Rolling the Union On

...Building on its close ties to the congressional Democratic leadership, the AFL-CIO has made a number of presentations to the Democratic caucuses, featuring workers whose attempts to unionize led to their firings...

...And it has parlayed its political chits into a range of appointments on local governing boards of city facilities such as the airport—where it helped persuade such bastions of nonunionism as the 52 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 Duty Free Shops and the W.H...

...In 1993, after all, labor had been unable to derail the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), though the Congress was controlled by Democrats and the economy was shaky...

...The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) has allocated $35 million, much of that to a campaign to unionize Head Start workers...

...At this fall's national convention in Los Angeles, the AFL-CIO began the process of reversing its previous position—and solidifying its new position as the immigrant worker's most powerful champion...

...The Steelworkers have hired organizers and hope to use their bargaining clout with the core steel companies to expand into newer, nonunion portions of the industry...

...The Organizing Institute (01), which trained new organizers and served as the medium to publicize best practices, had begun this work during the last years of the Kirkland regime (over the objections of some major figures within his administration, but with the support of then Secretary-Treasurer Tom Donahue...

...For most of the first half of this century, Detroit had the highest percentage among all large cities of single-family homes: built for auto workers who benefited, first, from Fordist wages and, secondly, from UAW wages...

...S S OME UNIONS are reconcentrating within their base...

...UNITE's premier organizer, Secretary-Treasurer Bruce Raynor, is slated to become UNITE president within the next two years...

...Labor's penetration of the new, high tech economy remains infinitesimal...

...T T HE SINGLE most notable organizing vic tory of the past several decades—the unionization of 74,000 homecare workers in Los Angeles earlier this year—was actually more the result of SEIU's political smarts and power than it was of any organizing legerdemain...

...Though it's not widely recognized, unions often determine the physical layout of major American cities...

...Last year, unions experienced a net growth of 100,000 members...

...In the more bipolar economy of the past twenty years, however, no one has been building new housing for the new proletariat...

...Chamber of Commerce paid the AFLCIO's political division the ultimate compliment: it announced it would try to reshape its own program in the image of the federation's...

...Sweeney has performed a bit of a balancing act on trade: consistently making the case for a more regulated, humane global economy subject to democratic oversight, criticizing the administration when it has pressed its quest for free trade with nations that permit child- and forced-labor, but declining to join its harshest critics, within and without the labor movement...

...Recently, the U.S...

...LA is an unusual terrain in that organizing internationals dominate the labor landscape: SEIU, with hundreds of young organizers at work among health care workers, airport employees and janitors, and HERE, a far smaller union but one that has built a remarkable support network among local clergy and liberal activists...

...Instead, they are compelled to cluster in rundown apartments and houses...

...Class" has returned to the American political lexicon, and multiracial class consciousness to the liberal sensibility— for which the new model labor movement can justly take a bow...

...The Gore Problem at the UAW and the Teamsters is his position—the Clinton administration's position—on trade...

...When times are good, the increasing concentration among public sector workers means that more and more union workers are far removed from those economic sectors where incomes and wages are really rising...

...Now, it meant organizing new members, while the existing members either made do with less attention or learned to service themselves...

...That had, after all, been the raison d'être for his candidacy...

...Give the devil his due: as policy, welfare reform is a tremendous threat to the American poor, with potentially catastrophic consequences...

...Respondents between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four, though, looked favorably on unions by a more decisive 37 percent-to-18 percent margin, and workers in the eighteen-to-thirty-four category who did not have a union in their workplace said they'd choose unions by a 54 percent-to38 percent margin...

...S S WEENEY'S TENURE at the federation has coincided with a growing public uneasi ness at the persistence, and virulence, of poverty in the midst of plenty...

...The Steelworkers have appropriated $40 million over the next two years, chiefly to rebuild their strength in steel...

...In one twomonth period in 1996, Congress both abolished welfare and raised the minimum wage...

...They don't have Newt Gingrich or Proposition 226 to kick around anymore...

...Unions' success rate in private sector campaigns, as measured by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), still hovers around 50 percent...

...Southwestern Bell Corporation agreed to card check and Bell Atlantic to automatic recognition...

...The federation's political operation, headed up by former CWA and Labor Department staffer Steve Rosenthal, today inspires the same admiration among campaign operatives and elected officials that the Christian Coalition's did five years ago...

