Rather than address the real challenges facing American workers, the AFL-CIO has decided to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
During its recent convention in Pittsburgh, the AFL-CIO approved a resolution that allows for the creation of the Carpenters’ Organizing Committee, which would be part of the group’s Building and Construction Trades Department. The committee could eventually be chartered as a union to represent carpenters and compete with the 500,000-plus member United Brotherhood of Carpenters.
UBC General President Douglas J. McCarron called the AFL-CIO’s action misguided and a waste of money and energy that would instead be better “directed to organizing the craft workers in the markets they used to represent.”
For nearly 130 years, he said, the UBC has fought on behalf of North America’s carpenters, who benefit today from the union’s robust organizing efforts and a $175-million-a-year investment in training its members.
The UBC left the AFL-CIO in 2001 after years of battling the labor umbrella group’s hidebound bureaucratic ways and anemic commitment to helping workers by organizing them. The AFL-CIO subsequently excluded the UBC from the Building and Construction Trades Department.
“The AFL-CIO once again mistakes bureaucratic process for product,” President McCarron said. “The Carpenters’ Organizing Committee exists. It is, was, and always will be the very heart of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters.”
Click here to read President McCarron’s full statement.