Where Are the Workers?

One sparkling day about 10 years ago, I drove from Los Angeles to Santa
Barbara to deliver a talk at a nationwide staff retreat of the Hotel
Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE). I can't
recall exactly what I talked about, but I remember distinctly whom I
was talking to. The HERE staffers -- there were about 70 of them --
were all corporate researchers, most of them from HERE's locals.

This was something new. For some time, locals in America's more
vibrant unions had employed organizers, but no union I knew of -- until
that day -- had embedded corporate researchers in their locals as well.
The researchers I met that afternoon were preponderantly young and
uniformly bright. But HERE's decision to create a cadre of corporate
campaigners was based on the grimmest of facts: Traditional
private-sector union organizing -- signing up workers who want to join
a union, winning a certification election conducted by the government,
and securing a collective-bargaining agreement in negotiations with the
employer -- had become a dead-end.

I discovered that day in Santa Barbara that HERE had concluded
there was not a single hotel that could be organized absent a campaign
to bring so much financial, political, and community pressure on the
employer that it would agree not to oppose unionization. The mere
desire of workers to form a union no longer sufficed.

By the 1990s, 30 percent of American employers routinely
discharged employees during organizing drives, 49 percent threatened
workers with the prospect of closing up shop if they voted to go union,
91 percent compelled workers to attend one-on-one meetings with their
supervisors, and many delayed certification elections interminably and
refused to agree to a first contract even if the union was legally
certified. Employer willingness to violate the terms of the National
Labor Relations Act (and suffer the negligible penalties it imposed on
them) rather than let their workers unionize had become the norm in
American business.

Accordingly, the very act of organizing has gone through a sea
change at the nation's better unions and has been all but abandoned by
the rest. With employers delaying elections and unions avoiding them,
the number of National Labor Relations Board?supervised elections has
declined steadily for several decades and has dropped by 41 percent
over the past decade alone. One factor not standing in the
way of union elections is employees' desire to belong to a union, which
has been increasing for the past 15 years. Recent polling shows that 53
percent of nonunion workers would like to have a unionized workplace.

The only option open to unions seeking to organize
private-sector workers has been to reach agreements with employers that
sidestep the NLRB process altogether. The Service Employees
International Union (SEIU), the Communications Workers of America
(CWA), the now-merged union of clothing and hotel workers (UNITE HERE),
the Teamsters, and a few others continue their work to build union
support among rank-and-filers but now supplement that work by waging
so-called "corporate campaigns," bringing financial or political
pressure on corporate employers to compel them to not oppose
unionization efforts. Beginning in the 1980s, these unions created
corporate-strategy offices. They began asking elected officials to
devise laws and rules that helped friendly employers and hurt
union-busters. And they hired community organizers to build support for
unionizing campaigns among churches and other potential allies.

Of necessity, many of these campaigns are conducted in arenas
far removed from the workplaces the unions seek to organize. Some
require the intense involvement of the workers seeking union status.
Some don't. What sometimes emerges is a kind of top-down, "let's make a
deal" unionism that results in an agreement covering workers who may
not even have been aware that the unionization campaign was under way.
It's a far cry from bottom-up organizing, but its proponents make a
plausible case that given the erosion of the protections that labor law
once provided workers, bottom-up organizing no longer works.

Labor and business are set to square off in the coming
congressional battle over the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which
would create new legal protections for workers seeking to join or form
a union by enabling them to attain recognition if a majority of them
sign union-affiliation cards (a method known as "card check"). The bill
is essential to any sustainable economic recovery, as unions offer the
nation its best chance to attain broadly shared prosperity. (After all,
the only period in American history in which productivity gains were
widely shared was also the only period of high unionization -- the
three decades after World War II, which saw the creation of history's
first middle-class majority.)

EFCA is an essential step toward simplifying organizing and
restoring workers to the center of the process. It wouldn't eliminate
the need for the corporate researchers or the community organizers or
global campaigns. But it would give workers who want to form a union in
their workplace a shot at doing it without the kind of years-long,
worldwide struggles that are now necessary to enable workers to bargain
collectively.

The most successful union-organizing efforts of recent decades have
all been complicated campaigns in which worker mobilization was just
one part of a larger canvass. HERE's most celebrated campaign was that
of its Las Vegas local to organize the city's hotel workers. The effort
resulted in contracts with virtually every major hotel on Vegas' Strip,
and the local grew from 18,000 members in the late 1980s to nearly
60,000 members today -- roughly 90 percent of all major Vegas hotels'
employees.

The growth of the Vegas local can be attributed to both
bottom-up and top-down organizing. No local has more active worker
committees, and its members have a legendary ability to sustain a
strike -- most famously, their strike against the nonunion Frontier
Hotel, which lasted more than six years in the mid-1990s, without a
single worker crossing the picket line, until the owners capitulated.
But the growth of the union is also a function of the economic and
political power it has wielded to either help or pressure owners, as
circumstances dictated.

In the late 1980s, when casino-magnate Steve Wynn was building
the first of his gigantic themed hotels that would transform the Vegas
Strip, the local struck a deal with him to ensure his new hotels would
be open to organizing. HERE offered simplification of its work rules,
and its political assistance in killing a pending Internal Revenue
Service rule to withhold the casino winnings of non-citizens, which
would have damaged Vegas' trade in global high-rollers. In return, Wynn
agreed to card-check at his new hotels.

Over the past two decades, no union has grown nearly as much as
SEIU, which has seen its membership increase by at least 700,000 since
Andy Stern became its president in 1996. The union's best-known
organizing campaigns, those of the janitors who clean the office
buildings in America's downtowns, have combined brilliant
worker-mobilization efforts with full-court financial pressure on the
employers. Even in anti-union Houston, SEIU successfully organized
5,300 mostly immigrant janitors in 2006. Over several years, SEIU built
a strong base of support both within the city's janitorial work force
and within the city's political and religious institutions.

