[Ualeindiv] Surviving Open Shop America

[Robert McCarl]

Steve: Thanks for this piece. It is very timely. I am scheduled to give a
talk to Idaho AFL-CIO next weekend on Idaho unions and the impact of Right
to Work. As you can imagine, with the exception of teachers and first
responders, public sector unions in Idaho have never been robust. With the
new laws passed last year in Idaho, even the existing public sector workers
who are union members are excluded from bargaining about anything but
wages, and then only if their salaries do not keep up with the COL as
determined by R party wonks at the legislature. Ho hum. I have been madly
searching out some new ideas about where to go from here, and I skimmed
through Aronowitz's *Post-Work*. Do you know it? He is arguing for the
workweek reduction and he traces it back quite a ways. I think it is a
grand idea, but I am not sure how to gain enough leverage to get it even
considered. Also, the LRAN network is up and running and I will send you
their meeting announcement. It will be in early June in Georgetown. I am
not sure I am going, but I would like to. More soon and thanks again Steve.
Bob

On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 12:03 PM, Steve Early <lsupport at aol.com> wrote:


> *From Social Policy, Spring, 2012

>

> Back to the Future: Union Survival Strategies in Open Shop America

>

> By Steve Early and Rand Wilson*

>

> When the history of mid-western de-unionization is written, its sad

> chroniclers will begin their story in Indiana. That is where Governor Mitch

> Daniels paved the way, in 2005, for copycat attacks on public-sector

> bargaining in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan — and for a successful assault

> on private sector union security in his own state earlier this year.

>

> A right-wing Republican, Daniels was elected in 2004. Immediately after

> taking office, he began cutting state agency jobs and, via executive order,

> revoked state-employee bargaining rights granted by his Democratic

> predecessor, Evan Bayh. Over the next six years, state government

> employment dropped from 35,000 to 28,700. In 2005, 16,408 state workers

> were paying union dues; by 2011, only 1,490 still belonged to labor

> organizations now deprived of dues check-off.1

>

> In Indiana, the end of collective bargaining led to a pay freeze in 2009

> and 2010, introduction of a new merit-pay system, loss of seniority rights,

> and health-care cost shifting. Several state employees interviewed by The

> New York Times in February, 2011, reported paying $5,200 a year for their

> insurance premiums — $3,400 more than when Daniels took over. According to

> The Times’s reporter, Steven Greenhouse, the resulting drop in union

> membership was due “to workers deciding it was no longer worth paying dues

> to newly-toothless unions.”

>

> Jim Mills, a welfare worker in New Castle, Indiana, offered a different

> explanation for why his union branch shrank from 260 to twelve members:

> workers were afraid that management would retaliate against them for union

> activity once they were no longer protected by union contracts.2

>

> Republican governors elected in the fall of 2010 — like Scott Walker in

> Wisconsin, John Kasich in Ohio, and Rick Snyder in Michigan — all looked to

> Daniels as their model. For unions like the Service Employees, the American

> Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the two

> national teacher organizations, NEA and AFT, unionized firefighters and

> police, the Indiana scenario is a formula for union marginalization, if not

> total extinction. As soon as they took office in early 2011, Snyder and

> Kasich quickly rescinded bargaining rights for the newest public-sector

> union members in their respective states—more than 40,000 child-care

> providers and home-health aides. These workers had only recently been

> organized under the terms of executive orders issued by previous Democratic

> governors; none were covered by the pension and medical plans covering

> regular state workers, with a longer history of collective bargaining.3

>

> Broader anti-union measures introduced by Walker in Wisconsin, and by

> Kasich in Ohio, were adopted by state legislators not long afterwards,

> triggering the mass community-labor protests in Madison described and

> analyzed elsewhere in this issue of Social Policy. In Wisconsin, these

> demonstrations reached truly unusual and inspiring proportions in the

> winter of 2011. The focus of organized labor's counter-campaign then became

> a partially successful recall effort aimed at Republican legislators and a

> legal challenge that delayed — but did not prevent — implementation of the

> law.4 Weighing its potential impact on 360,000 public employees in the

> Buckeye State, some experts argued that SB-5, Ohio's anti-union law, was

> even tougher than Wisconsin’s, because uniformed public-safety employees

> were included whereas Walker excluded them from his “budget repair” bill.5

> Fortunately, labor opponents of SB-5 collected more than one million

> signatures to force a referendum vote last November that repealed Kasich’s

> draconian curbs on collective bargaining in Ohio.

>

> In Wisconsin, however, all state employees have been thrust into a new

> open-shop environment since last summer. County and municipal unions, along

> with local teachers’ associations, are losing their ability to collect dues

> through automatic payroll deduction as their current contracts expire.

