[Pen-l] Are U.S. Unions Ready for the Challenge of a New Period?

[c b]

Are U.S. Unions Ready for the Challenge of a New Period?
by Kim Moody

New Politics   Summer 2009   Vol:XII-3

http://newpolitics.mayfirst.org/fromthearchives?nid=89

BY NOW IT SEEMS CLEAR that the United States has
entered a new period of contradictory trends that
presents a profound challenge to organized labor. First
there is the deepening world recession that is bringing
down some of American capitalism’s most high profile
institutions from Wall Street to Detroit. At the same
time, of course, it is wiping out millions of jobs, 4.4
million from December 2007 to February 2009. Slightly
less dramatic is the changing climate of social and
political opinion in the US that has been taking shape
for a number of years and made the landmark victory of
Barack Obama possible. This change is not simply that
the dark clouds of neoconservatism have lifted. Nor is
it that we have a Democratic administration and
Congress, as these predictably disappoint. At root is a
definite mood shift away from faith in markets and
business leaders that just might help unions recruit
and open the door to bolder action.

There are a number of ways to measure this shift in
public opinion away from the conservative hegemony that
seemed to solidify when Newt Gingrich led his far right
posse to seize control of Congress in 1994-95. First is
the rise of pro-union sentiment. When Gingrich took the
gavel, 39 percent of non-managerial workers were
favorable to unions. A decade later it was up to 53
percent, according to a Peter D. Hart poll. If the
attitudes toward unions have become more favorable,
views of America’s leading capitalist institutions have
gone largely sour. NBC/Wall Street Journal surveys
taken over the past decade show that those who had
“little or no confidence in large corporations† rose
from 24 percent in 1998 to 54 percent in late 2008.
Similarly negative views of the “financial industryâ€
rose from a mere 17 percent in 2000 to 55 percent in
late 2008. Another indication was, of course, the
incredibly negative ratings of George W. Bush from 2005
on. This general shift was one of the underlying
factors that made the election of America’s first
African-American president possible.


What of the impact of this new administration and
Congress on union hopes? President Obama is supposedly
committed to passing the Employee Free Choice Act
(EFCA) on which the hopes and dreams of America’s labor
leadership rest. He owes a lot to the unions, who put a
quarter of a million people in the streets and on the
phones and whose members voted by 67 percent for him —
69 percent in key battleground states according to the
AFLCIO. But Obama and the Democratic majority in
Congress also owe much to certain sections of big
business. Since the Democrats took Congress in 2006,
business money has shifted from Republican to
Democratic campaign coffers, as it usually does when
they dominate Congress and its committees. According to
Federal Election Commission figures, defense, FIRE, and
health care all went from giving more to Republicans
prior to 2007 to giving a majority of funds to
Democrats. Even Obama, who has made much of the
majority of small campaign contributions he received,
got over a quarter of his money from contributions of
more than $1,000. About 2,000 contributors bundled
gifts of $25,000 or more. Among these big donors Wall
Street and related investment and real estate firms
were well represented. On top of this, big business has
mounted a multi-million dollar campaign to defeat EFCA.


Obama has made pro-union gestures by appointing
union-friendly people in second-tier positions, notably
Secretary of Labor and Chair of the NLRB.
Vice-President Joe Biden and Labor Secretary Hilda
Solis have both appeared at AFL-CIO events. But, at the
same time, Obama has surrounded himself with union-shy
Clinton veterans and imperial praetorians whose
interests lie more in the bailout of global capital
than of the working class at home. He has the votes to
pass EFCA, even in the Senate, but there is massive
business resistance. While Obama does represent
something new in American politics, he is still the
leader of the free (market) world. At most with most
previous Democratic administrations since the Second
World War, union issues have tended to slide down the
legislative agenda and face compromises or even defeat
as capital asserts its right to rule. The EFCA was
introduced in Congress on March 10, but will certainly
go through a long process involving possible
compromises. Obama has hinted that the bill may have to
be amended. If labor hopes to win the EFCA in a timely
and useful form it will have to fight for it. Fit to
Fight?

BUT ARE THE UNIONS FIT TO FIGHT? Basically, many union
leaders have had two strategies for survival and
increased fitness: mergers and new organizing. Mergers
have been a matter of survival for small and shrinking
unions. For the larger unions that have absorbed
smaller ones, mergers were meant to increase the
membership size, financial resources, and presumably
power of individual unions. As many unions shrank, the
number of mergers increased from 24 in the 1960s to 42
in the 1990s. Mostly these were absorptions of smaller
unions by larger ones. Increasingly, they had little
industrial or jurisdictional logic. The bigger unions
became conglomerate organizations. By the 1990s almost
half these mergers were carried out by five
conglomerates. With the merger of UNITE and HERE in
2004, six conglomerates dominated the merger process
and accounted for a majority of the membership of the
pre-split AFL-CIO. The multi-jurisdictional giants
included SEIU, IBT, UFCW, USWA, and CWA. UNITE-HERE and
the UAW followed close behind.


