WILL UNIONS ORGANIZE AGAIN?
Kuttner, Robert
He looks like Central Casting's idea of an organizer. Domenic Mario Bozzotto, president of Local 26, is bearded, olive-skinned, tieless, with the bravura and streetcorner patois of a Damon...
...If not, all the public relations campaigns and all the mass merchandizing of unionism will be futile gestures...
...Elsewhere in the union hall is a meeting that typifies the sort of organizing that must succeed if the labor movement is to reverse its long, slow decline...
...They can't relocate...
...As Rothstein talks, the main activity in the ACTWU hall this Thursday morning in East Los Angeles is the distribution of free bags of groceries to unemployed and retired garment workers...
...Richard Rothstein of ACTWU, an immensely talented organizer who led that union's successful campaign to organize the J.P...
...The corporate campaign identified a vulnerability— Beverly needed huge infusions of capital to continue expanding...
...SEIU also affiliated an independent 2,000 member union called United Labor Unions (ULU), associated with the community action group ACORN...
...Local 26 routinely prints leaflets in Spanish, Creole French, Vietnamese, Cambodian—and English...
...Stevens company, says, "What is 'high tech...
...The union will contact Headwear's customers...
...We opened the union to everybody...
...it has built District 925, a spin-off of the feminist clerical group Nine-to-Five, as a fullfledged district of the union, with about 5,000 newly organized clerical workers...
...In order to organize anybody you have to organize everybody...
...SEIU seems unafraid of young, often fairly radical organizers, and it recruits them, for modest pay, from community organizations and citizen movements as well as from the workplace rank and file...
...the turnover and the ethnic divisions make it very difficult to organize the low end...
...A good organizer has to work weeknights and weekends...
...Money is important for our health care workers, but we're not organizing people around money...
...Again, as in Boston's Local 26, one senses a bit of the militant union movement of yore...
...He married a black woman, got active in the civil rights movement, and in 1981, at age 40, he led a rank-and-file revolt to take over the local, ousting the incumbent three to one...
...Ustedes son los que tienen que explicar...
...While flagrant and illegal union-busting of the sort rampant in the private sector is not a problem in the organizing of public workers, nonetheless the public employee unions are not immune from the generally anti-union climate...
...There is no such thing as high tech...
...When the unions finally reached an accord with the firm's national management committing Beverly to stop interfering with union organizing, the development of these unconventional pressure points was a key to the union's leverage...
...Rothstein, now the manager of ACTWU's California joint board, takes pains to remind the interviewer that old-fashioned organizing was the key to the Stevens success...
...You know what...
...Representing building-cleaners, the union found early in its history that it could succeed in raising wage levels only by organizing every cleaning company in a city...
...Now the place is alive with activity...
...Ganz pulled all the documents that California unions are required to file with the Labor Department...
...It is striking that even in the most intractable of organizing conditions— luxury hotels with elaborate caste systems and ethnic rivalries that should keep workers divided, and minimum-wage garment factories where non-English speaking workers are vulnerable to all manner of harassment, people like Shelly Coppock and Domenic Bozzotto are actually organizing workers...
...SEIU has been able to use its public-sector base to help finance the far more costly organizing of private-sector service and clerical workers...
...In the high-tech field no union has yet emerged to play the forward looking role of an SEIU or HERE...
...Organizer is the most talked about and least honored job in unions," says Marshall Ganz, who was for over a decade the organizing director of the United Farm Workers union...
...The sense of solidarity, and struggle, and romance, is impressive...
...We went totally open shop, and we signed up 3,000 new people...
...You have to make a lot of house calls...
...To observe Local 26 in action is to work oneself into an optimism about the vitality of a newly emerging labor movement, a movement beginning to learn how to organize the new lowwage service economy of women and minorities, one that makes room for the raw talent of natural leaders like Bozzotto, and demonstrates the rich possibilities of empowerment of ordinary working people through a democratic union local...
...It was always a multi-ethnic union, with a long tradition of local autonomy and democracy...
...The logic of just becoming a service organization is relentless...
...In Massachusetts, the electricians union is organizing a professional association for nonunion electricians, offering them health benefits and discounts on tools...
...The good news: The NLRB has just officially certified ACTWU as bargaining agent...
...The national agreement stipulated elections within forty-five days after a majority of workers at a nursing home signed cards, circumventing NLRB delays...
...This way, I know month to month exactly how we're doing...
