If the Economist is writing about it you can tell me theres trouble brewing...(Sorry no link because its a subscription only article.)

Brothers at arms - A row in the labour movement

America's trade unions are in a rut. They are at last having a proper debate about their future
'We will not be a rubber stamp of the Democrats'. That was the pledge of John Sweeney shortly after he was elected boss of the AFL-CIO, back in 1995. Ten years later, the trade-union federation, which represents 13m workers, looks more than ever like an adjunct of the Democratic Party. It gives no hard money to any party, because it is not allowed to; but it routinely endorses individual Democrats in elections; it mobilised 250,000 people in a massive get-out-the-vote drive for John Kerry last year; and it has waged a fierce campaign against President George Bush's plan to reform Social Security.

Meanwhile, union membership has continued to slide. Today, a mere 12.5% of the workforce belongs to a union, compared with over one-third of workers in the 1950s. Much of this has to do with the decline of the heavily unionised manufacturing sector, but the labour movement has also been slow to react. On Mr Sweeney's watch, it has lost nearly 800,000 members. And there is grumbling in the ranks about the movement's priorities.

Andy Stern, the feisty boss of the service workers' union, the biggest and fastest-growing in the movement, says Mr Sweeney has poured too much money into politics. The $44m political budget for the past two years (a number which excludes staff) should have been spent on increasing the size of the movement. Only when unions get bigger, goes the argument, will they be able to sway policy.

Mr Stern has threatened to bolt from the AFL-CIO unless the unions that do the most organising get a 50% rebate. He is also pushing John Wilhelm, who represents hotel workers, to challenge Mr Sweeney. The latter is up for re-election at the AFL-CIO convention in July.

Mr Stern met with four rebel bosses this week in Las Vegas to plot strategy. They are cross that Mr Sweeney plans to increase the political budget to $60m (again not counting staff salaries). The extra cash will go on setting up a year-round field operation to lobby all levels of government. Mr Sweeney has doubled the budget for organising to $22.5m, but the rebels would rather spend $65m. Mr Wilhelm calls the $7.5m earmarked for organising at target companies, such as Wal-Mart and Federal Express, 'radically insufficient'.

Nevertheless, many union barons are rallying around Mr Sweeney. That is partly because they object to Mr Stern's pushiness. But they argue that organising cannot be separated from politics. For public-sector unions in particular, politics is crucial. In many states, collective-bargaining rights for state employees are granted by the governor. When Republican governors came into power in Missouri and Indiana last year, they promptly tore up orders granting such rights.

It is not hard to see why the public-sector unions want to fight Mr Bush. By outsourcing jobs to private contractors, he has trimmed the federal payroll. Citing national security, he has rolled back the collective-bargaining rights of thousands of workers in the Department of Defence. And he has all but banned transport-security workers in the Department of Homeland Security from unionising.

Many private-sector unions also fear the administration. The Department of Labour has issued a new rule requiring them to disclose the purpose of expenditures above $5,000. And the unions complain that the National Labour Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that governs union elections and arbitrates union-employer disputes, is stacked against them. It banned Brown University graduate students from organising last year. Now the unions think it will limit 'card-check' , a somewhat dubious system where a union gets most of the workers at a firm to sign a pledge card and thus avoids NLRB-supervised secret-ballot elections.

Some union leaders think the labour movement ought to support a few token Republicans; but only a few more, and not very conspicuously. Mr Stern baffled the barons last year when he gave $570,000 to Patrick Ballantine, a Republican challenger for the governorship of North Carolina who had promised pay rises for state workers. 'He's playing into the Republicans' hands', says Leo Gerard, president of the steelworkers' union.

But is Mr Stern really so wrong? The unions' current Democratic strategy has plenty of political drawbacks. It means the Democrats take them for granted, moderate Republicans do little to help them and they have to endure the wrath of conservatives like Mr Bush. It also plainly goes against many of their members' interests. One in three unionists voted for Mr Bush last year; many of them are traditionalists who do not like to see their money going, however indirectly, to support abortion choice or gay marriage. 'We need to get across that this is a movement that believes in faith and individual rights', admits Harold Schaitberger, the head of the firefighters' union.

On the other hand, it is hard to see how mending fences with Republicans would help the unions stem their decline. In many southern and western states they face 'right to work' laws, which allow workers to opt out of joining. (Elsewhere, workers are forced to pay dues to the union if a majority of the workers vote to have one.) Ever more workers nowadays are part-timers, who are harder to organise. And as Richard Hurd of Cornell University points out, businesses are sophisticated at shutting unions out. Tactics include avoiding the hiring of rabble-rousers (something Wal-Mart is accused of) and dividing people into teams, which bolsters morale and makes complainers unpopular.

These tactics appear be to working. Despite rising inequality in wages, job satisfaction is quite high. And without a brewing sense of injustice, it is tough to get workers to rise up against their bosses.