Thursday, Feb. 26, 2004 | 11:27 a.m.
SUN STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
The nation's leading apparel workers union and the nation's leading union for hotel and restaurant workers have voted to merge, union officials said Wednesday.
The merger will bring together two unions that are among the most aggressive in organizing nonunion workers, especially immigrants.
The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union has 250,000 members. UNITE, formerly the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, has 180,000 members.
The hotel workers' union is known in Las Vegas as the Culinary Union and has 40,000 to 42,000 members in Southern Nevada paying more than $21 million in annual dues. The union generally represents workers at Strip megaresorts, with some notable exceptions. For years it has tried to organize the Venetian and the Aladdin while agitating at locals' giant Station Casinos Inc.
D. Taylor, secretary of the Culinary Union Local 226 in Las Vegas, said locally the two unions will be run separately for now with the two unions' offices within a mile of each other.
"The structure is that though there is a merger of the unions, there will still be separate locals in Las Vegas. Over time it would be a complete integration," Taylor said.
He said the two unions are excited about the merger.
"I think this is great. I think consolidation makes sense. In this day and age of consolidated corporations, our ability to be stronger and bigger makes sense," Taylor said.
Las Vegas is a key battleground for UNITE in its bitter fight to organize laundry and uniform company Cintas Corp. The union has around 3,000 members in Las Vegas.
By voting to approve the merger Wednesday at a meeting in Los Angeles, the board of the hotel employees union moved to create a larger group ranging from seamstresses in New York's Chinatown to hotel housekeepers in San Francisco.
"We think it makes sense to have like-minded unions join together to be bigger and stronger," said John Wilhelm, president of the hotel employees union. "We think the organizing programs of both unions will be dramatically accelerated."
The merged union will be based in New York and will be called UNITE HERE.
HERE is a frequently used acronym for the hotel employees and restaurant employees union.
The merger brings together two of the most charismatic leaders in organized labor, Wilhelm and UNITE's president, Bruce Raynor.
Raynor, a 54-year-old Cornell University graduate, will be general president of the merged union. Raynor's star rose in labor when he successfully spearheaded the 17-year effort to organize textile workers at J.P. Stevens and win a union contract for its workers.
Wilhelm, a 58-year-old Yale graduate, will be president of the merged union's hospitality division. Wilhelm became a labor movement star by spearheading efforts to organize hotel and casino workers in Las Vegas and by orchestrating organized labor's about-face on immigrant workers. Labor unions are now seeking to organize immigrants after decades of considering them to be a harmful force that pulled down wages.
The deal calls for Raynor and Wilhelm to have joint decision-making authority on budget, personnel and strategy. "We will be co-presidents," Wilhelm said.
As part of the deal, several union officials said, Raynor and Wilhelm agreed to cooperate to help Wilhelm succeed John J. Sweeney as president of the AFL-CIO. Sweeney has said that he plans to seek another four-year term in 2005. Wilhelm declined to say whether he was interested in that position.
UNITE was formed in 1995 from the merger of two unions with illustrious histories: the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. The garment workers union was founded in 1900 and had 457,000 members at its height. The clothing and textile workers union had 569,000 workers at its height and was famous for its successes in organizing workers in the anti-union South. The hotel union was founded in 1891 and at one time had 400,000 workers.
The new union is likely to create a strong presence on the progressive end of organized labor. UNITE once overwhelmingly represented manufacturing workers, but as hundreds of thousands of apparel jobs have moved abroad, it has focused increasingly on organizing workers in distribution centers and industrial laundries.
"This merger is very reasonable because the workers they're organizing are quite similar," said Richard Hurd, a professor of labor relations at Cornell University. "They're focusing on lower-skilled, relatively low-wage immigrant workers."
UNITE is a wealthy union, owning the Amalgamated Bank and considerable real estate assets, while the larger hotel employees group has little in the way of financial assets.
"This merged union will have tremendous financial resources and wherewithal so we can stand up to any employer," Raynor of UNITE said. "This gives us financial security for organizing and for strikes when we have thousands of members in the street. But our unions also have a history of developing very close relationships with employers that want to take the high road."
For decades, the apparel workers union has worked on programs with management at the Xerox Corp. and at Hart Schaffner & Marx, the clothing company. The hotel employees union has worked closely with the unionized hotel casino industry in Las Vegas in a strategy that has enabled both the casinos and the unionized work force to grow.
Wilhelm said his union was not in financial straits and did not need to merge. "Neither union needs to do this," he said. "Our union can keep going in our present form. But we don't want to keep going the same way. We want to organize and grow in a way that works best. We think this is a great opportunity."
Over the past two years, the hotel employees union had considered a merger with the Service Employees International Union, but both unions decided against the move, labor leaders said.
Raynor and Wilhelm have repeatedly urged the AFL-CIO and other national unions to devote more resources to organizing to help reverse labor's slide. Last year 8.2 percent of private-sector workers were in unions, down from 35 percent in the 1950s.
"Virtually every union merger in the last 20 years has led to less organizing, not more," said Richard Bensinger, former organizing director of the AFL-CIO. "This one is clearly designed to be forward-looking and to produce more organizing."
Sun reporter
Alana Roberts and the New York Times contributed to this story.
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