From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  As the New Voice campaign had recognized from the start, organizing the unorganized required a strong union commitment to civil rights, and the new leadership backed grassroots and union initiatives to send this message.

  AFSCME, SEIU, and the AFT, along with the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Union Department, had endorsed bans on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In June 1994, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, AFSCME’s District Council 37 hosted a Stonewall 25 gay labor conference that drew more than 300 labor activists from twenty-five unions and founded Pride at Work, a national gay labor network. PAW lobbied to become an AFL-CIO constituency group and was recognized (but not funded) by the Executive Council in August 1997. PAW activists found some unions hostile to proposals for domestic partner benefits, and coming out of the closet continued to be controversial in many building trades locals. When gay activists campaigned against Hawaii’s state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in 1998, only the University of Hawaii Professional Association and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union joined the campaign. But when in September 2000, CWA member Danny Lee Overstreet was shot to death in a Roanoke, Virginia, bar by a man in a homophobic rage, his local staged vigils and rallies and started a campaign for hate-crimes legislation.

  Women’s issues got more substantial support. As Karen Nussbaum, onetime president of the 9 to 5 National Association of Working Women and now director of the AFL-CIO’s Working Women’s Department, pointed out, the Federation had become the country’s largest organization of workingwomen. In 1997, the AFL-CIO’s “Ask a Working Woman” initiative collected 50,000 survey responses and held meetings and hearings in twenty cities to identify workingwomen’s concerns—equal pay, layoffs and downsizing, and sick leave were most often listed—and discovered that four out of five women surveyed were interested in collective bargaining. The most visible sign of the change in attitude came in the AFL-CIO’s own affirmative actions. In 1995, women headed three of its nineteen departments; by 1998, women headed ten of twenty-one. Of the four AFL-CIO regions, two were headed by minority men, one by a woman.

  With AFL-CIO support, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance became a leading national advocate for Asian American civil rights, especially active around legislative attacks on immigrants and affirmative action. After the Japanese-owned New Otani Hotel in Los Angeles fired union activists during an organizing drive, HERE Local 11 called a boycott. APALA helped HERE persuade Japanese professional and trade associations to honor the boycott. During the February 1997 AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting, Sweeney, Trumka, and Chávez-Thompson led 2,000 people to a rally at the hotel.

  The immigrants with the fewest rights were the undocumented. By Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates, about 6 million undocumented immigrants lived in the U.S. in 1999, about half in California. Organizing low-wage workers meant challenging the INS. Though both the NLRB and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission extended federal labor law to undocumented workers, employers hardly feared the INS—between 1995 and 1999, about 4,000 were fined for immigration violations, and nearly every fine was reduced or forgiven entirely. Deportations more than doubled from 1990 to 1997.

  When UFCW organizers visited Nebraska and Iowa meatpacking plants in 1998, they found Operation Vanguard. Inspecting 24,000 employee records from forty plants, the INS operation discovered almost 5,000 without documents on file. When the Service notified the workers by mail, over 3,000 fled the area, including twenty out of twenty-two activists organizing at Greater Omaha Packing. That summer the INS disrupted a UFW drive at rose grower Bear Creek Productions in California’s San Joaquin Valley by deporting hundreds of workers—many had lived and worked in the area for more than fifteen years. In 1999, the INS deported 500 members of SEIU San Francisco Local 1877 as the union began mobilizing for a contract; and in Minnesota, the Holiday Inn Express manager turned over nine employees to the INS during a HERE organizing drive. In February 2000, the AFLCIO Executive Council declared that employer sanctions had failed, and for the first time in its history the Federation called for amnesty for illegal immigrants (and also for tougher enforcement at the already militarized Mexican border).

