LAS VEGAS - During argumentative meetings of the AFL-CIO's executive council this week in Las Vegas, a disagreement between two former Philadelphia labor activists turned into a curse-filled shouting match that could be heard in the hall.

In a casino conference room, Andrew L. Stern, head of the 1.8-million-member Service Employees International Union, and Gerald W. McEntee, who leads the 1.4-million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, were fighting over who should represent 50,000 child-care workers in Illinois.

Jurisdictional disputes are nothing new in organized labor, and this one was but a subplot in a pivotal time for the AFL-CIO. But it spoke to an underlying challenge in labor's struggle to reverse a trend of declining union membership.

AFL-CIO president John J. Sweeney will have to resolve the issue. The moral of the story, labor leaders say, is that, in issues big and small, labor unions need to fight for workers, rather than against each other.

Yet a larger battle between Stern, who has threatened to pull his members out over strategies for organizing, and McEntee has the AFL-CIO looking closely at itself.

Leaders of international unions came out of the meetings charged up, stirred by a chance to reexamine the core mission of the AFL-CIO, with its 58 unions representing 12.9 million workers. One, a Stern ally and a possible AFL-CIO presidential candidate, called this week's gathering a relief from the "highly scripted meetings" of the past.

'A high degree of tension'

"I think there's a high degree of tension," said John W. Wilhelm, a leader of Unite Here, the hotel and textile workers' union, who may try to unseat Sweeney in July. "We're in deep trouble. We need to have a debate, but also a fight about how to turn this around."

While the number of U.S. workers has risen 42 percent, to 123.6 million, in the last 25 years, the number in unions has fallen 26 percent, to 15.5 million.

What union leaders seem to agree on is that something must change if organized labor is to retain any clout on the job or as a political force.

One thing that must change, Wilhelm said Thursday, is labor's knee-jerk support of Democrats. "The AFL-CIO political program has devolved to the point where we are only an appendage, or a wing, of the Democratic Party," he said.

Three days earlier, Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean - who for a time had been the front-runner for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination - had told the labor leaders that the strength of the Democratic Party and of organized labor are closely tied.

Dean's visit came as arguments swirled over how much emphasis the AFL-CIO should put on politics.

There again, Stern and McEntee clashed. Stern, who got his union start as a social worker in Philadelphia in the early 1970s, prefers an emphasis on recruitment and organizing. McEntee, who was a leader in AFSCME's District Council 33 in Philadelphia at the time, says labor must change a harsh political environment so it can recruit more workers. Stern says that if labor doesn't first recruit more workers, it won't have enough clout to change the political environment.

Sweeney's proposal

Sweeney has proposed increasing political and legislative funding by one-third, to $45 million a year. And he would convert the AFL-CIO's organizing program of technical assistance and grants into $15 million worth of dues rebates for unions to use to organize in their core industries.

Stern and Wilhelm, along with allies from the Laborers' International and the United Food and Commercial Workers Unions had backed a Teamsters plan that would have rebated up to $45 million in dues for such core-industry organizing.

That's partly what made the dispute between Stern and McEntee on Illinois child-care workers so interesting. Which could rightfully claim these workers as a core industry?

Both unions represent public workers - the Illinois child-care workers are independent contractors who work primarily for the state. Stern's SEIU had been organizing those workers for years, and had negotiated an agreement with the Illinois government to allow the workers to unionize. But McEntee's AFSCME says that it has more experience representing child-care workers - 150,000 throughout the nation - and that it already represents state employees in Illinois.

Sweeney will probably be able to resolve this dispute. But the larger philosophical question is much harder.