Organizers build political clout in dues-poor territory
North Carolina is the Norma Rae of states. You remember "Norma Rae," the 1979 movie starring Sally Field, about how a textile worker disturbed about Dickensian working conditions organized a successful union vote despite fierce company opposition.
Norma Rae was based on Crystal Lee Sutton, a $2.65 per hour towel folder at the J.P. Stevens Plant in Roanoke Rapids. Sutton ended up losing her job and working at a fast-food restaurant.
North Carolina is the least unionized state in the country, with 3 percent of the work force belonging to unions in 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. To put this in perspective, Mississippi has double the unionization rate of North Carolina, Alabama triple the rate. The national average is 12.1 percent.
As you might expect, the current drive in the legislature to allow public employees to engage in collective bargaining appears to be going nowhere fast this session.
The House Democratic caucus took up the matter last week.
"At this point, I doubt it has the votes to pass," said House Majority Leader Hugh Holliman, a Democrat from Lexington.
North Carolina has one of the most restrictive laws against collective bargaining by public employees in the country.
But a labor coalition is making a concerted effort to change that.
Leading the drive is the 2 million-member Service Employees International Union, the nation's fastest-growing union. This spring, the State Employees Association of North Carolina -- the major advocacy group for state workers -- voted to affiliate with the SEIU.
Also pushing to change the collective bargaining law are the N.C. Association of Educators, the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters and the American Federation of Teachers.
To gain clout in the legislature, the SEIU has been plowing money into Tar Heel political campaigns.
But the drive also has powerful opposition. Business groups fear it will lead to a more powerful labor movement in the state. State and local government officials warn it will lead to work disruptions, drawn-out negotiations, time-consuming grievance procedures and higher taxes.
History would suggest you bet on the opponents.
There are a lot of reasons why unions have found North Carolina such barren ground.
Part of it is cultural. When North Carolina was industrialized in the 20th century, the mills were manned by fiercely independent hill-country farmers, not by European immigrants as elsewhere. The factories were in small, rural mill towns, often controlled by the mill owners, rather than in big cities where organizing was easier.
North Carolina -- a once poor rural state trying to attract Northern industry -- has been openly hostile to its workers' organizing.
During the 1920s, the government used bullets and billy clubs to put down the union movement. There is still a plaque in state AFL-CIO headquarters commemorating six striking textile workers shot dead in the back by deputy sheriffs in McDowell County.
The crushing of the labor movement has had a profound impact on North Carolina politics. There is no countervailing political force to business in North Carolina as there is in most states. Consequently, business interests usually get what they want in the legislature.
The clout of business and the weakness of labor also mean that any effort to persuade the legislature to give public employees collective bargaining rights will be a tough sell.
(tmcnet.com)
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Obama - The Unionizer-in-Chief
Noted economist and University of Maryland scholar John Lott says the election of Barack Obama as president would benefit labor unions even more than eight years of a Bill Clinton White House did.
As senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, Lott is examining the pro-union policies supported by Democratic presidential frontrunner Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois. "Even Bill Clinton wasn't near this strongly in the unions' pocket, so to speak, as you have with Barack Obama," the economist contends.
Lott notes Obama's opposition to education vouchers, votes against trade deals with U.S. allies, and desire to renegotiate NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement). But the best evidence, Lott says, of Obama's hyper-union stance is his support for the questionably-named "Employee Free Choice Act" - a proposal that would eliminate secret ballots by employees when unions are trying to enter a workplace.
"I think if you were going to go and tell people that we were going to stop having secret ballots, they would think you were joking," he suggests. "And that's because we think that there are very strong reasons to have secret ballots. Many people may wear lapel buttons for their candidate or put up yard signs, but a lot of people feel uncomfortable being public and outspoken about that. You may have issues of intimidation. You may also have issues of vote-buying," Lott explains.
Unions project they could add millions of members if they could eliminate secret ballots. But Lott believes many employees, out of fear, may reluctantly sign a public statement calling for a union.
"Right now, a worker may feel pressure from others to go and vote for the union, but not believe that it's in his interest to do it. [But with a secret ballot option] he can go and sign the public statement saying that he's for a union vote, but then vote differently once he's in the safety of the voting booth. That would no longer be an option for people because how they would vote would be public knowledge," Lott points out.
Currently, according to Lott, a union election is called for when more than 50 percent of employees sign a public petition supporting the idea. He says many workers realize that the higher wages that unions demand come at the expense of employees who lose their jobs as employers move to reduce their costs.
(onenewsnow.com)
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When News Hits heard about the melee at the recent Labor Notes conference in Dearborn, all we could hear in our heads was the union anthem "Solidarity Forever."
Here's the first verse, as sung to the tune of "Battle Hymn of the Republic":
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.
Unfortunately, it's the song's irony we've taken notice of — what happened at the event was anything but strengthening for labor's cause. News about the incident was hard to come by locally — neither of the dailies said boo about it. But it was a big deal in the national world of labor politics.
Here's a summary of what happened:
The Labor Notes conference was going at the Dearborn Hyatt, April 11-13, with about 1,000 union members from at least 50 different groups from all over the country learning how to organize and mobilize grassroots forces. Labor Notes is a nonprofit organization that produces a monthly magazine of labor news, creates other printed materials and hosts the biennial conference to support grassroots union efforts. The spunky newsletter founded with the organization in 1979 has a reputation for in-your-face criticism of the labor movement.
