Lane Windham: Why Employers Want Union Membership to Rise

My article from today's American Prospect:

Why Alt-Labor Groups are Making Employers Mighty Nervous - -

Why Employer Groups Want Union Membership to Rise

Union membership remained steady last year—steady at its near-hundred-year low. A mere 6.7 percent of private-sector workers are union members, as are 11.3 percent of U.S. workers overall, according to figures released last Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS.)

Those government union membership statistics, however, don’t capture an entire swath of new, exciting and emerging labor activists—“alt-labor” activists—whom alarmed employers would like to see regulated by the same laws that apply to unions. Yet before we regulate them as unions, shouldn’t we first count them as unions?

Consider those striking fast food workers you’ve been reading about, the ones calling for a $15 an hour wage. Their numbers are not counted in the union membership figures. How about those Wal-Mart workers who struck for Black Friday and just won a key court case? Uncounted. What about the day laborers who joined any one of hundreds of workers’ centers nationwide? You got it, not included. Neither are the restaurant workers, home health care workers, taxi drivers or domestic workers, all of whom are organizing for workplace power outside traditional unions.

Why are these labor activists uncounted? The BLS bases its union membership numbers on the Current Population Survey (CPS). Every month, the government asks about 15,000 people whether they are union members or members of an employee association like a union. The people who went on strike at McDonald’s for a day, or who joined a local workers’ center, will almost certainly say “no” to this question, because they don’t pay union dues or aren’t covered by a contract. The government’s questions have no place for these workers who are part of a new breed of “alt-labor” groups leveraging workplace power outside the realm of collective bargaining —such as through worker centers, labor coalitions, or the three million members of the AFL-CIO’s Working America. In addition, the government union numbers exclude people who report they are self-employed. In todays’ economy, that could easily mean day laborers and domestic workers who are part of new labor groups.

This problem is not a new one. Although the media has long used the BLS numbers to gauge labor’s strength, the BLS numbers only paint part of the picture. For instance, these numbers have never reflected the numbers of people who tried to form unions each year, but who were thwarted by resistant employers or weakened labor law. However, there are other government statistics we can use to find a trail for these would-be unionists, like the numbers who tried to form unions through voting in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union elections. However, in order to truly capture today’s morphing labor movement, the government would have to ask different questions—ones which aimed to pinpoint wider involvement in today’s iterations of worker groups.

Employers don’t actually want the BLS union membership numbers to rise. They will tout the news about low 2013 union membership without counting such new activists among labor’s ranks. Nevertheless, the Chamber of Commerce, the National Restaurant Association and anti-union coalition groups publicly insist that these new groups are unions, because they want them to be subjected to the same kinds of legal limits that have come to constrain America’s labor unions, such as not being able to strike in sympathy with other workers. Scott DeFife, an executive vice president at the National Restaurant Association, said as much to the New York Times recently: “They’re trying to have it both ways. They’re a union and not a union. They’re organizing workers but not organizing workers. They have a history of tactics unions couldn’t get away with.” DeFife’s group insists that the Restaurant Opportunity Center (ROC) is a union despite ROC’s insistence that it is not.

Do these uncounted “alt-labor” groups serve the same function that unions once did? No, they do not. When workers gained the right to state-backed collective bargaining through unions in the 1930s, it was one of the few checks the U.S. ever effectively put on employer power. As a result, people who have a union today make 26 percent more than those who do not, according to the government’s new statistics, and are much more likely to have health insurance and real pensions. The new labor groups have yet to harness a comparable kind of state-backed power with which to force employers to play fair. However, in a 21st century economy in which collective bargaining has been so severely weakened by structural changes and the roll back in workers’ rights, these new labor activists represent an important frontier for people concerned about worker power and economic inequality writ large. And their impact is becoming increasingly clear. President Obama’s $10.10 minimum wage for federal contractors rose on a groundswell of economic activism driven by labor groups both “counted” and “uncounted.”

You know that workers are on to something when employers start to get nervous. It turns out the low union membership statistics may not be as good a measure of labor’s future as employers would hope.

