Unions forced to organize outside toothless labor laws

By DON McINTOSH, Associate Editor

If American unions are to halt their decline in numbers and power, they will have to undertake strategically targeted large-scale organizing campaigns and work outside the legal handcuffs of U.S. labor law.

That was the message at a July 18 Portland conference on union organizing, the third such gathering since the Oregon AFL-CIO began stepping up its efforts to support organizing in 1999.

In sync with a tone set by the national AFL-CIO, the June 2000 convention of the Oregon AFL-CIO declared a two-year target of 17,000 new members, after it was determined that 9,300 new members would be needed just to maintain current density.

The results have been mixed, Oregon AFL-CIO President Tim Nesbitt told union leaders and organizers at the conference. The numerical goal had been defined as new members with a first contract with their employer. Slightly less than 18,000 workers joined unions in the two years, but only 4,292 of them have won a contract thus far.

Of course, skewing these numbers substantially are the 13,122 state home care workers organized in one swoop by Service Employees Local 503. Those workers have yet to secure a first contract, though they expect to.

Nesbitt said the June 2000 goal reflected campaigns already under way at the time, including the home care campaign. He acknowledged that the federation won't achieve similar gains in coming years. Leaving aside the home care workers, the number of new workers under contract was less than half the number needed to maintain union density.

Union density - the proportion of union members in the workforce - is a concern at all levels of labor movement leadership; in the United States, union density has fallen from 35 percent in 1955, its highpoint, to 13.5 percent last year.

The Oregon AFL-CIO is taking stock of the experience of the last two years and is pursuing discussions with leaders of its member unions to develop new targets. Based on those conversations, Oregon AFL-CIO staff will announce a new three-year organizing goal at its September Executive Board meeting.

Part of the problem has been resources. The Oregon AFL-CIO wants member unions to make organizing a top priority and commit appropriate resources to it, but the federation's Committee on Organizing reported in June that the number of full-time union organizers had fallen to 64 from 65 the year before.

Several speakers at the July 18 conference stressed that organizing is integral to winning results for existing members. In order to work, though, organizing has to be strategic. To be strategic, unions need to know their employers and their industries inside and out, including relationships and pressure points, said Jim Grogan, laundry campaign national coordinator for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE.)

"It's like in the military," Grogan said. "If you don't come up with a strategy, you fight your enemies' strategies." UNITE, Grogan's union, has been devastated by the near total replacement of U.S. clothing manufacturing by Third World sweatshops. Four years ago, the union decided to move into industrial laundry operations, which wash laundry for hotels and hospitals. In the last three years, 20,000 workers have been organized in that industry, one-tenth of its total employment.

"We're not organizing because it's the right thing to do," Grogan said. "We're doing it because we have no other choice. We're under attack."

Grogan said UNITE has chosen areas where existing membership can help organize, and it has used every weapon in the union arsenal as it set out to organize all employers in a regional market so as not to put union employers at a competitive disadvantage.

And they lost, Grogan said, until they realized that organizing within the customary legal framework of U.S. labor law is a recipe for failure. Those laws give employers nearly every advantage and have little teeth to keep companies from breaking the law.

Rather than file for an election and wait two months while union supporters are fired and anti-union workers hired, UNITE has in some cases demanded recognition and then gone on strike immediately when it's refused, picketing customers hard in attempt to deal quick losses.

Kevin Mulligan, organizing coordinator for District 7 of Communication Workers of America (CWA), echoed Grogan's appeal to forget about the government protecting workers' rights to organize. "The National Labor Relations Board is a joke," Mulligan said.

Mulligan said his union woke up late to a management strategy of keeping a small number of workers fat and happy while tripling the industry around them through new units, spinoffs, and contracting out, with all the new work going to non-union workers.

CWA's response has been to bargain hard for a streamlined process of organizing new units. These include employer commitments of neutrality and automatic union recognition when more than half the workers sign union cards in new units. Mulligan said the union made "bargaining to organize" its top priority, reiterating it in every communication with employers, and even striking or trading some economic demands in several cases to win organizing rights. As a result of those efforts, he said, CWA organized 40,000 new members in the last decade. Many of the recent organizing successes in Oregon have also used this "bargaining to organize," resulting in as many as 1,000 new members among five Oregon unions.

But most organizing by Oregon unions is still done through traditional election processes, and at small units that add little to union power - over the last two years, the median size was 24 workers.

The Oregon AFL-CIO is pushing member unions to strategize how to generate and win larger campaigns that will contribute to building union power and density. The federation is offering to help unions craft these strategies, and expects to hire a full-time organizing coordinator by September.

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