From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  Many union members were readier to mobilize than their leaders. New York Chinatown garment workers belonged to ILGWU Local 23–25. The union negotiated wage rates with “manufacturers” who specified material and pattern, then took the agreement to contractors who hired workers to make the clothing (the union provided medical insurance). In 1982, Chinatown contractors rejected the rates. The union announced a rally, and 20,000 turned out, mobilized by the women workers themselves. After a second demonstration on the same scale, the contractors gave in to community sentiment and accepted the agreement.

  Ethnic solidarity could mobilize workers against great odds. Latino workers showed what was possible. After the Watsonville cannery strike, most of the area’s food processers closed or relocated. When Green Giant (Local 912’s largest employer) moved broccoli processing to Irapuato State in Mexico, workers formed Trabajadores Desplazados to campaign for severance pay and retraining. They also contacted FAT and mounted a joint corporate campaign against Green Giant, winning better displacement benefits in Watsonville and some toxic-waste cleanup at the Mexican plant. Women laid off in 1993 by Levi Strauss Company in San Antonio, Texas, formed Fuerza Unida to fight for better severance pay and more retraining.

  Most union leaders thought undocumented workers could not be organized. In 1984, Nicaraguan refugee and organizer Gaspar Amaro convinced the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union to organize Camagua, a Los Angeles mattress and waterbed company. Its owner preferred hiring undocumented immigrants because, as he observed, “the illegal worked a lot harder.” The union won the January 1985 election 113–48, and the company appealed. The workers stenciled union slogans on their shirts, called in sick in groups, observed department-wide “moments of silence,” and left work an hour early one day to attend Mass at the plant gate. The company began firing them for disruptive behavior. The union launched a boycott campaign in April. Fired workers located and picketed stores selling the waterbeds; by the end of June more than 200 had dropped the Camagua line. In November, the company settled. The contract did not require Camagua to take back fired workers, but they urged ratification anyway, just to beat the boss.

  Building services had been SEIU’s original base, and the union started a “Justice for Janitors” campaign in 1985 to reorganize the industry. In Los Angeles, membership in SEIU Local 399 had fallen below 2,000 after an open shop drive by real estate and development companies. The workforce was mainly immigrant Mexicans. J for J came to Los Angeles in 1988, going after industry clients (who paid the bills) as well as contractors and using direct action—demonstrations, sit-ins, traffic blockages—instead of filing for elections. Some immigrants were especially militant. One organizer attributed Salvadorans’ militancy to repression in their home country: “There, if you were in a union, they killed you. Here you lost a job at $4.25 an hour.” In 1990, after the police beat immigrant janitors at a demonstration at the Century City office complex, the union got recognition.

  That same year 800 workers at the American Racing Equipment Company, mostly first-generation Latino immigrants, struck for three days to get union recognition. Six months later they affiliated with the Machinists. By that time, residential drywallers had started to organize themselves, led by immigrants from El Maguey, a village in Guanajuato, Mexico. The “Movement of Drywall Hangers” called a strike on June 1, 1992, for an increase in piece rates. Flying squads shut down construction from the Mexican border to Ventura, just north of Los Angeles. When the Highway Patrol intercepted them, they sat down on the highways. The Border Patrol raided picket lines. After learning the strikers might charge them with violating overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the contractors settled in November 1992. Two thousand four hundred drywallers joined Carpenters Local 2361 and got a union contract in 1993. In 1995, 2,000 framers did the same.

  Mobilized members improved their negotiating position. Some unions organized almost one on one. In Boston, Local 26 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) has 4,000 members, 60 percent women and 60 percent minority, speaking eighty-seven different languages and dialects. For the 1982 negotiations the Local appointed a 350-person Contract Committee reflecting membership diversity in sex, race, ethnicity, age, and kind of work. Fifty served on the negotiating committee. For the 1985 contract, hotels demanded reductions in health care coverage, lower entry-level pay, and a five-year term. The Local expanded the Contract Committee to 500, held regular meetings after shifts, always with child care, never more than an hour long, and arranged training in civil disobedience. Union members packed the lobby of City Hall while negotiators met upstairs. The new three-year contract increased wages and employer contributions to health plans and provided affirmative action in hiring and promotion, a new legal services plan, and a four-month entry rate 25 percent below the standard.

