May
30, 2000
Despite Defeat on China Bill, Labor Is on Rise
New
Organizing Efforts Alter Dinosaur Image
By STEVEN
GREENHOUSE
Despite the American labor movement's loss in the bruising battle over
the China trade bill,
supporters and opponents of the movement say
that after years of
decline, labor has once again become a powerful
political force.
Unions provided
important political muscle that helped Vice President
Al Gore locked up the
Democratic presidential nomination, and they are
certain to be a major
force for the Democratic Party in the fall.
After many people
wrote off labor as an irrelevant, toothless
dinosaur, the
A.F.L.-C.I.O. has displayed considerable muscle on
Capitol Hill. labor
has blocked legislation to grant the president
fast-track authority
to negotiate trade agreements and has helped push
through a higher
minimum wage and the Family and Medical Leave Act.
In other signs of
promise, white-collar workers, including doctors and
psychologists, are
flocking into unions as never before, and labor
registered its
biggest organizing victory in 60 years by unionizing
74,000 Los Angeles
home-care workers last year.
Much of this rebound
has been engineered by John J. Sweeney, who was
elected president of
the A.F.L.-C.I.O. four and a half years ago on a
platform of reviving
labor after its membership and clout had slipped
steadily for two
decades. To rebuild labor, Mr. Sweeney has focused on
attracting new
members, and as the foremost evidence of a turnaround,
he points to last
year's 265,000 jump in union membership -- by far
the largest increase
since the 1970's.
Thomas J. Donohue, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce,
said it would be
foolish for anyone to think that labor was weak
because the House of
Representatives defied it last week and approved
permanent normal
trade relations with China.
"Anybody who stands
up and says, 'We won this thing by a couple of
votes and therefore
labor is weak,' they don't know how to count,"
said Mr. Donohue, who
led the corporate fight for the trade bill.
"Labor has a lot of
money. Labor has a lot of forces on the ground.
Anyone who wants to
declare them weak, just look out for the next
fight."
This year, the
13-million member A.F.L.-C.I.O. has pledged to put
together its biggest
army of campaign volunteers; tens of thousands
will distribute
literature at workplaces and make millions of
get-out-the-vote
phone calls.
The
labor federation's endorsement of Vice President Gore gave him
much-needed
assistance in the Democratic presidential primaries, with
union foot soldiers
helping him trounce former Senator Bill Bradley in
the Iowa caucuses and
capture the New Hampshire primary. Political
experts give labor
much of the credit for Democratic victories in 1998
ranging from Gray
Davis's election as governor in California, to
Charles E. Schumer's
triumph over Alfonse M. D'Amato for a New York
Senate seat, to the
party's surprising success in gaining House seats
in the last midterm
elections.
"It's like
night and day comparing the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s political
operations today with
those in the 1994 elections," said Charles Cook,
who publishes a
nonpartisan political report. "It's like comparing a
Model T with a
Ferrari."
But labor
has a long way to go to regain the economic might it had in
the 1950's. Back
then, 35 percent of the nation's work force belonged
to unions compared
with 13.9 percent today. The sectors where unions
have traditionally
been strongest, like steel, automobiles, mining and
apparel, have been
losing jobs the fastest, while the sectors where
unions have the least
representation, like high technology, finance
and fast food, are
the fastest-growing fields.
Organized labor is
losing about half the elections in which workers
vote on whether to
unionize largely because many corporations mount
aggressive and
expensive campaigns that urge workers not to join
unions. As a result
of such corporate tactics, unions now represent
less than 1 in 10
private-sector workers.
"The labor movement
has done very well in the public sector,
organizing government
employees, but in the private sector, it is
still very
difficult," said Richard Hurd, a labor relations professor
at Cornell
University.
Labor
also faces other problems: the occasional embarrassing episodes
of union corruption,
repeated Republican efforts to weaken unions, and
internal feuding
among union leaders over political strategy and trade
issues. Businesses
contribute 15 times as much in campaign money as
unions do, and many
Democrats still keep their distance, fearful of
accusations that they
are in Big Labor's pocket. And for all their
efforts, unions lost
the fight they have cared about the most over the
last few years, the
China trade bill.
To
reinvigorate labor, Mr. Sweeney has advocated more militant
tactics, like those
used by thousands of striking Los Angeles janitors
who repeatedly
blocked traffic last month to draw attention to their
low wages. He has
also worked to reduce labor's unwanted reputation as
a "special interest"
by having it focus more on helping low-wage
workers and by
forming alliances with religious leaders,
environmentalists,
immigrant groups and college students protesting
overseas sweatshops.