  AFL-CIO support for organizing low-wage workers expressed the New Voice ambition to rebuild the labor movement as a social movement, but many union leaders worried that coalitions might escape their control. The AFL-CIO had declined to support groups such as Black Workers for Justice, Korean Immigrant Workers Association, Chinese Progressive Association (Boston, Massachusetts), the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, Asian Immigrant Women Association (Oakland, California), and the Pilipino Workers Center (Los Angeles), because of their radical connections. The Federation gave Jobs with Justice $100,000 in 1996, but Secretary-Treasurer Trumka wondered whether even that low level of support was worthwhile. A grassroots outcry changed his position. In 1997, the AFLCIO Executive endorsed JwJ’s demand for real jobs instead of welfare work and its Workers Rights Boards projects, and the Federation went on to encourage its affiliates to support “Street Heat” tactics.

  In fact alliances became more important to many union efforts. One of the first New Voice initiatives was the Organizing Institute’s Union Summer program, which recruited hundreds of college students for short summer internships with unions. The program itself got mixed reviews, but when the students returned to campus many continued to work for labor causes. In 1999, a student-faculty-community Coalition for Justice persuaded Long Island’s Southampton University to dump a custodial services contract and rehire its former janitors, mostly Native and African Americans. Student activists also demanded their schools require contractors to pay a living wage—the first to adopt the policy was Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

  What really took off was the sweatshop campaign. Developed originally from the National Labor Committee’s Central American solidarity work, the sweatshop campaign picked up speed in 1995, when seventy-two Thai women contract workers were discovered in a barbed-wire California compound sewing name-brand garments for seventeen hours a day at about a dollar an hour. It got another boost when NLC activists reduced television celebrity Kathie Lee Gifford to tears on her own program by showing how her Wal-Mart clothing line was made by teenage Honduran girls working fifteen-hour days. Union Summer graduates started the United Students Against Sweatshops in July 1998 to make universities and colleges impose fair labor standards on contractors licensing school logos for athletic clothing. After protests at schools like Duke, Michigan, Georgetown, and Wisconsin, students staged simultaneous actions at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Kent State in April 1999.

  Academic support for labor, usually confined to a few college and university labor studies programs, got a boost in October 1996, when a sixties-style teach-in at Columbia University drew over 2,000 participants. The organizers went on to start Scholars, Writers and Artists for Social Justice. SAWSJ distributed essays for publication in school and local newspapers, encouraged labor caucuses at national meetings of scholarly associations, and organized labor teach-ins at colleges around the country.

  Religious leaders had always been key supporters in labor struggles, but the AFL-CIO’s new emphasis on social justice encouraged a more organized and inclusive approach. The National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice started in Chicago in 1996, and by 1998 had twenty-nine affiliated groups, including Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, and Jewish clergy. In Los Angeles, the Clergy and Laity for Economic Justice supported HERE Local 11’s campaign for better contracts for Westside hotel housekeepers with “Java for Justice,” breakfast sermons delivered in hotel restaurants. In Minneapolis, silent vigils by ministers persuaded hotels to rehire workers fired for union activities. During Labor Day weekend 1999, activists took the pulpits in 700 churches and synagogues to preach about the right to organize and earn a living wage. The next year the Interfaith Committee organized a public fast in support of migrant farm workers in New York State, helping persua
de the state legislature to bring them under state labor law, with the minimum wage and the right to organize.

  Union interests did not always fit easily into the wider world of social justice movements. Issues like capital punishment and incarceration, drug-law reform, reproductive rights, and welfare found union members themselves divided, or their interests in conflict with the community. In 1996, AFSCME prison guards helped break a prisoners’ strike for minimum wage against the Minnesota subsidiary of Unicor, the country’s largest prison labor company, despite strike support from the community-labor “A Job is a Right” coalition. The next year the Tennessee AFL-CIO supported prison privatization in exchange for Corrections Corporation’s neutrality in union drives.