  A similar style produced organizing victories at two of the country’s elite institutions. Yale University blue-collar workers had been organized since the 1930s, but five drives by different unions had failed with clerical and technical workers. In 1982, the blue-collar union, now HERE Local 35, started a new drive to organize Local 34. Organizers spent more than a year talking about working conditions, recruiting an organizing committee (eventually about 450), developing the idea that clerical workers deserved respect as well as better pay. HERE filed for election in 1983 and won the May 18 vote 1,272 to 1,233, with thirty-three ballots challenged, only six short of the margin of victory. Local 34 members endured more than a year of negotiations before striking in the fall of 1984. They staged two mass arrests for civil disobedience, rallied community residents, students, and faculty to picket lines and marches, and shut down the university for three days in November. They declared a “Christmas truce” and went back to work in December after sixty-nine days; Yale signed contracts with both unions at the end of January. The AFSCME-affiliated Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers used similar tactics to win a three-year campaign in 1989, then applied feminist principles to such union issues as grievances, which were handled by conflict resolution procedures.

  Unions with many women members had to pay attention to gender issues. In the early 1980s, public employee unions began trying to negotiate commitments to study differentials between men and women doing similar work or using comparable education, training, and experience on the job. The campaign had only limited success. Employers rarely gave extra raises to some workers unless they could reduce them for others, and the studies themselves were complicated and unreliable. The Coalition of Labor Union Women endorsed a “Family Bill of Rights,” which went beyond usual union demands for a family wage and the eight-hour day to focus on a living wage, shorter work week, and better pay for part-time work. CLUW’s American Family Celebration on May 14, 1988, drew 40,000 unionists and family members. By 1993, most unions endorsed child care for their members.* But the AFL-CIO Executive Council refused to endorse reproductive choice—two of the three women on the Council voted with the majority.

  The first union to get family benefits for “domestic partners” was the UAW’s District 65 local at the Village Voice newspaper in New York City in 1982. Pressed by unions and employee associations, several public employers and some private companies added domestic partners to their benefits coverage over the next decade. SEIU hosted a reception for gay and lesbian trade unionists at AFL-CIO Washington headquarters the day before the “Great March” for Gay and Lesbian Rights in October 1987, and César Chávez addressed the half-million-strong rally. The Gay and Lesbian Labor Activist Network in Boston, San Francisco, and New York City held community forums on issues like using union labor in gay community centers and the impact of the AIDS crisis on health care workers. Activists at a spring 1991 Labor Notes conference organized Lavender Labor, an international network to support gay and lesbian labor activists coming out of the closet at work and in unions. An SEIU women’s conference that year produced a Lavender Caucus, which had chapters around the country by 1994.

>   Other organizing initiatives came from outside the labor movement. In 1984, the Anti-Klan Network invited UFCW to organize Zartic Foods in Cedartown, Georgia, where the Ku Klux Klan had set up an American Workers Union with a “Fire the Wetback” campaign in 1981, and two Mexican immigrants had been murdered, their killers acquitted by local juries. The Catholic Sanctuary movement, which helped Central American refugees apply for asylum, began organizing Mayan migrant farm workers from Guatemala in south Florida in 1984, and Catholic activists in North Carolina supported strikes by Guatemalan workers at Case Farms in Morgantown and the Perdue plant in Lewiston. Black Workers for Justice started in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, to build community support for workers in the garment, automotive, pharmaceutical, and other manufacturing shops that ringed the city.

