August 25, 2023
In a recent conversation with an otherwise well-informed young labor activist, I made a passing reference to Change to Win, a national labor federation formed in 2005 by defectors from the AFL-CIO. “Change to what?” she asked. “Never heard of it.”
Her response was not surprising, given the short shelf life of the organizational brand in question. Launched with much media fanfare, Change to Win initially represented 5.5 million workers, about one-fifth of the AFL’s total membership. Its founders—the Service Employees, Teamsters, Carpenters, Laborers, United Farm Workers, Food and Commercial Workers, and UNITE-HERE—saw themselves as the second coming of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CWA), the rival federation created in the mid-1930s to spearhead mass organizing in that era.
To “build power for workers” seventy years later, key CTW strategist favored organizational consolidation—in the form of more mergers between national unions and internal consolidation of members into larger regional or multi-state locals. One cheerleader for that approach, Professor Ruth Milkman, penned a NY Times opinion piece hailing CTW as “labor’s best hope — maybe its only hope — for revitalization.”
CTW did not live up to such hype. It was soon wracked by internal conflict, precipitated by then-SEIU President Andy Stern’s controversial restructuring of healthcare locals in California and his disastrous meddling in the internal affairs of UNITE-HERE. That...
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