...For decades, working for a union meant servicing the needs of the members...

...HAROLD MEYERSON is executive editor of L.A...

...Bensinger was replaced last year by veteran SEIU organizer Kirk Adams— a decision that had more to do with conflicting management styles than with any federation downgrading of the importance of organizing— but Bensinger's tenure clearly marked the Missionary Period of the Sweeney era...

...And much as European socialists call on the European Union to develop transnational social protections and dispel the "democracy deficit" that characterizes its decisionmaking process, so Sweeney calls on the World Trade Organization to develop its own global social protections, and to supplant the backroom deals in which the rules of global trade are currently set with "open covenants, openly arrived at...

...The percentage of the workforce that is unionized has finally stopped its forty-five-year slide this year—at an anemic 13.9 percent—but it hasn't moved upward yet...

...Upon assuming the presidency, Sweeney created an organizing department within the federation, funneled a sizable piece of the federation's budget to that department, and appointed OI director Richard Bensinger as its first head...

...AT&T agreed to hold "expedited" elections in its wireless companies, meaning it wouldn't have the time to wage an all-out anti-union campaign...

...Steelworker president George Becker did yeoman work convincing his members to authorize this change in strategies...

...Exit polls showed Latinos opposing 226 by a 75 percent to 25 percent margin: 6 points more than the margin by which blacks opposed it, and a dozen points more than the margin by which Latinos opposed the banning of bilingual education, another measure on that year's ballot...

...and it would damage labor's credibility not to stand by such a friend...

...I support John Sweeney," he said— and scurried away...

...Through militancy on the line—and a very supple touch in bargain 50 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 ing—the union made Vegas the only American city with a decently paid service sector...

...Although 17.5 percent of the total U.S...

...But mobilizing union members for Gore may prove the trickiest challenge the political operatives at the new AFL-CIO have yet encountered...

...For younger Americans in particular, the decline of middle-income jobs and the dwindling of the middle-class majority are both personally experienced and viscerally understood...

...Over time, the union had to persuade the state legislature, the governor, and the LA County supervisors to designate the county as the employer of record and to establish a board with whom the workers—hired by tens of thousands of sick, disabled, and elderly individuals, but paid by a combination of federal, state and local government funds—could bargain collectively...

...This growing chasm of class, and the growth of Sweeney's social unionism, are likely behind the increasing stature that unions hold, especially among the young...

...Throughout high tech and the bulk of the new economy, however, unions remain a blip at best...

...The past year has seen not just votes by the national delegate body of the American Medical Association to study forming a union, but decisions by smaller groups of doctors to join up with existing unions...

...We've got a ways to go yet...

...The list of industries targeted for organizing in LA—health care, tourism, building services, food processing—is emblematic of union priorities everywhere: it consists almost solely of industries that can't relocate...

...But there are three problems with the emphasis on public sector workers...

...Leveraging its political power into organizing victories has proved more complicated than affecting legislative votes, but it is certainly beginning to happen...

...The craft structure may be a necessary condition to organiz ing the new economy...

...The welfare mom is out...

...Now as then, the call of the social gospel is transforming the ROLLING THE UNION ON urban clergy: this past Labor Day, seven hundred pulpits participated in a labor-sermon project...

...if they did, the above list would be a good deal longer...

...First, there aren't too many other Puerto Ricos—untrod, easy organizing terrains—to go around...

...At the outset, there wasn't a whole lot to showcase...

...By the terms of the state's buildingtrades labor law, contractors for the state can't sack workers for belonging to a union, but apparently it happens all the time, at which point the Painters take the contractors to court—a routine that's been going on for several years now...

...The problem is partly cultural, but also partly structural: high tech is disproportionately an industry of part-time and job-hopping workers, and unions have trouble evolving a successful strategy for a proletariat that's just passing through...

...in Los Angeles, there are probably more than two hundred thousand people living, all illegally, in garages...

...Smiths stores to agree to card-check recognition of workers...

...By 1999, thirteen of fourteen federation-backed candidates had been elected in local contests, and the federation was key to the state's rejection of the union-busting Proposition 226 on the 1998 ballot...

...it is not, as Dean herself readily asserts, a sufficient one...

...And that, as far as organizing went, was pretty much that...

...I I F THE AFL-CIO'S emphasis on organizing is something new (or something so old it seems new), its endorsement of Al Gore is right out of the playbook that labor's been using for years...