“We’re Locking Up Demographics:” AFL-CIO Live Blog, Day Two

Lane Windham


The convention media buzz is mostly about the federation's decision to solidify partnerships with new groups. A resolution to that effect did pass, though it basically punted on the question of how official those partnerships would be. That’s a story we’ll have to watch develop over the next year.

But the bigger story at this convention may actually be what the AFL-CIO is doing to lay the groundwork for those partnerships. Resolution #17, the “Big Business Behind Mass Incarceration” resolution, is important. The AFL-CIO came out sharply against the growing prison pipeline, and embraced this issue fully as its own. President Trumka made the link clear between race, class and incarceration: “We’re not locking up individuals as much as we are locking up demographics…. We punish people for being brown and black.”

A young woman then rose to quote Gompers, calling again for “more school houses and less jails.” She pointed out the US spends six times more money on prisons that education, and that Americas is number one in the developed world for incarceration rates. A teacher then rose to talk about how much education has been de-funded over the last 25 years, and how he has seen too many students who ended up behind bars.

And here’s a little inside scoop. Tefere Gebre, the soon-to-be Exec. V.P., happened to sit down next to me in the hall. As we chatted, this resolution came up, and he confided that he thinks it’s one of the most important ones of the week. In fact, he helped develop it. That bodes well for future leadership and direction for the Fed! Tefere Gebre is pictured here:



A few other fun tidbits:

Terry O’Neill, the President of Now, spoke in support of the resolution on community partnerships, saying “we’re not leaning in as individuals, but together.”

North Carolina’s Moral Mondays and the NAACP’s Reverend Barber were among the groups featured in a film on community partnership.

President Obama was supposed to address the convention live, but took a pass because of Syria. In a taped message, he said he’d join a union if he was someone looking for economic security. Sign that man up! He also called for a “true right to organize, free from intimidation” and said that’s why he got the NLRB functioning again. But, really, isn’t that sort of a low bar after ignoring EFCA?

Good news: an Indiana judge struck down that state’s proposed Right to Work law.

Not so good news: Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said that this decade will be the “lost decade” for the US and Europe, and that unless we change course, we’ll lose more than a decade. The economic crisis was, “not a result of inevitable forces, not a natural disaster or earthquake, but the result of what we have done or not done.”

And finally, there was a tear-filled good-by to the current Exec, V-P, Arlene Holt-Baker. She pointed out that after growing up in a segregated Texas, amidst poverty as the daughter of a domestic worker, “you decide that you want to make your community and your world a better place.” Well done.

Class Talk is Back: Live Blog from AFL-CIO Convention in Los Angeles

Lane Windham

I’m blogging live for a few days from the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles.

President Trumka gave his keynote this morning. I swear I didn’t write this speech –I don’t do that anymore - but I feel like I could have. It showcased a class-based rhetoric - -

Highlights here: “This is a rich country, so where’s all the money going? …We can shout about the Koch brothers and nasty little conspiracies, and it’s true – there are powerful forces in America today who want our country to be run by and for the rich. But greed and hate have always been with us. The question is what are we going to do about it? …We can’t win economic justice only for ourselves or the union movement…it’s just not possible…all working people rise together or we will fall together.”

And catch this. Trumka asserted “We must ignite our movement not so we can have bigger unions, but so we can make all working people’s lives better.” Wow, so the President of the AFL-CIO is saying the goal is NOT just bigger unions. That’s one for the record.

Yesterday, Elizabeth Warren wow’d the nearly 5000 people who are here. There’s much buzz about whether she’ll throw her hat in the ring for president. Her message: “Our agenda is America’s agenda!” She skewered the Supreme Court for its corporate focus. Pointing out that five of the Supreme Court justices are among the top 10 most pro-biz justices in history, she warned, “If keep on this track, the court will be a wholly-owned subsidiary of big business.” Amen. (She also talked about trade deals that don’t work for workers. That’s something we could use from a Dem.)

The highlight of yesterday was when domestic workers from across the globe marched singing to the dais to receive the Meany / Kirkland human rights award. George and Lane would have had quite a shock were they still alive to see it. The women are part of the International Domestic Workers Network.

Overall, the AFL-CIO has put much effort into making this convention about diversity. That’s not new, exactly. One of the sleeper stories from the 2005 split convention was that the delegates passed a resolution requiring that the 2009 convention delegates accurately reflect the membership in turns of race and gender. At this convention, 46% of the delegates are women or people of color (though a number of the trades and uniformed services’ delegations are STILL all white guys.)

