Culinary Union parent returns to AFL-CIO after split

By Michael Mishak

Thursday, Sept. 17, 2009 | 9:38 a.m.

PITTSBURGH -- Unite Here, the parent organization of the Culinary Union, returned to the AFL-CIO in grand fashion this morning after splitting from the nation’s largest labor federation four years ago.

Unite Here leader John Wilhelm, onetime head of the Culinary, ascended the stage at the federation’s convention here and was embraced by Richard Trumka, the newly-installed AFL-CIO president.

“It is a good and fitting thing for us in Unite Here to be back home,” Wilhelm said, to rousing applause.

Coming on the last day of the convention, the announcement was made to a half-empty hall, but the significance was clear. The return of Unite Here to the AFL-CIO makes real, if only in a small way, Trumka’s vision for a united labor movement. Wilhelm told the crowd he hopes his union can serve as a “bridge” for others to rejoin.

“Now is the time to unify,” Wilhelm said. “This is a moment of great promise as well as great peril.” Unions, he added, must band together to counter the power of corporate America.

In 2005, four unions – the Service Employees International Union, Unite Here, the Teamsters, and the United Food and Commercial Workers – quit the AFL-CIO, saying it was too focused on politics and not enough on organizing nonunion workers. Later, the laborers, the carpenters and the United Farm Workers joined them in a rival federation, Change to Win.

But times – and leadership – have changed, Wilhelm told reporters.

He said President Barack Obama’s election presents an opportunity to win reform in the health care, labor law and immigration arenas. And the coordinated efforts of both labor federations in the 2008 campaign prove unions work better with one voice, he said.

“The opportunity that the Obama administration presents is only an opportunity,” Wilhelm said. “I think Obama needs a very strong grass roots organizing effort” to enact legislation.

The announcement served as a reunion of sorts for Trumka and Wilhelm, both seemingly touched by the occasion. Trumka recalled Wilhelm’s support of his United Mine Workers’ strike against Pittston Coal: Upon hearing that the company had fed replacement workers a lobster dinner, Wilhelm sent six union chefs to cook for the strikers.

Likewise, Trumka walked the picket lines at the historic Horseshoe and Frontier strikes in Las Vegas.

As for Change to Win, Wilhelm said he had no regrets.

“When any institution is in trouble, it’s worth taking risks,” he said. “But it’s time to get back all in the same house.”

Wilhelm said his running feud with Change to Win co-founder Andy Stern played no role in the decision to reaffiliate.

Wilhelm accuses Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union, of capitalizing on a power struggle inside Unite Here, itself a merger of the hotel employees and apparel workers unions, and engineering a takeover.

With Unite Here factions at loggerheads, Stern invited both sides to join the SEIU. Former Unite leader Bruce Raynor took him up on the offer, leading 150,000 members of the merged union into a new affiliate of the service workers. Unite Here and the SEIU are now engaged in a legal fight over union assets and organizing jurisdiction.

Stern has said the Unite faction had a right to break away from, as he put it, “a marriage that has gone bad.” And on Wednesday the SEIU issued a statement calling on Trumka to help resolve the dispute with Unite Here and pledged to work with the AFL-CIO to further labor’s legislative goals.

The SEIU also pledged its support for an anti-raiding resolution passed by the AFL-CIO.

But Wilhelm told reporters Thursday the service workers were engaged in efforts to poach Unite Here members in various locals – something the SEIU denies.

The friction would now seem to put the AFL-CIO and its new leadership at odds with the SEIU, one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing unions.