> According to University of Wisconsin labor historian Stephen Meyer,

> Walker's anti-union legislation is worse than the private sector "right to

> work" laws spawned by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act "because it requires that

> unions get re-certified by their members yearly, at the same time that the

> unions are prevented from accomplishing anything for them."6 The new

> electoral deck is further stacked against incumbent unions by the

> requirement that they win recertification by majority vote of everyone in

> the bargaining, rather than just 50% plus one, of the workers who turn out

> to vote.7

>

> Most of the 1.6 million American workers covered by labor agreements, but

> who are not union members, can be found in our twenty-three right-to-work

> states. This political bloc increased by one earlier this year, when

> Indiana’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a bill signed by

> Governor Daniels that outlawed negotiation of any contract clause requiring

> payroll deduction of dues — or non-member “agency fees” — for union

> representation. In Indiana, as elsewhere, unions in private industry remain

> legally obligated under the National Labor Relations Act, which

> Taft-Hartley amended, to provide services on an equal basis to everyone in

> their bargaining units, regardless of whether individual workers contribute

> a dime. In New Hampshire in 2011, it took a Democratic governor's veto to

> prevent the open shop from being imposed there, with similar unfair

> financial burdens, on unions in both the private and public sector. If

> anti-union forces had succeeded in the Granite state last year, as they did

> in Indiana this year, it would have marked the first encroachment of

> “right-to-work” in New England, a supposed “blue state” bastion.8

>

> *Dues-Deduction Dependence*

>

> Wherever legally sanctioned, negotiated provisions for automatic payroll

> deduction of dues have long produced a guaranteed income stream for U.S.

> labor organizations. With the revenue from dues and "agency fees" —

> payments required by workers who choose not to join — unions have paid for

> their lawyers, lobbyists, full-time negotiators, and field staff. They have

> also helped finance state, local, and/or national election campaign

> activity by their members, some of whom also make voluntary membership

> contributions to union political action funds. Some commentators on the

> left have long argued that "dues check off" makes unions less responsive to

> workers, because the latter have no way of withholding financial support

> from organizations granted the exclusive legal right to represent them. One

> radical critic of the union shop — a longtime labor educator and former

> organizer in the garment industry — believes that labor's post-New-Deal

> reliance on government certification and automatic dues deduction

> effectively "precludes any meaningful internal democracy — a precondition

> to a militant mass organization."9

>

> For better or worse, depending on your point of view, major unions are now

> operating in hundreds, if not thousands, of workplaces in which union

> membership has just become voluntary again. According to the all-knowing

> editors of the New York Times, Republican sponsors of recent open shop

> legislation are mistaken in their belief that "unions will simply fade

> away" when they have "no ability to raise funds." Says The Times,

> optimistically, "As much as unions may struggle with these new shackles,

> their members — and their motivation — are not going away."10 On the other

> hand, it has been many decades since passage of the NLRA and the later

> public-sector bargaining laws modeled after it. During that time, most

> unions have not had to function as voluntary membership organizations

> within private and public-sector enterprises in much of the country. One

> major challenge they face today is quickly adapting to this new and more

> difficult “internal organizing” environment. In Wisconsin, for example, a

> combination of rank-and-file apathy, anger, fear, and/or dissatisfaction

> over past union representation, including recent concession bargaining

> about wages and benefits, could easily send dues receipts plummeting to

> Indiana levels, if unions do not strengthen their workplace structures and

> become more member-oriented.

>

> This is exactly the crisis that faced Local 100 of the Transport Workers

> Union (TWU) New York City, when it paid a high price for its workplace

> militancy seven years ago. After a 2005 citywide bus and subway system

> strike, 35,000 transit workers were punished under New York’s Taylor law

> which prohibits walkouts by public employees. Local 100 members were

> assessed fines ranging from $650 to $750, the equivalent of three days’ pay

> for most strikers. The local was fined $2.5 million, its president briefly

> jailed, and automatic dues deduction temporarily suspended. The contract

> settlement, which included unpopular givebacks, was rejected narrowly but

> later imposed by an arbitrator.

>

> The punitive suspension of TWU's dues check-off deal with the Metropolitan

> Transportation Authority resulted in the local's paid-up membership sinking

> to nearly fifty percent in the bargaining unit involved in the strike.

> Local 100's weak and demoralized steward structure made systematic hand

> collection of dues impossible in many workplaces. Members were bitter and

> angry about being fined for striking against benefit concessions they were

> ultimately forced to accept anyway, after a work stoppage that many felt

> was poorly organized and led by the union.