...This meant that the first task of Sweeney's federation was missionary work—convincing member unions, first, that they would either change or die and, second, that they could change...

...this year it will go to 200,000...

...Virtually alone among the nation's local labor councils, though, the federation has become a mini-version of the national AFL-CIO, with its own organizing department that helps unions develop organizing strategies and resources...

...This November, nearly 100,000 public employees in Puerto Rico voted to join unions, after a change in the law finally enabled them to unionize...

...Not since the forties— the last period of union growth—has organizing expertise been considered a criterion for heading a union...

...Twice since John Sweeney became president of the AFL-CIO, the federation has held national conventions, and on each occasion Sweeney's keynote address has been preceded by the same distinctive introduction...

...The very fact that Sweeney had emerged as the candidate of the anti-Kirkland forces was the result of his success in nearly doubling the size of his own union, the Service Employees (SEIU), during the Reagan-Bush years, while membership in nearly every other private sector union was spiraling downward...

...When times get tough, it is not clear that a deunionized private sector will be eager to pay taxes to support a unionized public sector...

...For unions whose base is dying, no one is saying, `Go die with your base.' But you should have a clear alternative target...

...In polling conducted earlier this year by Peter Hart Research, respondents' positive view of unions was up to 39 percent, from 35 percent in 1993...

...this year's figure will top 500,000—signaling a net gain of between 100,000 and 200,000 new members when the losses from deindustrialization are factored in...

...The much enhanced political clout of the union movement since Sweeney took the helm is only now beginning to pay dividends in organizing...

...I know of no other field of law where an industry has arisen to offer instruction in how best to violate it...

...Bargaining to organize was also a chief feature of the 1998 negotiations between the CWA and AT&T and the Baby Bells—and the CWA won signal breakthroughs at the table...

...Twenty or thirty have to move to this type of effort if we're going to grow...

...With Sweeney—possibly the single flattest speaker the Bronx has ever produced—the moment almost instantly deflates...

...To coordinate the campaign over the past several years, SEIU tapped David Rolf, who, though still in his twenties, had already made a name for himself by running some of the union's most successful political and lobbying campaigns...

...The Fed has also worked closely with the local Living Wage coalition, which has convinced numerous large and small cities around LA to enact living wage ordinances...

...Though the federation has to be prodded on occasion by the more trade-impacted internationals to draw clearer distinctions on trade with the White House, the AFLCIO has nonetheless become the linchpin of the anti-free-trade forces—not just nationally but globally...

...organizing shopbyshop would never succeed, because a few unionized shops could not survive in a sea of nonunion manufacturing...

...The need to toughen employer sanctions in the National Labor Relations Act and to make organizing a less hazardous activity has been impressed upon Democratic legislators for the past four years...

...But politically, it has made it safe in mainstream circles to be concerned about the poor again...

...As a result, the CWA has unionized roughly six thousand new workers in the wireless industry, with a good deal more on the way—one of the very few instances in which unions have been able to gain a foothold in the new economy...

...Such negative campaigning as they'll undertake will be directed against George W.—not Bill B. But because Bill B.'s record isn't a whole lot different from Al G.'s, the main Gore selling point may inevitably become the rather circular argument that he has labor's endorsement...

...In the electoral arena, labor beat back the GOP's assault last year by defeating ballot measures, most notably California's Proposition 226, which would have curtailed unions' capacity to wage political campaigns...

...By training and deploying hundreds of congressional district coordinators across the nation, mobilizing tens of thousands of volunteers to walk precincts and staff phone banks, the Federation was in good part responsible for the Democrats' House pickups in the 1996 and 1998 elections...

...Los Angeles remains the largest concentration of manufacturing in the nation, though its once huge—and unionized—aerospace and auto sectors have been decimated (aerospace) or eradicated altogether (auto...

...In 1900, Samuel Gompers' s movement largely shunned the unskilled immigrant workers...

...For years, unions have been responding to this grim reality by organizing whatever they could in the public sector...

...But it cannot happen at all absent the kind of union power that, in the past few years, the American labor movement has been learning how to rebuild...

...In the battle over the emerging rules of the global economy, the AFLCIO is the linchpin of a transnational alliance of unions, environmental groups, and human rights activists that has finally begun to challenge the supremacy of the "Washington consensus" for free trade...

