Making Them Flinch: Five Riddles for the Labor Movement

...It's shocked some Democrats, but we've stopped sending volunteers out on campaigns...

...The local's research director sits down and consults with the local's field organizers—most of whom come from the rank and file—at least twice a week...

...he's not optimistic about efforts to form a true third party, but he believes that labor needs some sort of electoral apparatus independent of the Democratic establishment...

...It has no authority to dictate its constituent unions' organizing practices...

...The corporate campaign model does not always harmonize easily with unions' democratic commitments to worker leadership and participation...

...If your goal is to make life uncomfortable for cor54 • DISSENT Riddles for the Labor Movement porate management, it may be tempting to play a few dirty tricks...

...But such tactics ought to be used with caution...

...What are you going to do—strike...

...So it ought to be obvious to the union print workers: if they don't organize the rest of the industry, they're presiding over their own demise...

...A small, heartening sign of the times: labor's best organizers are so eager to learn what works that they'll put serious time and energy into investigating every avenue...

...It has raised the level of anti-union hysteria among televison talking heads and on the pages of the Wall Street Journal to yet higher levels...

...We don't have John Lewis taking a swing at Bill Hutcheson out there—unfortunately...

...A victory at The Box Tree would certainly be stirring—its seriously exploited immigrant workers have been walking the picket lines for nearly four years...

...They're convinced that they can avoid NLRB organizing—[and they're] laying deep and permanent roots on the way toward building a majority...

...This will involve hard choices—and on all of these questions, there are spirited arguments among labor leaders and their allies...

...And UNITE narrowly lost an election at a giant Fieldcrest Cannon textile mill in North Carolina...

...It doesn't make sense every election cycle for unions to give huge amounts of money and then have nothing to show for it," says Goldstein...

...For the United Electrical Workers, for example, this has meant organizing part-time toll-booth workers on the Ohio Turnpike and the faculty and staff of the University of Vermont...

...Not everyone is so convinced...

...It's not a tactic for the faint of heart: employers will not waive their right to an election without a convincing show of union FALL • 1997 • 53 Riddles for the Labor Movement muscle...

...One tenacious partisan of the NLRB route is Bruce Raynor, the Southern Regional Director of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE...

...One of the most ambitious of the new electoral efforts is Progressive Milwaukee, a New Party-affiliated venture that nurtures candidates— largely from the unions' rank-and-file or from other progressive organizations—to run in nonpartisan races for city council and the county board...

...The things that the Democratic Party does to us, the Republican Party would never do to the Christian Coalition...

...After decades of labor somnolence, all of this is good news—even a little thrilling...

...Are such practices unethical...

...Somebody's got to shake things up...

...The NLRB model is attractive on a short sprint," says the SEIU's Rathke...

...The need to devote serious resources to organizing ought to be obvious...

...Not just at the level of collective bargaining, but also above, at the level of governance and ownership, and below, at the level of workplace democracy...

...The Card Check Question With labor law reform nowhere on the horizon, U.S...

...unions are faced with the challenge of squeezing everything they can from the existing framework...

...Or the workers at the Marshall's distribution center in the suburbs...

...Apparently this lesson isn't obvious enough: many unions during the past three decades have devoted only a tiny fraction of their resources to new organizing...

...We get monthly updates .. . as to how you are going to operate...

...And in California, the United Farm Workers have launched a strategic campaign that targets the entire strawberry sector...

...Think of clerical workers in the financial sector," she says...

...Can Labor Redeploy its Resources...

...but HERE has managed to give Dennis Riese undreamt-of headaches...

...For the past generation or so, attacking unions had been a stealthy (if lucrative) business...

...It is with these questions in mind that labor activists are keenly scrutinizing the ongoing strategic projects in Las Vegas and in the strawberry fields of California...

...But the new leadership's thorniest challenges still lie in front of it...

...52 • DISSENT Riddles for the Labor Movement But a victory at Riese would be more than stirring: it would have a palpable effect on the wage landscape of New York restaurants...

...Whereas the UAW militants of 1936 could shut down General Motors by sitting down en masse at their machines, today's most muscular labor "actions" are sometimes conducted by a few college-educated researchers in cubicles, poring over databases and 1099 forms...