  Unions sometimes disagreed with environmentalists, again over jobs. In the Pacific Northwest, unions backed timber company opposition to regulations protecting the endangered Spotted Owl and old-growth forests. Unions in polluting industries often sided with companies resisting pollution controls. The USWA, UMW, UAW, UTU, and Carpenters all joined the National Association of Manufacturers in opposing the Kyoto Protocols designed to slow global warming. But OCAW worked with the Texas United Education Fund to document increased pollution after Crown Petroleum locked out the union in February 1996. Steelworkers Local 890 joined the Albuquerque-based Southwest Research and Information Center to sue Phelps Dodge for disclosure of toxic emissions from its mines in Chino, New Mexico. United Paperworkers Local 30296 charged that toxic dumping by Arizona Portland Cement was an unfair labor practice. New Jersey unions joined a coalition called “Justice for Our Jobs, Health, and Environment” to press for statewide public hearings on hazardous wastes and catastrophic chemical accidents. The Laborers organized Local 455 in a Brooklyn, New York, recycling plant. In fact, a number of unions, from AFSCME to the Steelworkers, Operating Engineers, Machinists, and Teamsters, developed programs on hazardous waste removal and processing.

  Labor alliances could be found almost anywhere. In 1992, activists from a revived American Indian Movement joined HERE Local 17 in a sit-in at the Normandy Hotel in Minneapolis-St. Paul the day before the Superbowl. Union members then joined AIM’s protest against racist mascots in professional sports at the next day’s game. In Greensboro, North Carolina, UNITE members trying to get a first contract with the local Kmart distribution center worked with the Pulpit Forum, a local ministers’ group that supported a local Kmart boycott and joined in nonviolent civil disobedience at a Kmart Superstore on Martin Luther King Day. UNITE supported Pulpit Forum campaigns for more public school funding and against racial disparities in prison sentences. Streetcorner leafletting by a local community-labor coalition provided crucial neighborhood support for UNITE Local 169’s successful eight-month campaign to get contracts for Mexican immigrant greengrocery workers at several stores on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1999. In New York City suburbs, the Women Workers Project launched a “Justice Clinic” to provide counseling and assistance to Asian immigrant domestic workers, most undocumented, many living in virtual bondage to the whim of their employers.

  Some of the most ambitious and best organized coalitions came from local labor councils in cities like Los Angeles and Oakland, New Haven, Connecticut, and Buffalo, New York, which had been building them for years. Los Angeles community and labor activists got together for a long-term effort to raise the local standard of living (in the city with the widest gap between rich and poor in the country). They focused on the low-wage and growing tourist industry. In 1995, they set up the Tourism Industry Development Council, later the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, an umbrella coalition of religious, labor, and community groups, to develop proposals, educate and mobilize workers and residents, demand reinvestment and land-use planning, and support union organizing. LAANE stressed that the community should benefit from public investment, got area city councils to require that workers paid with public money get health benefits and earn more than minimum wage, and worked with other community-labor coalitions on projects in low-wage industries like entertainment, light manufacturing, and health care.

  Local coalitions could get the attention of local politicians. In New Haven, when the new Omni Hotel reneged on a neutrality agreement with HERE, Elm City Churches Organized got the city’s Municipal Services Committee to hear testimony about corporate obligations to communities, employer resistance to union organizing, and Omni’s hiring discrimination. After months of weekly pickets and reservation cancellations from groups contacted by activists, the mayor intervened and Omni agreed to HERE card-check recognition.

  Workers’ Rights Boards hearings could generate enough publicity to get an employer to the table, even without local government support. Aramark ran the cafeteria at Salomon Smith Barney’s New York headquarters on Wall Street. When employees petitioned for recognition with HERE Local 100, Aramark management began to transfer and fire union workers. The Jobs with Justice New York Workers Rights Board convened a hearing that drew 200 people to a downtown church to hear testimony about Aramark employee relations and NLRB procedures. Dismayed by the publicity, Salomon Smith Barney agreed that Aramark would give HERE card-check recognition.

