SAN FRANCISCO - Its fortunes slipping away, its membership in decline and trapped in a cycle of political setbacks, the AFL-CIO will attempt this year to regain its footing and, if there's the will, reinvent itself.

However, there may be a fight over differing ideas about reform and perhaps even a challenge to the president of the labor federation, John Sweeney, who will seek re-election in July at the AFL-CIO convention in Chicago.

On one side of the battle will be advocates for sweeping change, particularly the leadership of the nation's largest union, the Service Employees International Union, which wants to reorganize the AFL-CIO. On the other side will be defenders of the status quo for U.S. labor unions.

Sweeney said he favors change, but he questions the degree to which it's necessary. No matter who prevails, change is coming to a movement that has grown weary of its losing streak.

Labor suffered two major body blows in 2004. The first was the devastating, nearly five-month strike and lockout of some 60,000 union grocery clerks in Southern California.

The grocery chains - Safeway, Albertson's and Ralphs, owned by Kroger - lost more than $1.5 billion in sales and have yet to recover. But labor was a loser, too.

In the end, the United Food and Commercial Workers accepted something it had strenuously resisted - a two-tier pay system in which new hires get less than existing employees.

Labor's other big loss came on election day.

The AFL-CIO spent $100 million on an unsuccessful effort to defeat President Bush, whom Sweeney had lambasted as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history. Bush's victory and Republican gains in Congress left the union movement's political clout at its lowest ebb since the Roosevelt era.

As the union movement regroups, it is re-examining its organization.

The key Service Employees International proposal is to reduce the number of affiliated, separate and autonomous unions in the federation from 65 to 20 or fewer and to strengthen those larger unions when they bargain with consolidated national and international corporations. If this change is adopted, 40 presidents could lose their power.

Some observers of the tumult couldn't be happier.

"It's only a matter of time before Sweeney's marble Taj Mahal on 16th Street (in Washington, D.C.) becomes his mausoleum," said Pat Cleary, senior vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers, who worked in the Labor Department under President Reagan.

Sweeney became AFL-CIO president in 1995, promising to revive it and to emphasize organizing. One of his priorities was to have affiliated unions devote 30 percent of their budgets to recruiting, but few have done so.

Meantime, the labor movement has continued to decline, representing just under 13 percent of the nation's workers, compared with 35 percent in the mid-20th century. Only 8.2 percent of private-sector workers are unionized.

One of the agents of change and the chief protagonist in the labor drama is Andrew Stern, 53, president of SEIU, the federation's largest, fastest-growing union, with nearly 1.7 million members.

He helped write a far-reaching, 10-point proposal for reform that some people interpret as a campaign document from a would-be challenger to Sweeney. Stern says he's not running, and no serious challenger to Sweeney has emerged to date.

Chief among the SEIU-Stern proposals is a plan to consolidate 65 AFL-CIO unions into perhaps 20 or fewer. Stern said he may pull SEIU out of the AFL-CIO if the core proposals are not adopted.

That said, Thomas Buffenbarger, international president of the International Association of Machinists, said his union, representing 730,000 active and retired members in the United States and Canada, will quit the federation if Stern and his allies prevail.

"We are not against change," said Rick Sloan, an aide to Buffenbarger. "What is very problematic for us is the idea that a small group of elites would decide for the rest of the labor movement what is in our union's best interest."

Sweeney, 70, who came to the nation's top labor position as president of SEIU from 1980 to 1995 and who hired Stern to manage SEIU organizing efforts 20 years ago, says he embraces the notion of change.

In fact, he heads the federation's Committee for Change, which will consider the SEIU proposal, another from the Brotherhood of Teamsters, still another from the Communications Workers of America and others.

Tom Woodruff, SEIU international executive vice president, was asked if the union's proposal, called "Unite to Win" and supported by a Stern blog and Web site, www.unitetowin.org, is in fact a campaign to unseat Sweeney. "It's not a question of who leads the AFL-CIO but where the AFL-CIO is being led," he said.

Stern noted that transportation workers are divided into 15 different unions. The same is true in construction. There are 13 unions with significant numbers of public employees and nine major unions in manufacturing. Health care members are divided into more than 30 unions.

In 13 major sectors of the economy, there are at least four significant unions, and in nine of those sectors there are at least six unions.

Meanwhile, only 15 of the 65 AFL-CIO national unions have more than 250,000 members, and 40 have fewer than 100,000. Many of these unions "do not have the strength to unite more workers in their industry and change workers' lives," the SEIU proposal says.

Source:  The San Francisco Chronicle