Newly re-elected AFL-CIO president John Sweeney just saw the Teamsters and and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) leave the organization he has led since 1995. Earlier in his career Sweeney headed the SEIU and helped launch the career of Andrew Stern, the man who succeeded him as SEIU president and who led the exodus from the AFL-CIO last week.

The conflict is described by many Sweeney supporters as an attempted power grab on Stern’s part. The dissenting unions say they want to put more energy into organizing and less — although still significant — energy into electoral politics.

Sweeney’s position is that unions need to elect Democratic politicians to help reverse the erosion of union membership and to roll back the more restrictive organizing environment imposed by Republican Congresses. Stern’s is that politicians don’t sign up new members: unions do.

I’m no expert on union politics, but my vote is with Stern. Although Democrats almost universally laud unions and in many instances depend on organized labor’s ability to mobilize voters and cash on behalf of Democrats, a good chunk of the party has effectively abandoned the positions that identified Democrats as friends of union workers. And any other workers, for that matter.

You can elect all the Democrats you want, but if you elect ones that support legislation such as the recently passed bankruptcy “reform” bill, otherwise known as the Indentured Servitude Act of 2005, there’s not a lot of point to it.

House Democratic whip Steny Hoyer, the man responsible for lining up Democrats to support their leadership’s positions on legislation, voted for the bill, as did more than 70 other House Democrats. Hoyer said his office was telling members to “vote their conscience” on the bill.

Some of the bill’s supporters may have been voting their consciences. Some of them may have been voting their campaign contributions. But if your conscience or your coffers tell you to screw people who go bankrupt because of catastrophic medical expenses or because they took an entrepreneurial leap and failed or because of any number of other reasons good people go broke, you’re not much of a Democrat and any union working to elect you isn’t getting much for their time and money beyond a resounding slap in the face.

Stern and the SEIU have the right idea. Throwing an ever-decreasing amount of money and bodies into electing Democrats who embrace the interests of credit card companies and big business over those of workers is pointless. Growing the ranks of union members isn’t.

And Stern’s union represents the workers most in need of support in a country where the rights they were literally dying to obtain in the not so distant past are being steadily eroded and where income inequality is by some measures greater now than it has been since World War Two, and accelerating. Getting those people unionized and voting will do a great deal more for them and other working Americans than getting Steny Hoyer re-elected will.

The departure of the Teamsters and the SEIU, and probably at least two other large unions in the near future, should be a wake-up call for Democrats: if you want union support, support unions. If you want more union money and more union manpower at your back, support laws that support unions.

Support universal health care so that no one in this country winds up a victim of Draconian new bankruptcy rules because they got sick.

Support a minimum wage that supports minimum living conditions. Support educational and job retraining benefits for workers who lose their jobs to the economy or to corporate swindlers such as those at Enron and Worldcom. Support new pension laws that don’t permit corporations to bail on their obligations, leaving an underfunded Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation holding the bag and in many instances paying out only a fraction of the benefits employees worked a lifetime to accumulate.

And support campaign finance reform that will remove the temptation of relying on giant credit corporations to get you elected or re-elected. Study the differences between Costco and Wal-Mart, and see if you can figure out how it is that one pays more than double the average wage of the other and still makes a dandy profit.

I don’t know how the fractures in the labor movement will play out. My hope is they’ll refocus unions on growing and on supporting only those politicians who will help them grow and who vote to protect the rights of workers.

The bottom line is that no matter the corruption and incompetence and inefficiencies that sometimes bedevil unions, every advance in the rights of workers has been good for this country. We need a strong middle class, and unions have been the springboard out of poverty and into if not affluence, at least security. Union insistence on decent working conditions and environmental protections has been the driving force behind many of the protections working Americans enjoy whether or not they’re unionized; for every former hippie and Nader disciple in the environmental movement there’s a steelworker or a meatpacker who has had just as much of an impact, whose demands for a safer environment inside the plant have helped create a safer one outside it as well.

Those are the people Democrats need to support, and if a few Democratic politicians lose their jobs and the swanky benefits that come with those jobs because Andy Stern is busy helping less well-paid workers keep their jobs and get benefits amounting to a fraction of what Congresscritters get, well, tough. Any Democrat who can go to the doctor for free or pick up a $5 prescription at the pharmacy or collect that $10,000 paycheck every month and doesn’t think about what he or she can do for people living on a quarter of that or less with few or none of the benefits doesn’t deserve to be called a Democrat and certainly doesn’t deserve to be in office.

Unions shouldn’t be playing not to lose and neither should Democrats, and neither will win until they figure that out.

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