...Few top union leaders would disagree with that, but only some of them seem fully committed to brokering the institutional shifts necessary to convert the present labor movement into an organizing movement...
...He was appalled to find that in the entire state of California, the labor movement fields just 180 paid organizers, or about 2.4 percent of its total paid staff...
...An additional twenty dollars a year from each AFL-CIO member would produce a $250 million organizing war chest...
...When you organize new people, it changes the complexion of the union...
...The leader may think his job is less secure...
...Big unions also pour organizing resources into drives to annex small unions in declining industries...
...In private employment, the unionization rate is now below 15 percent...
...After nearly a decade of spadework, high-tech workers' associations in Silicon Valley and in the Route 128 corridor around Boston have both virtually ceased operations...
...Unions have been doing relatively well enlisting public-sector workers, where elections are generally uncontested by management, but public employment is not currently a growth sector...
...rights of temporary workers...
...And when Security says you can't go into the cafeteria, we look Security in the eye and 52 we say, 'I'm on the negotiating committee.' We want management to understand we're in control...
...I know more about those homes than some of the operators," Splain says...
...The service sector, accounting for more than two out of three new jobs in the economy, is only about seven percent unionized...
...When the management team walks into the room, at eleven sharp, the workers will already have been there for two hours, psyching themselves into a unified force, signaling occupancy of the turf...
...If it takes bringing the strike to their houses, that's what we're gonna do...
...Shelly Coppock, an ACTWU organizer, who acquired her fluent Spanish working in Mexico with the American Friends Service Committee, chairs the meeting...
...But the labor movement still lacks a coherent strategy...
...New issues emerged: sex and race discrimination...
...55 About half of them are in the public sector and half in the private, though the major organizing gains are in the public sector...
...In one county Splain has targeted thirty major nursing homes, preceding actual worker organizing with a three-year research analysis 56 of wage rates, staffing ratios, per-patient expenditures, occupancy rates, administrative costs, dietary outlays, and profit levels...
...BOZZOTTO IS THE SORT OF UP-FROM-THE-RANKS labor leader who seems to prove there is still lots of life in the labor movement...
...It will prevent future Ohios," says Charles McDonald, the AFL-CIO's new director of organizing...
...We added eight full-time organizers...
...Laughter and more cheers...
...Here, if you are young and idealistic, somewhat radical, deadly serious about organizing, and willing to work for $300-400 a week, you can perhaps find a home...
...It is not a `way up...
...We represent a number of plants in electronics production, and the work is no more 'high tech' than other production work...
...People think you can come in and think up gimmicks rather than doing the hard work...
...Hotels are vulnerable," Bozzotto says...
...We have to enlist, and we shall flourish...
...Although almost exclusively a union of government employees, AFSCME hopes to use the leverage it has through its members' health insurance coverage to persuade Blue Cross/Blue Shield management to remain neutral in the drive to organize the big health insurer...
...Word of failure spreads...
...Working as a waiter, he put himself through college at night...
...We ran into IBEW, UAW, and the Machinists...
...This one CWA campaign—against other unions, not against management—probably cost more than all its private-sector organizing...
...Part of why the good public sector unions like SEIU have stayed so dynamic," says Marty Manley, "is that they have to fight day in and day our for their membership...
...It might be better if union members had the political consciousness and sense of solidarity to tax themselves to finance mass organizing drives...
...frustrations about wasteful and inefficient management...
...AFSCME's total membership has grown from about 950,000 in 1980, to 1.1 million in 1986...
...Management has assembled a force of strikebreakers, flown into town from New York and Chicago...
...The unionization campaign began abruptly, after a fight between two workers and a supervisor...
...The AFL-CIO's February 1985 blue-ribbon report on the future of work, the first real longterm strategy document in a generation, illustrates how fragile are the seeds of real change...
...He began working in restaurants at 13, setting out glasses of water...
...I'm very proud of you," Bozzotto is saying...
...One must have algo de paciencia...
...Many of the top national and regional leaders of most unions are products of the "business unionism" compromise of the 1950s and 1960s, in which class consciousness and militance were traded for a comfortable place in the postwar social contract...
...It was so clean you could eat off the floor...
...As any unionist will tell you, much of labor's problem is "external...
...The pay is $3.353.60 an hour...
...It has been willing to put substantial resources into clerical organizing, even though the short-term payoffs are fairly meager numerically...