Did this growth through merger and absorption bring the
resources and power that had been promised?
Financially, all of these conglomerate unions remain
precarious, in most cases more so than before. The fact
is that most unions cannot finance their top-heavy
structures through members’ dues. Most cover about 8090
percent of expenditures from dues and fees. The rest
comes from investments, a risky practice in today’s
world. Even to do this, the big conglomerates have
raised dues.The Teamsters, SEIU, CWA, and UFCW had some
of the largest dues increases between 2000 and 2004 and
still couldn’t cover expenses with member-based
revenue. The main reason is that the conglomerates must
administer more contracts and sustain more officials
and divisions. In most cases the union’s bureaucracy is
inflated even more. While sheer size might increase
their political clout to some degree, the bargaining
record of the conglomerates in recent years often lags
behind the average wage increase of all union
agreements and seldom exceeds it. Whatever mergers do
for this or that union, they clearly have not
contributed to the growth and revival of the movement
as a whole. Unity from Strength?

SINCE DECEMBER, top leaders of the AFLCIO,
Change-To-Win Federation (CTW), and the National
Education Association (NEA) have met at least three
times to discuss the possibility of some sort of
unification either in the AFL-CIO or a rumored
federation of federations. The Obama administration has
encouraged this to simplify pacification, while the
imminent departure of John Sweeney opens some doors.
But the rush to re-unify is above all an admission of
failure on the organizing front, particularly for CTW.
Both federations saw a drop in overall membership since
the split in 2005. In 2006-2008, the AFL-CIO saw a drop
of 146,939 members in its affiliates, a 1.7 percent
decline. The CTW, however, saw the membership of its
affiliates drop a net 458,083, a disastrous 8.6 percent
drop. The only CTW union to show any growth through
organizing since the split was the SEIU.


Here something needs to be said about the Bureau of
Labor Statistics figures for union membership in 2008.
The BLS figures show a net gain of 428,000 union
members for 2008. The AFL-CIO and CTW figures showing a
combined drop of over 600,000 members are based on the
fiscal years of their affiliates, meaning in most cases
that the last three months of 2008 are not counted. So,
they are not strictly comparable to the BLS figures.
Yet, the combined drop of over 600,000 members means
that the gap between the federation figures and those
of the BLS exceeds a million union members. How do we
account for this? Some part of this may simply stem
from statistical problems with the current population
survey on which the BLS figures are based. Then too,
almost two-thirds of the recorded gains are in the
public sector where employment grew significantly in
2008. My own theory is that the bulk of the BLS
increase came from what might be called the “Obama
Effect.† That is, the intense canvassing of members by
their unions during the 2008 elections probably made
more workers aware of their union membership — hence
the statistical surge. If this is the case, the 2008
increase represents a greater consciousness of union
membership rather than actual growth, particularly in
the private sector.


The 2008 Department of Labor LM-2 membership figures
are not yet available for most individual unions, but
the organizing record since 2000 is not encouraging.
>From 2000 through 2007, only 17 unions grew as a result
of recruiting new members. Nine of these were public
sector unions, including the huge NEA, which added
237,612 new members over those years, excluding the
400,000 in the New York State AFT who affiliated with
NEA in 2006. Similarly, the SEIU’s legendary growth,
over 300,000 from 2000 through 2007, was mostly in the
public sector. These were largely home health care
workers recruited through political deals with
governors whom the SEIU funded and helped elect,
including the now disgraced Blagojevich of Illinois.
Besides the SEIU, only eight mostly private sector
unions grew in this period.Three were construction
unions, and five were smaller, occupationally-based
unions. The fastest growing union in the United States
was not the SEIU, but the small International
Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers
which grew by 42 percent, compared to the SEIU’s 23
percent.The second fastest growing union was the SEIU’s
arch rival, the California Nurses Association/National
Nurses Organizing Committee.


