By Tom Deignan

Organised labour in the U.S. has been Irish roughly as long as it has been organised.

However, at the moment, two Irish Americans are battling to determine the future of organized labour for millions of Americans.

As the Irish Voice and others have noted, the key Irish player in this battle is John Sweeney, the Bronx-born son of Irish immigrants who has been the president of the AFL-CIO for a decade now. Sweeney leads a flock of 13 million workers and is up for re-election next month at the union’s annual convention in Chicago.

But there is another determined Irish American leading a coalition opposed to the direction Sweeney is taking AFL-CIO. Terence M. O’Sullivan, president of the 800,000-member Labourers’ International Union of North America, is not as well known as Sweeney. But he is leading a coalition that represents five million workers.

Friends and opponents have said you should never underestimate O’Sullivan.

“He’s the greatest breath of fresh air to come along at the top level in the labour movement in a long time,” John W. Wilhelm, the president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, told The New York Times in 2003.

In what now looks like a highly prophetic statement, Wilhelm added, “Terry has simultaneously led a process of very dramatic change in one of the nation’s most important unions and has taken a very strong leadership role in the labour movement as a whole.”

Last week that certainly proved to be true. When all is said and done, this may be the biggest shakeup in organized labour since the AFL and CIO merged in the 1930s.

And it just so happens that two Irishmen are at the centre of the battle. Think of it as O’Sullivan vs. Sweeney, a heavyweight battle for the soul of organized labour.

On June 15, O’Sullivan and four other presidents of the largest unions in the AFL-CIO announced the formation of the Change to Win Coalition, an alliance “devoted to creating a large-scale, coordinated campaign to rebuild the American labour movement,” according to a statement.

“Our goal is to empower the tens of millions of American workers who face the daily challenge of making ends meet and whose voice has been silenced by the overwhelming power of large global corporations and their representatives in Washington,” the five presidents said in a joint statement.

O’Sullivan and his associates hope their proposals are passed by delegates at the AFL-CIO convention in July. Until then, these unions — seen as rebels, even traitors by Sweeney supporters — will put their agenda into practice.

“Regardless of the agenda adopted in Chicago by the AFL-CIO, the coalition will move forward with its reform program after the convention,” the presidents said.

These moves have enraged Sweeney and his supporters, who say now is the time for organized labour to stick together.

So, who is Terrence O’Sullivan, this man seen as either a saviour or traitor?

His father was a member of the labourers, a union that often does the toughest and dirtiest work at work sites. O’Sullivan often says that without the union, his father, also named Terence, would not have been able to offer his family a middle-class lifestyle.

According to the Times, O’Sullivan was born in San Francisco in 1955 and moved to Virginia in 1968, when his father was elected the labourers’ secretary-treasurer.

After graduating from American University, where he majored in business administration, he taught high school and coached baseball for three years. After starting his own computer-services company and running it for seven years, he returned to the union, running a training centre in West Virginia that taught courses on construction and safety.

Then in 1994, O’Sullivan moved on to the position of assistant to the union’s president, Arthur A. Coia. In 1999, Coia resigned and then plead guilty to federal fraud charges.

O’Sullivan is widely credited with rooting out corruption since his election as president.

“Maybe there’s some ghost in the closet about Terry,” Ronald Nobili, a business manager of a labourers’ local in Connecticut, told the Times. “But I only have nice things to say about him. He’s a motivator, and he’s very well liked by everybody.”

Well, not John Sweeney. Still, O’Sullivan and his supporters just might make labour history next month.

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net.)