FIGHTING BACK
While top AFL-CIO leaders seemed baffled or stymied by economic and political changes, many labor activists struggled to find and use new tactics to defend themselves, organize new members, and to take control of their unions. They challenged union leaders on foreign policy, concessions, democracy, and corruption, and won some victories.
Memories of Vietnam jumpstarted labor opposition to Reagan’s foreign policies. In 1981, presidents and other officials from twenty-four unions formed the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador, run out of the New York offices of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. In 1983, a Labor Committee delegation recommended that the U.S. suspend aid until the Salvadoran regime stopped its massive violations of labor and human rights. At that year’s AFL-CIO convention, the Committee’s constituent unions amended AIFLD’s El Salvador report and rejected claims of progress on human rights. In 1985, Kenneth Blaylock of the American Federation of Government Employees, Ed Asner of the Screen Actors Guild, and William Winpisinger of the Machinists criticized U.S. support for the Salvadoran government from the floor of the convention. In 1987, Lane Kirkland and AFT president Al Shanker tried to stop unions endorsing the April 25th Mobilization for Peace and Justice in Central America, but up to 50,000 trade unionists joined the Washington rally. At that year’s AFL-CIO convention, delegates passed a resolution opposing U.S. support for both the Salvadoran military and the anticommunist contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Some affiliates broke ranks with AFL-CIO foreign policy. Solidarity with the South African antiapartheid struggle was strong in unions with significant black membership like AFSCME and SEIU, and in unions confronting transnational employers with South African operations or investments, like the Steel Workers, Mine Workers, and OCAW. Unions sponsored speaking tours and organized support for activists like South African miners’ union leader Amon Msane, detained after a U.S. tour in 1986. Similar activities supported Central American labor activists like the Stegac union workers who occupied their Guatemala Coca Cola plant for thirteen months in 1984–85 to win a strike, despite the death-squad assassinations of three union presidents. UMW observers helped the union at the Cerrejon coal mines in Colombia negotiate with Exxon in 1992, the first contract ever settled without military intervention.
AFL-CIO caution complicated relations with unions in next-door Mexico and Canada. Most Mexican unions were organs of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional. In 1982, the PRI government expanded its “Border Industrialization Program” into a nationwide program to attract foreign investment. Both the “official” Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos and the “reform” Confederación Revolucionario de Obreros y Campesinos worked to maintain low wages and labor discipline and helped repress independent unions. The AFL-CIO recognized CTM and CROC, which generally opposed cross-border union cooperation as a threat to their control. Nevertheless, the AFL-CIO–affiliated Farm Labor Organizing Committee supported a Mexican union representing tomato pickers working for Campbell’s Soup contractors while FLOC negotiated with Campbell’s U.S. contractors in 1989.FLOC set up a U.S.-Mexico Exchange Program to coordinate negotiations with cucumber and pickle companies. The independent United Electrical Workers developed a “Strategic Organizing Alliance” with the Frente Auténtico de Trabajo, an independent Mexican federation. UE supported FAT drives in G.E. and Honeywell plants in northern Mexico in 1994; FAT helped UE organize the Aluminum Casting and Engineering Company in Milwaukee, where Mexican immigrants were the largest group among 450 black, white, Latino, and Southeast Asian workers.
Across the border to the north, many Canadian labor activists disagreed with the AFL-CIO’s rejection of labor-based political parties, resented U.S. union’s indifference to Canadian issues, and found American-style negotiation frustrating. OCAW’s Canadian district disaffiliated in 1979. In 1982, Canadian UAW Chrysler locals struck to get back the 1979 COLA, and won. Their thirteen-day strike against G.M. in 1984 won a “special Canadian adjustment.” They formed the Canadian UAW (later the Canadian Auto Workers) in September 1985. On a smaller scale, the Newfoundland Fishermen’s Union withdrew from UFCW in 1987, after headquarters threatened a takeover. According to NFU’s Earle McCurdy, “The UFCW sees trade unionism as a business. We see trade unionism as a democratic people’s organization.” In USWA’s 1984 special election after Lloyd McBride’s death, nearly unanimous support from Canadian locals helped Canadian Lynn Williams defeat the candidate, backed by many reformers, who ran as the “All American Steel Worker.”
