Just how far left has the AFL-CIO lurched under the leadership of its president, John Sweeney, who took over the union in 1995? So far left that the labor federation is coming in to the left of Senator Kennedy and Senator Schumer on the immigration bill voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. Mr. Sweeney, 71, pronounced himself “deeply troubled” by the guest worker programs that are part of the bill. “Guest workers programs are a bad idea and harm all workers. They cast workers into a perennial second-class status, and unfairly put their fates into their employers’ hands, creating a situation ripe for exploitation,” Mr. Sweeney said. “They encourage employers to turn good jobs into temporary jobs at reduced wages and diminished working conditions and contribute to the growing class of workers laboring in poverty.”

Mr. Sweeney, in other words, would have you believe that Senators Kennedy and Schumer, Democrats who usually pretty much do labor’s bidding, back exploitative employers and want to “harm all workers.” Count us in defense of Senators Kennedy and Schumer on this one. With unemployment running below 5% nationally, more workers are needed to help meet the demand for labor, and there’s plenty of precedent for time-limited immigrant worker visas that have with them a path toward permanent residency and, eventually, citizenship. Mr. Sweeney may want to create a labor shortage that will drive up wages for workers already here while leaving would-be immigrants locked out of the American dream. But not even Senators Kennedy and Schumer are buying that one.

Nor, apparently, are the many unions that have left the AFL-CIO under Mr. Sweeney’s leadership and joined under the “Change to Win” rubric. A leader of that splinter group, Anna Burger of the Service Employees International Union, issued a statement praising the Judiciary Committee’s bill. The AFL-CIO’s Web site last night was expressing solidarity with workers in France striking against what the Web site described as “a new labor law pushed through by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin that makes it easier for bosses to fire young workers during their first two years on the job.” The AFL-CIO site noted that, “In this country every day, employers fire at-will workers who don’t have the protection of union contracts – young, old and in between.” There you pretty much have it. The AFL-CIO under John Sweeney: To the left of Senator Kennedy and to the left of France.