>

> Dues deduction was eventually restored but, as recently as late 2009 when

> a reform slate took over Local 100, about 17,000 former strikers were not

> eligible to vote because they still owed as much as $900 in back dues and

> could not or would not pay that amount. Members of the Take Back Our Union

> slate, headed by current Local 100 President John Samuelsen were faced with

> the monumental challenge of restoring rank-and-file confidence in the TWU

> and gradually coaxing as many lapsed members as possible back into the

> fold. In late 2010, when Local 100 began preparing for contract

> negotiations this year, stewards, officers, and staffers were still trying

> to get 14,000 bus and subway workers back into good membership standing.

>

> In the rest of this article, we examine the pressing debate, within labor,

> about how best to respond to such daunting open-shop conditions, whether

> they arise in atypical Local 100 fashion or as the result of legislation

> and executive orders that more permanently disrupt union financing,

> administration, and day-to-day functioning.

>

> Clearly, conducting "business as usual" is not a viable option in new

> open-shop states. If government-employee unions remain what Stanley

> Aronowitz calls "insurance companies and grievance machines," the soft

> underbelly of mainstream unionism, public sector division, may soon be

> exposed for all to see. Are there ways that these endangered labor

> organizations can operate "outside the protection of the law?"11 Can they

> learn to function with greater membership consent, rank-and-file

> participation, and voluntary financial buy-in than was needed in the past?

> Can they develop internal organizing plans based on worker-to-worker

> relationship building and collective action on the job as a substitute for

> formal collective bargaining?

>

> *Lessons of Southern Organizing*

>

> Public-sector unionists with long experience in open shop states like

> Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina, or Texas argue that all is not lost

> for their brothers and sisters north of the Mason-Dixon Line. In North

> Carolina, notes United Electrical Workers (UE) organizer Leah Fried,

> "collective bargaining rights were stripped from public employees in 1959

> by an all-white state legislature [which] made it illegal for state and

> local governments to enter into collective bargaining agreements with

> workers." For more than fifteen years, the UE has "helped public workers

> across North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia form non-majority unions

> that organize and fight to improve workers' lives on the job without a

> contract."12

>

> UE Local 150, the North Carolina Public Service Workers Union, initially

> concentrated on gaining strength within the state university system, which

> includes sixteen campuses and over 19,000 workers. The union's primary base

> and leadership came from parts of the workforce that is majority

> African-American and female, like house-keeping, groundskeeping, and other

> blue collar jobs. As UE organizer Steve Bader reported in Labor Notes,

> "When UNC refused to meet with the union, UE 150 organized Martin Luther

> King Day leafleting, Black History Month black armband days, and meetings

> with legislators [that] culminated in a meeting between UNC System

> President Molly Broad's office and 18 rank and file workers. The meeting

> pressured the president into issuing an official memo that recognized

> workers' rights to join and build their union without retaliation, changed

> the grievance policy to allow a co-worker grievance assistant, and

> established 'meet and confer' bodies between employees and top

> management."13

>

> Later, the UE expanded to other UNC campuses and the Department of Health

> and Human Services, where members held union meetings during lunch or break

> time to decide on issues and strategies. An independent union of city

> workers in Durham voted to affiliate with UE Local 150 and has even

> conducted several strikes. Whether they are state or municipal employees,

> rank-and-file activists are trained to represent co-workers in grievance

> meetings with management and serve as elected stewards and officers.

> According to Bader:

>

> "Victories in this area include winning formal grievances over unfair

> discipline. In at least three cases, racist managers and supervisors have

> been forced to leave the job due to pressure from the union. At almost

> every institution, union chapters have had direct meetings with management

> regarding workplace issues. In several instances they have won concrete

> changes, such as improved equipment, respect for or changed policy, and

> internally granted raises of $1,500-3,000 for individual workers."

>

> UE Local 150 also gathers, organizes, and distributes data on wages,

> benefits, personnel practices, and employment-related legislative

> initiatives — information that may be publicly available but difficult for

> workers to obtain. The union has established a regular presence in the

> capital when the legislature is in session and regularly contacts lawmakers

> about issues affecting public workers. Rank-and-file members are organized

> and encouraged to speak directly to elected officials, rather than relying

> on professional lobbyists. UE legislative priorities or accomplishments in

> the past include winning flat rather than percentage raises, to aid the

> lowest paid, passage of bills to improve the grievance procedure, and win

> stronger family and medical leave rights and protection against

> discrimination based on disability. The UE has also generated much

> publicity for its creative challenge of North Carolina's legal ban on

> public-sector bargaining as a violation of international labor standards.

>

> Tom Smith is an organizer for and former president of Communications

> Workers of America Local 3865, Tennessee’s United Campus Workers (UCW).

