Coalition’s Strategy Builds on Union Efforts in State

A group of dissident union leaders last week vowed to reinvigorate the slumping U.S. labor movement by launching a series of big, strategic organizing campaigns. Elements of what they have in mind have already been road-tested in California, a hot spot for union activism for more than a decade.

And they seem to be working.

The individual unions’ innovative campaigns, aimed at some of the state’s lowest-paid workers, have brought tens of thousands of new members under the union umbrella in the last decade and raised pay and benefits for most, even as wages have stagnated nationally and organized labor’s overall share of the workforce has declined.

“Here in L.A., because we’ve been growing and winning, it’s hard to see how bad it is in the rest of the country,” said Mike Garcia, president of a statewide janitors’ local with the Service Employees International Union.

Since taking to the streets of Los Angeles with massive protests in the mid-1990s, Garcia’s Local 1877 has grown to represent 28,000 janitors throughout the state. Most have won substantial raises and fully paid family health insurance under new contracts.

Similar campaigns have been waged for workers in hospitals, nursing homes, building security, commercial laundries and tourism -- all areas that are likely to expand in the service economy.

Each one started with a carefully considered game plan that examined the strengths and weaknesses of entire industries and the major players in them. The unions then looked for ways to help cooperative employers while pressuring those who resisted in every way they could -- working with political and community allies behind the scenes, staging attention-getting public protests, contacting customers and suppliers of targeted employers, running boycotts and sometimes launching well-financed strikes.

The goal typically was to win an agreement from employers to not fight the union’s attempt to sign up members.

Not all efforts have panned out. Faced with rising healthcare costs and intense competitive pressures, and convinced that a union would only add to their burdens, many employers are determined to keep organizers out.

But the campaigns that have succeeded prove that organized labor can grow even in a tough political and economic environment, said the five union presidents who on Wednesday formed the Change to Win Coalition, citing frustration with the AFL-CIO. The presidents said strategic campaigns had a greater chance of building union density than organizing one workplace at a time through the slow and contentious federally supervised union election process.

The five -- SEIU, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Laborers’ International Union of North America, United Food and Commercial Workers and Unite Here -- said they would work together on large-scale coordinated efforts, using many of the principles proved in California.

“Our purpose is to get real growth,” food workers union President Joe Hansen said. “To build worker power, we need action and we need action now.”

Hansen, who took office last year, said his union’s costly and disappointing 4 1/2 -month supermarket strike in Central and Southern California that ended in February 2004 convinced him that radical change was needed in his own ranks. He said that he was restructuring the union to better match the geographic reach and corporate structure of employers, and that he joined the coalition to become more strategic about organizing and bargaining.

“The world that all workers live in has dramatically changed, and quite frankly the labor movement has not changed,” Hansen said. “It is our responsibility as leaders to address that, and to do things to regain the power that we had.”

For a variety of economic, political and cultural reasons, organized labor’s share of the workforce has steadily declined since the 1950s, when one in three workers was unionized.

AFL-CIO leaders elected 10 years ago promised to reverse that trend, but membership has continued to fall, from 15% of the workforce to slightly less than 13% today. The federation’s president, John J. Sweeney, is expected to win a third term next month, over the dissidents’ objections that new leadership is needed.

During the same 10 years, unions in California have fared slightly better than in the nation as a whole, losing 1 percentage point of its share of the workforce, to 17%. One reason is that the most rambunctious of the dissident unions -- the service employees -- had a strong presence in the state, where the union has tested its strategic approach, said Ruth Milkman, a UCLA sociologist who has written extensively on the California labor movement.

“SEIU has tripled in membership in the last quarter-century,” Milkman said. “That’s the best advertisement for this approach that I can think of. But those experiments were never brought to scale. We don’t know what the results would have been if more unions were doing this. Now, we’ll have a chance to find out.”

Strategic organizing is certainly not limited to California, nor to members of the new coalition. AFL-CIO organizing director Stewart Acuff said he had been preaching the same ideas for years, and that an increasing number of unions are receptive to them.

In the last couple of years, Acuff said, he has helped 18 of the federation’s 57 unions make the changes necessary to organize strategically, which often involves restructuring locals and hiring organizers and researchers. Last week, Acuff said, he was working in Los Angeles with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union to map out a comprehensive strategy for organizing.

But in California, at least, it is the SEIU that has led organized labor in thinking more strategically, Milkman said.

In the last decade, the union restructured itself from dozens of small geographically based locals to a handful of large, statewide units with clear lines of membership. Now a single local, SEIU Local 250, represents 100,000 healthcare workers and is using its massive resources to organize the few remaining nonunion hospital chains in the state. As a result, local President Sal Rosselli said, the union has been able to negotiate pensions, healthcare, training programs and minimum staffing levels.

The SEIU has also been at the forefront of combining political and legislative work with organizing. Working through the state Legislature for nearly a decade, the union was able to create a structure that allowed it to organize more than 100,000 publicly funded home-care aides.

More recently, the union worked with nursing home companies to convince the state to change its formula for covering nursing home patient care. That made an additional $1.2 billion in state and federal funding available to the homes, said Jon Barton, SEIU deputy director for long-term care. The nursing home companies earmarked some of the money to improve pay and working conditions, Barton said. They also agreed not to fight the union in organizing workers.

As a result, Barton said, “we’ve organized about 3,000 new nursing home workers in the state, and hope to add another 7,000 to 10,000 in the next three years.”

Most of the new members are certified nursing assistants, who typically earned $8 to $9 an hour with no benefits, Barton said. “It’s grinding work with few rewards” and high turnover, Barton said. “We hope and believe that once we create higher standards, that will stabilize the workforce and improve the level of care.”

At the same time, nursing home companies that have refused to cooperate with SEIU have felt the heat, as organizers have encouraged aggrieved employees to speak up about conditions in the homes and file lawsuits over staffing levels.

John Wilhelm, president of the hospitality division of Unite Here, said coalition members were seeking ways to partner with employers to reduce costs and increase productivity, as his union has done with casino hotels in Las Vegas. There, the union and hotel operators jointly run an training program, which includes English and citizenship classes, that has cut turnover and improved service.

Now, after lining up hotel contracts across the country to expire in 2006, Wilhelm said his union hopes to have a “national conversation” with major hotel chains on joint programs that could reduce workers’ compensation and health insurance costs.

Another tenet of strategic organizing is to make sure each victory leads to another. That’s what Garcia of the SEIU janitors union has been trying to do for the last 10 years.

With each new contract, Garcia has sought agreements from major contractors not to fight the union in other parts of California where the contractor operates. That sped up the organizing process and built union density for janitors throughout of the state.

Now Garcia’s organizers are targeting nonunion security guards who often work side by side with janitors at night.

“They work for many of the same companies in the same buildings,” Garcia said. “But in Los Angeles, they’re paid $2 an hour less than the janitors with no benefits at all.”

As expected, organizers have run into stiff resistance. Despite months of public protests and behind-the-scenes maneuvering, the union hasn’t signed a single contract covering guards.

But, Garcia said, another watchword of the strategic approach is patience, and he’s not discouraged.

“The janitors took about seven years in L.A. to really break,” he said. “We’ve only been at this for 2 1/2 years. It’s early.”