The Michigan AFL-CIO - like its national parent - is significantly smaller than it was a month ago - when three major unions dropped out of the national AFL-CIO to form the Change to Win Coalition.

Dropping out were the Service Employees, the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, amounting to about four million of the nearly 13 million workers that had been in the AFL-CIO. Additional members of the new coalition (but not yet necessarily out of the AFL-CIO) are the Carpenters, Laborers, UNITE HERE (garment and hotel workers) and the Farm Workers.

Addressing delegates to the Michigan Building and Construction Trades Council's annual convention, Mark Gaffney, president of the Michigan AFL-CIO, asked rhetorically, "What does this mean for the Michigan AFL-CIO?"

He answered: "We will cooperate with these unions in a new way. The Change to Win Coalition is a separate labor coalition and it's very serious and well-funded. I hope you will see them as a partner labor federation."

Gaffney said he hoped the new labor federation would lead to "healthy competition," and suggested "there are ways we can use competition to be helpful and work on common goals, for example political fundraising."

He said the state AFL-CIO would not allow the breakaway unions to participate in voting matters or in the endorsement process, and any of their officers must resign from AFL-CIO positions. As a result of the break, Gaffney said the state federation has lost about 18 percent of its funding. The Metro Detroit AFL-CIO has lost about 50 percent.

"As it is, this split makes all of the building trades together about the largest union group in the state AFL-CIO," Gaffney said. "That makes you very important."

Gaffney said he did not envision the split in labor as a "short-term deal."

Essentially, he said, the arguments over leaving boiled down to a demand for a priority for more money to spend on organizing, sought by the Change to Win Coalition, vs. the AFL-CIO, which leans toward spending more money on political action.

The Change to Win Coalition "has something to prove," Gaffney said. "The coalition is made up of unions that have different outlooks, so it may be as little as two years, or it may be as much as 10 or 11 years."