  STEPS FORWARD, STEPS BACK

  Immigrant organizing, especially SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaigns, made great headlines for the new labor movement, but unions scored some remarkable victories elsewhere too.

  The Laborers organized New York-area asbestos workers—mostly Ecuadoran immigrants—in 1996, and by 2000 had organized about two-thirds of the small UXO (unexploded ordnance) industry.

  The Machinists settled strikes at Boeing (December 1995) and McDonnell Douglas (September 1996), both after members rejected the settlements first negotiated. The new contracts improved wages and medical benefits, and provided sixty days notice of subcontracting plans involving union layoffs. (The members had wanted job security provisions.)

  UAW Local 696 at two General Motors Delphi Division brake plants at Dayton, Ohio, went on strike early in March 1996. Within days most of the North American G.M. plants had suspended operations—“lean” production and “just-in-time” inventory could be vulnerable at strategic points (in fact, the leaner, the more vulnerable). Though the strike was technically “local” and over health and safety concerns, G.M. ended it by promising yet again to hire more production and skilled workers.

  In 1997, the Teamsters won a fifteen-day strike against United Parcel Service. The union paid special attention to public relations—UPS drivers visited their regular pickups to explain why they were on strike. The union demand that the company convert part-time jobs to full-time got widespread public support, and the new contract promised 10,000 new full-time jobs.

  The UAW struck Johnson Control’s auto seat factories in Plymouth Township, Michigan, and Oberlin, Ohio, for first contracts in January 1997. After three weeks and a Ford commitment not to buy nonunion seats, Johnson Control settled. In February, the union got a first contract at American Axle & Manufacturing, a 1994 G.M. spin-off—the contract fit the standard G.M. pattern. An eighty-seven–day strike at G.M.’s Pontiac East truck assembly plant in Michigan won 567 jobs in July. Nine days later, a five-day UAW strike at G.M.’s Powertrain plant in Warren, Michigan, won 420 new jobs and a promise not to outsource wheel production. When G.M. removed dies for hoods and bumpers from its Flint Metal Fab Center in June 1998, UAW Local 659 walked out, joined by Local 651 at Delphi East. The fifty-four-day strike shut down twenty-seven assembly and over a hundred parts plants in North America, and cost the company almost $3 billion in lost profits. G.M. agreed to return the dies and invest in the plants. In January 2000, UAW Local 12 painters at Chrysler Daimler’s Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio, walked out after a plume of paint ignited but failed to trigger the elaborate fire suppression system. Within two hours two other Chrysler plants had suspended production, and work resumed only when the union verified that the suppression system worked.

  Over the summer of 1998, CWA and IBEW workers at Bell Atlantic won a di
spute on forced overtime after a two-day strike; the unions at USWest had to stay out fifteen days to get the same relief. In 1999, Steel Workers Local 8888 improved hourly rates and pensions for 9,200 workers at Virginia’s Newport News Shipbuilding with a fifteen-week strike. By that time a campaign by the Southern Nevada Building Trades Council and HERE had made Las Vegas one of the highly unionized cities in the country; the AFL-CIO promised to support other “Union City” drives and started one in New Orleans.

  Unionism passed a milestone when the biggest white-collar strike in U.S. history was settled early in 2000. Nineteen thousand Boeing Corporation engineers and professional workers in the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, which had recently affiliated with the AFL-CIO’s International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, struck to bring their raises into line with other Boeing unions. The forty-day strike was supported by the Machinists local at Boeing, and by CWA, AFSCME, IUE, and the AFL-CIO.

  Some organizing drives prospered. In October 1996, HERE Local 2 won a year-long campaign at the San Francisco Marriott Hotel. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, HERE Local 17 won contracts and raises for more than 1,500 hotel workers—many of them new immigrants from countries as remote as Tibet and Somalia—with a thirteen-day strike in June 2000. According to HERE staffer Kate Shaughnessy, the Minneapolis strikers’ “unity in diversity” was their greatest strength.