As the nation's union leaders worked through long and sometimes acrimonious meetings of the federation Executive Council in Las Vegas last week, they left a lot undone.

That means there will be more meetings between now and late July on revamping the 12.95-million member labor organization.

And it may not be over even then, since the federation's July convention must approve major changes that would have a ripple effect on the future of organized labor.

Many issues the leaders discussed in the March 1-3 Executive Council meetings -- everything from exact budget numbers to deciding which functions the federation should handle versus which ones its member unions will retake or take over -- were postponed. Discussion started, but did not finish.

Instead, you got results like this: "The Executive Council shall establish specific categories of core federation activities, which shall describe the areas of responsibility of the federation. The council shall further establish specific funding levels for these areas."

Outside of politics -- $45 million to $47 million this year -- and organizing, at $15 million, all else was left just as vague.

In some cases, leaders agreed. For example, they decided on a wider role with accountability for state federations and Central Labor Councils, but left details to be worked out.

Still, the goal was vague: "A unified, effective and well-resourced mobilization program for politics, legislation and support for organizing...connecting members where they work or live to state and national issues and campaigns."

In other cases, they almost agreed. For example, federation Communications Director Denise Mitchell said the leaders were "that close" -- she held her fingers inches apart -- to approving a plan to encourage voluntary union mergers. Voluntary mergers were a key part of a comprehensive AFL-CIO revamp plan offered by Teamsters President James Hoffa, the new leader of the coalition pushing to revitalize the labor movement.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney actually drafted a voluntary merger blueprint, reflecting what he thought the consensus was. But then the union president who touched off the revamp debate last June, Andrew Stern of the Service Employees, reiterated his demand for forced mergers, ordered by the AFL-CIO, to cut the number of member unions from 58 to around 20.

And the agreement fell apart.

What was left was a decision to increase federation spending on organizing to at least $15 million, up from approximately $12.5 million last year, and to redirect it downwards.

But even the redirection is in the hands of a committee that will look at the most-effective use of organizing dollars, though those dollars will return to qualifying unions as a "rebate."

Rebating 50 percent of any union's AFL-CIO dues was another part of Hoffa's proposal. But he conditioned rebates on specific targeted organizing programs in the union's core industries, and minimum spending and training requirements, among other things.

In another indication of the incomplete decision-making, the federation's Executive Committee -- a smaller set of leaders -- spent much of the week hashing out a position on spending on politics and legislation.

The final result: Allotting the $45 million-$47 million, again half of the per capita dues money the federation gets from individual members through their unions. It would go for grass-roots politics and legislative campaigns, lobbying and member mobilization on key issues, such as preserving Social Security.

But the full Executive Council didn't even vote on that, Sweeney said. It wants more details for its coming meetings in May and June.

A host of other questions were left undecided. Besides mergers, they include governing structure, cuts in staff and AFL-CIO functions, what the movement-wide target would be for spending on organizing, organizing in the South and what to do about Wal-Mart. A key national issue--the war in Iraq--never came up, Sweeney told Press Associates Union News Service.

Stern advocated that all unions, from the federation on down through locals, should spend $2 billion movement-wide on organizing, making that and not politics labor's top focus.

Mitchell guesstimated national unions alone spend $200 million now. She didn?t know how much locals spent.

But she said that if all unions hit Sweeney's previously announced target of spending 30 percent of their budgets for organizing, the total for national unions would be $500 million.

Again, that issue was left for later.

Why should all this matter to U.S. workers, especially to the seven of every eight workers who are non-union?

There were several answers to that, and they came down to the political environment that unions and workers face -- and how political decisions could hurt everyone's standard of living.

"The 'union-free' crowd," including GOP President George W. Bush, "is using the concentration of political power to take away the right to organize," says Paul Booth, top assistant to AFSCME President Gerald McEntee. "A decision to join a union should be like a decision to join a church, a synagogue or a temple."

"If you continue to turn out the lights on workers' rights here, you'll continue to turn out the lights on democracy," declares Communications Workers Executive Vice President Larry Cohen, slated to move up to CWA's top job in August.

The discussions on the future of the labor movement concern "how we regain some influence on public policy," adds Postal Workers President Bill Burrus. "There's no greater force for working people in this country. This is their future," he told Press Associates Union News Service.

Both sides in the debate over the role and the structure of the AFL-CIO agree, as shown by statements from Sweeney and Hoffa.

Non-union "workers want to be organized, but they're confronted with illegal and sometimes-legal actions by employers to block that," Sweeney told a closing press conference on March 3. "That's why this program is important to them."

"It's all about hope," Hoffa said in an interview with Press Associates Union News Service. "Unions bring hope at a time of despair in America. When millions of people are unemployed, when the jobless rate is really closer to 10 percent, when manufacturing jobs are going to China, when people are forced to take a lesser job and end up at Wal-Mart or punching a cash register at the local Mobil station as others buy groceries or gas, they live in fear."

Mark Gruenberg writes for Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.