...The AFL-CIO has taken real steps since John Sweeney and his allies won the leadership in late 1995: the much-publicized "Union Summer" program, which has trained thousands of young activists in the rudiments of organizing...

...Suppose the AFL-CIO emulated the French labor movement, which likes to target sectors—most famously, transportation— that lie in the economy's soft underbelly...

...Here's why: nearly every observer agrees that labor needs to wean itself from "hot shop" organizing, in which unions pour resources into shops that already have serious grievances...

...And finally, the federation has organized a series of regional conferences designed to preach the gospel of organizing and to bring activists together to share "best practices...

...But unions usually shouldn't be on a short sprint...

...Second, the department is using its influence to prod unions to relax their turf worries and to work cooperatively across jurisdictional lines...

...The department will tackle the governance-and-ownership level in part by encouraging unions to leverage their pension funds' holdings in various corporations...

...The Teamsters did just that earlier this year when they coordinated a shareholder resolution that challenged GE chair Jack Welch's astronomical earnings...

...This summer, unions were reminded that having allies in power—even allies as indigestible as Bill Clinton—sometimes matters...

...thirty-five million dollars in political advertising...

...Acuff is a member of the New Party...

...The second is an elaborately planned campaign targeting Riese Restaurants, a 180-unit company that operates various franchises (T.G.I...

...Abandoning the hot shop model is uncontroversial...

...The decision to devote resources to strategic organizing will need to be made local by local and union by union...

...Local 100 has worked to unthread this tension by heavily involving its worker-leaders in every aspect of the campaign...

...This question may sound foolish...

...They're hard to organize, but they'd be worth the effort—they're in a position to shut the country down...

...The engine room of the campaign has been Local 100's research department, which has aggressively scrutinized Riese's management and financial profile—and hasn't been shy about sharing its findings with potential creditors and investors...

...People have to learn all of this for themselves, on the ground," says Stewart Acuff, president of the Atlanta Labor Council...

...but that in itself can't erase the four decades of severe decline that preceded 1995...

...And Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric, recently mailed a videotape of himself, Mission: Impossible-style, to thousands of GE managers, imploring them to mount the barricades in advance of contract talks: "We don't need some third party to give people voice and dignity," proclaims the $22 million-a-year chairman...

...The strawberry campaign is still in its early stages, but the Las Vegas effort—which draws on organizing launched a full decade ago—appears to be a strong success...

...Wilhelm spent several days in the rural South, and Raynor paid a call to Las Vegas, to explore some of their disagreements at first hand...

...It's astonishing—every day I pick up the paper and see something else labor is getting involved with...

...The difficulty has been moving 'best practices' into large-scale campaigns," says Rathke...

...He almost certainly would have invoked Taft-Hartley and forced the Teamsters back to work...

...It's easy to sympathize with unions' impulse to sit back and nurse their existing contracts: new organizing, especially during a period when Reagan appointees have dominated the NLRB, is grueling and dispiriting...

...Labor has used its new visibility to raise exactly the questions that American business dreads most: Why, in the seventh year of an economic recovery, are Americans' feelings of economic insecurity, as measured by pollsters, at a post-Depression high...

...In Las Vegas, HERE and several other unions have combined forces to target the entire range of hotel, restaurant, and casino workers...

...In Southern states where unions lack a real toehold, Raynor argues, it's extremely tough to bring enough pressure on employers to force them to respect card-check majorities...

...Labor '96 was a success," says Acuff...

...The resolution failed, but it generated headlines—and may have subtly undercut Welch's videotaped message to his troops...

...First, the Organizing Department has radically expanded the Organizing Institute and Union Summer programs, which train college-age organizers (and also seriously reduce the staffing burdens of many campaigns...

...See David Brody's "Labor Elections: Still Good for Workers...

...Everybody's looking at these drives," says Wade Rathke, a founder of the community organization ACORN who now organizes with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in New Orleans...

...Consider the work of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local 100 in New York City...

...As one long-time organizer puts it, "I never thought I'd see these changes...

...Why in the world would you want to do that...

...Labor needs both to maximize its power on a hostile playing field—by many measures, ours is the most antilabor nation in the developed world—and also find ways to transform that playing field...

