The United Food and Commercial Workers, a union representing 1.3 million members mostly in retail and food production, has announced it is rejoining the AFL-CIO after leaving in 2005 at the forming of the Change to Win federation. In
a statement announcing the affiliation, UFCW President Joe Hansen said:
The need for unity became paramount after the 2010 elections. The attacks on workers brought the UFCW into direct strategic partnership with the AFL-CIO and the entire labor movement. Our shared campaign revealed a dynamic and revitalized AFL-CIO and made it clear that it was time for the UFCW to redouble our efforts to build a more robust and unified labor movement.
As that statement indicates, the UFCW and AFL-CIO had been working together in recent years, so this move is not a sharp change in direction but a formalization of an ongoing process. What's more significant here is that the UFCW is not the first of the Change to Win unions to rejoin the AFL-CIO. Change to Win began as a reform movement to increase organizing and rebuild union strength; sadly, while each of its member unions has had some successes, no broad revitalization of the union movement has resulted and, as Hansen's statement about the UFCW's re-affiliation with the AFL-CIO suggests, there's been a growing sense that more unity is needed.
At its formation in 2005, Change to Win included SEIU, UNITE HERE (garment, hotel, and restaurant workers), UFCW, the United Farm Workers, the Laborers, the Carpenters, and the Teamsters. UNITE HERE re-affiliated with the AFL-CIO in 2009 after a damaging internal battle that saw a number of locals—largely garment workers—leave and create an SEIU affiliate called Workers United. The Carpenters disaffiliated from Change to Win in 2009. The Laborers rejoined the AFL-CIO in 2010. The emphasis on partnership and unity is not restricted to the unions that have rejoined the AFL-CIO—SEIU and the AFL-CIO have increasingly stressed that they are working together on broader political goals even though they are not formally affiliated.
At the same time, since becoming AFL-CIO president in 2009 and especially over the past year, Richard Trumka has emphasized that unions have to change, to reach out more broadly, to find new strategies to combat growing inequality and the Republican and corporate war on unions and workers. The AFL-CIO's increasing desire to change, then, moves it toward the founding goals of Change to Win. Re-affiliating, for a union like UFCW, can be seen not just as a statement about unity, but one that the two federations have moved in more similar directions than might have been anticipated from the bitterness of the split in 2005.