Some unions looked to member mobilization for strength and to the wider community for support. A California cannery strike showed both the possibilities and the limits. In 1985, two Salinas Valley canners—Watsonville Canning and Richard Shaw—demanded a wage cut from $6.66 an hour to $4.25 and reductions in medical coverage. Teamsters Local 912—mostly Chicanas—went on strike September 9. Their community saw the demands as an Anglo assault and strongly supported the strike; unorganized cannery workers contributed to the strike fund, and 3,000 supporters marched in a November rally. When Watsonville Canning hired replacements, not one striker crossed over.
Shaw strikers settled for $5.85 an hour in February 1986, but the Watsonville Canning workers stayed out. Their rally in March drew 4,000 supporters. The strike committee rounded up 914 of the original thousand strikers from as far as Texas and Mexico to outvote 848 scabs in an August decertification election. After the owner went broke, Wells Fargo Bank sold the cannery to a grower. Teamsters Council 7 offered him an agreement. When the strikers learned the contract did not return them by seniority or provide medical benefits to all members, they massed around the plant to keep it closed, and six women started a hunger strike. On March 11, 1987, they accepted a new contract with seniority and medical benefits intact, but with a concession on wages.
Some union leaders preferred not to mobilize members during concessionary bargaining, but not all. Reformers recaptured the United Mine Workers presidency in 1982 when miner-turned-lawyer Rich Trumka defeated incumbent Sam Church, who was backed by the old Boyle faction and endorsed by AFL-CIO leaders. When the UMW started work on a new agreement with the Bituminous Coal Operators’ Association in 1984, operator A. T. Massey—owned by Fluor Corporation and Royal Dutch Shell—refused to bargain. The union went on strike in October. Miners blocked Massey operations, and Trumka brought in an organizer from the South African National Union of Miners to run a Shell boycott, which got wide support among antiapartheid activists. When the NLRB ordered Massey to bargain in December 1985, the union ended the strike, but not the boycott.
In 1988, Pittston Coal Company demanded cuts in benefits, work rule changes, an end to overtime pay, and the right to open nonunion mines. The miners worked without a contract, filed a host of unfair labor practices charges, and set up “Camp Solidarity,” where the “Daughters of Mother Jones” brought peace groups to train over 30,000 miners and supporters in civil disobedience. The strike began April 5, 1989—1,700 miners and their families blocked roads to the mines. Over a thousand were arrested the first month. Across eleven states, 40,000 miners staged wildcat strikes and shut down nonunion mines and coal-fired factories in “Memorial Day” solidarity actions. When ninety-eight miners and a local clergyman—each owning a share of company stock—occupied Pittston’s main coal treatment plant, Moss No. 3, and a judge ordered them out, thousands of miners and supporters surrounded the plant until the court deadline passed. Pittston resumed bargaining in October and settled the last day of the year without most of the concessions. And over time coal operators invested more in nonunion strip-mining in the West, and UMW contracts covered less than half of national coal production.
Against leadership opposition, mobilizing the rank and file took patience and perseverance. For ten years, a Rank and File Slate in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ Connecticut Local 35 worked to change how the local’s business agent handed out jobs. The agent accused them
of favoring blacks and homosexuals and siding with community activists to delay public construction projects. The dissidents finally won some local offices in 1992, reaffiliated the local with the Greater Hartford Central Labor Council, and continued to build membership support.
