Airline unions have made wave after wave of wage, benefit, and pension concessions since September 2001—often under the gun of bankruptcy threats. Now Northwest Airlines is upping the ante, pushing for a business model that copies non-union airlines like JetBlue and demanding to lay off more than half its maintenance workforce . . . .

To get to this year’s heated AFL-CIO convention in Chicago, you had to walk the length of the newly remodeled Navy Pier, past a funhouse complete with a massive maze of mirrors. Watching people lost in confusion inside the maze, it was hard not to think about the tangled mess that was unfolding a hundred yards away . . . .

The AFL-CIO split is behind us now, and unions in and out of the federation must work together to organize the unorganized. Right? . . . .

Behind the war of personalities and the big ideas of the dueling AFL-CIO and Change to Win (CTW) leaders, a story emerges that portrays the split as a play for power as much as it was about differences between the two camps . . . .

Many have been quick to compare the Change to Win Coalition’s split from the AFL-CIO to the split of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1935. Shortly after SEIU and the Teamsters left the AFL-CIO, labor journalist Harold Meyerson wrote in the Washington Post that the Change to Win leaders are “harking back to the old CIO, which…roared out of the old AFL determined to unionize America’s industrial workers.” . . . .

Though most folks wouldn’t know it, the July AFL-CIO convention wasn’t that month’s only national union convention. More than 9000 delegates of the National Education Association (NEA) — the largest union in the U.S. — met in Los Angeles from July 2 through 6 for their annual Representative Assembly . . . .