...Even so, however, SEIU and UFCW have managed to sign up only about 10 percent of Beverly's 1,000 nursing homes, and management continues to chisel on the deal whenever it can...
...Bozzotto holds up a union petition calling on management to settle: "If you work in a hotel and you haven't signed my solidarity petition, whatever you say, I know in my heart you're a . . ." "SCAAAAAB," yells the committee...
...The reason why few people are organizing electronics plants is that few people are trying to organize anything...
...Organizing, of course, threatens the status quo most acutely when that status quo most needs disturbing...
...In the wake of the Ohio campaign, which saw AFSCME emerge as the big winner, several senior CWA organizers quit...
...Local 660, formerly a rather passive civil service association, offers a good example of how SEIU goes about organizing the organized...
...Organizing," observes Ganz, "is generally seen as the least important activity in most unions...
...top leaders don't identify as organizers...
...Experimental efforts by organizers for the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and the United Electrical workers (UE) to develop networks of high-tech workers, as "preunion" associations, have produced plenty of meetings, but no organizing successes...
...SEIU was originally a union of building service workers— janitors, cleaners, window washers, and the like...
...In electronics, the main growth sector within manufacturing, the unionization rate is about 2 percent, and most of that is in longtime union companies like GE...
...By calling into question the quality of Beverly's patient care, labor could jeopardize the company's business plan...
...According to Bob Welch, the union's chief of staff, labor's next big breakthrough will have to be "a mass organizing movement within a whole industry," such as health insurance...
...If the mainstream labor movement can make room for more such people, and give them real support, then the labor movement can revive...
...Another source of the SEIU's commitment to organizing seems to be the fact that it straddles the public and the private sectors...
...54 The reasons have to do with both ideology and with internal union politics...
...It is low-paid, poorly esteemed work, reserved for the novice or the political crony, while business agent is considered 'making it.' As a result, organizers get frustrated...
...Marty Manley, who was once the head of the AFLCIO's political operations in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, says, "Organizing high tech will require an expensive commitment over a long period of time, and most union leaders just don't think it can be done...
...What remains to be seen is whether this transition can come fast enough to arrest labor's continuing decline...
...The negotiating committee, she adds, is central...
...The external problems—the decline in blue-collar employment, the hostile NLRB—are only "peripheral" factors, says Vince Sirabella of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees...
...As Ganz observes, successful organizing must rock the institutional boat...
...The report also endorsed corporate campaigns, experimental industry-wide organizing committees, better training of organizers, more internal democratic participation, and more effective public relations...
...All of us have to be in the cafeterias, making sure our own people aren't coerced into scabbing...
...Ganz estimates that the California organizer figures are actually slightly better than the national average...
...After questions, the meeting closes with a cancibn, words and music composed by a Guatemalan, a resident of the community and volunteer organizer, who must be given' the pseudonym Javier...
...The company, for its part, has threatened to make the layoffs permanent...
...THE TROUBLE IS, THERE ARE FAR TOO FEW Slla organizers, too few unions willing to make organizing the priority it should be, too few unions receptive to the young radicals who make good organizers, too few unions willing to commit massive resources for the long term, and too few unions able to look beyond parochial concerns about turf...
...That's all wrong...
...The problem is the leadership...
...Just to maintain current membership, unions must double their rate of organizing wins...
...They can't stockpile...
...Mark Splain, the former welfare rights activist and Massachusetts Fair Share organizer who was a co-founder of ULU, is now national director of SEIU's health care organizing...
...Most local leadership is elected, and they define their roles primarily in political terms, with the membership as the electorate and the staff as civil service or political allies...
...Within a few weeks, workers had turned to ACTWU...
...In this spirit, SEIU was the main impetus behind the AFL-CIO's recently announced nine-union campaign to organize Blue Cross/Blue Shield, which SEIU president John Sweeney chairs...
...The strategy seemed promising for a time, but the company struck back by contracting out work, changing job classifications, laying off workers, and even setting up a rival anti-union "rank-and-file" committee...
...we agreed to stop impeding their expansion...
...The National Labor Relations Act has ceased to be labor's bill of rights, and has become a positive obstacle to organizing...
...ACTWU has just won an election to represent workers at California Headwear, a Los Angeles maker of baseball caps...
...There had been long-standing cultural and tactical differences between the local Harvard organizers and the UAW hierarchy...
...Instead of circulating union cards and looking towards an NLRB certification election, CWA set up an office across the street from the plant, and began pursuing worker issues without worrying about its formal status as bargaining agent...
