Hard Organizing in Sunbelt City

...What we're trying to do is give us more tools and informational backup than the other side has...

...Labor's Uphill Struggle BY DAVID MOBERG Hard Organizing in Sunbelt City As much as the forests of oil refineries and the glittering office buildings, the Astrodome is a symbol of booming Houston, the self-styled "golden buckle on the Sunbelt...

...Along with the frustration, anger, and shock came fear...

...Competition for jobs, pressure for union concessions, shutdowns, and capital flight-all these ills supposedly confined to the Frost Belt began plaguing Houston workers...

...We handbilled the plant, got an in-plant committee," he says...

...The Houston Organizing Project is proud of its computers and word processors...

...The Plumbers are now only loosely associated with the Project...

...Concessions definitely hurt us," says Vanya...

...The unions, though, have not kept pace...

...Twenty-nine participating unions provide it with an annual budget of $1 million and a staff ot twenty organizers and ten researchers, publicists, and community relations aides...

...I think it's been a total failure...

...Our percentage of commercial [work] has been reduced from 70 per cent to 50 per cent"—despite contract concessions...

...Today, a union contractor can decide crew sizes, supervisors, equipment, and almost everything else at the site without union restrictions...

...Maybe it could, maybe it will," he said...

...They enable organizers to spend more time with the folks...

...After five years of preparation, the Houston Organizing Project was launched in October 1981...

...He makes up 75 per cent of the open shop contractors...

...If they're illegal, they shouldn't be in our union, and we shouldn't be bothering with them...

...Gale Van Hoy, executive secretary of the Houston Building and Construction Trades Council, claims, "The biggest issue we have to contend with is the illegal alien...

...In the building trades, too, unions are under fire...

...One industry group estimates that union membership in the building trades dropped from 38 per cent in 1970 to 22 per cent in 1983...

...Nine of twelve Houston Organizing Project campaigns have so far resulted in union recognition, Comeaux says, but not all have produced contracts...

...They really don't have anything to offer us," insists Bertani...

...Modeled on a coordinated effort begun in Los Angeles twenty-one years ago and similar to smaller efforts sponsored by the AFL-CIO or its Industrial Union Department in Atlanta, Orlando, and Baltimore, the Houston OrDavid Moberg is a senior editor of In These Times...

...Still, it took almost a year after the election victory to win a modest 10 per cent pay increase as well as better safety and grievance procedures...

...But the AFL-CIO's Houston Organizing Project, which includes the Astrodome drive, is labor's quiet declaration that it will try, however long that may take...

...The SEIU and the United Food and Commercial Workers are conducting a joint drive against Beverly Enterprises, the largest and fastest-growing nursing home chain in the country with 600 homes, one-fifth of them in Texas...

...In Freeport, for example, the Carpenters Union won an election at a Canadian Millworks factory employing 120...

...Some labor leaders attribute their organizing problems to the undocumented Mexican immigrants who spill over the border...

...But maybe that's the way it has to be...

...But the Organizing Project ran into unexpected trouble not long after it began...

...But labor has been kept at bay in Houston partly because it hasn't tried hard enough...

...I haven't found anybody say they're getting anything out of it," says C. L. "Chuck" Bertani, vice president of the Texas AFL-CIO and president of the state Machinists union, which does not participate in the Project...

...I asked Van Hoy whether the Project has made any difference...

...When the Astrodome drive started last year, for instance, two key supporters were dismissed...

...I think it would be more effective with rank-and-file organizers...

...Unemployment soared from 3.8 per cent to a high of 9.9 per cent...

...Nevertheless, he says, "I would hate to see them go, 'cause anything is better than nothing...

...But so far, they haven't had much of an impact...

...Demetrio Lucio, a former organizer for the United Farmworkers who now works for the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, wants to make it another kind of symbol...

...We are waiting on the economy to pick up...

...ganizing Project is designed to throw every available resource into the city's unionizing campaign...

...We still had a committee, but things just faded away...

...It turned out they wanted us to handbill the plant just to get a raise...

...In its first twenty months, the Project unionized some 7,500 workers, according to director Bob Comeaux...

...For the cost, it just didn't make good sense...

...In 1982, the number of union elections in south Texas declined, though Houston unions won a greater percentage of their elections than the national average...

...The Project also encourages cooperation among unions, says Stewart Acuff, a coordinator of the campaign by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to organize Texas nursing home workers...

...But those tools do not replace what organizers traditionally do...

...After a union victory at one area hospital in 1979, other hospitals raised wages and improved working conditions...

...Phillip Lord, business representative of the Plumbers Union, said his organization has "lost ground in the last twenty months...

...Although such retaliation is against the law, employers commonly fire workers who are active unionists...

...Though the crafts have defended their hold on big-ticket downtown construction projects and are growing in strength at Gulf Coast industrial sites, home construction has been almost entirely nonunion in what, for several years, has been the nation's largest residential housing construction market...

...Suddenly, in an economy that hadn't seen hard times since before the Great Depression, the bottom dropped out...

...Details about where those members work are no longer provided by the Project, but earlier estimates indicate that at least half were public employees recruited into AFSCME or the American Federation of Teachers...

...If I got one of the guys out of the shop—a tool-and-die worker, a welder, or a fork-lift operator—and made him the organizer, people will believe him when he tells them what he's doing there and why he's in a union...

...Office vacancy rates are so high in Houston that construction is likely to be depressed for many years...

...Fear of layoff also can have a chilling Concessions have made unions less attractive to workers, who see little difference between union and nonunion shops effect on unionization...