When the new Local 35 officers went to the next IBEW convention, they were surprised to meet dissidents from Chicago and Detroit locals. Most local union reformers faced almost total control of communications by their union’s hierarchy. Labor support groups provided some alternatives. The Association for Union Democracy had started Union Democracy Review in the 1960s, but held its first national conference in 1979. The American Labor Institute, associated with OCAW insurgent Tony Mazzocchi, published books, pamphlets, and newsletters, and promoted international solidarity activities. Chicago-Gary area Steelworkers joined academics and labor activists to start the Midwest Center for Labor Research, which published Labor Research Review from 1982, and developed “early warning” programs to identify likely plant closures. Labor Notes, started in 1979, advocated militant confrontation with employers, vigorous organizing among women and minority workers, and cooperation with foreign labor activists. These and other efforts were projects of labor and sixties activists who had continued to advocate socialism and CIO-style social unionism—Walter Reuther’s brother Victor was an AUD associate.
A dozen national union presidents were voted out of office in the 1980s, but the government created the biggest upset. In 1989, federal monitors for the Teamsters mandated local elections for convention delegates and nominations for national office by secret ballot, to be followed by a nationwide membership vote by mail. In 1991, Teamsters held their first direct election in decades, and reform candidate Ron Carey won the presidency.
Union reform could take strange turns. When 1199’s Leon Davis retired at the end of 1981, he was succeeded in New York City’s District 1199 by his longtime protégé Doris Turner. Davis had planned to pull 1199 out of its parent Retail, Warehouse and Department Store Workers Union and merge with SEIU’s Hospital Workers Division. National 1199 left RWDSU in 1983 (it affiliated directly with the AFL-CIO). But Turner saw a communist plot against black leadership and won reelection over a promerger faction in April 1984. In July she pulled 50,000 members out of forty-one hospitals for nearly two months, then settled for 5 percent, close to the hospitals’ original offer. When an 1199 staffer admitted helping fix the April vote, the Labor Department ordered a new election. Turner never finalized her “settlement,” and uproar over the “missing 5 percent” helped elect Georgianna Johnson in June 1986. She fared little better, losing a 1987 referendum on constitutional changes curbing the president’s power in a bitterly divisive racial campaign. Dennis Rivera replaced her in 1989, and 1199 rebuilt its distinctive “movement” unionism. During the same period, National 1199 successfully merged its mainly white West Virginia district with its mainly black Ohio district, through carefully planned training and social events where members learned to confide problems, share hopes, and amplify their voices in unison.
Developing wider community support took many forms. Public employees faced budget cuts, layoffs, and mounting workloads. Their unions—long accustomed to participating in local and state politics—responded with lobbying, outreach to community activists, solidarity demonstrations, strikes, and electoral challenges to faithless Democrats.
Cuts in services were the main issue, whether direct or through outsourcing, where contractors profited by skimping on wages, supervision, and standards. Philadelphia’s AFSCME District Council 33 had lost a twenty-one–day citywide strike in 1986. When the mayor promised to privatize sanitation during his 1987 campaign for reelection, AFSCME Local 427 joined with Philadelphians United, a coalition of community groups fighting reductions in city services, to defeat the proposal. Local 427 activist James Sutton became D.C. 33 president in 1988, and negotiated an agreement to use early retirement incentives instead of outsourcing and layoffs to reduce the city’s workforce.
Simple justice was important too, since many public employees were women or minority workers. Stephen F. Austin University in East Nacogdoches, Texas, contracted food services out to ARA Corporation in 1985, partly to avoid a court-ordered settlement of a 1972 NAACP discrimination lawsuit. After winning an NLRB election at the ARA unit, the Texas State Employees Union, a 5,000-member CWA affiliate, brought 3,000 people to town December 12, 1987—TSEU members, CWA telephone workers, other unionists, and NAACP and National Organization of Women contingents. City officials insisted the University and ARA settle: the workers got a contract, and back pay from the lawsuit too.
