The Brilliance of Labor

[ProSense]

September 03, 2006

The Brilliance of Labor

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So on this Labor Day, this is my celebration not of the justice of the labor cause, but of the brilliance of those fighting and often winning against long odds in the modern economy.

What's Been Won: Just surviving in the fact of political and corporate assaults by a rightwing that wants to kill off labor is an underestimated victory...

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The results have been dramatic. In an early signature campaign reviving the fortunes of the union movement, janitors began organizing around the country, largely using card check to win. In Los Angeles, for example, a union local where once 5000 workers were organized collapsed down to just 1800 members by the mid-0-s. But with the support of community allies, they used dramatic street protests to pressure janitorial companies to recognize the union and raise wages and benefits in the industry. Now, over 25,000 building service workers are organized in California alone. Similarly, hotel unions in Las Vegas would use card check to expand a local to over 50,000 members in that city alone.

And in the high-tech world, traditional telephone-based unions used card check to make inroads into new industries like cell phones. The Communication Workers of America has organized over 39,000 cell phone workers at Cingular Wireless, many of them workers in the US South. After initial resistance, this campaign has even forged a partnership with SBC (now AT&T) that has helped workers and management pursue win-win gains in the workplace, rather than the hostility bred of constant union busting and outsourcing in so many industries.

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Mobilizing Customers: As part of such corporate campaigns, unions have long used simple consumer boycotts to pressure companies, but now they are becoming even more sophisticate in organizing consumers before a conflict to preemptively pressure companies before a conflict even begins. A brilliant recent example is the Informed Meetings Exchange, a project of UNITE-HERE where a broad range of academic, political and religious organizations have signed onto an organization that will advise them on which hotels to stay at for large organizational conferences-- the lifeblood of many hotels. By providing experise to help these groups get a better deal at conference hotels, the union will also be in a position to steer those groups away from hostile hotels and towards those less likely to disrupt a conference with a strike or lockout. As John Stephens, Executive Director of the American Studies Association and Board Chair of INMEX, stated:

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Organizing Globally: Part of the success of the union movement has been matching global outsourcing by the business community with global organizing of its own. This is a still a tough challenge, but unions are increasingly making inroads. Unions increasingly draw on help from overseas, as the chemical workers union did a few years ago in Alabama-- taking on Imerys, one of the largest global minerals companies in the heart of the anti-union South. Mobilizing help from the 20 million-strong International Chemical Energy, Mining and General Workers Unions (ICEM), the workers were able to pressure the company to recognize the union.

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Conclusion: These strategies by labor don't often get a lot of play in the mainstream media, but on this Labor Day...
more...

http://www.nathannewman.org/laborblog/archive/003726.shtml

[ProSense]

1. Labor Pains

ECONOMY

Labor's Pains

In 1898, Samuel Gompers, one of the original founders of the American Federation of Labor, called Labor Day "the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed." This Labor Day, U.S. workers have many grievances that deserve attention. The New York Times reported recently that the median real hourly wage for American workers has declined two percent since 2003, despite the fact that productivity has been steadily rising. Worker productivity rose 16.6 percent from 2000 to 2005, while total compensation for the median worker rose 7.2 percent. Among the reasons economists offer to explain this phenomenon are that workers' bargaining power is being slowly eroded and "trade unions are much weaker than they once were." The trends have left U.S. workers feeling bleak about the future. A poll of laborers conducted recently found that 63 percent of the workforce believes the country and the economy are on the wrong track; a majority now believe their children are going to be worse off economically than they are. The Progress Report details some of the problems facing today's workforce:

WORKING HARDER, EARNING LESS:"Wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation' s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947." A majority of today's workers say the number one issue they face is that the wages they are paid are not keeping up with the cost of living. Aug. 20th marked 10 years since the last time the federal minimum wage has been raised. Frozen at an unlivable $5.15/hour, the minimum wage is at the lowest buying power it has been in 51 years. Workers earning above the minimum wage are struggling as well. According to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, "Real median earnings for men working full-time and year-round were lower in 2005 than in 1973. In inflation-adjusted 2005 dollars, a typical man working full-time in 1973 earned $42,573. Thirty-six years later, this figure has fallen to $41,386." Yet, productivity — as President Bush likes to frequently point out — remains high. "What jumps out at you is the gaping hole between productivity growth and earnings," said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). People are "working harder and smarter but not really seeing remuneration that they ought to be seeing." The wage crunch isn't affecting the entire labor force, however. The top one percent of earners — including many corporate CEOs — received 11.2 percent of all wage income in 2004, up from 8.7 percent a decade earlier and less than six percent three decades ago.

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NO FRIEND IN THE WHITE HOUSE: The Bush administration has consistently sent signals to the labor movement and the general workforce that they do not have an ally in the White House. In the wake of the Sago mine disaster that called attention to the administration's lack of safety enforcement, President Bush nominated Richard Stickler, a coal industry executive who managed coal mines with injuries that were double the national average, to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). When the Senate blocked the nomination, Stickler was hired by MSHA as a "consultant" to advise the agency on mine safety issues. Just yesterday, Bush announced he would recess-appoint Paul DeCamp, a former lawyer for Wal-Mart "with a long paper trail outlining his opposition to the Fair Labor Standards Act’s (FLSA’s) overtime pay and other provisions, to run the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD)." Also, labor leaders are concerned that the National Labor Relations Board -- composed of five Bush appointees -- is weighing a series of cases that "could make it easier for companies to declare certain workers supervisors and thus ineligible for union membership." Union activists fear that employees who could possibly be reclassified as "supervisors" -- such as nurses and teachers -- would be forced to do so by employers trying to prevent the formation of unions. Business groups are pushing for such authority, arguing as Elizabeth Gaudio with the National Federation of Independent Business Legal Foundation did, that the "bottom line" is to be profitable.

more...

www.americanprogressaction.org/site/apps/nl/newsletter2.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=917053#3

[senseandsensibility]

2. Happy Labor Day

to all workers.

[omega minimo]

3. Wow... don't get much play here either

"These strategies by labor don't often get a lot of play in the mainstream media, but on this Labor Day..."

[ProSense]

4. Hence the intro:

Admit it. Many of you think labor unions are dinosaurs, lumbering beasts with pea-sized brains stumbling along waiting for extinction in a world passing them by. God knows, union leaders have done stupid things at times, but what strikes me is the sustained innovation and intelligence by unions over the last decade or so, barely noticed by the media or even fellow progressive activists.