What figures we have for 2008 are not encouraging
either.The SEIU, usually the growth engine of the
movement, “united,† as they say, only 89,000 workers in
2008 and 55,000 of those came from the affiliation of
the North Carolina State Employees Association. The
Teamsters claim 43,000 new members. The CWA’s 2008 LM-2
shows a slight decline, while UNITE-HERE admits a drop
in members. All of this points to organized labor’s
inability to organize in the private sector, the heart
of American capitalism. Card Check, Reality Check

PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS HAVE GROWN over the years, while a
majority of private sector unions have lost ground —
including most of the big conglomerates. The net loss
of private sector members since 2000 was almost a
million. As we saw, the split didn’t change that. But
neither did the other panacea tried by several unions —
neutrality agreements and card checks. These are
voluntary methods of gaining recognition without going
through the unbalanced and ineffective channels of an
NLRB election. Recognition is granted on the basis of a
majority show of authorization cards, and in most cases
the employer agrees to not attack the union. In recent
years fewer than 100,000 workers have been recruited
annually through NLRB elections with a win rate of
about 55 percent. So, several unions have taken the
neutrality/card check route to growth. One study
identifies five unions that use it fairly regularly,
UNITEHERE, CWA, UAW, SEIU, and the Steelworkers. The
Teamsters and Food and Commercial Workers also use this
approach.


The win rate for card check recognition is considerably
higher than for NLREB elections, around 68 percent,
according to one study. Furthermore, while hard figures
are rare, the AFLCIO claims its unions organize more
workers through this channel than through the NLRB. In
2005, it gained 150,000 new private sector members
through card check or other voluntary methods, compared
to 70,000 through the NLRB. It is also the case that
the targets of card check campaigns are generally much
larger on average. Not surprisingly, this tactic works
best with employers with whom the union already has a
longstanding bargaining relationship. This is often
called “bargaining to organize.† The CWA’s neutrality
agreement with AT&T netted it 40,000 members at its
wireless subsidiary (formerly SBC Cingular) from 1997
to 2007. UNITEHERE’s agreement with Hilton and
Star-wood Hotels brought it 6,000 new members from 2004
through 2006, while the UAW’s eleven agreements with
auto-parts suppliers won it 20,000 from 2002 through
2006. The Teamsters have such an agreement with UPS
Express (formerly Overnite) and claim to have organized
12,000 workers under this agreement in 2008.

All this comes at a price. In most neutrality
agreements, the union agrees not to attack management,
removing the “them v. us† sensibility that helps build
a union identity. The biggest problem, however, comes
with employers who have no prior relationship with a
union and wish to keep it that way. Most U.S. companies
are not prepared to volunteer for unionization. So, the
campaign to convince them often becomes a long drawn
out and costly one, not unlike those through the NLRB.
An example is the SEIU’s successful campaign to
organize 5,000 janitors in Houston. It took months of
mobilization and a ten-day strike to get to card check
and then recognition and another year and a strike to
get a contract. Similarly, the CWA’s 1997 neutrality
agreement at Cingular Wirless (later AT&T) was,
according to Dorothee Benz, “the result of years of
struggle and organizing.† Writing in Working USA, Benz
pointed out that to evaluate the effectiveness of this
approach, “we have to look at the process it takes to
get to neutrality or card check agreements as well as
the results from such agreements.†This tactic was
rendered more difficult in 2007 when the Bush NLRB
ruled in its Dana/Metaldyne decision that the
traditional “recognition bar† that gave a newly
recognized union a reasonable amount of time to
negotiate a contract before anyone could file for
de-certification no longer held in card check cases.


Most of the unions that use this approach have failed
to grow, losing members faster than they gain them. One
reason is that most of these campaigns are part of
highly targeted, very expensive, drawn out campaigns
where employer resistance remains high. The highly
praised Justice for Janitors national campaign,
UNITEHERE’s Hotel Workers Rising, and the drawn out
Teamster campaign at UPS Express are examples. While
this approach has its strengths, it also has at least
two drawbacks. Janice Fine, writing in New Labor Forum,
notes that it took SEIU ten years to organize 900,000
workers for a net gain of 600,000 at a cost of $1
billion. She argues that at this pace “To reach the
same goal in health care, it would take upwards of
thirty years, at a cost of three billion.† In other
words, the resource-based, targeted road to growth is
very long, expensive, and staff-intensive. Unions that
follow this approach are likely to experience financial
tensions and enormous frustration at slow progress. It
is, at least in part, this problem that is at the heart
of the exploding fight between the top leaders of
UNITE-HERE. EFCA to the Rescue?

THE LABOR LEADERSHIP IS UNITED in the belief that the
EFCA will pass and will save the day, allowing rapid
expansion. Canadian industrial relations scholar Roy
Adams says, “Canadian experience indicates otherwise.â€
In Canadian provinces that have laws granting card
check and first contract arbitration, union density has
continued to fall in the private sector. Adams cited
employer resistance as the main reason. The EFCA would
undoubtedly make organizing easier in many cases but
could not eliminate all the problems of organizing in a
depressed economy with intense employer opposition.

