Joining a union

...Martin de Porres Church in Dixwell, the historically African-American neighborhood adjacent to Yale...

...According to Forbes, it is the 417th largest corporation in the United States and is run by Richard Farmer, the 140th richest American...

...In the current climate, unions must increase their visibility and influence in order to pass legislation that will increase their visibility and influence...

...After lunch we drove to Branford, a New Haven suburb, to visit the local Cintas facility to hear management's side of the story...

...Just why a janitor might be likelier to fail at marriage than an engineer is a tougher question...

...In March, I tagged along with the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice on fact-finding visits to Cintas plants in New Haven and Chicago...

...Raynor led the successful decades-long fight to organize the J. P. Stevens textile workers...

...In the past twenty years the percentage of workers in unions has fall-en from about 20 to 13 percent...

...And so the fight for union recognition creeps toward the public square...

...But such coalition building may be the only option left in an era in which public policy is so antagonistic to organized labor...

...But, if we think it's such a good idea, why aren't more of us in unions...

...Unionizing Cintas will require the same broad-based strategy...

...HERE's John Wilhelm, who many believe will succeed John Sweeney as president of the AFL-CIO, led a similar fight to unionize Las Vegas hotels and casinos in the 1990s...

...This fact has drawn criticism from activists and from one of Cintas's shareholders, who during an annual meeting accused the company of running a sweatshop...

...But there's more going on than that...

...Demographically, the Unite-HERE merger makes sense...

...Do these empirical realities shed light on current campaigns to rescue the American family...

...Such an election can then be postponed while management pressures and proselytizes on the job, usually with the aid of professional union-busting consultants...

...Of course, there's a well-understood theatrics to such events...

...It is also a departure from tactics traditionally employed by unions like the Miners and the Teamsters, which relied heavily on internal solidarity and were disdainful of outside alliances...

...In the dismal days since Ronald Reagan fired the striking air-traffic controllers, the only high-profile strikes that have succeeded have been those that recruited allies outside the union and courted public sympathy...

...Maybe we are all more communal and less individualistic than we are led to believe...

...What would be ideal is a profamily alignment that aspired to both a broad moral consensus in America and a more equitable sharing of social goods, such as livable wages...

...Tom Smucker, who spent thirty years as a telephone central-office technician in New York City, is a retired member of Local 1101, Communications Workers of America...

...Others spoke about weekly sessions of antiunion propaganda and, more promisingly, what the potential presence of a union could lead to: sudden pay raises and compliance with OSHA safety requirements...

...both unions represent lower-paid, often newly immigrated workers in the service sector...

...And Cincinnati informed us that we were free to look at the Cintas Web site's virtual tour, but not the Branford site...

...In more than one place we were told that employees had to provide their own toilet paper and soap, ironically two of the items Cintas sells its own customers, along with its uniforms, rugs, rags, and towels...

...One could peel back his argument and ask why people with resources are better at keeping their families intact, why working-class couples are less able to work it out, why marital chaos and child poverty are close cousins...

...The workplace has become invisible to the public at large and to the religious community...

...Pius V, in Pilsen, one of the city's oldest Mexican-American neighborhoods...

...Nonetheless, polls show that most Americans think unions are good for their members and for the economy...

...Commonweal 14 July 16, 2004...

...There, the law limits managerial interference in union drives and "card check" recognition is common...

...Unite and HERE are run by high-profile leaders eager to reverse organized labor's nearly fatal decline...

...Police will be called and will arrive as the union delegation—some in clerical collars—is in the middle of a long and public prayer...

...Gleaning insights about human behavior from aggregate social data is a dicey undertaking, and when it comes to divorce data, official collections and correlations are some-what crude and sporadic...

...Unite contends that Cintas temporarily moved that hazardous work to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, when the company was sued for polluting the water supply in Connecticut...

...Management will not allow the group past the reception area...

...These [markers] also happen to be the same characteristics that correlate with liberalism, which is why the low divorce rate in Massachusetts has to do with the fact that Massachusetts is the most liberal state in the union," says David Popenoe of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University in New Jersey...

...Perhaps the family-values coalition should be as preoccupied with finding solutions to child poverty as they are with nailing the Ten Commandments to every courthouse door...

...Farmer's personal wealth is estimated to be $1.5 billion...

...Even with 30 Senators and 183 Representatives cosponsoring, the legislation languishes in Congress and has received little attention outside the labor media...

...Tom Smucker JOINING A UNION Why it's hard to organize workers intas is the largest industrial laundry business in North America...

...The Mineworkers at Pittston, the Steelworkers at Ravenswood, the Communications Workers and Electricians at NYNEX, and the Teamsters at UPS, all won against the odds by reaching out to concerned citizens across the country, and even overseas...