...The federation's newfound election-day prowess was quickly translated into heightened legislative power...

...Sweeney's own campaign DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 47 ROLLING THE UNION ON slogan, "America needs a raise," didn't initially seem much of a counter—nor the labor movement much of a rock on which liberals could rebuild their church...

...Where union members are aging and nearing retirement, as they are disproportionately in large industrial unions, it is difficult to persuade them to make concessions in bargaining or to divert resources to organizing campaigns that won't pay dividends until after they're gone...

...As Marx predicted in the Manifesto, organized capitalism has turned doctors into wage slaves...

...How Marx managed to foresee the rise of Health Maintenance Organizations I will leave to Marxologists...

...The SEIU under Sweeney was spending roughly a third of its resources on organizing...

...I recently spoke with the head of the Los Angeles district council of Painters, who told me of a multi-year campaign to place and sign up recruits on jobs funded with public money...

...SEIU, HERE, and UNITE may be the most successful models of organizing unions, but there's another model of successful organizing that relies even more heavily on politics...

...Starting at the University of Michigan, the UAW has become a lead union for organizing teaching assistants at public universities (they recently picked up 10,000 at the University of California...

...To be sure, the transformation of American labor, as Sweeney and those around him take pains to point out, is very much a work in progress...

...Unions that persist in private sector organizing absent the additional leverage of political moxie or bargaining-table clout have a very tough time...

...More than any labor leader since Lewis, John Sweeney has changed the direction of America's unions, altered what it is they do and say, whom they recruit, whom they hire, whom they embrace as allies, and whom they elect as their leaders...

...Currently, 45,000 of the 600,000 American physicians are unionized—a rate (7.5 percent) that is two points higher than that among service workers generally...

...As soon as he begins speaking, the very idea that this charismatically-challenged figure is in some way responsible for the tumultuous procession— let alone the rebirth, however provisional, of American labor—seems absurd on its face...

...That was only one piece of HERE's strategy: the Vegas local also waged a six-and-a-half-year strike at one hotel that refused to negotiate, without a single worker ever crossing the picket line...

...Often it backed union-oriented Latino candidates against the candidates of a more nationalistic DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 51 ROLLING THE UNION ON Latino political establishment...

...He then ran a political-canvass-type campaign to reach out to the workers in their homes, since no two of them had a common worksite...

...As the decade ends, though, the emphasis that Sweeney and his movement have placed on the persistence of poverty amid prosperity, on the growing disparity in wages and incomes, on a social unionism that has seen them become the tribune and the organizers for low-wage America, has refocused liberal thought and managed to push the entire political spectrum to the left...

...One study by Cornell's Kate Bronfenbrenner shows that one-third of companies currently engage in illegal firings of workers involved in such campaigns—up from just 8 percent in the sixties...

...That was the same argument the old-model AFLCIO made for Walter Mondale in 1984, and it didn't work...

...The model was both pioneered and perfected by John Wilhelm and HERE in Las Vegas, where the union agreed to some work rule changes at hotels at which they already had contracts in return for card-check recognition at the new hotel next door owned by the same management...

...As well, the tacticians of Sweeney's campaign were drawn disproportionately from the organizing directors of the rather small number of unions that actually organized...

...Moreover, some federation political powerhouses have yet to endorse Gore...

...the hardworking immigrant parent is in—and the object of solicitude from the same political system that scrapped welfare...

...Unions have to figure out what their base is," says AFL-CIO organizer Steve Lerner, who for years headed up SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaign...

...At the convention, where Gore was endorsed, I asked one normally voluble leader his presidential prefDISSENT / Winter 2000 n 53 ROLLING THE UNION ON erence...

...Unless and until the SEIU, the UAW, and the Teamsters come aboard, labor will have to campaign in such key primary states as California and Michigan without its major players...

...And yet, by any number of measures, American labor is coming back...

...One can only imagine the mix of majesty and bombast with which John L. Lewis would have capped so theatrical an occasion...

...Rolf had the union play a key role in the state legislative and county supervisorial elections of 1996 and 1997, finally securing all the necessary legislation to enable the homecare workers to organize and bargain...

...The auto workers (UAW), the Machinists, and the Teamsters have also beefed up their organizing programs, as, to a lesser degree, have some of the building trades unions (the Operating Engineers have set aside a $15 million organizing fund...

