Is It Still a Union Town?
Oreskes, Michael
When Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post in 1976 he launched his new product with a declaration that New York was "a newspaper town again." The Newspaper Guild, under pressure to grant...
...Although it would be difficult to build an office tower without the construction trades, it would be just as difficult to find such a new building whose office workers are predominantly unionized...
...First, Van Arsdale's supporters, drawn heavily from the more conservative building trades and other private-sector unions, were impressively disciplined...
...It remains to be seen if it will be...
...they checked the books every day to make sure their supporters' union dues were paid up...
...Not only are unionized sectors dwindling as a share of the entire job market...
...Gotbaum says he would not have tried to use the council as a platform for foreign policy issues, but he believes his views are an important reason why national labor leaders would not have wanted him in control of the most central of all labor councils...
...In addition, many public-sector unions are among the most integrated institutions in the city...
...the proverbial "Taiwan" has come to them, in the form of the greatest wave of immigrants to New York in half a century...
...It is in times of crisis that leadership matters most, but labor in New York is facing its crises divided by squabbles over job market turf, political access, and personalities...
...But equally symbolic was the ensuing struggle for succession in the Central Labor Council...
...Van Arsdale says that "a small number saw that as the issue and were excited to vote for me...
...But that decision is not something that affects only union members and their employers...
...The exceptions are jobs in local government and construction...
...He was opposed in that contest by Victor Gotbaum, then retiring from DC 37, the largest municipal workers union...
...The head of the PBA has launched strident attacks upon the city's first black police commissioner, Benjamin Ward, and is regarded by minority leaders and, indeed, many minority officers, as hostile to black and Hispanic advancement within police ranks...
...And when these workers, predominantly black, working-poor women who make only about $4.50 an hour, rallied late last spring in front of City Hall, with the support of both the Reverend Jesse Jackson and New York's John Cardinal O'Connor, to demand higher wages, one of the three unions, the more conservative Service Employees, stayed away because of a dispute with 1199 and an AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) district council over tactics and jurisdiction...
...according to Professor Leo Troy of Rutgers University, the nation's leading expert on levels of unionization, union strength within its own traditional sectors is weakening, too...
...Three different unions are attempting to organize the growing field of home health-care attendants who care for the ailing and elderly...
...In the bitter, hard-fought campaign, Gotbaum emerged with a lead of about 5,000 out of 800,000 votes cast by union leaders on the basis of total membership...
...The top political adviser to powerful new State Assembly speaker Mel Miller is the former political 488 • DISSENT A CITY DIVIDED director to former AFSCME DC 37 head Victor Gotbaum...
...The hotel gives us all the information we need," she said...
...the outcome revealed a left or progressive wing unfocused and divided within itself, and a conservative or right wing relatively more disciplined and unified...
...And it accounts for much of the political power that labor retains in the life of the city...
...It is one of the pivotal factors shaping New York's political and social life for the next generation...
...The ILGWU, as already mentioned, is competing with at least half a dozen other unions in the so-far frustrating effort to organize office workers...
...whose first interest is not the United States...
...The Newspaper Guild, under pressure to grant Murdoch wage and work rule concessions, responded by distributing buttons declaring, "New York: A Union Town Still...
...Strategic power refers to more than electoral influence, however, and even to more than the traditional, if not always legal, capacity to shut down the city through strikes...
...Garment manufacturers, meanwhile, haven't fled the city or the nation in recent years as often as they've simply opened nonunion sweatshops in Chinatown or Queens...
...The Postal Workers Union, Local 1199 of the Health Care Workers Union, and the largest local of the ILGWU are all now headed by blacks...
...Even here, in one of the cradles of American unionism, there has been both serious erosion and a dramatic shift in the base and nature of union power...
...Gotbaum, for example, says he was denied victory by Kirkland because the latter is a strong supporter of American foreign policy, including aid to the contras in Nicaragua, while Gotbaum is just as strong in opposition, and therefore "not the leadership's kind of guy...
...Second, one major public-sector union, the UFT, sided with Van Arsdale, part of a legacy of years of distrust of Gotbaum by UFT leaders...
...Outside these sectors, unions have not only been slow to organize stockbrokers, lawyers, and clerks in the burgeoning financial and corporate service industries...
...That mediation and advocacy role is even clearer in the case of health-care and day-care workers, not only because their clients are poor, but also because their own members are themselves among the working poor—or have achieved security and middle class prospects only because of their unionized jobs...
...To others, the partnership is a model for unions in the post-industrial world...
...I don't know," he responds...
...With the exception of the air traffic controllers at LaGuardia and Kennedy airports, public-employee unions have maintained if not expanded their position of strength...
...On the other hand, the Republican Senate's resistance to tenant protection, progressive taxation, and ethics reform is well known, and to some activists it has not always been clear that a determined statewide effort couldn't dislodge the Republicans from power...