...The economic pressure on the company includes plans for a boycott, at Dodger Stadium, and at Disneylandia...
...Otherwise the nonunion contractors simply underbid you...
...Nobody was ever in here...
...Some organizers insist that it is a self-defeating mistake to mythologize "high tech" as a uniquely difficult field to organize...
...It takes a fanaticism that few people have...
...Javier, who is about four foot six, hoists his guitar, and sings in a haunting trill: Adelante, companeros y companeras...
...The bricklayers, America's oldest union, hopes to penetrate the anti-union Southwest by organizing bricklayers' co-ops...
...Bleak Prospects in High Tech IF THERE IS CAUSE FOR GUARDED OPTIMISM in clerical and service organizing, where some unions are at least expending resources and thinking through strategies, the other major emerging industry, electronics, is an organizing desert...
...Reagan's appointees to the labor board have made a bad situation worse...
...International compe53 tition, deregulation, and industrial transition, all have devastated seemingly impregnable labor strongholds like autos and steel, airlines and trucking, leaving many unions inwardlooking, defensive, and institutionally conservative...
...Without a strong missionary sense, politics takes priority over competence, and not rocking the boat drives out risk-taking and imagination...
...It was only something convenient for the leadership...
...they can't have a two-forone sale...
...It's the first acceptance of responsibility...
...I met with the 'dissidents.' I found out that all they wanted to do was build a union...
...The report recommended experimentation with "new approaches to represent workers," as a strategy of bringing unionism to workers in regions and industries where labor is not yet strong enough to win NLRB elections as bargaining agent...
...Raytheon, and Xerox, not in new high-tech firms...
...Another recent failure illustrates just how difficult it is to crack high tech...
...there's only 365 days in the year, and the guest might go someplace else...
...the rest were organized from scratch...
...And last February, in the wake of the Ohio fiasco, the AFLCIO council surprised its critics by approving a tough, compulsory arbitration system that will award a single union exclusive rights to attempt to organize a particular unit...
...But that attitude is suicidal...
...We put it all on spreadsheets...
...If one pulls back, to a wider angle lens, the reality is dozens, perhaps hundreds of dedicated men and women like Bozzotto, a few of them making real headway, but in an all-but-impossible larger context...
...SEIU as an Example MUCH OF THE EXPLANATION FOR SEIU'S agressive stance is in its history...
...For the past year and a half, Ganz has been investigating why labor unions do so little organizing, using California as a laboratory...
...As tempers flared and trust evaporated, UAW supervisors one day changed the office locks...
...The deeper problem, he observes, is that a whole generation of labor leaders, spanning 1950 to 1980, all but abandoned organizing...
...Before a single organizer began knocking on doors, SEIU, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), and the hospital workers union (Local 1199), conducted more than a year of corporate research, working with the AFL-CIO Food and Allied Service Trades department, and devised a novel campaign investigating Beverly, relying on state nursing home inspection reports and Medicaid reimbursement records, as well as going after Beverly's sources of financing on Wall Street...
...In the era of business unionism, material appeals drove out militance...
...We're going to protect our job security...
...SEIU places a very high priority on organizing...
...Sweeney hopes the Blue Cross/Blue Shield drive will point the way towards other multiunion campaigns in which the AFL-CIO serves as a clearing house to agree on targets, train organizers, and pool resources...
...We're going to defeat the concessions...
...The son of Italian immigrants, he lived most of his life in working-class East Boston...
...At this moment, on a Tuesday morning in December, he has brazenly commandeered a conference room in Boston's Park Plaza Hotel, where his negotiating committee of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) will shortly commence the fifth session of contract talks, now deadlocked against a strike deadline of Saturday midnight...
...Internally, within most unions, the servicing of existing membership consumes over 95 percent of resources...
...The reality is that the labor movement, taken as a whole, is doing far too little organizing for its own survival...
...Over at the Ritz, we hear that they're getting ready for the strike with paper plates...
...SEIU has also grown by affiliating quasiunions, such as state civil service associations, helping them to develop into full-blown unions...
...At Wave-tek, an Indianapolis manufacturer of advanced microwave equipment, the CWA in 1983 devised what seemed a novel and promising strategy...
...It is a curious criticism...
...there were no structures that invited participation...
...When we took over, this union hall was like a bank vault...