But what is new is that the AFL-CIO is doing more things that will naturally bring diversity. For example, the new Executive V.P. is going to be Tefere Gebre, an Ethiopian immigrant. That’s huge. It was only in 1999 that the AFL-CIO even reversed its historic policy opposing open immigration. Now, one of the top three officers will be an immigrant.

Also, seated among the union delegations were members of the Taxi Workers Alliance - - as real delegates, not as guests. That’s a big deal, and begs the question of whether other “alt-labor” groups - - like the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the Restaurant Opportunity Center - - or even groups like the Sierra Club or NAACP, might one day come to the convention as delegates.

Finally, as a former union spin meister, I hear a difference in the rhetoric in many of the speakers. It’s more class-focused. Maria Elena Durazo, LA County Fed President, welcomed the crowd saying that we are in a “real class war.” In his opening remarks, Trumka nodded to class: “This is where we confront the truth of what we have to do, to build shared prosperity and to build a new working class movement.” He echoed that again this morning “It’s time to turn America right side up. It’s time to build a working class movement that can do it.”

Then Trumka ended the key note today by pulling up dozens of workers - - taxi drivers, teachers, construction workers, immigrant workers - - in a rousing, shouting, energy-infused speech. I hope it sets a tone for the whole movement.

Detroit, Labor Day, and a Hard Day's Night

Lane Windham

As part of my dissertation, I've been trying to answer "Why did employers target unions so much, starting in the early 1970s?" I've concluded that one big reason is that the government had charged unions with wrestling broad economic security in our employer-provided welfare state model. Employers wanted out, and they attacked unions in order to get out of their role as a broad provider of benefits and economic security. This helped set up 21st century economic insecurity, and the kind of crisis that is now hitting Detroit.

I developed that line of thinking into a Labor Day opinion piece. Check it out on the The Hill's Congress Blog.


Here's the full text:

Detroit, Labor Day and a Hard Day’s Night

The Beatles first visited Detroit just before Labor Day in 1964, and they gushed with admiration for the Motown sound. Detroit hummed with industry then, like the Beatle’s own Liverpool, England with its bustling ports and pop music scene. Both industrial cities would soon flounder, losing 40 percent of their populations over the next 30 years.

As we approach Labor Day 2013, Detroit still endures its “Hard Day’s Night,” filing for bankruptcy last month. Yet Liverpool thrives once more, a showroom for urban renaissance. Why did Detroit and Liverpool follow such different paths? It turns out that workforces thrive best in a challenging world economy when they have a solid, government social safety net, not one woven from the vanishing threads of employer-provided job security and benefits.

People fled both Detroit and Liverpool after WWII, taking their tax base with them. America scattered its military industries outside the cities and the people followed the jobs. Eisenhower’s interstate highways paved a path to the suburbs, at least for many white families. After the German air force flattened Liverpool, residents found replacement housing outside the city center. Tough towns, they hung strong, only to find themselves on the wrong side of a newly-globalized economy. By the late 1970s, imports outran Detroit’s capacity to innovate, while Liverpool floundered when containerization made its ports obsolete.

Liverpool dock workers faced these structural shifts with far more security than did Detroit auto workers. England’s strong postwar social safety net guaranteed citizens health care, livable wages and unemployment insurance. In the U.S., a coalition of unions and civil rights organizations lost their post-war fight for national health care, job security and a federal unemployment system.

Instead, the U.S. wove a unique social safety net that relied on employers to provide citizens with economic security, such as health care and pensions. It was a compromise with a built-in dilemma. If the government ceded the role of security provider to business, how was it going to make sure business kept stepping up? For that, the nation’s leaders turned to unions. In the Inland Steel case of 1948, the federal government first decided that employers must bargain with unions over pensions and health care. The nation then came to depend on unions to wrangle good benefits and paychecks through collective bargaining. The U.S. thus built two social safety nets - - a robust one for those workers who could effectively organize a union and enter the collective bargaining system, and a much more meager one for others through public benefits like Social Security and the minimum wage.