...Two central challenges imperil a constructive response...
...Two footnotes to this leadership struggle cast additional light on internal politics and communications...
...But to say that labor occupies a strategic position is not necessarily to say that it has the strength, unity, or inclination to take advantage of it...
...More than the church, political parties, or media, the unions, or at least certain of them, bridge divisions of race and class that are the city's crucial social challenge...
...Politics in New York is indeed inseparable from union power, to a degree unknown virtually anywhere else in the country...
...It's massive in dimension and pervasive among manufacturing industries," says Samuel Ehrenhalt, head of the New York office of the Bureau of Labor Statistics...
...he says he notes this distinction in "influence" between New York's labor movement and that of the rest of the country whenever he travels...
...They are the most significant force with both a presence at the centers of power and strong ties to the city's poor who are clients—welfare recipients, schoolchildren and their parents—or even, in low-wage occupations like health-care attendants, members of unions themselves...
...How important was this belief to his supporters...
...When the city's AFL-CIO unions sought a new leader for their Central Labor Council last year, what should have been a debate about the future rang with battle cries from the past...
...Van Arsdale insists that he, personally, did not feel that national or world politics was a deciding factor, but then adds, "There can be no doubt there are people in the trade union movement whose first interest is not the trade union movement...
...That same wave has thus far permitted several new hotels to open in midtown Manhattan without the participation of the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union...
...And the overall decline in manufacturing here has been considerably greater than in the nation as a whole...
...With ebbing membership in declining industries in a time of economic trouble, unions often feel forced to defend their own bases against newcomers instead of reaching out to potential new members in other areas...
...Van Arsdale's son Thomas, like his father the head of Local 3 of the electrical workers, took over the council pending an election to fill the 490 • DISSENT A CITY DIVIDED job for a full term...
...Nationally, labor was so concerned with its ebbing power in 1984 that it put aside past practice and became directly involved in Democratic party politics to ensure Walter Mondale's presidential nomination...
...Unions provide the manpower, a good deal of the brainpower, and even, to a considerable extent, the money in local electoral campaigns...
...The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), for example, despite its historic differences with minority champions of "community control" of the public schools, has come, almost by default, to "represent the children," the phrase used by the union's new president, Sandra Feldman...
...It is only to say that whatever labor does will matter beyond its own ranks, influencing whether the city's current divisions will widen or dissolve in the multi-ethnic city of the 1990s...
...It needs a lot of pulling together...
...But even here, there have been sea changes...
...they are even losing some of their grip on such traditional sectors as manufacturing...
...To some, particularly rank and filers who don't play tennis with investment bankers or see any dollar benefits, the special relationship is a mistaken accommodation...
...The implicit defensiveness of that move— a major union has to remind people that this is a union town?—underlines the state of labor in New York...
...Without question, there is no more potent political force for the public schools than the UFT, and it is not just union propaganda that the organization fills a real void left by the weakness of parent, social service, and minority constituent groups...
...The answers aren't always clear...
...First, the city is undergoing a wrenching transformation that, overall, has weakened union power: the nonunion sectors of the local economy are booming, while unionized sectors shrink...
...How much difference the leadership of the Central Labor Council can make in meeting the challenges confronting unions in New York is open to question...
...Hill, a black man from Queens who had risen through union ranks, instantly became a major figure in New York politics...
...Indeed, at the conservative end of the labor spectrum, the gap between city workers and poor clients could not be wider than it is between the leadership of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (PBA) and black and Hispanic New Yorkers outraged by police misconduct and brutality that they charge is predominantly racially motivated...
...According to Professor Troy, some employees in growth sectors even view unionization as a threat to their jobs rather than a way to improve wages and protect working conditions—not an attitude one expects of workers in New York...
...I think it could be pulled together...
...Fernando Ferrer, who took over as Bronx Borough President after the Bronx Democratic organization scandals, counts among his top advisers the president of one public-employee union and the political director of another...
...Troy has not yet issued precise figures, but one doesn't need statistics to see what is happening...
...At a time when labor's central challenge in New York is to organize the people who do the grunt work of a changing American capitalism—the backoffice workers, secretaries, and tellers—two men vying for leadership have been questioning each other's motives and credentials on foreign policy...
...It was Van Arsdale who had served as a conduit for funneling the resources of private-sector unions into publicsector organizing during the "heroic" years of municipal unionization in the 1950s and 1960s...
...No one knows exactly what portion of New York's work force is unionized...
...It's a far cry from what it once was...
...How did she know...
...Printing, textiles, and plastics have all been hit hard, as have support industries like trucking and shipping...
...But "inside influence" in electoral politics has involved compromises, too, as in the frequent decisions of traditionally liberal publicemployee unions to support Republican candidates in crucial State Senate races in order to remain on the good side of the Republicans who control the State Senate...
...It is the one institution straddling the great divide of modern New York...
