Organizing, elections focus of Change to Win

New organizing drives in construction and transportation are also planned, but they have yet to start.

CTW Chair Anna Burger, who was re-elected to serve a two-year term, said 75 percent of the $18 million federation budget has been allocated for union organizing.

Leaders of the CTW unions had originally said, when they broke two years ago with the AFL-CIO, that the parent federation had put too much emphasis on electoral activity at the expense of union organizing.

The decision at the CTW convention to plunge into the political arena was significant, therefore, because it puts virtually all of labor into a drive to use the 2008 elections to shift the political balance of forces in the United States.

Since the split, both federations have been involved in — and have increasingly worked together on — not just electoral activity, but in the struggles to reform labor law, to keep manufacturing jobs in the U.S. and for universal health care.