AFSCME VICTORY IN CALIFORNIA

...So far, full-fledged antiunion campaigns are rare in the public sector, especially among employers like the University of California, with relatively liberal reputations...

...Since the mid-1960s, AFSCME has been the fastest growing union in the AFL–CIO, increasing its membership from 250,000 in 1964 to more than a million today...

...Perhaps that's why the media haven't covered the UC organizing victory—it doesn't fit in with their premature obituaries for the unions...

...At times when their jobs and paychecks are imperiled, public employees—like other workers—seek the protection of union representation...

...Perhaps by the time this is published, the media will have pointed to the UC election as an example of a successful union-organizing campaign, at a time when the labor movement is supposed to be declining in membership strength, bargaining power, and political influence...

...AFSCME's dramatic growth began during the Great Society years, when increases in domestic social spending swelled the ranks of state and local government employees...

...AFSCME, however, succeeded in turning around the two most potent emotional issues that often cause white-collar workers to vote against unions—the fears of conflict with management and of union "outsiders" pushing employees around...

...And they reported that the most recent University of California budget, which didn't provide pay raises for most workers, did include salary increases for top administrators and funding for ambitious construction programs...

...In fact, AFSCME consists almost entirely of state and local government employees...

...The management campaign started almost two years ago, beginning on a high note, with the distribution of slick, illustrated folders on the benefits of "Working for the University...

...In this era of budget cuts in education and health care, the UC employees decided that doing without representation was a greater risk than voting for the union...

...In August 1982, about ten months before the election, I walked through the UCLA hospital with AFSCME organizers and employee activists...

...Moreover, management claimed, collective bargaining, with its adversary relationship between employer and employee, would bring disharmony into the university's work environment...

...By the end of the day I felt we had a good chance to win the election...

...Both were shaped by the issues and efforts of the 1960s and '70s and share a commitment to AFSCME's traditionally progressive politics, aggressive organizing, and political action...

...However, AFSCME kept growing in the '70s, when public social spending wound down, and many state and local governments began laying off workers or were freezing new hirings...

...The neoliberal guru Charles Peters of the Washington Monthly summed up popular misconceptions about AFSCME in an article several years ago, contending that AFSCME is predominantly white-collar, with a large federal-employee contingent, and that its late president, Jerry Wurf, cared more about well-heeled government bureaucrats than underpaid hospital workers...

...Hard times also have encouraged formerly independent associations of public employees to join AFSCME...

...They are following in the footsteps of the largest independent public employee association of them all—the 230,000member Civil Service Employees Association of New York State which joined AFSCME in 1978...

...AFSCME was rooted so deeply in that working environment that it would be almost impossible for management to portray the union people convincingly as "outsiders...

...That staff is a remarkably heterogeneous group, largely of former UC employees, all sharing a good-natured fanaticism about their work...

...AFSCME's newsletters and mailing pieces were factual and low-key, stressing such issues as occupational safety and health and the need of opportunities for career advancement...

...Yet as this is written, it has received little coverage outside of California...

...Associations that have affiliated with AFSCME since 1981 include the 17,000-member Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, the 7,500-member Arizona Public Employees Association, and associations in New Mexico and South Dakota...

...After all, it took place in the "Sunbelt," where unions are supposedly ineffective and unpopular...

...It concluded on a low note, with pamphlets warning that unionization would lead to an "increase in tension, confrontation, and conflict...

...Department of Energy showing that at one facility alone, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, UC management spent $247,000 to campaign against unions...

...CALIFORNIA HASN'T BEEN the only state where AFSCME has successfully organized public employees in recent years...

...My "tour guides" stopped constantly to talk with hospital workers, calling most of them by name, and discussed the progress of grievances, safety problems in the parking lot, and the status of the organizing campaign...

...UC management adapted that pitch to the individualistic California temperament, warning that unionization would submerge workers into a presumably unwanted collectivity and bring rigid work rules into each office, hospital, campus, and work area...

...AFSCME organizers and campaign literature adopted a nonconfrontational approach, offering UC employees "a stronger voice" at the bargaining table and before the board of regents and the state legislature...

