Hoffa breaking away from labor biz as usual By ROBERT NOVAK, Chicago Sun-Times
What Hoffa and Stern have in common now is dissatisfaction with Sweeney's nine-year tenure running the AFL-CIO, during which union membership continued to decline and now represents just 12.9 percent of the work force. Hoffa is particularly unhappy about the growth of an unproductive AFL-CIO bureaucracy and its duplication of functions performed by individual unions.
Hoffa's arrow, shot directly at the heart of that bureaucracy, is a proposal to ''rebate'' one half of the ''tax'' that the AFL-CIO collects from each union based on its number of members. Those funds would return to the unions, if committed to organizing. In the case of the Teamsters, that would cut in half the $9 million tax. All told, the AFL-CIO receives $90 million annually in such funds.