One of those problems is the tendency for this
resource-based approach to growth to make unions even
more top-heavy than before. Staff proliferates,
decisions on targeting and tactics are made by the
central leadership, more power is concentrated at the
top, and the nature of the union as a workers’
organization is perverted. As Bill Fletcher and
Fernando Gapasin put it in their recent book Solidarity
Divided, this approach has become “focused on retooling
existing unions to make them more effective organizing
machines.† In this view, “one chooses to ignore the
character of the union or unionismâ€|† Democracy, already
a slim reed in a strong wind, is further undermined.
The temptation to take short cuts to recruitment via
“partnership,† that is sweetheart deals, becomes
massive. The most extreme example of both of these, as
Herman Benson showed in New Politics #46 (winter,
2009), is the SEIU.


Since 2000, more and more power has been concentrated
into the hands of its president, Andy Stern, and a
small group around him. Locals are forcefully merged
into gigantic, sometimes multi-state administrative
units with officials appointed by Stern. The staff has
doubled since 2000, not only to expand organizing, but
to administer these outsized units. With leaders more
isolated from rank and file scrutiny, corruption has
returned to SEIU. Most recently, workplace
representation has been outsourced to call centers
known as member resource centers.This drive to
centralized power has led to the flight of the union’s
largest health care local, the California-based United
Healthcare Workers — West, which is now reorganizing
itself outside the SEIU as the National Union of
Healthcare Workers. Inside the SEIU, Stern’s heavy hand
has also spawned a national rank and file opposition
known as SMART (SEIU Member Activists for Reform
Today). The issues in both cases are democracy and
resistance to sweetheart deals. Dump the Business
Union, Resource-based Model

IF AMERICA’S LABOR MOVEMENT is to meet the challenges
of the new economic and political context, it will need
to jettison the whole business union model. Top down,
conventional organizing, even with EFCA, will not
create the social momentum needed to turn the fate of
millions of workers around in today’s unfolding
economic crisis. One practice that can and should be
dropped is that of limiting union members to existing
or soon-to-be-recognized, majority bargaining units.
“Open source† or non-majority unionism, where any group
of workers can begin engaging in concerted action,
should become a norm in new organizing. This practice
could have kept the nearly 475,000 workers who
participated in lost NLRB elections between 2003 and
the end of 2008. It could have brought into unions
those in the 30 percent of lost card check campaigns.
It could also keep those who face long-term layoffs, a
practice that could be important in a period of
recession or worse. More importantly, it could bring in
at least a slice of the 50 million who say they would
vote for a union. A few unions such as the UE, CWA do
use this tactic and interestingly enough UE, several
AFL-CIO unions, and CTW have all petitioned the NLRB to
allow recognition of unions without majority status.
But formal recognition need not be a requirement to
getting a big foot in the door and acting like a union
from the start. A little Knights of Labor style
expansion is in order as a transition to a growing
union movement.


To organize in the midst of recession will take bold,
high profile tactics. The 250, mostly Latino UE members
at Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors set a fine
example when they occupied their plant for six days in
December in the face of its closure. They demanded back
pay, health insurance, and vacation pay owed them, and
won. They had the backing of their union and the
sympathy of the working class public. Plant occupations
have been illegal since the Supreme Court ruled them so
in 1939 after three years of sit-down strikes. Yet, no
one attempted to enforce the law. The action was widely
publicized and popular, making eviction a messy task.
It is a precedent that has yet to be followed, but a
tactic of great relevance with layoffs and closures
certain to spread. It might have made some difference
for UAW members in the debacle that passes for
bargaining at the “big† three auto makers.


Whatever tactics are used, labor’s most important
resources aren’t its budgets or staff, but its
membership. As AFSCME’s Paul Booth put it a few years
ago, “What we need is an army, and that can only come
from our underutilized membership ranks.† Member-based
organizing and mobilizing should become the alternative
to resource-based organizing. If organized labor can
turn out a quarter of a million workers to elect a
president, why can’t a similar force be mobilized to
kick off a huge recruitment drive? The two million or
more non-union workers the AFL-CIO has recruited into
its campaigning Working America could help. The goal
would not be just a few thousand more bargaining units,
but a movement aimed at changing the balance of social
forces in America.This mobilized force could fight for
EFCA, universal health care, and a shift in “stimulusâ€
from capital to working people, even as it recruits new
union members. The pro-labor, anti-business sentiment
is there to be drawn on. Yes, this too will take
resources and a lot of motivation and inspiration to
get the largely passive membership on board. But the
activist layer is there to lead if encouraged. If there
is to be a reunification of labor, and there should be,
let it not be just one more layer of bureaucracy, but a
coordinating committee to launch such an ambitious
campaign.
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l