...As the labor economist Richard Freeman told the New York Times in February, Sweeney has great strengths, but he and his colleagues may nonetheless be "captains of a sinking ship...

...When we canvas door-to-door, it's always our apparatus talking about our issues...

...Ron Blackwell, who directs the new department, told a conference in February that "[t]he AFL-CIO is trying to provide leadership to help workers challenge employers at every level...

...Last year these officials successfully enacted living wage ordinances for the city, the county, and the school board...

...How to Conduct Corporate Campaigns...

...Labor's real test, this argument insists, is organizing low-skilled service employees in the private sector...

...So why be choosy...

...Unions throughout the country are beefing up their research departments—both in the service of guerrilla tactics like Local 100's and for the more prosaic purpose of strategic targeting...

...Card-check organizing is being tested in all sorts of arenas, but its current showcase is the Las Vegas project...

...Today, however, you can hardly turn on CNN without seeing Republican apparatchiks shouting oaths at "Big Labor" or "left-wing labor bosses...

...And as Richard Rothstein has argued, local union leaderships are sometimes institutionally conservative, fearing that an influx of newly organized workers would disrupt their electoral base...

...These campaigns have often been effective and worthwhile—indeed, a few unions might not have survived the 1980s without forays into the public sector—but some trade unionists fear that government organizing sometimes serves as a distraction, an evasive maneuver...

...Indeed, even in Las Vegas there have been a few turf wars...

...American unions have been losing members by the hundreds of thousands, as rust-belt industries decline and the service sector continues to resist organizing...

...And the AFL-CIO has unveiled a new Department of Corporate Affairs, whose mandate runs very wide...

...We're out there dying—if somebody's got a cure for cancer, we're not waiting for the FDA to certify it...

...That's not exactly the point— after all, Gannett and Knight-Ridder bullied the Detroit workers into striking in the first place...

...Can Labor Wield Political Power...

...The UPS win was labor's largest victory in years...

...Many of the strategic campaigns of the last decade have targeted government workers, because in most states the barriers to public-sector organizing are relatively low...

...Dissent, Spring 1997, for a fuller discussion...

...You want to talk about people being organized right here: the mechanics at Valujet, where no one thought they'd ever be able to organize...

...We were effective at upping the number of union members who voted and participated in elections...

...The local has recently distributed leaflets that attack one of Riese's creditors for its ties to the Union Bank of Switzerland, which was exposed earlier this year as a harbor for Nazi-era gold...

...The federation exists to serve its constituent unions, not the other way around...

...It's clear that something is getting under corporate America's skin...

...Fridays, Dunkin' Donuts) throughout the metropolitan area...

...They leave unions vulnerable to legal action under racketeering statutes, an avenue employers are increasingly fond of (see David Brody's "Criminalizing the Rights of Labor," Dissent, Summer 1995...

...When Dennis Riese, the president and CEO of Riese Restaurants, realized that his firm was being targeted by HERE, he cheerfully told union leaders, "There's nothing you can do to me...

...Hot shop organizing generally has little to do with maximizing a union's power within a particular community or industry...

...The bleeding has slowed during the past two years, but labor would need to organize over a million members each year for the next decade in order to recover the proportion of the work force it covered at its early-1950s peak...

...And what do Jack Welch and his ilk do all day, that they should earn a thousand times more than schoolteachers, nurses, or fire fighters...

...But the problem is that we have a Democratic Party that isn't unified with us on our core issues...

...He is also anxious that the Las Vegas experience will prove unreplicable because too many unions are reluctant to work in collaboration...

...Local 100 is currently waging two high-profile campaigns...

...For all their public prominence, the officers of the AFL-CIO can't quite claim to be the "leadFALL • 1997 • 51 Riddles for the Labor Movement ership" of the American labor movement...

...We'll show the world how we can operate in a strike and not flinch if that's what happens...

...Still, the triumph at UPS—and especially the unexpected levels of public support the Teamsters received—may someday be remembered as a major step forward for a more militant labor movement—the kind of movement that might make Jack Welch and his fellow CEOs sleep a little less easily...

...You better get prepared like you have never been prepared...

...Look at the steel workers: they're building member-only representation plans in several of the new [small] mills...