...When Sweeney announced his insurgent candidacy for the AFL-CIO presidency in the spring of 1995, Bill Clinton's recent pronouncement that "the era of big government is over" seemed to stamp the entire decade as a time of conservative ascendancy and liberal collapse...

...In short order, the federation's political operation became the powerhouse of LA politics— waging massive registration, mobilization, and get-out-the-vote campaigns among two distinct but overlapping groups: union members and newly registered Latino voters...

...That means we have to organize a million new members a year...

...his successor there—former organizing director Andy Stern—has raised that figure to a breathtaking 47 percent, which required dismantling a number of existing departments to free up the resources...

...Most major American cities, however, remain heavily Democratic and heavily nonunion within their service and ROLLING THE UNION ON retail sectors...

...Just before its October convention, John Sweeney told his colleagues on the executive council that they had asked Gore for many things over the past seven years and Gore had usually delivered...

...Dean is probably right that such a structure makes sense for the torrent of temps who wash through high tech, but the craft structure is not in itself a panacea...

...But by building a steadily rising level of pro-union sentiment among local officials and civic groups, within the Catholic church and among immigrant workers generally, Contreras has long-range aspirations of converting much of low-wage LA into the world's largest "hot shop"—organizer parlance for a worksite where the workers are itching to unionize—and convincing the manufacturing internationals to come back to industrial Los Angeles...

...About six months after Sweeney became national AFL-CIO president, Miguel Contreras, a seasoned HERE official with roots in the United Farm Workers, became leader of the LA County Fed upon the death of his predecessor...

...The difference was that labor's political muscle was respected in 1997, as it had not been in 1993...

...almost invariably, its choice prevailed...

...The LA "model" is not easily replicable elsewhere, though in recent months Central Labor Councils in other cities have been dropping by to pick up pointers...

...Even among those that have, there are some—the Food and Commercial Workers and the Teamsters among them—that still seem to lack a clear strategic vision for where and how to rebuild their strength in core industries...

...In view of all the difficulties that still vex organizing campaigns, many unions have not yet made the leap to an organizing mode...

...In Santa Monica, the coalition is likely to prevail upon the left-leaning city council to enact the first such ordinance that applies to certain private sector employers with no city contracts—as part of a campaign to unionize that city's luxury beachfront hotels...

...In some notable particulars, America's cities are ending the century much as they began it—with middle-income jobs dwindling, vast immigrant communities ghettoized into low-wage work, and the rich almost unable to comprehend their new fortunes...

...This October, as the NASDAQ hit record highs every other day, the average wage of the American worker increased by exactly one cent...

...to the Trilateral Commission— in which he has demanded protections for the right to organize, and for stronger labor and environmental standards, in every trade agreement...

...In the battle for the political allegiance of America's new immigrants, labor has become the chief vehicle of immigrant socialization and mobilization in cities and mill towns...

...DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 55...

...The largest and most politically active AFL-CIO union in the state, the SEIU injected itself into countless political campaigns over a twelve-year period, established an independent support group of clients with whom it negotiated a series of worker-patient understandings, and plunked a cool two million dollars into Gray Davis's successful gubernatorial campaign...

...It is, however, true...

...Labor's qualified success at becoming a tribune for the bottom end of the proletariat has a faint echo at the top end as well...

...while across the nation, the same city councils and county boards that have slashed welfare benefits have passed living-wage ordinances...

...Congress, statehouses, and city halls have been raising the minimum wage and enacting living wage ordinances, even as they have consigned welfare to the dust...

...In only one American city do normally lowwage service sector workers make enough to buy their own homes: Las Vegas...

...Above all, John Sweeney's union movement is reinventing American liberalism—and not a moment too soon...

...There, as the HERE local has grown during the past decade from a little more than 10,000 members to a little more than 50,000, and won decent wages and benefits from the hotel-casinos that employ them, new housing tracts with their shimmering green lawns are stretching ever further into the desert...

...T T HE DAY AFTER Sweeney assumed the fed eration presidency at its 1995 conven tion, he told his first press conference that the standard to judge him by would be the renewed growth of the movement...

...Sweeney has extended the Wilsonian vision of international relations to the realm of transnational economics...

...Nonetheless, "bargaining to organize" is increasingly becoming one of the leading—actually, one of the few—organizing strategies...

...Not only has Stern become SEIU's president, but John Wilhelm, the organizing genius of Las Vegas, has become HERE president...