...Rondeau, however, won a round when the UAW region voted out the longtime regional director who had been unsympathetic to her organizing drive...
...As Bozzotto, Rondeau, Rothstein, Coppock, and countless others show, it is still possible to organize people, even in a climate of industrial transition, union baiting, and diminished resources...
...If one did not believe in the historic importance of the work, one would not tolerate the low wages, long hours, setbacks, and abuse...
...FOR EXAMPLE, SEIU TOOK THE LEAD in a threeunion cooperative drive to organize nursing homes owned by the Beverly chain, the nation's largest for-profit nursing home operator...
...The workforce is mostly Hispanic, from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia...
...It became cheaper for Beverly to settle...
...Bozzotto's rise in Boston coincided with the rise of Vincent Sirabella, now the Hotel and Restaurant Employees' national director of organizing...
...The union has been preparing for this contract deadline for three years, and has its own guerrilla warfare, including a sophisticated corporate campaign against the John Hancock company, part owner of several Boston hotels, even bringing demonstrators to the homes of Hancock executives...
...But, she adds, it will take a long time to get a contract...
...What still remains is to win the campaign...
...A CWA organizer observes bluntly, "A lot of local union officials are not so enthusiastic about organizing new units, because it could turn out to be somebody else's power base, not yours...
...SINCE THE LATE 1970s, corporate America has gotten serious about busting unions...
...The largely unorganized service sector, the fastest growing part of the economy, had the fewest organizers per capita of all...
...Few unions are entirely comfortable with the militant personalities of good organizers, or the cultural shifts required to organize unfamiliar industries, or the internal political dislocation necessary to shift massive resources to organizing...
...Like the corn in our fields, like the sunshine in spring, our contract will come...
...The union says nothing doing...
...Bozzotto illustrates the promise, not the widespread reality, not yet...
...At Harvard, difficult enough for one union to organize, there are now two rival aspiring unions, one with most of the ground troops, the other with most of the financial resources...
...adelante que la victoria sera nuestra...
...They can scab all the workers they want, but they can't scab the guests...
...A typical high-tech firm includes a fairly elite force of engineering and design employees, who are generally well paid, conscious of their professional status, and skeptical about unions—and a low-paid force of production workers, often female and Third World, with notoriously high turnover...
...In a few cities the unions have had to wink at temporary workers during what should be permanent jobs in order to protect the salary levels of full-fledged civil service workers...
...Half of these are in public-sector unions, leaving just 96 full-time organizers for 6.75 million unorganized private-sector workers...
...Other unions will help...
...They get tired of turning their people and their work over to political leaders who often fail to share their vision...
...They want to convince you that they can run the place without you...
...58 High tech seems a somewhat special case of what ails the labor movement generally...
...Bozzotto's committee, eighty strong, is a mosaic of races and colors, reflecting the Haitians, Cambodians, Salvadorans, Filipinos, first- and second-generation Irish and Italian-Americans, blacks, and WASPs who serve the meals, change the linen, wash the dishes, and pamper the guests in Boston's nine unionized luxury hotels...
...It has threatened to call in immigration inspectors (that, ironically enough, would be an unfair labor practice...
...Of the 150,000 new members, about 50,000 resulted from mergers...
...The sort of young radicals who will work long hours to organize out of ideological conviction are unwelcome in many unions...
...and worker dignity...
...Typically, when a public service is contracted out, the salary and benefit package drops by about a third...
...Protracted delays at the NLRB and anti-union rulings permit management to fire pro-union workers almost with impunity, wrecking organizing drives...
...AFSCME devotes about one-third of its national budget to organizing and has an organizing staff of over 250...
...Barbara Rahke, the UAW official sent in to take over the Harvard drive, says the local organizers bogged down, and developed a parochial and grandiose view of their work: "This campaign became more than just a drive to organize Harvard...
...the union wants raises, and more conscientious enforcement of management's paper commitment to promote women and people of color out of the laundries and slop sinks, into the front-of-the-house "gratuity" jobs like waiter and bell captain that permit middleclass earnings...
...The sad truth," says Martin Manley, who has worked as an organizer in California's Silicon Valley, for the machinists, the service employees, and the hotel and restaurant employees, "is that most unions are perfectly capable of gradually shrinking into mere service organizations...
...Although it was part of the AFL," says Bob Welch, the SEIU's chief of staff, "the union had a culture that saw itself not as a craft union but as a general union of fairly lowskilled, low-paid service workers...