...But while the city's economic boom increased the number of stock and commodity brokers by 57,000 in a decade, key segments of the traditionally 486 • DISSENT A CITY DIVIDED unionized garment industry declined by almost exactly the same number of jobs...
...For more than a generation, the council had been synonymous with one man, Harry Van Arsdale—curmudgeon, tactician, extraordinary organizer, friend and adviser to several mayors...
...In recent years perhaps the most important such transition in leadership in the city took place in January 1987, when Victor Gotbaum was replaced by Stanley Hill as executive director of DC 37...
...Who they are I don't know, but they're out there...
...For the first time in its history, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) has embarked on organizing outside the needle trades, among office workers—a sector where several other unions have already met with considerable frustration...
...The intermediary role is imperfect, of course, for the interests of union members are not always identical with the interests of the poor...
...There are a lot of people who supported him who are in that category...
...Their interest is furthering the interest of the Soviet Union...
...The weakening of county political organizations has only strengthened the role of union political operations...
...After Van Arsdale's victory, a UFT official was named secretary-treasurer of the Central Labor Council...
...One came away with an impression of competing organizations that all just happen to be in the business, as it were, of representing different groups of workers to their particular employers...
...Patrick's Cathedral in 1986...
...It was a symbol of changing times that Mayor Koch was absent from Van Arsdale's funeral at St...
...It FALL • 1987 • 487 A CITY DIVIDED gives a link and justification which the rest of the labor movement sorely needs to rebuild its strength," claims Michael Piore, an economics professor at MIT...
...it would have been unthinkable for Koch's predecessors to have missed such an occasion...
...In New York, FALL • 1987 489 A CITY DIVIDED another dimension of union power involves labor's ability to mediate between the city's elites and its poor...
...A young waitress at the Novotel Hotel on Broadway explained recently that she felt more in common with her employer than with the union, which she claimed was corrupt...
...They would like to have control of the city's Central Labor Council to further their interests...
...And while electricians, carpenters, masons, and the rest are bloated with contracts on midtown office construction, they seem to feel no great motivation to defend union turf on smaller projects, including renovation work, often undertaken with non-union labor...
...in New York, unions had been doing that for years...
...There is a labor movement," Sandra Feldman of the teachers union insists...
...Contrary to a common misconception, the job loss is not just among small, nonunion shops and light industries...
...Gotbaum, by contrast, lost because several local unions did not pay their dues properly and were disqualified...
...The public-employee unions' role in the 1975 fiscal crisis, which involved accepting wage concessions and committing union pension funds to keep the city from default, has given publicsector unions a special and, to some, ambivalent status and influence as architects of New York's fiscal recovery...
...a number of blacks otherwise stymied in reaching top positions in New York's political and civic life are emerging as heads of important unions...
...Who is co-opting whom...
...The movement needs new organizing strategies to reach a changing work force, and it will need strength that comes not only from top leadership if it is to put those strategies into effect...
...q FALL • 1987 • 491...
...Unions have used their Senate entrée to improve pensions and, during and since the fiscal crisis, to strengthen the city budget and hence their own chances of winning raises and increased services to the poor...
...Even Mayor Koch, who was elected in part on a "get tough with city workers" platform in 1977, has since found it expedient to ally himself closely to the more conservative uniformed unions (police and fire) and to maintain a truce with the others...
...Clearly, it is far higher than the 18 percent of the nation's workers who belong to unions...
...Is he suggesting that a Gotbaum victory would have meant Communist control of the council...
...What all this makes clear, of course, is not a conspiracy of the sort Van Arsdale perceives, but an ideological and personality-driven cleavage in the city's labor movement...
...Mario Cuomo's first Democratic gubernatorial primary victory over Mayor Ed Koch in 1982 and his generalelection victory over the much better financed Republican conservative Lew Lehrman were organized largely by labor unions, especially at the field operations level...
...Sellout or shrewd partnership, the new relationship clearly has something to do with the fact that publicemployee unions have managed to offset the decline of unionization in manufacturing and commerce in New York...
...But a number of Gotbaum's supporters, including locals within his own district council, were disqualified for failing to pay their dues on time, and Van Arsdale was declared the winner in a ruling by AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland...
...Gotbaum still contends he should have been ruled the winner...
...But even if he had been—and many of his own supporters feel he lost fair and square—the election would have revealed a movement almost evenly divided by contending ideologies and personalities...
...To be sure, the Guild's button emphasized what is still an important truth: for all its economic troubles and internal strife, the labor movement holds a strategic position in the city's life and politics...
...Second, the labor movement is riven with factional, ideological and personal strife—so much so that a visitor to several major union leaders in the city finds himself asking whether there is still a labor "movement" at all...
...Nothing illustrates the political and personal divisions better than the fight last year for control of the city's Central Labor Council, composed of the leaders of all the AFL-CIO unions in the city...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
