At the convention, John Sweeney released a letter to CLC’s and State Feds with the very short and pithy, bumper-sticker like title, “Moving Forward From the Convention to Build A Stronger Labor Movement at the State and Local Levels and Maintaining Organizational Integrity.” It essentially laid out the ground rules on how to treat locals from disaffiliated unions–well, it basically said they cannot participate in local labor bodies.

In one sense, the letter takes a pretty hard line. On the other hand, the letter does say that the Federation has always worked with unaffiliated bodies on mutual projects and that “State federations and central labor councils are encouraged to continue such collaboration…” Obviously, the difference, if you are a CLC or State Fed is that collaboration does not pay the bills i.e., you don’t get paid per capita taxes by unaffiliated unions who work with you.

But, this may be a model to develop: a hybrid coalition of unions that walks, talks and quacks like a central labor council, has a mechanism that can fund activities but doesn’t fly the banner of the AFL-CIO and does not, then, run afoul of the edict from the national AFL-CIO to kick out locals of disaffiliated unions from existing AFL-CIO bodies.

Well, here it is, with a new date on it but it’s the same letter. It’s the document that state feds and CLCs will now have to decide whether to enforce or ignore. (A note: there are a couple of places where someone has highlighted points–that wasn’t me).