Ever since Andy Stern, President of the Service Employees International Union called for a restructuring of labor, a great deal of attention has been focused on what it means on a national level. Tracy Suprise, organizing director of SEIU1199-Wisconsin, told WIN on Thursday that restructuring is important on the local level because many states are watching their union membership numbers drop.

[Suprise1]:That tells me that no matter how good we are at collective bargaining, no matter how good we are in terms of being a player in the political action arena, we're not organizing to even stay with a percentage of the workforce - we're losing ground. That to me is a clear cut message as to why we need to step out of the box and we've got to do things differently.

Suprise also says that unions need to try to work together to take on some of the larger injustices in the world:

[Suprise2]: And we've got to start taking on the global issues of trade unionists being killed by Coca-Cola for trying to organize a union in Colombia and we got thunderously silent on the issues of child labor. Those are the types of things that we can not do as individual unions, but we have to be able to do this as more unified, collective voice on the national level.

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