  The same tradition of organizing for mutual support in poor and working-class communities that inspired the United Farm Workers produced ACORN (Association of Communities for Reform Now). Started in Chicago in 1970, ACORN developed a reputation for militant community-based direct action and in fifteen years grew to 60,000 dues-paying members in thirty-five cities spread across twenty-six states. In 1978, ACORN started United Labor Unions to help low-wage workers organize around immediate demands. ULU organizers began by surveying a local industry, then recruited workers from the industry and encouraged them to develop actions like “Recognition Days,” shows of strength to get negotiations started. In 1983, ULU targeted the twelve largest vendors of home health care services in Chicago, who hired mostly welfare recipients at the minimum wage. It won the first election, at National Home Care Systems, in January 1984, finally signed a contract (under a strike threat) in June 1985, and signed up more vendors. In Detroit a ULU group of fast-food workers got the first U.S. union contract in the industry. In New Orleans ULU organized low-wage workers in hospitals, nursing homes, and tourist hospitality centers. ACORN pioneered suing for court certification to represent members with state and local agencies, first with poor and elderly home health care clients. ACORN affiliated with SEIU in 1985.

  In San Francisco, the Asian Immigrant Women Advocates started in 1982 to support organizing among women working as seamstresses, waitresses, and maids. In Los Angeles, the Korean Immigrant Workers Association provided advice to immigrants cheated on their labor contracts, and campaigned to get the Koreatown business community to release relief funds to Korean workers displaced by the violence that followed the 1992 acquittal of four police officers tried for beating black motorist Rodney King. Both groups worked with HERE and SEIU locals.

  Los Angeles was also home base for the Alliance of Asian Pacific Labor, which started in 1987 to build labor support for issues important in the Asian community, like language rights, political participation, and the Ward’s Cove case. AAPL supported the Radio Korea strike, which finally failed after four weeks, the longest strike in Koreatown history. AAPL also recruited Asian American organizers, finding Vietnamese Americans to help locals in the UAW and the Aluminum, Brick and Glass Workers defeat decertification drives. Union activists founded the AFL-CIO constituency group Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance in Washington, D.C., in 1992.

  Union relations with community labor groups could be strained. In 1987, affiliates of the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Union Department founded Jobs with Justice (JwJ), which got union rank and filers and community activists to pledge to join at least five solidarity actions every year. The group made its debut June 23, 1987, when 3,000 Eastern Airlines machinists put on red shirts and picketed company headquarters at the Miami airport, joined by 500 community and labor activists sponsored by eighty unions and twenty-three community groups. A second Eastern rally in July brought out 12,000 people. Within a year JwJ chapters had staged more than sixty rallies, mostly in right-to-work Sun Belt states, and started Workers’ Rights Boards, panels of citizens who held hearings on denials of workers’ rights. Colorado JwJ started in 1988—helping CWA members working as Denver Post mailers fight off a 25 percent wage cut, getting the Denver U.S. Mint to hire union janitors by leafletting tourists waiting on line. But when JwJ proposed a mass rally at the Denver airport’s Continental Airlines terminal to protest the company’s role in breaking the Eastern strike, the Colorado AFL-CIO backed off and called a rival rally a mile away. Both events flopped, and Colorado JwJ broke up.

  The Los Angeles Bus Riders Union/Sindicato de Passajeros formed in 1990 to press for more funding for public buses. BRU/SdP practiced direct action—sit-ins at intersections, office seizures—and cultivated alliances with unions representing low-wage workers and with the United Transportation Union at the Metropolitan Transit Authority. A court settlement designated BRU/SdP as representative for the bus-riding public. But BRU/SdP also opposed union initiatives like SEIU Local 660’s proposal to transfer transportation funds to health care and OCAW’s support for refinery owners who refused to release toxic emissions data.