...Harvard illustrates a central dilemma of unionism in the 1980s...
...Some of the scabs had the nerve to ask our people what the job was...
...The embroidering machines are a touch of high tech— they are computer controlled...
...Despite all the rhetoric, there is not much internal pressure to organize...
...it is not clear that a different set of material carrots will bring back militance...
...We used to think fifty dollars a head was an expensive campaign," Welch adds...
...and the local organizing staff headed by Rondeau took home files, ultimately regrouping as an independent union...
...out of a $30 million national budget, nearly $10 million goes for organizing...
...You can't work a nine-to-five schedule...
...As Domenic Bozzotto puts it, "You often hear that the membership resists new organizing...
...In Los Angeles, the SEIU flagship is the big county workers' Local 660, with some 40,000 members...
...His union triumphed against difficult odds in New York and Las Vegas concession negotiations...
...The game is—who will offer the most staff jobs with the biggest salaries to the most hack officials...
...At a time when most unions are shrinking, it is growing—from some 600,000 members in 1980 to 850,000 today...
...They agreed to stop impeding our organizing," recalls Gerry Shea, director of the union's health care division...
...But in the same year the labor movement lost about 700,000 workers from plant closings, automation, layoffs, and decertification elections, leaving a net loss of 350,000, or about 2 percent of its total membership...
...At the Hilton, they're already bringing in the scabs...
...The bad news: company layoffs are continuing, in no particular seniority order, and it is not entirely clear whether they will be judged an unfair labor practice, or when workers will be recalled...
...Individual unions are experi61 menting with a variety of such models...
...CWA, meanwhile, was plagued by its own local union officials who were not at all sure that they wanted a massive influx of new members...
...Last August, the UAW sent in officials to oversee the local Harvard staff...
...they create the illusion of growth, but they add nothing to labor's strength as a whole, and they consume resources that might better be spent organizing new workers...
...We hired a team of organizers," recalls Phil Giarizzo, the thirty-four-year-old one-time college drop-out who took over as the local's new general manager in 1983...
...The famous paternalism of the high-tech industry keeps the high-end workers unreceptive to unionism...
...But such a proposal was missing from the future of work report...
...However, the other side of that coin is the fact that turning a public-employee organization into a genuine union requires constant organizing of the potential membership pool, to persuade them that belonging to the local is worthwhile, even though membership is seldom a condition of employment...
...Privatization is a source of constant erosion of membership and salary levels...
...Although most of the AFL-CIO's top leadership will agree—in the abstract—that the labor movement as a whole must "organize or die," little practical machinery is aimed at that objective...
...A FEW UNIONS ARE THE EXCEPTION TO THIS picture—Bozzotto's Hotel and Restaurant Employees, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the National Union of Hospital Workers, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), as well as some regions of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), and the Communication Workers of America (CWA...
...The people have to be kept informed of what is going on...
...management will even come across with a modest raise...
...Surprisingly, although minimum-wage work is often associated with short-term, casual employment, many of the workers have been there for several years...
...Dozens of workers from as yet ununionized hotels, invited by Bozzotto to the contract talks, will come away impressed...
...The structure of the economy is tilting away from unionized sectors, into nonunion ones...
...FROM RONDEAU'S PERSPECTIVE, the UAW regional office, dominated by middle-aged men and oriented toward a force of factory workers, had little affinity for organizing young, female clerical workers, and turned routine tactical decisions into tests of loyalty...
...The term `back-of-the-house' meant black-of-the-house...
...It was never something that the membership wanted," says Giarizzo...
...The union adopted a new slogan: "We're worth it...
...The union knows this because the union has a complete file of management's memos...
...In the building service business, wages make up most of a contractor's cost," Welch says...
...He and his associate Scott Washburn then conducted in-depth interviews with over 100 California union officials...
...We found a culture of powerlessness, a general demoralization, and a siege mentality...
...That generation is finally giving way to a more militant generation, whose consciousness is colored both by the political radicalism of the 1960s and the economic frustrations of the 1970s...
...The union used both local people from an aggressive Indianapolis CWA telephone workers' local and two full-time organizers paid by the international...
...Most of what union officials do, day in and day out, is to monitor contracts and process grievances...
...Why So Few Organizers...
...Instead of picking a strategic sector in one locality, say, health care in Los Angeles, and going all out, there's a little nibble here and a little nibble there," Ganz says...
...that you can't win...
