Over the last few months, the American labor movement has faced a new and terrible threat -- from within. Fierce internecine fighting among a number of national unions has threatened to destroy carefully built coalitions and distracted the movement at a time when it can't afford to lose focus.
The battle has been centered in New York and Washington, where the national unions are headquartered. But the city where it could do the most harm is Los Angeles.
The troubles began within Unite Here -- a union that has only been around since 2004, when Unite (the apparel workers union) merged with Here (the hotel workers union). The two groups were among labor's stars. Here had turned Las Vegas into a union town, a place where lowly hotel workers could step into the middle class; Unite had won epochal battles for Southern textile workers; and both unions had led the fight for America's growing immigrant workforce.
The new union's two halves, however, never melded into a coherent whole. Each had a distinct culture increasingly at odds with the other's.
This last winter, as it became clear that the leaders of the former Here would soon have the votes to oust the leaders of the former Unite from their leadership posts in the merged union, the Unite side voted to unmerge and affiliate itself instead with the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU -- the nation's most dynamic and powerful union.
The de-merger, though, only intensified the conflict. Each union maintained that it had rights to assets the other had brought to the merger: The hotel workers, who now control Unite Here, laid claim to financial assets that had been Unite's before the merger (including Amalgamated Bank, the nation's last labor bank). The apparel workers insisted they still had the right to organize hotels because their own industry, domestic clothing and textile manufacturing, had largely collapsed.
Each side put pressure on the other, but the SEIU-Unite side really brought out the big guns. Throughout March and April, it phoned and mailed members of the hotel locals in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas and elsewhere, urging them to turn against their leaders and come over to the other side. This, in turn, raised the hackles of the leaders of other unions, who were clearly perturbed by the spectacle of one union destabilizing another.
