
08/14/05
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