The most sustained union involvement in grassroots politics came out of struggles against plant closings. Youngstown, Ohio, had endured the shutdown of three steel mills and the loss of 10,000 union jobs by the end of 1979, and local clergy joined with USWA officials and the National Center for Economic Alternatives in the “Save Our Valley” coalition to try to buy and run the mills. After President Carter declined to back the plan, activists formed the “Tri State Conference on Steel,” which focussed on the Monagahela valley around Pittsburgh. Tri State lobbied for extended unemployment benefits and a moratorium on foreclosures, and proposed a Steel Valley Authority (SVA) that could seize plants and sell them to employee or labor-community corporations. U.S. Steel announced in December 1983 that its Dorothy Six blast furnace in Duquesne would be torn down to clear a new industrial park. Tri State got local officials to pay for a study, while unemployed steelworkers winterized the furnace at their own expense and stood watch around the clock to make sure the company removed no machinery. The study found a growing market for semifinished steel, and SVA was incorporated by Pennsylvania in 1986. But the Authority’s finance consultants insisted on retooling, then found no backers. USX demolished and buried Dorothy Six that spring.
SVA had some success. When Continental Ralston-Purina closed Braun Bakery in 1989, community and church leaders and city officials joined Bakery, Confectionary and Tobacco Workers Local 12 and SVA to fund a study that discovered that Pittsburgh had become the largest metropolitan market with no general bakery. With support from local grocers worried about fresh bread supplies in wintertime, City Pride Corporation started in 1990 and began production in 1992 in a new facility with 120 former Braun employees, now City Pride worker-owners. But the region lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs over the 1980s.
Local government helped UE Local 277 keep Morse Cutting Tool open in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Morse’s owner, Gulf & Western Corporation, offered wage cuts or closure in 1982. The local called a strike and set up the Citizens Committee to Support the Morse Tool Workers. The Committee got the city council to authorize the mayor to save Morse by any means necessary, including seizure. After thirteen weeks, G&W signed a new contract without union concessions. When G&W announced in 1984 that it would sell or liquidate Morse, the mayor again threatened seizure, and G&W came up with an acceptable buyer.
Several cities and states passed plant closing legislation, but local and state laws could require little more than notice and severance pay. When SCOA Industries got out of the shoemaking business in 1981, its 800 employees at two Norwock Shoe Company factories in Maine got an average of $2,250 each. Corporations whipsawed local and state governments all too easily. When General Motors threatened to move operations to Montgomery, Alabama, Detroit contributed twelve years of 50-percent tax abatements and 430 acres of land (occupied by 3,200 residences) for a new Poletown plant, which opened late and operated sporadically. G.M. got property-tax reassessments everywhere in Michigan.
Beyond local politics, the Democrat-Republican duopoly was hard to crack. In Vermont, union rank and filers supported longtime activist Bernie Sanders for mayor of Burlington in 1981. When he ran for an open seat in Congress in 1988, the state AFL-CIO endorsed the Democrat and ran his campaign; the Republican barely beat Sanders, and the Democrat came in a poor third. In the 1990 rematch, local union leaders unanimously lined up behin
d Sanders, helping make him the first independent socialist member of Congress in more than sixty years. In national politics, the most surprising moment came when civil rights activist Jesse Jackson ran for President in the 1988 Democratic primaries. Every white candidate ran on a business platform, and the AFL-CIO made no primary endorsement. Affiliates with large numbers of black and Latino members, like District 1199 and the American Federation of Government Employees, and many black union leaders and locals joined Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. He pulled 35 percent of the votes from union households in the primaries, and led the delegate count after the UAW-dominated Michigan caucuses. The Party establishment closed around Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, and the Rainbow Coalition dissipated as an organized political force.
Efforts to gain labor influence on management accomplished less. Weirton Steel Works employees, represented by an independent company union, bought the plant from National Steel in 1985, but layoffs and restructuring continued. Union representatives on the Eastern Airlines board of directors could not vote their shares when the company was bought by antiunion Texas Air in 1986. By 1990, over 10,000 Employee Stock Ownership Plans were in operation, serving mainly to thwart hostile takeovers. Operating Engineers Local 675 in south Florida tried a different tack, using pension-fund money to finance construction using union labor. The Labor Department sued the fund trustees for technical violations. That suit was dismissed in 1985, but savings-and-loan failures halted some projects, a local Right to Work Committee protested discrimination against open shop contractors, and the Department put the pension fund into receivership in 1990.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 38
