At a time when unions are rising high politically they are straining under the weight of internal bickering.

From the New York Times

With their allies controlling the White House and Congress, the nation’s labor unions should be making hay. Instead many unions are making war — largely with one another — in the biggest, nastiest surge of labor fratricide in decades.

With some union leaders condemning other leaders as dictators and Darth Vaders, business leaders are smiling. Every million spent by unions to bash one another depletes their coffers for battling corporate America and Republican political candidates.

“The other side doesn’t have to take any shots at us,” said Amy B. Dean, a longtime union leader and an author of a new book on reinvigorating organized labor. “We’re killing ourselves.”

Many union officials acknowledge that the infighting is undercutting two of labor’s biggest objectives: having Congress enact pro-union legislation and organizing millions more workers to reverse labor’s long decline.

“They need a united front when they go to Congress to get pro-union legislation through,” said Charles B. Craver, a labor law professor at George Washington University. “If they miss that opportunity, it will be a very sad day for organized labor because they might not see an opportunity like that again for years.”

For the most part, the battles don’t involve grand philosophical differences, as many labor union disputes have in the past. Instead, they often reflect power struggles, with some unions jockeying to take others’ members at a time when unions are having a hard time gaining members at companies that are not organized.

The Service Employees International Union, union officials say, recently spent millions of dollars in California on organizers and a phone and mail campaign — in one fight to discourage workers from joining a rival health care union, and in another to urge hotel workers to quit their union and join the service employees.

The changes in the auto and other traditionally heavily unionized industries have put a great deal of pressure on union leaders to prop up their membership to keep the cash flowing from dues.  These dues in turn not only finance the unions political activity but enable union leaders to pay themselves hefty salaries and perks that the rank and file can only dream of.  For them it really isn’t about protecting workers as it is about their own job and power base.

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