National Federation of Public and Private Employees

The Executive Council selected Thomas Reilly Donahue to serve out the remaining months of Kirkland’s term, however a the AFL-CIO convention later that year, Donahue lost the seat to John J. Sweeney who has been re-elected three times since.
At the time of his election, he was serving his fourth four-year term as president of SEIU, which grew from 625,000 to 1.1 million members under his leadership. An AFL-CIO vice president since 1980, Sweeney was born May 5, 1934, in Bronx, N.Y.
His trade union career began as a research assistant with the Ladies Garment Workers. In 1960, he joined SEIU as a contract director for New York City Local 32B. He went on to become union president and to lead two citywide strikes of apartment maintenance workers. In 1980, he was elected president of the international. Sweeney is the author of America Needs A Raise: Fighting for Economic Security and Social Justice.
The AFL-CIO merger and its accompanying agreements brought about the elimination of jurisdictional disputes between unions that had plagued the labor movement and alienated public sympathy in earlier years. The unions placed a new priority on organizing workers in areas, industries and plants where no effective system of labor representation yet existed. In many cases, it meant crossing the barriers of old thinking and tired methods to reach the employees of companies, which for years had resisted unions. Thanks to the foresight, and commitment of our forefathers, today, millions of people enjoy the benefits of union membership.
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) is a voluntary federation of 53 national and international labor unions.

Today's unions represent nearly 12 million working women and men of every race and ethnicity and from every walk of life. We are teachers and truck drivers, musicians and miners, firefighters and farm workers, bakers and bottlers, engineers and editors, pilots and public employees, doctors and nurses, painters and laborers—and more.

Since its founding, the AFL-CIO and its affiliate unions have been the single most effective force in America for enabling working people to build better lives and futures for their families.