After months of not-so-veiled threats, Andy Stern officially threatened to pull the SEIU out of the AFL-CIO if his New Unity Partnership proposals are not adopted. The proposals include doubling the amount of money spent on union organizing, devoting $25 million a year to organizing Wal-Mart stores, and consolidating about 60 AFL-CIO unions into less than 20. John Sweeney, now embattled in his post as AFL-CIO president on the heels of the embarrassing re-election of Bush (it is notable that Andy Stern’s SEIU spent more than the AFL-CIO – $65 million – on Kerry’s campaign), also sent a letter to AFL-CIO member unions hoping to reconcile differences. In a cruel twist of fate, 40 or more unions now find themselves in the role of red states, as illustrated by the following quote from a spokesman for the Machinists union (who has threatened to leave the AFL-CIO if Stern and his cohorts get their way: “It’s not Andy Stern’s role in life to say to 60 other international unions that you got to do it my way or the highway, That’s just dead wrong. There’s an arrogance to that. He fails by misunderstanding the nature of the labor movement – this isn’t a set of elites that dictates to us. This is a democratic movement.” A democratic movement indeed.