...There are certainly lessons from LA about maximizing political strength that can be applied in other cities—just as there are lessons from the SEIU that can be learned by other internationals...

...The SEIU is half-public, half-private...

...Particularly notable are a series of speeches Sweeney has delivered in the belly of the beast—to the annual mega-capitalist conclave in Davos, Switzerland...

...T T ODAY, the number of internationals devoting serious resources to organizing has increased—though not hugely...

...A new left, focused on the plight of poverty-wage workers here and abroad, has arisen on the campus and in the pulpit...

...Only then, with all the workers arrayed in the front of the hall, does Sweeney step forward to speak...

...Bensinger went from city to city, union to union, with a presentation that demonstrated in ghastly detail where unions would be headed unless they redefined themselves as organizing entities, that offered federation assistance for making that change, and that showcased ways that other unions had weathered the transition...

...their negative view had fallen from 34 percent in 1993 to 23 percent today...

...But they are not flocking to settlement houses this time around...

...Bradley, of course, is even more zealously pro–free trade than Gore...

...But Contreras also hopes to interest industrial unions in returning to the LA manufacturing sector...

...A number of the union presidents remained unpersuaded that Gore was the best, or even the better, candidate—but if Sweeney wanted it, they would go along...

...The biggest organizing victory of our time was brought about by a stunning display of political skills...

...One change in the Sweeney era has been the rise of the master organizer within the union hierarchy...

...both Democratic presidential candidates campaign on strengthening the right to organize, and even George W. himself expresses concern for the working poor, though not to the point of actually supporting a hike in the minimum wage...

...In the public sector, it soars to 85 percent—and not because private sector Fed Ex workers are libertarians while public sector postal workers are collectivists...

...The worksites are generally small and fiercely competitive...

...But fast-track never came to a vote, since fully 80 percent of House Democrats opposed it...

...But money and will do not in themselves guarantee results...

...In 1997 in Pittsburgh, and again in 1999 in Los Angeles, workers from successful organizing drives have paraded past the podium while their stories, and their numbers, are shouted to the assembled delegates...

...and CWA's longtime organizing director Larry Cohen is clearly a major candidate to succeed president Morty Bahr...

...he had promoted the right to organize more avidly than any political leader of comparable stature...

...Other legislation is moving at various levels of government that would forbid government contracts to any companies that employ anti-union consultants...

...The reason is that private sector employers all but routinely violate the National Labor Relations Act to suppress organizing drives...

...HERE with hotel maids and cooks—the labor movement was one of the very few established entities with any entrée into that economically depressed community...

...The UAW was only partially successful, though—failing to get card check at either Mercedes or the suppliers, but winning the right to meet with workers inside the Mercedes plant and securing a promise that the Big Three will tell their suppliers not to threaten job cutbacks during the organizing drives...

...The federation's Web site cites the 1938 federal Fair Labor Standards Act—the first national minimum wage law— as a model for what now needs to be done at a 54 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 global level...

...Add to that labor's new interest in social unionism—in organizing and highlighting the plight of the poorest workers in America's cities, in promoting minimum wage hikes and living wage statutes and now immigrant rights, in rallying churches and campuses for these campaigns—and the whole image of America's paradigmatic poor person has undergone a sea change...

...W W HAT MAKES the Los Angeles Fed a model for organizing, however, is that it systematically uses its political power to build organizing drives...

...In the mid-1980s, the national AFL-CIO took a position in favor of employer sanctions to discourage the employment of undocumented immigrants...

...Today, John Sweeney's movement, by embracing them, has also become the real-world connection of the campus left— sponsoring the Union Summer internships, the organizing jobs, and the antisweatshop campaigns that define the new generation of activism...

...Oddly enough, the best efforts of the new labor movement and the worst compromise of the Clinton presidency have combined to put a new, more compelling face on the American poor...

...Her Working Partnerships organization offers its several hundred members portable benefits, constant training in new programs and operating systems, and a unionized hiring hall...

...What Sweeney is saying is it can't be just five unions, or ten, that reshape themselves into organizing unions," says federation organizing director Kirk Adams...

...But arresting labor's sickening slide required nothing less than convincing the federation's constituent unions—not just the 48 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 sixty-eight internationals but their thirty thousand locals—that they had to change what it was they did...

...In short, the federation had created a powerful labor-Latino alliance that is already reshaping California politics...