> UCW/CWA is a "non-majority union" of state university workers that's grown

> from two dozen members on one campus to more than 1,200 in eight cities in

> the last ten years. "While having dues check-off helps, not having it isn't

> fatal," says Smith, although he notes that "we struggle with

> self-sustainability every day." According to Smith, in the early years of

> Local 3865, "elements of our leadership argued that having to hand-collect

> dues kept the local's leaders and organizers honest. This attitude meant

> attending weekly meetings to make plans to collect dues. Quickly we

> realized that spending the majority of our time playing bill collector was

> not part and parcel of union democracy, nor did it help build the kind of

> political relationships we're aiming for on the job."14

>

> Instead, stewards started to spend more of their time "listening to

> co-workers, gathering opinions about how to build the union, organizing

> meetings, and working to save jobs from budget cuts." Local 3865 switched

> from hand collection of cash or checks to a bank-draft system which enables

> dues to be deducted straight from members' accounts. But that requires new

> members to fill out a form providing their bank routing and account

> numbers, which creates "a new layer of difficulty in signing up members."

>

> "Bank drafts are complicated. We have a number of different drafts

> depending on pay periods. As anyone who has lived from paycheck to paycheck

> knows, automatic withdrawals need to be timed so that enough "available

> funds" are left behind to ensure groceries and gas do not overdraw the

> account. When possible we deduct dues from the check that does not contain

> the health insurance premium."

>

> According to Smith, "very few people sign on first contact" because "a

> longer relationship must be built beforehand.” The amount of work required

> for dues collection via bank drafts is still "very large." Local 3865 staff

> devote dozens of hours each month to adding new members to the system,

> dealing with transaction fees, returns that slam the union with an

> additional fee, and costly "drops" when workers drop out of the union. "We

> now know all the local bank routing numbers, "he says, "so new members

> signing up can simply put their bank's name on a dues form that specifies

> savings or checking account, to prevent expensive returns.”15

>

> In Texas, the CWA-backed counterpart of Local 3865 is the Texas State

> Employees Union (TSEU)/CWA Local 6186, a group launched as a "non-majority

> union" organizing project in the early 1980s. Although heavily subsidized

> by the national union for many years, TSEU has built up a dues-paying

> membership base, now numbering about 12,000, in the same fashion as

> higher-ed union organizers in Tennessee. (Texas has more than 120,000 state

> employees.) Both white-collar and blue-collar state workers can join, in

> any state department, agency, or university system campus. As TSEU lead

> organizer Jim Branson explains, "The union can represent workers in

> grievance hearings, which means that individual workers don't have to be on

> their own when faced with some kind of adverse personnel action."16 But

> individual worker representation in grievance proceedings is just "a small

> part of what TSEU does," Branson says.

>

> "We have a voice on the job because we are an active and growing movement

> that puts a lot of emphasis on organizing. We have agency caucuses, made up

> of union activists, who meet regularly to formulate goals and plan actions

> for winning those goals. From time to time, members of the caucus will meet

> with agency heads to discuss our goals, and when the legislature is in

> session, caucus members will speak directly to lawmakers. ….If a united

> group of workers act like a union, they can have a voice on the job. It's

> not easy, but it can be done."

>

> TSEU activist William Rogers says his union "has managed to win some

> victories even though it has very few legal rights." In 2007, for example,

> TSEU led a campaign that saved thousands of government jobs by preventing

> further expansion of privatization of the state's health and human

> services. "That was a fight of organized workers, even though we weren't a

> majority in the health and human services agency, and we didn't have

> collective bargaining," Branson said. "But members mobilized like crazy.

> Their mobilization turned public opinion against the privatization plan,

> and when the contractor screwed up, the state had no choice but to fire

> it." TSEU members throughout Texas lobbied elected officials and succeeded

> in getting about 100 counties and municipalities to pass resolutions

> against the governor's privatization plan. They also visited state

> legislators, marched, rallied, demonstrated, held press conferences, and

> spoke out at public hearings. In the process, reports Branson, "We got

> workers who had been sitting on the fence to join the union. We were able

> to maintain our presence in the agency — even though a lot of workers were

> quitting in anticipation of being laid off — because we never stopped

> organizing."

>

> Rethinking the Union Idea in Wisconsin....

>

>  For the rest of this article and its footnotes, see:

>

> *

> http://www.socialpolicy.org/index.php/component/content/article/4-latest-issue/532-back-to-the-future-union-survival-strategies-in-open-shop-america

> *

>

>  *Steve Early worked for twenty-seven years as an organizer and

> international representative for the Communications Workers of America in

> New England.*

>

> *Rand Wilson is a longtime union activist and organizer in Boston, who

> helped found Massachusetts Jobs with Justice. This article is an updated

> version of a chapter in Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back (Monthly

> Review Books, 2012), edited by Michael D. Yates.*

> *

> *

>

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