[Excerpt] Labor unity in the U.S. lasted exactly half a century. At the convention to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1955 merger of the American Federation of Labor with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, bitterness and rebellion swept away plans of celebration. On the eve of the August 2005 event in Chicago, seven major unions announced that they would break away from the AFL-CIO. Six weeks later they formally established the Change to Win federation, spawning both proclamations of labor’s rebirth and simultaneous warnings of the movement’s destruction.