For twenty-five years, this two-tier system worked out pretty well, not only for Detroit auto workers but even for many people who didn’t have a union. Most big businesses matched the pay and benefits of the unionized industrial giants, in part to keep their employees from forming unions. Once corporations faced growing international competition and began to pull good jobs out of Detroit, workers found they needed the kind of national safety net that preserved workers in Liverpool, where the spiral into poverty never got as destructive as in Detroit.

Other differences matter. While both towns received federal aid, Liverpool benefits from the European Commission’s Structural Funds which recognize that regional poverty hurts Europe’s global economic position. There are no comparable funds for Detroit to smooth out the wreckage left by globally-mobile corporations. Instead, Detroit turned to bankruptcy courts.

As the U.S. struggles to define its role in a globalized economy, it would do well to study the challenges facing Detroit. A competitive nation needs a strong safety net for its citizens, one that neither depends on fickle global employers nor burdens workers’ democratic institutions with a redistributive role best played by the government. In addition, the U.S. should take a cue from the European Union and allocate more funds to help hard hit areas transition their economies.

Working people in other American cities may soon face their own hard day’s night, but it does not have to be this way. This Labor Day, we can choose to support our nation’s workers and their cities in the shifting global economy.

New Worker Power Structures, Not a Fortress...

Thanks, Jeff, for the apt reminder that as we build a new source of worker power, we must build it as a global one. Your point goes to this larger question of how we define success.

I applaud Rich for putting forth a specific idea for getting us out of the mess that we’re in. Yet in his essay on fortress unionism, Rich defines success as, “to organize enough workers so that union density increases significantly, or at least keeps pace with workforce growth.” But organize workers into what? Traditional unions in which workers’ source of power is through a one-on-one collective bargaining relationship with one employer? Is that the best we can do? We must build new worker power structures that are better suited to today’s challenges than is the current collective bargaining sytem.


I organized in the clothing and textile union in the South throughout the 1990s, and we won a lot of campaigns - - Tultex (5000 workers in Martinsville, VA), Healthtex, Springs Fashions. We won contracts, too. Every shop I helped organize is gone today because of the global turn in the industry, and when the employer went, the local union dissolved because there was no longer a collective bargaining agreement. What if we had spent the 1990s building an organization that could continue to mobilize those workers, perhaps in an industry or regionally-based organization? Impossible the leaders said. But now there is nothing…


There’s no point building a fortress, hoping one day to increase union density, if all we have to offer is today’s weakened system of collective bargaining. When workers do begin to militantly mobilize, they will remain ill equipped for today’s economy, and will be crushed.


Worker militancy does not solve the kinds of structural problems which Rich points out - - today we have smaller work places, a mobile workforce and global capital. History can serve as a guide here. Rich spotlights the worker militancy in 1937 and the Republic Steel strike in which 18 workers were murdered for standing up for a union. But militancy alone does not cut it. Workers also need the appropriate structure and strategy. Steel workers tried for decades to organize and were crushed – aka Homestead in 1892 and the Great Steel Strike in 1919. It was only in the post-Wagner Act period that hundreds of thousands of steelworkers were able to form unions - - and they were able to do so because of the new-fangled industrial unionism and state-backed collective bargaining. I agree that FDR signed Wagner because he was pushed by striking workers to do so. Nevertheless, those workers needed that particular new structure in order for their militancy to stick.


I just attended the Labor Research Action Network (LRAN) conference in Washington, DC - - and I was struck that many of the young people who attended that conference are way beyond us on this - - especially the ones in what Rich calls “alt labor.” They have taken many of these ideas and are running hard, building a worker power movement and trying out a host of new ways for workers to leverage power. (And, Jeff, be cheered by the fact that they're leagues ahead of us on the global power issue.)

Yes, yes… they struggle with sustainability. And, yes, many of the organizations that work best are the ones that combine collective bargaining with new tactics. But maybe we can take a break from brick-and-mortaring our fortress to really … REALLY… help them wrestle with how to build sustainability. Someone asked Saru Jayaraman (co-director and founder of ROC – the Restaurant Opportunity Center) what labor could do to help and her answer… she wants help making a 25-year plan. She wants labor leaders to sit down and help this new movement build a plan. Seems like we can do that, right, everyone?