  Some unions resurrected more militant shop floor tactics from CIO days. UAW activists tried “running the plant backwards.” When Local 282 at Moog Automotive in St. Louis faced demands for concessions in 1981, members worked without a contract, followed management directives to the letter, refused overtime, and spontaneously mustered around disputed situations. Moog management retaliated with firings and suspensions, but after six months agreed to a contract that raised pay more than a third over forty months and reinstated fired and suspended workers with back pay. UAW locals at Bell Helicopter and LTV-Vought in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area used the same tactics in 1984. The fight lasted longer—about fifteen months, including a month-long lockout at Bell—but the new contracts had no concessions, and fired workers returned with back pay.

  Other unions returned to original organizing principles. IBEW had long used an apprentice program to control the supply of electrical construction workers, but it had started by organizing working electricians. In 1987, IBEW began a “bottom-up” organizing program, developed first in Boston and Atlanta. Organizers signed up workers on nonunion sites until they had enough members to call a short strike over an unfair labor practice. New members took “no-fail” exams, which qualified them on a range from beginning apprentice to full journeyman, and placed them in appropriate training. IBEW gained members in construction, while other unions were losing them. The Bricklayers and Allied Craftsmen began organizing nonunion masonry workers in New Jersey and Virginia (where racial prejudice among local Bricklayer officials required intervention by national staff).

  The UAW returned to the nonunion sector of the auto industry using rank-and-file members as organizers. In 1988, UAW Local 3000 at the Detroit Flat Rock Mazda assembly plant started a drive to organize the forty Michigan-based Mazda suppliers using local members under the direction of a full-time UAW organizer. The first successes were MANA, a Mazda-owned shipping and packaging plant, and Pentsone, a Japanese-owned window assembly supplier. But UAW progress was uneven: The union was trounced in a 1989 NLRB election at the Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tennessee.

  UFCW organizers learned to avoid NLRB elections and targeted employers with “pressure campaigns.” After losing a 1988 election in the Kalamazoo Family Foods chain, UFCW Local 951 started a consumer boycott, which finally helped put the company out of business. Local 951 secretary-treasurer Joe Crump observed, “There is no ‘free lunch’ in our jurisdiction.” UFCW had other ways to get recognition; union staff looked into employer compliance with a myriad of laws and codes on discrimination, wages and hours, unemployment and workers compensation, pension management, safety and health, environmental zoning and fire codes, and taxes. At the Delta Pride Catfish Farm in Mississippi, UFCW got a contract after documenting unpaid time and agreeing to represent workers in a lawsuit for back pay.

  “Reaganomics” was finally discredited on “Meltdown Monday” (October 19, 1987) when the Dow Jones average fell more than 500 points, but the bills remained to be paid. “Neoliberals” proposed balancing the federal budget with new taxes, deeper spending cuts, and debt repayment.
They also called for more deregulation of the international marketplace, especially restrictions on trade and investment.

  The policies were bipartisan. Democrats saw how corporate contributions went Republican in 1980 and scrambled to restore balance. Democratic House leadership fast-tracked Reagan’s tax cuts and solicited suggestions for additional corporate tax benefits. After Mondale’s defeat, Party leaders started the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985 to make the Party more responsive to business concerns. Both Dukakis in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 1992 ran on neoliberal policies, and the AFL-CIO endorsed them both. Vice President George Bush beat Dukakis by 7 million votes, partly by promising he would never raise taxes, then lost to Clinton by more than 5 million votes after he did. Neither election changed national economic and trade policies; both saw the major parties becoming more dependent on corporate contributions to pay for more costly campaigns.

  The new policies had some success. Before-tax corporate profits had fallen from about 12 percent in 1979 to about 5 percent in 1986; by 1992, they had risen back to 8 percent. By 1989, the Dow Jones average was back to 2,500, and rose to 3,700 by 1994. But the federal deficit and the national debt remained high—federal debt as a proportion of gross domestic output went from 60 percent in 1990 to 70 percent by 1995. Military spending—which gave employment to 6 percent of the workforce in 1992—never went down, and Clinton’s promise to fund military-civilian conversion projects fell through after several defense contractors declared they would rather close than convert. Interest payments took about 14 percent of the federal budget in 1995.