The PATP is a new chapter of United Steelworker’s union. Why steelworkers? Because the union isn’t just a steelworker’s union, although it retains that name in common usage for historical reasons (and also because it’s short enough to say). The union’s full name is The United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union. Years of erosion of union strength and membership in the US has led to a lot of union mergers.

The PATP is not part of the DPE. The DPE is a branch of the AFL-CIO. The AFL-CIO is a federation of unions — a metaunion, if you will. The DPE helped the PATP organize, that’s the DPE’s job. But the DPE isn’t a union itself, it’s an umbrella organization for professional employees represented by the AFL-CIO’s member unions.

I mention this distinction because the claimed “con” is based on an implicit misrepresentation of what the USW is (it is not, counter to its common name, just a union that deals with steelworkers), and it’s important to attribute the misrepresentation to the party that was motivated to misrepresent things, and not the newspaper that merely quoted it.