...We tried to bring in 15,000 people from the telegraphers union, at Western Union," says the CWA organizer disgustedly...
...It also organized 2,600 clerical workers at Yale University...
...There will be no strike...
...To recall the words of ACTWU's Richard Rothstein, or of Marshall Ganz, good organizers precisely need to be missionary...
...The workers sew seams on caps, using industrial sewing machines...
...Domenic Mario Bozzotto, president of Local 26, is bearded, olive-skinned, tieless, with the bravura and streetcorner patois of a Damon Runyon tough guy, but also the sweetness of a parish priest...
...The AFL-CIO is currently developing a package of economic benefits including cut-rate travel, insurance, and even a low-interest union Mastercard, as inducements to market unionism to associate members...
...Only people who are ideologically committed will do it, but not all ideologically committed people will do it...
...In several states, the teachers union offers associate member status to teachers outside formal bargaining units...
...In centers of high-tech industry, like California's Silicon Valley, or Boston's Route 128 corridor, there have been a few small forays by individual organizers, but no serious commitments of resources by major unions...
...Yet to focus on external factors, real as they are, lets the labor movement off the hook far too easily, for it is never really an easy time to organize a union...
...The risk of this bread-and-butter approach is that it doesn't quite add up to the militancy and union consciousness required for successful organizing...
...Loud cheers...
...Parades of workers carrying banners will play tag with hotel security, marching in one main lobby and out the other, astonishing guests...
...59 You are the ones who must explain things...
...Despite the discouraging external context, SEIU has achieved goals that have eluded most unions...
...One at a time, it has organized about a thousand new Boston workers...
...The more troubling difficulty is that precious few unions are serious about organizing...
...The only time you can talk to workers is when they get off work...
...Ultimately, Local 26 will win, and win big...
...Most people look at contracts in terms of wages and benefits...
...To its credit, the report acknowledged that labor was in serious trouble, and that organizing had to become the labor movement's top priority...
...Eventually, management will drop its demand for a two-tier system...
...By contrast, in the great farm worker drives of the 1960s, the farm workers organizing committee fielded nearly 300 organizers...
...The task, however, is immense, and even a fifty-person organizing staff, though large for a union of SEIU's size, is a drop in the national bucket...
...From the UAW viewpoint, the local organizers were making progress too slowly, and were not sufficiently loyal to the UAW as an institution...
...Now it costs five times as much because of the protracted time it takes to do it right" AFSCME, like the SEIU, is also devoting substantial energies to organizing, and is gaining membership...
...no rank-and-file workers had been involved in bargaining...
...In our interviews," says Marshall Ganz, "we found a union culture built on the positive values of loyalty, trust, helping people, and sticking up for the underdog, but which seriously discourages effective organizing—of either existing members or of new members...
...This is the public-sector equivalent of the two-tier work force, and if it spreads it could seriously undermine public-worker unionism...
...Well, the biggest job they have is to get out of town...
...Such affiliations are not unlike corporate mergers...
...This borrows the old CIO system, which worked fairly well to keep the new industrial unions of the 1930s out of each other's hair...
...But even ten million dollars doesn't go very far in today's organizing climate...
...The Ritz, they're not gonna serve anything on paper plates...
...It could take months...
...You run into the fact that most of the labor movement is not very good at organizing Third-World people, or women...
...Since 1979, under the pressure of the Proposition 13 austerity climate, the local has built an impressive force of shop stewards, fought against contracting-out of public employee jobs, and has also made common cause with the electorate to defend the quality of public services...
...Now we can begin knocking on doors...
...if management didn't demand green cards before the union, it can't demand them now, though that would be small comfort in a raid...
...SEIU is also more strategic in its organizing than most unions, which frequently pick ad hoc targets of opportunity rather than engaging in long-term planning...
...We asked our members what problems they were having on the job, what problems they had with the union, and what the union should be doing for them...
...The oft-heard line, "We have to take care of the membership we've got" could well be the epitaph of the labor movement...
...I found that there had been no membership meetings...
...As A REPORTER VISITS, there is good news and bad news to discuss with the inplant negotiating committee...
...and after an intense ten-week organizing drive, supported by community churches, the union won a representation election, 54-39...
...We're approaching organizing in very nontraditional ways," says Splain...
...Management plans to put the strikebreakers up in the hotels for the duration, give them their own private lounge, with beer and wine and video games...
