FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 17, 2001

Contact: Harry Kelber
(718) 858-7728
Hkelber@igc.org

The AFL-CIO Executive Council is “a self-perpetuating oligarchy that does the labor movement incalculable harm,” veteran labor journalist Harry Kelber asserts in a letter sent to Council members last week.

Kelber, editor of The Labor Educator newsletter and a union activist since the 1930s, is a long-time critic of the “egregiously unfair and discriminatory” convention voting practices mandated by the AFL-CIO Constitution. For example, the Federation of Professional Athletes, with only 1,700 members, controls nearly three times the convention votes of all 50 AFL-CIO state federations and all 575 central labor councils combined.

As Kelber points out, for more than a century the voting power and influence of international unions has been magnified at the expense of state and local labor bodies whose representatives become little more than “window-dressing” at the labor federation’s biennial conventions. These same delegates from state and local bodies are “labor’s front-line troops” in all of its economic and political efforts.

The Executive Council will hold its quarterly meeting in Boston on April 30-May 1. To prevent another “sham, automatic re-election of all incumbents by voice vote” at the upcoming convention (Dec. 4-7 in Las Vegas), Kelber is urging the adoption of a “one delegate, one vote” resolution to amend the federation’s Constitution.