...I'd like to think we've increased membership [over that time]," the Painters official told me...

...Rolf may be the most successful union organizer since Bob Travis headed up the UAW's drive in Flint in 1937, but he's currently self-employed as a political consultant...

...But we have to get to a net increase of 500,000 members to increase our density, what with the workforce growing at 2 million a year...

...Two Democrats who've evidently been impressed are Al Gore and Bill Bradley, both of whom regularly speak about their commitment to making organizing easier...

...Its goal was to break into the new, nonunion sector of the communications industry, in particular, all the wireless phone companies that had sprung up alongside—and were largely owned or controlled by—Ma Bell's progeny...

...Last year, the movement organized 450,000 new workers...

...Contreras came to power just as Latino voters were beginning to enter the political process in large numbers, determined not to let another calamity such as 1994's Proposition 187—then-Governor Pete Wilson's anti-immigrant ballot measure—befall them again...

...Indeed, the increase in organizing activity in the Sweeney era has produced a corresponding increase in the number of anti-union consultants who advise employers on how to break the law...

...Critics of sprawl are doubtless, and rightly, appalled, but there's another story here—the physical creation of the first city in decades to boast a middle-class majority...

...Unemployment may stand at a thirty-year low, but the percentage of private sector workers in unions is so low—just under 10 percent—that wages are behaving as if unemployment were at 8 percent, not 4 percent...

...The third problem is that predominantly private sector unions that find it easier to fish in the public sector waters may well grow weaker in their core industries—and find it correspondingly more difficult to win decent DISSENT / Winter 2000 4 9 ROLLING THE UNION ON contracts there...

...it has been fully registered at fewer than half-a-dozen of the federation's sixty-eight unions, and partly registered at maybe half-a-dozen more...

...The world is changing for American unions, even if labor law, and the willingness of many unions to organize despite it, has not...

...The UAW's recently completed negotiations with the Big Three auto makers included efforts to get the companies to lean on their nonunion parts suppliers to lessen their resistance to organizing, and to get DaimlerChrysler to agree to recognize the union at its Alabama Mercedes plant if a majority of workers signed cards affiliating themselves with the union (a procedure called "card check," which supersedes the need for an NLRB election, and the anti-union campaign that management usually wages during that time...

...last year it was 51 percent...

...After World War II, similarly, the great housing tracts of Los Angeles were first clustered around the giant, unionized aerospace plants...

...Now as then, college students are devoting themselves to the cause of the poor...

...In 1997, when the administration's fast-track trade proposal came before Congress, Republicans held sway and the economy was strong: by every measure but ROLLING THE UNION ON one, fast-track went to the Hill in a more propitious political environment than NAFTA had...

...The growing number of organizing drives, not just in LA but across the nation, that focus on immigrant workers is also producing an important shift in the movement's position on immigration laws...

...Today, those sanction are frequently used by employers to break up immigrant-led organizing drives...

...We've certainly increased the number of lawsuits we file...

...If you're the Nehru jacket union, no one wants you to die with the Nehru jackets, but that doesn't mean you hop around to postal and shipyard workers...

...The building trades, with just such a structure, have seen a tremendous erosion in membership over the past four decades as contractors increasingly turned to nonunion workers...

...Weekly...

...Amy Dean, the industrious and innovative head of the Santa Clara County (which includes Silicon Valley) Central Labor Council, argues that a craft or occupational, rather than an industrial, union structure makes more sense in such a terrain...

...Second, there's a huge disparity between the unionization rates of private (9.6 percent) and public (37.5 percent) sector employees...

...With a number of LA unions already active among immigrant workers—the SEIU with janitors, homecare, and hospital workers...

...Such a city, goodness knows, doesn't have to take the form of Las Vegas...

...The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor— the 800,000-member central labor council in LA, second in size only to New York's— has become, through a combination of accident and moxie, one of the most strategically savvy and aggressive organizing centers in the movement...

...The Communications Workers (CWA), Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE), and the garment and textile workers (UNITE) all had thriving organizing programs spread unevenly across their internationals...

...to the Council on Foreign Relations...

...Today, more than 600,000 workers are employed in largely lowwage worksites, making everything from computer components to racing wheels to high- and low-end fashions...

...workforce is employed part time, for instance, fully 40 percent of the Silicon Valley workforce is composed of temps and part-timers...