...The NLRB process may be treacherous and slow— but it offers Raynor's campaigns a certain degree of public legitimacy and breathing space...

...This demarche bypasses the formal National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election process, which too often permits employers to bully and stonewall unions out of existence...

...and aggressive drives in the strawberry fields of California and the entire service sector of Las Vegas...

...We need the political will to get past these encrusted jurisdiction fights...

...but just what type of strategic organizing to undertake is a stickier question...

...In each case the AFL-CIO has committed to provide an array of national resources: training, coordination, and public relations...

...Insofar as the Las Vegas and strawberry campaigns are successful, they will not provide models that can simply be imposed on the rest of labor...

...When Democrats like [Georgia Governor Zell] Miller privatize everything left and right, they're gutting their own electoral base...

...One organizer recommends that the beleagured newspaper workers in Detroit launch a harrassment campaign against the boards of Gannett and Knight-Ridder: "Find out where they live, jam their fax machines, harass them when they go shopping...

...These are the country's most vulnerable workers—and Wal-Mart, after all, is hiring faster than any government agency...

...I've never thought that it made sense to spend a lot of resources on an institution that's anti-union...

...The first aims at The Box Tree, a tony East Side restaurant that the union became involved with in 1993 on a hot-shop basis...

...John Wilhelm, a HERE organizer who has played a major role in Las Vegas, has made card-check tactics work by weaving together community alliances, financial pressure on corporate boards, civil disobedience, and savvy bargaining...

...One increasingly popular strategem is so-called "card check" organizing, in which unions try to pressure employers directly into the bargaining room as soon as they've signed up a strong majority on the shop floor...

...A more troubling aspect of corporate campaigns is their potential to spawn bad faith...

...We can't go around preaching to workers in Atlanta about all the great things that are happening in Las Vegas...

...And only 20 percent of them are organized...

...Progressive Milwaukee's chair, John Goldstein, who is also Secretary-Treasurer of the Milwaukee Labor Council, says that Progressive Milwaukee's elected officials have raised policy questions that even the most progressive Democrats had failed to address...

...Raynor and HERE's Wilhelm, who have conducted a friendly long-distance debate over the card-check question, recently exchanged visits...

...But even as the UPS strike unfolded, the labor movement suffered two grim setbacks: workers at a Wal-Mart store in Wisconsin, which would have been only the second unionized WalMart on the globe, soundly defeated an organizing vote...

...Sweeney's new team—along with ascendant reformist leaderships in several internationals— has set out to reverse this pattern...

...Several large-scale multi-union drives are likely to be announced during the next nine months...

...Now, the talented group of people that Sweeney has assembled faces the challenge of converting labor's newfound energy into a sustainable strategy for growth...

...We've got roughly fifty print shops in Atlanta," says Acuff...

...And when he visits (or pickets) loan officers, he always goes in the company of rank-and-file Riese workers...

...The SEIU recently launched a system that gives locals an elaborate series of financial and staffing incentives to increase the percentage of their budgets devoted to new organizing...

...The average salary at the nonunion shops is around twenty thousand, and the average at the union shops is about three times that...

...Elaine Bernard, the director of Harvard University's Trade Union Program, wonders aloud whether labor needs a still more leveraged approach...

...It's comforting to think that aggrieved workers at unorganized plants can call up a union and get serious attention—but this 911 model too often substitutes for serious strategic planning...

...The AFL-CIO isn't in a position to offer such carrots to its constitutent unions, but it has done what it can to nudge them along...

...Whom to Organize...

...And although Sweeney's slate campaigned on a platform of renewed organizing, and have launched some clever and effective intitatives, in the end their weapon is the bully pulpit...

...Consulting firms and think tanks would whisper formulas for busting unions into the ears of managers and state legislators—but rarely felt the urge to take their cause to the public...

...The federation can commit resources to such campaigns only when it is, in effect, invited to join...

...We need to build our own apparatus...

...q FALL • 1997 • 55...

...Labor has revitalized its core and put a scare into its enemies...

...The Teamsters' successful strike of United Parcel Service was built on years of careful organizing and mobilization...

...But all of that work probably would have gone for naught if Bob Dole were sitting in the White House...

...Three years later, the outcome of the Riese campaign is still very much in doubt...