Is the American labor movement irrelevant?

FAIR offers the press release "As Ford Downsizes Its Workforce, Bush Plans to Downsize Work":
The American worker is caught between outsourcing jobs and importing foreign workers, and no one in Washington is standing up for them. As 55,000 Ford workers join 50,000 General Motors workers facing the prospect of finding new jobs, the Bush administration is pushing a new foreign guestworker plan to import workers, the Democrat leadership is pursuing increased immigration, and organized labor is disintegrating, with a growing number of unions focused on organizing immigrant workers rather than defending American jobs...

..."While the American worker agonizes over where the next paycheck will come from, and whether it will support a family, the administration and the Senate try to pass new laws to increase the giveaway of American jobs to foreign workers," observed Dan Stein, president of FAIR. "The irrelevance of the American labor movement will be permanently fixed in the mind of American workers if it fails to act in defense of American jobs for American workers. The breakaway unions that are focused on organizing immigrant workers, most of them illegal entrants, are not only destroying the union movement, they are selling out American workers."

Comments

When McCain-Kennedy first came out, the AFL-CIO endorsed it. A recent NYT article says that the AFL-CIO no longer endorses the "guest worker" bill, which could be McC-K or another one that is emerging. Perhaps seeing union construction workers in New Orleans fired and replaced by illegal aliens had an effect.
As for organizing illegal workers - or for that matter, newly legalized ones - there will be a surplus of unskilled labor should any of the amnesties pass and that doesn't bode well for organizing.

"no one in Washington is standing up for them"

Perhaps given the advent of pervasive media, with all the sound bites and fluff plug pieces that surround an election, politicians have rightly come to believe, if implicitly, that they don't really need to do old fashioned things like actually address and legislate to the concerns of the electorate in order to win -- just hire the right people to orchestrate your "campaign", and pay mind to the big donors who finance it. Nowadays it is hard not to see individuals who give money to candidates as saps. One exception perhaps: the environment.