Labor Reunification Hits Speed Bump?
That’s what Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times is reporting. He also adds this nugget:
Union leaders said the National Education Association, the nation’s largest union with 3.2 million members, was likely to join a unified federation. Dennis Van Roekel, the N.E.A.’s president, is involved in the talks, but it could take a year for his union’s 50 state chapters to ratify the move. “We have a good chance to have a basic outline to create a unified labor movement for the first time ever,” said Larry Cohen, president of the communications workers’ union. “The N.E.A. was founded more than 100 years ago and has never been an explicit part of the U.S. labor movement.”
There seems to be a lot of certainty that NEA will join this new grand federation, but Van Roekel himself is never quoted in these stories, and NEA has been officially silent on the issue. I am very far from omniscient, but I haven’t heard much chatter about it along the usual channels either. This isn’t 1998, but if NEA plans to do this, it has a lot of work to do to get the affiliates aboard.
