FOKUS AMERIKA Büro Washington Dr. Almut Wieland-Karimi 1023 15 th Street NW,# 801 Washington, DC 20005 USA Tel.:+1 202 408 5444 Fax:+1 202 408 5537 fesdc@fesdc.org www.fesdc.org Nr. 6/ 2006 Dueling Federations: U.S. Labor in 2006 Richard W. Hurd 1  Seven unions with six million members formed the Change to Win federation in 2005, leaving the AFL-CIO with nine million members.  Neither dire predictions of open warfare nor optimistic scenarios of immediate growth have proved accurate; union density is relatively stable, and the two federations are learning how to coexist peacefully.  There has been a marked increase in strategic cooperation among national unions, most notably within the CTW, but also through AFL-CIO Industrial Coordinating Committees.  The CTW is sponsoring a number of large-scale organizing campaigns, and several AFL-CIO unions have increased organizing expenditures substantially; to date the results have been modest.  The two federations are cooperating for the 2006 Congressional elections with the AFL-CIO taking the lead.  The best hope for the future is that the labor movement will ultimately benefit from competing models for growth. Background Labor unity in the U.S. lasted exactly half a century. At the convention to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1955 merger of the American Federation of Labor with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, bitter­ness and rebellion swept away plans of celebration. On the eve of the August 2005 event in Chicago, seven major unions announced that they would break away from the AFL-CIO. Six weeks later they formally established the Change to Win federation, spawning both proclamations of labor’s