We need to stop defining success according the Bureau of Labor Statistics union density figures. Success is about worker power. Maybe that means fixing collective bargaining somehow. Maybe it means finding another source of leverage. But whatever path we choose, now is the time to expand our vision of success, not narrow it.

Should We Adopt "Fortress Unionism" - An Answer to Yeselson's Thoughtful Essay

In a recent essay on "fortress unionism" Richard Yeselson argues that given the realities of today's political economy, unions should hunker down and defend our strongholds and wait for another worker-led union surge. While the essay is provocative, I have some different ideas.

Here's Yeselson's essay: http://www.democracyjournal.org/29/fortress-unionism.php

Here's my response:

Yeselson may be correct that a solid defense is the labor movement’s best move in 2013; nevertheless, there are two major considerations that we should take into account as we have this discussion.
First, we should consider a broader definition of success than expanding union density. Who cares if unions are big, as long as the movement makes this world a better place to live for workers and their families? Our goal is economic and social justice, not necessarily big unions. For example, the dominant narrative on the women’s association 9to5 seems to be – “great idea, but they didn’t succeed.” Really? Yes, they did not make unions get bigger. But they helped put sexual harassment on the map as a workplace issue and helped transform the working experience for entire future generations of women workers. Seems like success to me.

Second, Yeselson highlights the big moments of union growth, and asserts that we should hang tight and “wait.” Do we really think that workers just built those moments of union growth out of the blue? They built those growth moments on decades of slow and persistent organizing. The seeds of the 1930s uprising were planted throughout the entire Progressive Era, starting in the late 19th century. Workers learned to form organizations, work in broad coalition, and that “success” would have to come through changes in federal law ( a fairly new concept then.)

Now is not the time to wait. Now is the time to understand that the unions in which all of us have been working for 20, 30, 40 years are specific creatures born of the New Deal and the Wagner Act, and that we need new creatures that are more fitting for the Wal-Mart economy that Yeselson describes so well. Yes, real change can’t happen without worker activism and passion. But workers need structures and tools. And the tools - - the unions - - we are offering them today are the wrong shape and size. So what should today’s worker power organizations look like? That’s the conversation I’d really like to see us engaged in.

The Roots of a Union City: The Los Angeles / Orange County Organizing Committee

Here's a little history of an important joint organizing committee that I am sharing with the AFL-CIO for their upcoming convention in Los Angeles:

The Roots of a Union City: The AFL-CIO Los Angeles / Orange County Organizing Committee

by Lane Windham

Jimmy Hoffa didn’t believe it. He charged that the new AFL-CIO Los Angeles / Orange County Organizing Committee (LAOOC), launched in 1963, would “not organize 50 people…it’s all propaganda and hot air.” In fact, this joint organizing campaign organized nearly half a million workers over its more than 20 years in operation, making it the largest such joint effort in the labor movement’s history and helping to forge Los Angeles as a 21st century pro-union city. The LAOOC offers several lessons to today’s union movement, including the importance of broad solidarity over narrow organizational interests, the need for big vision coupled with long-term investment, and the missed opportunity of community engagement.

In the early 1960s, Southern California’s workforce was booming as companies moved to the Sunbelt, but those jobs were increasingly non-union. Since 1950, union density in the LA metropolitan area had dropped from 37 to 30 percent, with no end to the slide in sight. The leaders fretted about the challenges ahead of them - - challenges that ring familiar to unionists today. They blamed the laws, the anti-union companies and the young people in the “space age” who seemed to see no need for unions. Inter-union rivalry was a big problem - - too often unions fought one another in big organizing campaigns rather than branching out into new territory.

The AFL-CIO itself was still a freshly-minted organization in 1962 and it was carving out its relationship on organizing with its affiliate unions. UAW President Walter Reuther had only agreed to the 1955 merger if the new AFL-CIO established the Industrial Union Department (IUD), a free-standing, autonomous department for industrial unions that would be a seat for much of the work of the former CIO. Reuther headed it and pushed the new federation to take a lead role in organizing. When Reuther started to put together an IUD organizing effort in Southern California, the non-industrial unions wanted in, too.

