Afl Cio

It was the first day of hearings on a controversial $11-billion plan to modernize and expand Los Angeles International Airport. In the gilded chamber of the Los Angeles City Council, airline representatives, residents and business leaders bustled around the marble columns. One man stood out. It wasn't just his demeanor -- the contented look of someone anticipating a big victory.

Business-funded organizations hit back at the most aggressive critics of President Bush's proposal to change Social Security, accusing the AFL-CIO of failing to represent its membership. Citing the results of a survey to be released today, the business groups argue that most union members favor the private accounts advocated by Bush even though union leaders oppose them.

The AFL-CIO turned up the heat on executive compensation Monday, naming six companies -- including Thousand Oaks-based Amgen Inc. and San Diego-based Sempra Energy -- as "case studies of excessive chief executive pay." The labor organization, which in recent years has become increasingly vocal about what it believes are outsized executive pay levels, said it was using the six firms to highlight some of the major compensation issues facing shareholders at corporate annual meetings this spring.

Hoping to blunt criticism from dissidents in the labor movement, AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney on Thursday proposed pouring additional funding into organizing and politics. The federation would pay for it by laying off as many as one-fourth of its 420 staff members and eliminating some departments, he said.

The Labor Department cautioned organized labor in a letter made public Wednesday not to use money from pension funds to lobby against President Bush's proposal to overhaul Social Security. "The department is very concerned about the potential use of plan assets to promote particular policy positions," Alan D. Lebowitz, a department official, wrote to the AFL-CIO's top lawyer. In the letter to Jonathan P.

Fifty years after it was formed by a merger of two powerful factions of labor unions, the AFL-CIO is on the brink of a historic split. If there's any single person to blame, or praise, for what happens next, it's an intense Ivy League graduate with a penchant for purple, the unifying color of the 1.8-million-member Service Employees International Union.

The board of the nation's largest labor union gave its leadership the authority Saturday to break away from the AFL-CIO, citing a "fundamental and apparently irreconcilable disagreement" over how to rebuild the ailing labor movement. Meeting in San Francisco, the executive board of the 1.

Frustrated with the AFL-CIO's direction, the presidents of five major national unions representing about a third of U.S. union members on Wednesday formed a coalition aimed at restoring power to the waning labor movement through a series of aggressive, coordinated organizing campaigns. The move was widely viewed as the first step toward a split in the 50-year-old AFL-CIO, a federation of 57 national unions that has been losing membership and power for decades.

The threatened split in organized labor that erupted last week is all about politics. I'm not talking about the internal squabbling of union leaders. I mean real politics -- elections and legislation. That's what's really driving the five unions that formed a potential breakaway group, called Change to Win, within the AFL-CIO. They fear -- quite rightly -- that they're losing political clout as their membership numbers decline. They're in a fight-for-survival mood.

A group of dissident union leaders last week vowed to reinvigorate the slumping U.S. labor movement by launching a series of big, strategic organizing campaigns. Elements of what they have in mind have already been road-tested in California, a hot spot for union activism for more than a decade. And they seem to be working.