By Francine Knowles

The union representing about 450,000 hospitality, laundry, apparel and food service workers quit the AFL-CIO, joining three other big unions that broke from the national labor body in recent months because of disagreements on organizing and leadership.

UNITE-HERE joined the Teamsters, the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers union in disaffiliating from the federation.

The union's departure means the loss of about $3.2 million in annual dues to the AFL-CIO, according to AFL-CIO spokeswoman Lane Windham.

John W. Wilhelm, president of the UNITE-HERE hospitality industries union, puts the figure at roughly $4 million.

Combined, the defections by the four unions mean the loss of about $29 million in annual dues payments to the AFL-CIO, which has an annual budget of $125 million, Windham said. The departures have also shrunk the AFL-CIO's membership base from 13 million to 9 million, she said.

The unions are a part of the recently formed dissident Change to Win Coalition, which also includes the carpenters, laborers and farm workers unions. The coalition advocates greater investments in organizing.

Henry Tamarin, president of Chicago-based UNITE-HERE Local 1, welcomed the disaffiliation, which was unanimously approved by the international union's executive board.

"The path we have been on hasn't been successful," he said. "We have to do something different and something bolder."

The AFL-CIO criticized the action.

"We think that UNITE-HERE's leadership made the wrong decision for their members and for really all of America's working people," Windham said. "Now more than ever, working people need a strong and united labor movement."

UNITE-HERE General President Bruce Raynor said the union will focus on helping make the coalition a federation that will succeed in organizing the millions of nonunion workers.

Union membership has fallen from about a third of all private-sector jobs in the 1950s to 8 percent today.

"We're not mad at anybody," Wilhelm said. "We believe it's our responsibility to do everything that we can to work with all interested unions to grow the labor movement, because the labor movement is the only institution in 21st-century America that can reverse the decline in the standard of living for most Americans." But the union believes it needs to take a different path to accomplish that, given what Raynor characterized as a "historical crisis" facing American workers.

"There are 28 million people that went to work this morning who make less than the poverty level," Raynor said. "Fifty percent of the workers in America used to draw defined benefit retirement plans when they finished their working careers. That number is down to 17 percent. More and more Americans face their old age without adequate financial resources to enjoy that retirement in dignity."

UNITE-HERE has been investing more than 50 percent of its resources in organizing, Raynor said. As a result, 2005 is proving to be the most successful year the recently merged unions have had in organizing in many years, he noted. He didn't provide hard numbers, but the union plans to do so in coming months.

Union representatives said the bulk of the per capita dues money that the Change to Win unions used to send into the AFL-CIO will now be devoted to organizing.

The coalition plans to commit 75 percent of the per capita dues it receives toward that effort, Wilhelm said. That will provide the infrastructure to support large-scale organizing campaigns, the leaders said.

Source:  Chicago Sun-Times