...THE MANAGEMENT CAMPAIGN didn't lack financing...

...And AFSCME has doubled its potential membership in California —no small victory for a union whose strength traditionally has been in the industrial Northeast and Midwest...

...It involved a pre423 dominantly white-collar work force, and whitecollar employees are supposed to be indifferent or hostile to unions...

...Now in the third year of the Reagan presidency, AFSCME continues to grow, despite —or perhaps because of—drastic reductions in federal aid to state and local governments and severe cuts in public services and work forces...

...and, whatever the color of their collars, AFSCME members perform some of the most unpleasant and overlooked jobs in our society...

...In ballots counted on June 29, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) won elections to represent almost 30,000 nonteaching employees of the University of California (UC...

...For years, AFSCME may have been synonymous with Jerry Wurf, the feisty, fiery socialist who headed the union from 1964 until his death in 1981...

...AFSCME's victory is not a triumph for slick public relations...

...California Congressman Pete Stark obtained a report from the U.S...

...They include approximately 19,000 clerical workers, 6,000 service workers, and 4,000 hospital workers at the UC system's nine campuses and five teaching hospitals...

...Now the leadership of the national union has passed to a younger generation, including the union's president, Jerry McEntee and its secretarytreasurer, Bill Lucy...

...This money came from UC's "Opportunity Fund" —paid by the federal government for the overhead costs of administering contracts and research grants...

...Both are more low-key than Wurf—which would be a safe description of almost anyone...

...425...

...Many professionally run campaigns have lost, and the burgeoning industry of Washington-based public relations consultants to the labor movement has few organizing victories to its credit...

...Not a word iri the Washington Post and the New York Times, or even the Wall Street Journal, whose weekly "Labor Letter" column is a virtual bulletin board of labor news...

...But AFSCME's recent organizing victories, particularly in California, prove that such pessimistic conclusions about the labor movement aren't invariably true...

...Yet, using its own management experts as well as outside consultants, the UC waged an antiunion campaign that included "captiveaudience" meetings for employees, literature distributions and mailings, and the use of supervisors in attempts to convince or intimidate workers not to support the union...

...There's some truth in these generalizations...

...In 1982, the UC regents voted 11 to 9 to use $157,000 in federal funds to campaign against unionization...

...According to much prevailing wisdom about the state of the unions, AFSCME's UC election victory should never have happened...

...The union promised nothing more than strong representation...

...The standard antiunion campaign attacks the union as an "outsider" that will burden the workers with strikes and high dues...

...And AFSCME outsmarted a management campaign that resembled—and may even have improved upon—the standard antiunion campaign developed by the professional consultants who promise corporations, hospitals, and other employers that they'll help them maintain "a union-free environment...

...This AFSCME organizing victory, one would think, is a major labor news story...

...its membership is still primarily bluecollar...

...But the $157,000 may have been only a small part of the total cost of the management campaign...

...Now that the elections are over, UC officials are 424 ready to bargain with AFSCME...

...The Los Angeles Times estimated the total cost at $1 million or more in federal and state funds...

...The UC victory belongs to hundreds of union supporters on the campuses and in the hospitals who spread the message to their co-workers— and to AFSCME's California organizing staff...

...Far from being the legendary overpaid federal bureaucrats, AFSCME members are more likely to empty bedpans in hospitals, care for the mentally ill and the retarded, clean the streets, repair bridges and highways, prepare and serve school lunches, handle welfare and unemployment claims, type and file government documents, and guard cellblocks in the prisons...

...THE UNION they're joining is frequently misrepresented in the news media...

...Since Reagan took office in 1981, AFSCME has won elections to represent large units of state clerical workers in Florida and Connecticut, as well as at the UC...

...More likely, however, Labor Day 1983 will bring more news reports rehashing familiar themes—that the unions are locked into declining industries and regions, are unwilling to organize white-collar employees and outclassed by the new breed of management consultants...

...AFSCME told UC workers that without a strong voice they surely could expect more layoffs, pay freezes, and deteriorating working conditions—yet, with it, they would stand a better chance of winning improvements in pay, benefits, working conditions, and career opportunities...