...All the same, the steady link between marital implosion and economic insecurity cannot be explained away...

...Popenoe reasons that the better-off are more successful in marriage because they are more successful in life, and that this probably explains more about the divorce disparities than the economic travails of struggling families...

...But the theatrics dramatize a point...

...Who is going to tell the nonunionized 87 percent of the workforce that Congress is even considering a card-check bill...

...William Bole is a freelance reporter in Massachusetts and co-author of Forgiveness in International Politics: An Alternative Road to Peace, written with Robert Hennemeyer and Drew Christiansen, SJ...

...In a strange sequence of events, Cintas subsequently sued the union and the shareholder...

...If conservatives have often closed their eyes to the role of economic hardship in family breakdown, liberals have generally been slow to acknowledge the massively documented role of family breakdown in economic hardship...

...At the Cintas facility in the northwest suburb of Schaumberg, we prayed in the reception area before being thrown off the property...

...Unite-HERE's organizing drives rely on the same strategy...

...In New Haven, our interfaith delegation began the day at St...

...Cintas is also known for subcontracting abroad...

...This battle will be fought in the courts, in the media, in schools, and in church basements...

...Both organizing efforts were extended drives in the private sector that actively sought community support...

...A workforce isolated by culture and language (these days, Spanish and Polish) works at the entry level of the economy...

...I wanted to see how the organizing campaign was faring on the ground...

...It's a story a hundred years old, stretching back to when Pilsen's residents were Czechs...

...The campaign has sought to develop support among students, politicians, the Sierra Club, the NAACP, and the religious community...

...Some of it was heartbreaking: stories of shop-floor intimidation and injury...

...One reason is that it is much harder to unionize an unorganized workplace than most of us realize...

...Not unreasonably, these groups are dedicated to promoting wholesome values derived from religious wisdom, yet the evidence suggests that these values alone are not enough to save marriages and shore up families...

...If nothing else, they certainly invite questions about the politics of conservative organizations like the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, both of which will encamp in Boston later this month...

...While 40 percent of public employees are organized, the portion of private employees in unions has dropped from a high of 33 percent in 1955 to less than 9 percent today...

...Here small entrepreneurs produce uniforms for Cintas, and there's little evidence of any regulation by the state...

...Unfortunately, neither the Democratic convention in Boston nor the Re-publican convention five weeks later in New York is likely to showcase such a refashioned family agenda...

...For the last year and a half, Cintas's seventeen thou-sand employees have been the focus of an organizing campaign by Unite-HERE, the new merger of the old garment and hotel workers unions, in alliance with the Teamsters...

...We also went to some subcontractor locations, further down the economic food chain...

...The company, meanwhile, has fought back in the courts, the media, and through the political establishment...

...This approach requires money, staff, stamina, patience, and much coordination...

...In Canada, on the other hand, union participation has remained around 30 percent...

...And then even if the election is held and won, the results can be contested and tied up in court for years...

...Labor has placed its bets on legislation before, but did so when unions were in a position of strength...

...Good will toward the union movement is still out there...

...The economics of marital dysfunction is especially confounding: divorce is at once a scourge of the less affluent and a creature of modem affluent society (Popenoe and his colleague Barbara Dafoe Whitehead would underline the latter point...

...In the United States, card check was C Commonweal 13 July 16, 2004 part of the original New Deal National Labor Relations Act, but was eliminated in 1947 by the Taft-Hartley Act...

...Card check is a process in which only a majority of employees have to sign cards saying they want a union in order to have one...

...The latest Labor Day Gallup Poll found the union approval rating at 65 percent, up from 58 percent the year before...

...That is the challenge facing Unite's Bruce Raynor, who will head Unite-HERE...

...In one location no one knew that the Illinois minimum wage had been raised to $5.50 an hour, a matter of some importance for those working for $5.15 or less...

...The recently introduced Kennedy-Miller Employee Free Choice Act would reinstate card-check recognition and tighten penal-ties on employer interference, but the bill has little chance of passing...

...In Chicago, we began our day at St...

...According to the union, the corporation runs plants in Mexico and Haiti that violate its own code of conduct...

...The flustered young manager who met our delegation in New Haven told us that we would have to call the national office in Cincinnati to arrange a visit...

...There we heard direct testimony, translated from Spanish, by Cintas laundry workers...

...One woman who developed a debilitating rash while folding towels said she was only taken off the job long enough for the rash to go away...

...Workers have the right to join a union if they wish, but over the last fifty years that right has been narrowed by Congress and the courts until it is now amounts to the right to request a union recognition vote...

...a union tries to organize as jobs slip into the world of subcontracting...

...Social rootedness" is also often mentioned as discouraging divorce in places like New England, where people tend to be less transient...