...No union has the resources to keep subsidizing targets that don't promise eventual members, and no union is currently spending serious money on high tech...
...The AFL-CIO report is a healthy development," Ganz says...
...In Boston, under Bozzotto, Local 26 has organized two new hotels, and targeted six more...
...We can organize 57 anybody, if we're willing to spend enough money," says Bob Welch...
...Beverly may indeed be the strategic breakthrough it is widely held to be, but it is a double-edged success that illustrates just how arduous labor's path will be...
...it became a mission...
...External and Internal Obstacles IN THE 1980s, NEW UNION ORGANIZING BRINGS in only 100,000 to 200,000 private-sector members a year, compared to 750,000 a year in the 1950s...
...By 1980, the union win rate in NLRB elections had fallen below 50 percent (from 74 percent in 1950), and in only about half of the victories does the union ultimately gain a contract...
...The report called for a "mechanism for resolving organizing disputes...
...Sirabella believes organizing must become the top priority for the entire labor movement...
...60 In another recent debacle, the UAW forced the resignations of a longtime organizing staff at Harvard University headed by Kristine Rondeau, who had been working for nine years to organize Harvard clerical workers, and had painstakingly built a 500-worker organizing committee...
...Thus, within its limited sphere, SEIU has begun to accomplish something that has eluded the labor movement as a whole—the transfer of resources from well-unionized sectors, like local government, to sectors with few labor beachheads...
...There is very, very little strategic thinking, and little collaboration between unions...
...It is the most tired unions that most desperately need new organizing— and are most likely to fear it...
...In 1984, according to the AFL-CIO, the labor movement organized about 150,000 new private-sector workers, and about 200,000 in the public sector...
...When CWA made early gains in preliminary elections, AFSCME poured in dozens of organizers, and spent millions of dollars on mass media advertising...
...As the talks approach the strike deadline, it is guerrilla warfare time...
...We're going to raise our standard of living...
...Before 1981," says Bozzotto, "there was tremendous segregation by classification...
...Management has demanded a two-tier wage system for the first time, with new hires getting 25 percent below the standard rates...
...Todo depende en el presiOn econbmica que nosotros podemos poner...
...Much more important are working conditions and patient care...
...Yet, the larger story remains more discouraging...
...The SEIU is a good example of a union that seems to be doing everything right, and making modest headway...
...The public-employee unions have begun to organize the newly privatized work force, with only modest success...
...Many unions have taken an activity—organizing— that is inherently missionary, and they've bureaucratized it...
...Tenemos que estar presentes y tendremos que florear como el maiz en nuestro campo como el sol en primavera nuestro contrato Ilegara...
...The career union leader, who rises from local elected official or shop steward to become a business agent or an international representative and eventually a regional officer, typically rises through the ranks because he is good at resolving grievances and at pursuing everbetter contracts for the established membership, not because he organizes new units...
...After eighteen months and an expenditure estimated at $250,000, CWA gave up...
...This mentality also discourages development of new leadership which could be a political threat...
...Boston's populist mayor, Ray Flynn, will have his police chief quietly pass the word to the hotels that in the event of strike disruptions, the Boston police will not do management's dirty work...
...In these campaigns, far too much money goes to buy the allegiance of officials of the target union, who are looking for the security of jobs on the staff of a larger, merged body...
...Most of the work is unglamorous...
...He made Boston one of HERE's priority cities, sending in flying squads of organizers to help the local...
...However, in the inevitable inter-union turf battle, several key regional Blue Cross targets were awarded to internationals whose commitment is halfhearted at best...
...Coppock holds up the NLRB certification, like a hard-won trophy...
...For example, in an epic donnybrook last year, the CWA, the hospital workers, the Teamsters, and AFSCME all fought each other to organize Ohio public employees who had recently won collective bargaining rights under a new state labor law...
...In the 1983-84 bargaining round, the local felt sufficiently confident to trade away its coveted "maintenance of membership" clause—the contractual equivalent of a closed shop—for better salary and benefits...
...Conventionally, some organizers in private-sector unions look down their noses at publicemployee unions, as creatures that are not quite "real" unions, thanks to civil service protections and generally uncontested elections...
...Apparently, the company is bringing in more caps from Taiwan, adding only the embroidered patches in L.A...
...In large units of more than 100 workers, just one organizing election in seven ultimately produces a union contract...
...We've taken a work force everybody says can't be organized, and we've organized them...
Vol. 34 • January 1987 • No. 1