...Organizers from the Project and its associated unions helped distribute leaflets at thirty Beverly facilities and demonstrated against a corporate official in Houston...

...From that point forward, it's been difficult to organize...

...Even within the labor movement, however, there is a sense of disappointment with the Project's progress...

...All the sophisticated machinery they have, we already have...

...Under state law, public employees cannot bargain with governmental bodies...

...Chuck Bertani puts the situation in harsher terms: "You start having concessions, bringing wages down, and soon people say, 'Why am I in a union when they are negotiating downwards?' We've really become a bunch of pussycats...

...Like Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers dissident Tony Mazzocchi, who ran unsuccessfully for his union's presidency, they favor using rank-and-file members to spread the word alongside professional organizers...

...To make matters even worse, employers fearing unionization often act on their own initiative to diminish the difference between union and nonunion shops...

...The Houston Organizing Project has not turned the city around...

...Joe Campbell, president of an Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers local, tells of getting a call to organize a Diamond Shamrock refinery...

...Houston certainly needs it...

...The Houston Organizing Project began as a cautious but sophisticated high-tech approach to organizing, but its best hope lies in becoming the start of a workers' movement...

...At Chance Cellar, a 300-employee oil-field equipment factory, a third of the work force was laid off for economic reasons just before a union vote...

...Houston Organizing Project researchers had advised the Carpenters Union to focus on the plant because it met their criteria for a drive: It was sufficiently profitable to stay in business, it had no history of vicious anti-unionism, and it seemed likely to negotiate a contract...

...Some labor leaders in Houston lament that these former unionists, who might otherwise be expected to boost organizing in the South, arrive disillusioned about what they see as the failures of their unions to defend them...

...But its chances of success would be much greater if the labor unions and their leaders had a strategy for becoming a social movement—defending their members' interests, mobilizing members to reach other workers, and joining forces with community organizations and sympathetic activists...

...There are a lot of tools that we have that expedite the work of organizing, to probe deeper and analyze more thoroughly and be aware of what's happening throughout a program," says Comeaux, who led a successful labor boycott of Winn-Dixie supermarkets in the South...

...the union dropped out because of Lord's objections to fluctuating policy and the failure to stick with campaigns...

...It sponsors a modest public relations program—radio advertisements, a twice-a-month radio broadcast, talks in local schools—and it has tried to garner support from churches, community groups, minority advocates, and others...

...As the center of the largest metropolitan area in Texas (and the eighth-largest in the country), Houston has been growing and getting rich...

...As a result, the crafts are agreeing to drastic changes in contract language, hoping to hang on to the unions' shaky share of area business...

...Industrial and construction unions have long been the center of gravity in the labor movement, but Bertani and other unionists report that work traditionally done in their factories is increasingly going overseas—often to be closer to new drilling sites...

...Signing up the 1,300 workers at the giant sports stadium—a formidable task in itself—won't be enough to crack Houston...

...Amidst these far-reaching changes, the Houston Organizing Project may seem too little and too weak...

...Most of the victories have been in small workplaces where employees are seriously mistreated and underpaid...

...It's more efficient and cost-effective to have twenty organizers that are mobile from union to union than to have every international send twenty organizers down," Acuff says...

...Then they got a raise...

...Northern workers fleeing depression at home are often, like the illegal Mexicans, desperate to take any job, even if they were once loyal union members...

...We're going to crack Houston right open," he says, "and we're going to do it by taking on the Astrodome...

...They have not been reinstated, sending a chill down the spines of co-workers...

...This would be an extension of a trend already apparent in many unions— to rely more heavily on committees of workers rather than on professional organizers brought in from the outside...

...The direction of Houston's economy will make the Organizing Project's task all the more difficult...

...Right now we're just picking shit with the chickens...

...The training, research, computers, and staff of the Organizing Project may help crack Houston some day, especially when the economy picks up...

...citizen to become a member of a union...

...Most people distrust labor leaders," Bertani argues...

...The work force, which was 60 per cent black, was as resentful of racial and sexual harassment by supervisors as of the pay-less than $5 an hour...

...It says its research increases the effectiveness of union organizers...

...The recession accentuates a worker's awareness of the need to organize," says Comeaux, "but the fear tactics of the employers—and the added fear of not finding a job—are compounded...

...But if this strategy has made unionized firms more competitive with nonunion companies, it may have also made unions less attractive to workers, who see little difference between union and nonunion shops...

...Its leaders contend that instant results were never expected...

...Morning and afternoon coffee breaks have been eliminated, and workers are now paid for the time they spend at specific work stations, not for their time at the work site...

...The only objection to me is it seems awfully slow," says Maynard White, president of the Harris County AFL-CIO and the Houston American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME...

...There's no question it's tarnished our image very badly...

...To be sure, anti-union sentiment is strong in this right-to-work state, and employers fight back ferociously...

...That beat us," says United Steel-workers organizer Roy Vanya...

...And the Texas Employment Commission estimates that almost half of the growth in jobs still taking place in Houston is in the professional, technical, or clerical sectors...

...in Texas, the portion of nonfarm workers in unions has slipped steadily over the past decade to 11.4 per cent in 1980, the third-lowest in the country...

...We missed by seven votes...

...Demetrio Lucio counters that "any worker in the state, regardless of where he's from, has the same rights as any U.S...

...Both Bertani and Campbell see the need for a different kind of organizing...

...Few new members have been recruited in the manufacturing sector...

...Hard times in the oil-field equipment industry have led 10 a wave of demands for contract concessions, some of which have been granted...

...The new president of the United Mine Workers, Richard Trumpka, also wants to reduce the dependence on professional staff and involve more miners in organizing campaigns...