But winning a contract took more than worker marches and media
attention. The reason the 2006 drive succeeded where its mid-1990s
predecessor failed, says Stephen Lerner, the chief strategist for the
union's Justice for Janitors campaign, is that by the mid-2000s, many
of Houston's office buildings were owned by global investors, and the
five cleaning contractors that employed the majority of the city's
janitors were either national or global companies. Where the union had
little leverage over local contractors and owners, it could apply real
pressure to national and even global institutions. Union pension funds
were investors in the national real-estate investment trusts that owned
much of downtown Houston, and they prodded the building owners to
settle.

Indeed, in their efforts to organize American workers, unions
have increasingly found themselves having to organize the world. Last
year, SEIU used its global leverage to win the right to organize
Wackenhut security guards. It began the campaign in 2002, but three
years later, Wackenhut, a historically anti-union company of 35,000
U.S.?based security guards, became part of the immense British
conglomerate G4S, which is second only to Wal-Mart as the world's
largest private-sector employer. The only way to organize Wackenhut in
the U.S., SEIU determined, was to organize G4S globally. SEIU launched
an ambitious campaign with its international affiliates, which included
efforts to keep Wackenhut from receiving the security contract for the
2012 London Olympics; lawsuits in British, Indian, Indonesian, and
Panamanian courts; and strikes by G4S employees across Africa.

Awash in a global sea of troubles, on Dec. 16, 2008, G4S
signed a groundbreaking agreement with the global network of unions,
agreeing to obey national labor laws in each of the 115 countries where
the company has a presence and honor a neutrality pledge during most
unionization campaigns. As part of that pledge, SEIU won the right to
run card-check campaigns for Wackenhut employees in the nine-largest
American cities. "No global agreements have come about with this kind
of company through this kind of process before," says Christy Hoffman,
SEIU's director of global organizing.

The implications of SEIU's Wackenhut campaign are both
inspiring and alarming. Even though it marks the most concrete example
yet of workers of the world uniting for mutual gain, consider what it
says about organizing within the United States. It's easier to seek
legal relief based on the global guidelines for multinational
corporations than to obtain protection from the National Labor
Relations Act, which was written to promote union organizing in
America. Then there's the most sobering lesson of all: If you want to
organize security guards in Chicago, you have to organize the whole
damn planet.

Not every campaign in this new era manages to strike a real
balance between worker organizing and corporate pressure. Some of
SEIU's other campaigns have proceeded more top-down than bottom-up --
and illustrate the trade-offs that the union has made in order to keep
growing. Four years ago, SEIU negotiated an agreement with a
nursing-home chain in Washington state in which the chain agreed to let
SEIU unionize some of its homes in return for SEIU's help in getting
the state government to authorize higher Medicaid payments. Under the
terms of the agreement, which became widely controversial within SEIU,
it was up to the chain, not the union, to designate which nursing homes
would go union. One year later, SEIU and UNITE HERE entered into
similar arrangements with the global food-service companies Sodexho and
Aramark, though they have subsequently compelled Sodexho to lessen its
role in the selection process.

Critics charge that "let's make a deal" unionism leaves no
real role for workers in the organizing process and minimizes their
involvement in negotiating their contracts. In addition, they argue,
the employers' ability to maintain unorganizable, nonunion workplaces
depresses the wages and benefits of the workers in the unionized
facilities. SEIU officials, while privately conceding that top-down
contracts are less than stellar, argue that their critics offer no
plausible alternative to this organizing model. Given the current state
of labor law, these half-a-loaf arrangements are both the best that can
be achieved for workers and the only way the union can gain a foothold
to win better contracts in future years.

The absence of the worker from the organizing process is a
direct consequence of the lack of legal protections currently afforded
American workers -- a hole in our democracy that the Employee Free
Choice Act would patch. Today, even if workers themselves express a
desire to organize, virtually every American union feels compelled to
tell those workers that their effort will fail absent an all-out
corporate campaign against their employer. Worker self-organization in
America is as dead as the dodo unless EFCA is passed.

If the Employee Free Choice Act is enacted, will unions be able to
downscale their corporate campaigns and dismantle their global
alliances? Not really.

"Corporations will continue to employ union-busters," says
Stewart Acuff, the AFL-CIO's director of organizing, "and they will do
it earlier." The ferocious anti-unionism of American employers is
unlikely to abate, and corporate campaigns will still be necessary,
particularly to win contracts that cover large numbers of workers. As
more American businesses become part of global conglomerates, more
global union alliances will be necessary, too.

But Acuff sees two kinds of changes coming if EFCA is passed.
"First," he says, "more unions will feel an incentive to organize
knowing they can win. They'll invest more in organizing. It will be a
quicker process, and we'll begin to grow in the growing sectors of the
economy that are largely unorganized today."

"Second," he says, "there will be a level of worker
self--organizing that we haven't seen in generations. I don't think
unions will be targeting workers at small establishments: It doesn't
make sense to organize a 12-person hardware store when there's a
400-person department store down the street. But in places where
there's significant worker anger, the workers will feel freer to
circulate a petition or to ask a union for a stack of cards and then go
to the union and say, we want you to represent us. It may not lead to a
significant increase in the number of new workers who get organized,
but it will lead to a significant increase in the number of
establishments where new workers get organized."

What EFCA will do, in other words, is create more opportunity
for large-scale organizing, which will continue to rely on corporate
campaigns. But it will increase the opportunities for mom-and-pop
worksite organizing as well. For both the American economy and American
democracy, that should come as very welcome news.