Constitutional Crisis Sparks All-Out War for Control of Powerful Union

General President Bruce Raynor, formerly the president of UNITE, is racing against time to undo the merger and lead his old union out of UH before he faces reelection at the convention in June.

Former HERE locals comprise the 60% of the membership of UNITE HERE and will therefore send the majority of delegates to vote on the union's next president.

"Raynor really wants to hold onto power," said Bill Fletcher, Jr., Director of Field Services and Education Department at AFGE and the author of the book "Solidarity Divided,"  "Now counting the numbers realizing he could lose out to Wilhelm."

Wilhelm, formerly the president of HERE, is trying to keep UNITE HERE together and consolidate his own power over the whole organization, with the help of a HERE-allied majority on the union's executive board.

Ironically, Raynor and Wilhelm are hamstrung by a constitution they negotiated themselves. Each president has veto power over the other on almost all major decisions, from the budget to organizing campaigns.

Wilhelm and his faction of former HERE officials control the union's General Executive Board, but the board has little power to act independently when the presidents don't agree.

The simmering tensions within UNITE HERE devolved into all-out war in December of 2008, when president Wilhelm commandeered an emergency meeting on the union's Executive Committee in Long Island, NY. The was ostensibly called to plan strategy on Employee Free Choice and discuss the union's own budget crisis.

Wilhelm and his allies shocked the UNITE faction when they used their majority to reset the agenda pass a series of surprise "budget steps" that would, amongst other things, have abolished the union's communications department and most of its in-house legal team.

Outraged by what he saw as an attempted hostile takeover and an unconstitutional usurpation of his authority, Raynor filed a federal lawsuit against his fellow president, asking the court to reverse the resolutions and stop Wilhelm from reintroducing them at the upcoming General Executive Board meeting in Washington, D.C. in early February. The meeting came and went, but the court didn't act.

At the same GEB meeting, the UNITE faction tried unsuccessfully to pass a resolution that would have allowed UNITE to secede.

Shortly before the meeting, the UNITE faction filed a separate federal lawsuit against Wilhelm and his allies demanding that the constitution of UNITE HERE be declared null and void because the 2004 merger between the two unions had failed to achieve its stated objective of organizing large numbers of unorganized workers.

Legal experts said it is extremely unlikely that a court would dissolve UNITE HERE's constitution in response to the lawsuit. The court would have to make its decision based on UNITE HERE's own constitution, and there's nothing in the constitution that allows for dissolution on these grounds. In fact, the constitution says that the union cannot be dissolved if even three locals support its continued existence.