California’s Unions Set Agenda to Secure Labor’s Future in America : Employment: Struggling against myriad challenges, the state’s unions are trying to meet the needs of the society as a whole--not just their members.

WASHINGTON —  Across the country, Labor Day speeches will be filled with metaphors about how America’s hard-pressed unions face a world of challenges. What makes things different in California is that this statement isn’t just metaphorically true--it’s literally true. Because of the state’s role in the global economy, it’s where many of the strategies that will determine American labor’s future are being tried.

Since the 1970s, unions have had to cope with the unemployment and wage pressure caused by a tidal wave of imports. But as a hedge against import restrictions, many foreign manufacturers opened plants in the United States. Now, foreign-owned companies are employing an ever-larger percentage of the U.S. work force. In general, unions have had a difficult time organizing Japanese-owned factories.

But in California, unions have made headway by proving they can coexist with Japanese-style management. In January, 1981, despite vigorous opposition by management, the Communication Workers of America won an election at the new Sanyo home-appliance plant in San Diego. They became the first U.S. union to sign a contract with a wholly Japanese-owned company. Since then, productivity has been high, and contract negotiations peaceful.

Another example is General Motors’ state-of-the-art auto plant in Fremont. It closed in 1982, primarily because of bad labor-management relations. Two years later, it reopened as the NUMMI plant, a joint Toyota-GM venture. Today, it employs virtually the same unionized workers, but builds cars of the same quality Toyota achieves in Japan. It is the only unionized Toyota plant in the country.

Unions also face the problem that more and more U.S. capital is invested overseas. According to John T. Joyce, chair of the AFL-CIO’s pension-investment committee, “The best way for union members to counteract the flow of capital overseas is to actively invest their own pension funds in creating jobs here at home. California’s unions have definitely been at the forefront. The California Public Employee Retirement System is the single largest investor in the AFL-CIO Building and Housing Investment Trusts, which only finance all-union construction projects and will recycle a lot of that money within the state.”

In an economy where competition is increasingly likely to come from another state or even overseas, the quest for administrative efficiency can mean difficult changes. For more than a century, most unions operated different “locals” in each work place. But earlier this year, the Bricklayers and Allied Craftsmen merged nine Southern California locals to form one large local with nearly 4,000 members. “It was a big change,” says Bill Armstrong, president of the new local, “but it was the only way we could have the strength and resources to keep more of our members working during the recession.”

California’s unions also have to consider such international political and environmental developments as global warming and the end of the Cold War. In a move to convert defense facilities to civilian production, a consortium named CALSTART, spearheaded by the International Assn. of Machinists, plans to retool a former Lockheed plant in Burbank to produce electric cars. The California Clean Air Act requires that 2% of auto sales have zero emissions by 1998, and 10% by 2003. This means some 220,000 electric cars in California alone, and organized labor wants to ensure they’ll be built union.

Coming to grips with environmentalism is one area where California leads the labor movement, with the state’s union workers more likely to pin their hopes on new jobs created by an environmental consciousness. In 1991, Advanced Photovoltaic Systems broke ground on what is billed as the world’s largest and most advanced solar-panel factory in Fairfield. The Sheet Metal Workers’ National Pension Fund provided a major chunk of the financing for the facility, which will employ union workers.

California’s unions have also had no choice but to accept the challenge of welcoming immigrant workers. “What makes the movement in L.A. different from the rest of the country is that most unions have finally accepted the large number of immigrants from Mexico and Latin America as a fact of life,” says Maria Elena Durazo, president of Local 11 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union. “This is a big change, because unions often saw immigrants as a barrier to organizing.

“Not long ago, my own union wasted $100,000 in legal fees trying to avoid having union meetings translated into Spanish. But now the attitude is: ‘What do we have to do to attract them?’ The AFL-CIO has formed the California Immigrant Workers Assn. and this kind of thinking is paying off. The machinists union just won a contract for 1,200, mostly immigrant Latino, workers at American Racing Equipment. Just like European immigrants 100 years ago, many Asians and Latinos understand a union can help bring you fair treatment on the job or safer working conditions even if it can’t always get you a raise.”

This emphasis on the basics may not only be a unions’ only chance to flourish in a global economy, but also in a world full of new ideas about what is fair. Berkeley provides a good example. After the unionized Berkeley Co-op was replaced by the non-union Whole Foods, an organic-produce retailer, many customers who consider themselves politically enlightened couldn’t decide if it was better to eat natural or shop union.

“Labor can only win that situation by proving that not only the employees but the larger community would benefit from the fact that the union store would provide their neighbors with higher wages and better health benefits,” declares Eric Mann, director of the Los Angeles Labor-Community Strategy Center. “In recent years, labor has predominantly constructed itself as just another special-interest group,” he charges, “and has lost much of its moral authority to ask people to support a strike. The challenge to unions is to reconstruct a social-justice movement for the 1990s, in which labor begins by thinking about the whole society rather than just needs of its members.”