WASHINGTON – The head of the largest member union of the AFL-CIO said the labor coalition has three months to begin a root-and-branch overhaul of its activities, or he may start building a new, rival labor coalition.

Calling the umbrella organization a “leaky boat” and the labor movement itself “divided” in the face of dwindling membership and waning political clout, the president of the 1.7-millionmember Service Employees International Union, Andrew Stern, urged proposals that threatened to alienate some members of the umbrella group.

At a closed-door post-election postmortem meeting, where labor leaders debated their movement’s future as well as that of the Democratic Party, Mr. Stern asked his colleagues “either to change the AFL-CIO or build something stronger,” he told reporters afterward. The federation is comprised of 60 unions representing 13 million workers.

Mr. Stern presented a contentious plan for action that includes a $25-million-a-year strategy to organize the retail giant Wal-Mart, sweeping consolidations of smaller unions into negotiating giants, and the empowerment of the AFL-CIO to impose a united line in collective bargaining. The aim of that would be to prevent individual unions from making concessions that might undercut the bargaining positions of others.

After the meeting, which included a visit by the defeated Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Kerry, the president of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney, said he welcomed Mr. Stern’s ideas. He said the executive council would vote on the proposals at a meeting in January, after an “open and thorough discussion,” rather than waiting until a planned July convention.

Some union leaders said, however, they are ready to defect from the AFLCIO if it tampers with their autonomy.

The international president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, R. Thomas Buffenbarger, said he would prefer to see the AFL-CIO focus on legislation and politics.

“I’ll worry about collective bargaining,” he told reporters after the meeting.

His union has passed a resolution authorizing its withdrawal from the umbrella organization if the group takes a position contrary to its interests.

“We don’t want to leave the AFLCIO,” said Mr. Buffenbarger, but he added, “We will defend ourselves.”

Mr. Sweeney said he hoped to forge a “middle road” between Mr. Stern’s proposals and the stances of individual unions.

“We have to recognize the fact that individual unions are autonomous,” he said.

Mr. Sweeney agreed the AFL-CIO could do more to unionize the rapidly growing service sector, and to put up a more united front on issues such as health benefits, which were among Mr. Stern’s proposals.

“We have to really be thick-skinned about taking a hard look at ourselves, what’s working and what’s not working,” he said.

Mr. Stern, though, said his proposals are “not a menu” of options, from which the leadership could pick and choose. He said that if the executive committee does not adopt his proposals, he will take them to the membership at large, to the AFL-CIO’s convention in July, or possibly defect and create a new organization.

“If there was no hope of change, we could build something stronger,” he told reporters.

After the meeting, the international president of the 1.2-million member United Steelworkers of America, Leo Gerard, appeared to brush off the suggestions for radical change. “I don’t need lectures on mergers,” he said, noting that there have been many in the past few years. “If everyone want to catch up to what we’ve been doing,” he said, “I think that’s great,” he added.

Mr. Sweeney stressed that the AFLCIO was already working on a number of the same issues and has launched a task force and a research project on unionizing Wal-Mart, for example.

But Mr. Stern dismissed those efforts as insufficient. ‘We’ve fooled ourselves enough times in this labor movement, we’ve written enough reports,” Mr. Stern said. Workers need action, he said, “not a smoke screen, not a process, not a committee, not waiting another four years to see if it works.”

Mr. Stern vehemently denied that he is advancing the plan as a platform from which to challenge Mr. Sweeney for the AFL-CIO presidency. Rather, he said, he is “hopeful” that he will succeed in work from within the organization. “I am ready to stay and fight and fix it,” he said.

Behind the closed doors, labor leaders also took aim at the Democratic Party, accusing Democrats of poor organizations and infrastructure at the grassroots level, according to several people present.

Mr. Sweeney said the Democratic Party “has to take a hard look at itself.” In many states “at the grassroots, there is no Democratic organization,” he said.

“More and more, I think, the labor movement has taken over the functions at the grassroots level that the Democratic Party used to exercise,” he said.

Mr. Kerry thanked the unions repeatedly for their organizational help and the tens of millions of dollars they spent on last week’s election, in which he received 65% of the union vote nation wide, and 68% in battleground states.

“We had a very good discussion with John Kerry. He was energized and in campaign mode,” Mr. Sweeney said. He said the Massachusetts senator had told them he would continue to fight for health care, a higher minimum wage, a better trade policy, and tax reform.

Several labor leaders said the Democratic Party needs to differentiate itself better from Republicans, especially on issues that affect the middle class.

“We need a champion in the U.S. Senate and maybe it is John Kerry,” Mr. Buffenbarger said. “Time will tell.”

But Mr. Stern derided the complaints as a diversion from internal changes, saying, “It was a broad anybody-but-us-needs-to-change discussion.”

Asked for his assessment of what went wrong in the election, Mr. Gerard said, “Nothing went wrong. We didn’t get enough votes.”

Meanwhile, an anti-union group, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, asked the Federal Election Commission yesterday to investigate Mr. Stern’s union, the SEIU, claiming it unlawfully spent workers’ dues to elect Democrats, through donations to the anti-Bush group America Coming Together, the Associated Press reported.

“We are confident we are in compliance with the law,” spokeswoman T.J. Michels was quoted as responding.