Thus the Organizing Committee of the AFL-CIO Executive Council established the new LAOOC in 1963, with Reuther’s support, and it originally included 57 unions. The level of coordination was impressive. Each union submitted to the AFL-CIO a list of its current locals in the two county area, and a list of potential organizing targets. The unions then divided themselves into five divisions: hard goods (lumber, steel, glass, etc.); soft goods (textiles, oil, chemicals, etc.); retail; government; and hotel and restaurant. Each union agreed to contribute money and organizers, according to their size. The original budget was for $230,000 a year, half of which the AFL-CIO paid, including for a director. The unions in each division then sat down and hashed out the acceptable organizing targets. Unless the group agreed to the target, the unions would not organize there. Unions would sometimes agree to petition jointly, or to confer with one another, but they would not oppose one another.

It worked. After five years, by 1967, the joint effort had helped hold union membership in Los Angeles at 30% density, even as national density slid from 30% to about 28%. There were over 1100 union elections in that same period, a whopping 98% of which only had one union on the ballot (compared to 89% nationwide.) They also counted 800 voluntary recognitions, many of which were card check agreements, and a number of new government units. By 1967, they’d organized about 110,000 new members in the two counties. Many of the elections were in traditional manufacturing, like UAW at Cadillac Gauge and USWA at Harvey Aluminum. Others were in newer industries, like the Machinists’ win at Scientific Data Systems or the Chemical Workers’ wins at Shell Chemical Division and Bio-Sciences laboratory, the largest privately-owned clinical lab in the world.

But it wasn’t perfect. Many of the unions backed out - - by 1965, the group had shrunk from 57 to 39 unions - - and the project was constantly having to harass unions to pay their share of the costs. One of the great tragedies of the project was that it dropped retail entirely as one of the original five divisions when the Retail Clerks and Amalgamated Clothing Workers union could not settle their differences over who should organize in retail. This was a very bad choice. Retail would end up driving the 21st century economy, and it would largely be non-union. In this case, the union movement would have done better to have a big vision for retail that pushed the bounds of what was acceptable by the jurisdictional unions, and insist on a plan that worked - - even if feathers were forever ruffled.

The project also did not have a seat for community groups, despite the fact that there were
contemporaneous models it could have emulated. For example, by the late 1960s Walter Reuther was driving through the UAW and IUD what he labeled a “socially-conscious” unionism which sunk resources into organizing the poor, such as through backing tenants’ unions. The LAOOC did not have this level of engagement. It stuck to traditional organizing, sometimes supported by ministers and community groups, but which was designed to lift wages and working conditions through traditional collective bargaining only. Such a narrow view later helped divide unions from the larger community, an issue that late 20th century Los Angeles labor leaders would be forced to tackle.

However, what the project did have was longevity. A core of about 35 unions stuck with the project for over twenty years. They’d meet each quarter, banging out those approved targets. The project served to not only coordinate organizing, but to spur it, for organizers routinely had to go sit next to their peers from other unions and talk about the state of their campaigns. By 1978, they’d organized 358,000 workers, 217,000 of whom came through board elections, and about 114,000 of whom came through new organizing in governmental sectors. By 1984, they’d organized nearly half a million.

The leaders who formed the LAOOC in 1963 had no idea that they were enriching the soil in which the LA County Federation of Labor - - under the leadership of Miguel Contreras and Maria Elena Durazo - - would grow a new kind of union movement after 1996, rooted in immigrants and deeply intertwined with the community. The 21st century Union City that is Los Angeles rests on the willingness of these early union leaders to think beyond their narrow institutions, to challenge their organizations’ cultures, and to invest in a geographically-targeted, long-term, joint organizing effort.



Sources:
Based on various memos, statistics, newspaper articles and meeting minutes surrounding the LAOOC, found at the George Meany Memorial Archives, Silver Spring, MD, RG28-002, Organizing Department, Boxes 1, 52, 53 and RG95-009, Alan Kistler papers, Box 6, Box 12.
Bernstein, Harry. “AFL-CIO Drive Here Will Fail Hoffa Says,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1963.
Murphy, Michael J. “Developing Communities: The UAW and Community Unions in Los Angeles, 1965-1974.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Vol. 6, Issue 4, 19.
National Labor Relations Board Annual Report, 1965.