During the Saturday evening banquet, members or sympathizers of the Service Employees International Union showed up in buses — the exact numbers of people and vehicles are in dispute — to demonstrate against the planned keynote speaker, Rose Ann DeMoro.
De Moro, as executive director of the California Nurses Association — which is a huge proponent of single-payer health care — was supposed to speak about that issue, but canceled her appearance. Apparently that didn't matter to SEIU members and supporters. The 1.9 million-member union was interested in making a very public statement about De Moro, her West Coast-based nurses group and its organizing work that competes with SEIU.
It seems the SEIU folks also have a burr in their britches over the role the National Nurses Organizing Committee, an affiliate of the CNA, has played in a health care workers dispute taking place in Ohio.
SEIU accuses the Committee/CNA of spreading false information and derailing an election to certify 8,000 employees with the Catholic Health Care Partners system. CNA says SEIU cuts deals with employers at the expense of the workers and stepped into the Buckeye State business, in part, because it learned the employer had asked for the union certification election — that's unheard of, nurses union folks say.
Incidentally, the CNA-SEIU friction goes back years in California, where the groups have clashed over nursing home employment, patient care and quality issues. Just last week — a few days after the Michigan incident — CNA obtained a temporary restraining order against SEIU in California.
Anyway, back to Michigan and that little ditty in our heads:
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.
So when somewhere between 300 and 800 people (it depends on who's counting) showed up to demonstrate at the Dearborn hotel, the doors were locked.
But some SEIU members attending the conference — under false names, organizers say — pushed the doors open after chanting and banging on them, says Chris Kutalik, Labor Notes editor.
With Labor Notes attendees linking arms to keep them out, SEIUers pushed forward and into the banquet room.
What happened next depends, again, on who's talking.
"They knocked people down," Kutalik says.
"It was a peaceful protest," says Zac Altefogt, spokesman for SEIU Healthcare Michigan.
Regardless, Dearborn police showed up, though no one was arrested. A 68-year-old woman was injured. Labor, as a cause, was damaged.
"I just find it really inexplicable what they hoped to gain by this," Kutalik says. "We don't want to damage their union, but we certainly think the leadership just seems to be on a disaster course at this point."
And lost among the melee was the main message of the conference, which came at a time when union membership is down and union leadership is losing clout in national and local politics:
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.
(metrotimes.com)
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Barack Obama spent Tuesday courting union workers and veterans, both important constituencies in Pennsylvania, which holds its Democratic primary next Tuesday.
Obama, addressing the Building Trades National Legislative Conference in Washington, said, "Your voices will be heard." The Illinois senator promised that if he's elected he'll support union measures not backed by the Bush administration: the Employee Free Choice Act, giving unions more power to organize; federal government use of "project labor agreements"; and tax policies to discourage sending jobs overseas and reward the creation of U.S. jobs.
He said federal infrastructure projects should use union laborers who were paid prevailing wages and good benefits. "It's time we had a president who didn't choke saying the word 'union,'" he told a crowd that roared in agreement. "It's not that hard: union. See? It won't hurt you. We need to strengthen our unions, not weaken them, not tear them down. We need to build them up."
At a meeting with veterans and military families later in Washington, Pa., Obama repeated promises to improve mental-health care and brain-injury treatment for veterans.
He voiced veterans advocacy groups' criticism that the Bush administration has restricted definitions of casualties compared with past wars so that the numbers being reported are "tens of thousands" short. He said he'd change that so as "to honor the full measure of sacrifice of our troops, and to prepare for the cost of their care."
His rival Hillary Clinton on Tuesday laid out an ambitious agenda for the first 100 days of her presidency, if she's elected, that includes signing legislation that President Bush vetoed, seeking a moratorium on home foreclosures and beginning the process of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
Speaking at an American Society of Newspaper Editors luncheon in Washington, Clinton said that she'd ask Congress to eliminate some of Bush's tax cuts -- replacing them with reductions targeting the middle class -- and press Canada and Mexico to renegotiate parts of the North American Free Trade Agreement. "In short, starting from Day One, the Bush-Cheney era will be over in name and practice," the New York senator said.
Clinton said she'd start with bills that Bush had vetoed, beginning with measures to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program and the use of embryonic stem cells for research.
"We will provide health insurance for millions more of our children as a down payment on achieving health care for all Americans with no exceptions," she said.
Clinton told the editors that she'd convene a meeting of mortgage lenders, banks, community organizations and regulators to negotiate an immediate freeze on foreclosures. "So many Americans are hurting, the projection is that more than 2 million American families will be foreclosed on this year."
She vowed to restore "fiscal sanity" to Washington by cutting taxes for middle-class families by $100 billion a year and ending tax breaks for oil companies, drug companies, insurance companies and Wall Street firms, saving $55 billion annually.
On climate change, Clinton said she'd convene a summit within her first 100 days to negotiate an international climate-change treaty to replace the Kyoto accords and include China, India and other rapidly developing greenhouse gas-emitting nations.
On Iraq, she vowed to convene a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other Pentagon officials to begin drawing up plans to withdraw troops "responsibly and carefully" starting within 60 days of her inauguration.
She also promised to close the detention center at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
(kentucky.com)
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