"John Sweeney has a
commitment to reach out to those who have been
largely bypassed by
the labor movement," said the Rev. Howard Hubbard,
the Roman Catholic
bishop of Albany, who has helped lead efforts to
rebuild the clergy's
once-strong ties with labor. "He's reached out to
the forgotten workers
-- child-care workers, nurses' aides, janitors,
people at the low end
of the scale. He's made a commitment to show
solidarity with the
poorest workers."
With union membership falling by nearly one-fourth from 1979 to 1995,
Mr. Sweeney has made
attracting more members his No. 1 priority. He
often cites studies
showing that labor's declining power is a major
reason that
after-inflation wages have declined for most workers over
the last
quarter-century.
Mr.
Sweeney has used his bully pulpit to urge the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s 68
member unions to hire
more organizers and to spend millions of dollars
more each year on
recruiting. Nonetheless, in his first three years at
the federation's
helm, union membership slid by 150,000 as many
unionized workers
retired or companies closed unionized factories and
moved operations
overseas.
But Mr.
Sweeney's ambitions seemed to pay off last year when the
Bureau of Labor
Statistics announced that union membership grew by
265,000.
Union leaders say
they hope those gains are not a one-time blip, but
the start of a
long-term upswing, although many labor experts say the
jury is still out.
"I think we're
starting to turn the corner," Mr. Sweeney said. "While
we've had significant
progress in terms of organizing, we still have
to do a lot more. We
can't rest on modest growth."
His ambitious -- some
say unrealistic -- goal is for unions to
organize one million
new members each year, meaning there could be a
net gain of 500,000
members after layoffs and retirements.
But there is a huge
obstacle to reaching this goal. Only a handful of
unions, most notably
the Service Employees International Union and the
Hotel Employees and
Restaurant Employees Union, are making an all-out
effort to attract
more workers. Mr. Sweeney said he wished that more
unions copied the
union he once headed, the Service Employees, which
devotes 45 percent of
its budget to organizing -- 10 times the
percentage of many
unions. That union recruited 155,000 workers last
year, many of them
janitors and hospital employees, the most any union
has organized in one
year since 1918.
"There is still tremendous inertia among certain unions," said Kent
Wong, a labor
relations professor at the University of California at
Los Angeles. "The
level of activism among some unions has changed
dramatically, but
many unions are having tremendous difficulties
changing."
In an effort to
expand union membership, Mr. Sweeney has gotten the
labor movement to
reverse its long-held position and embrace immigrant
workers, rather than
oppose their taking jobs. In the 1980's unions
were convinced that
immigrants were driving down wages so labor backed
a law that punished
employers who hired illegal immigrants.
But this year the
A.F.L.-C I.O. has called for ending such employer
sanctions and
granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.
Labor changed
direction because it now views immigrants as a natural
audience for its
message and because it sees many employers taking
advantage of illegal
immigrants.
One
welcome development for labor is the surge in interest shown by
white-collar workers.
With managed care squeezing their incomes and
professional freedom,
thousands of doctors are joining unions, while
in New York State,
3,000 psychologists have unionized. Nationwide,
10,000 podiatrists
have joined unions and so have more than 20,000
customer service
workers at United Airlines and US Airways.
Hundreds of I.B.M.
workers showed interest in unionizing last year
after their company
sought to cut their pensions. And even a few dozen
workers at Microsoft
called for a union because they were angry about
being long-term
temporary workers, with few benefits, rather than
permanent workers.
"In a lot of
industries, because of the way things are changing,
people realize they
need some form of collective voice," Mr. Sweeney
said. "People are
seeing the problems they're confronted with are too
big to resolve by
themselves."
In the
wake of the China trade battle, one of Mr. Sweeney's biggest
problems is that many
political and business leaders have pegged him
as protectionist and
anti-trade. These critics misunderstand his
position, he insists.
Convinced that past
trade accords have helped business but not labor,
Mr. Sweeney said he
told the Clinton administration that the
A.F.L.-C.I.O.
would oppose any
trade agreements that did not protect workers rights.
So when he learned
that the administration's trade deal with China
contained no worker
protections, he saw no choice but to oppose it.
"I think trade is
good for our country," Mr. Sweeney said. "It's
important to our
successful economy. We recognize that globalization
is here to stay, so
the question is how do workers around the world
share in the fruits
of globalization?"
Warm regards
George
Pennefather
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