Unions rebound as GOP falters

J. Patrick Coolican and Michael J. Mishak

Sunday, Aug. 19, 2007 | 1:16 a.m.

The lowest moment for the modern American labor movement came after the 2004 election.

Unions spent more than $85million trying to beat President Bush, money spent and gone forever, not to be used for future campaigns or organizing drives. The loss left unions facing another four years of hostile labor regulators and anti-union policies, as well as the relentless effects of globalization on American workers.

"No one woke up the day after the election and didn't feel like they shouldn't go back to sleep for a few years," said Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union. "We knew there was nothing good on the horizon."

After the election, unions also faced an internal fissure, with the SEIU and its 1.8 million members, as well as six other major unions, splitting from the AFL-CIO.

The drive to destroy organized labor, which had begun in earnest 25 years before with the election of President Ronald Reagan, was, it seemed, nearly complete.

But now, just three years later, labor is suddenly resurgent. It is flexing political muscles in the presidential campaign, and is poised, say some labor leaders, to reverse decades of declining membership with the help of allies in the White House and Congress.

The signs are all around: Democratic presidential candidates promising to march with members of Culinary Union in Las Vegas if the union goes on strike against MGM Mirage, with whom it is currently in negotiations; passage in the House, and near passage in the Senate, of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workers to join a union by signing a card rather than going through what labor advocates consider the onerous process of an election; and a genuine sense that Democrats, on the cusp of real power, will owe their allegiance to labor rather than the party centrists, or New Democrats, who dominated the party during the Clinton presidency.

The story of how and why labor has reemerged is instructive on the recent past and future of American politics and the American economy, where tectonic shifts now seem possible.

Paradoxically, Bush and the Republican Congress turned out to be a gift to labor. The Iraq war, economic insecurity and various Washington scandals helped unite Democrats and deliver Congress to them.

Labor remains a significant driver in Democratic politics, despite declining membership:

Unions spent more than $66 million in the 2006 election cycle, with most of it going to Democratic candidates. Nevada Sen. Harry Reid gushed about labor's political power in the midterm elections during a conference call in February, one week before the Carson City presidential forum, which was sponsored by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the largest of the 55 member unions in the AFL-CIO.

"Let me testify to everyone that I would not be the majority leader if it were not for you and your great union," Reid told Gerald McEntee, president of the public employees union.

Nor is the Democratic Party what it was 10 years ago.

The country has moved to the left on a range of economic issues. The richest 1 percent of Americans in 2005 controlled nearly one-fifth of the nation's income, the greatest share since the ominous year of 1929. American workers tell pollsters they are deeply pessimistic about their future, naming health care, exploding college costs and the outsourcing of jobs overseas as major concerns.

"Growing economic inequality and the return of what can be called the robber baron ethos in the business community has revived the idea that workers need their own organization to defend themselves - against employers that overreach and against a government that enacts polices that favor wealthy people," said Lance Compa, a senior lecturer at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

This sense of unease, and in some cases, desperation, has allowed industrial unions in the Midwest to elect Democrats to public office, despite rapidly declining membership.

The so-called New Democrats, of whom Clinton was the central figure, largely achieved their agenda through him and are more in agreement with labor than at any time in their history. Noam Scheiber, who writes for what was once the mouthpiece of New Democrats, The New Republic, recently wrote that the Democratic Leadership Council, the New Democrats' institutional base, should disband.

Labor is highly attuned to the country's changes and leveraged them with its campaign against Wal-Mart, the epitome of an anti-labor, profit-at-all costs company. After failing to organize Wal-Mart workers, two unions - the SEIU and the United Food and Commercial Workers - launched campaigns in early 2005 to shame the retailer into change.

According to a report in BusinessWeek, the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that negative publicity, driven in part by the unions, had driven down Wal-Mart sales 2 percent to 8 percent. The retailer also announced plans to cut the number of stores it will open. Employees have brought class action lawsuits claiming to have been locked inside stores to perform extra work without pay, and have filed the largest sexual discrimination class action suit in U.S. history.

While also fighting Wal-Mart, a new group of labor leaders, typified by the SEIU's Stern, has seen the need for change in a time of globalization and the American economy's rapid move to a service-based economy. New tactics are giving labor some minor organizational successes for the first time in decades.

"We're seeing that when we focus on an industry and speak on behalf of workers but not from an anti-business perspective, we can find, in many cases, partnerships," Stern said. "When that doesn't work, we're going to stand up for workers and use power of persuasion."

That strategy, Stern said, has allowed the SEIU to organize 125,000 child-care workers since the 2004 election. Now the union is behind the largest organizing election in Massachusetts history. Stern hopes to unionize 20,000 home-care workers in the state. The SEIU is also negotiating union contracts for security officers in six cities, Stern said.

As they try their new organizational strategies, unions are fantasizing about a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic Congress, as Democratic candidates pitch unions as part of the economic solution to globalization and stagnating wages.

"If they get a Democrat in the White House, they'll get a better agenda," said Jennifer Duffy, an analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. She noted, though, that, "Anything is better than what they have now. Remember, the bar was pretty low."

With a Democrat in the White House, unions will see a friendlier National Labor Relations Board, one more sympathetic to workers trying to organize. Also, the executive branch will likely be less hostile to federal public employee unions.

A bigger prize, however, would be the Employee Free Choice Act, which, if passed and signed, would allow unions to organize workers by getting them to sign a card, rather than go through a campaign that ends with an election.

Employers say elections are the fairest method. Unions say the campaigns allow employers the opportunity to frighten workers into voting against organizing.

The card check system last prevailed in 1947. If it became law again, it would help unions organize Wal-Mart and other large retailers and service industries. It's not impossible to think of America becoming a labor country again.

Still, although labor is more optimistic about its future than it has been in a generation, labor experts warned that Democratic victories in 2008 might not result in the kind of dramatic changes for which union leaders are hoping.

"What's on the horizon, even with a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president, is trench warfare," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara and director of the school's Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy.

Compa said unions still face tough institutional hurdles.

"It will be a new day for trade unionism, but I don't think it means the labor agenda will roll through Congress with White House backing," he said.

Take, for instance, the Employee Free Choice Act. Although it cleared the House this year on a vote of 241-185, it drew just 51 votes in the Senate, well short of the 60 votes needed to bypass opposition.

Finally, even if the bill were signed into law, unions would still face the legal and political muscle of firms that have made a cottage industry out of busting organizing campaigns.

Unions should pursue a broader working-class agenda, including a national health care plan, that would remove from the bargaining table one of the most contentious items in contract talks, Lichtenstein said. Employers would be less resistant to labor, he said.

Unions are already pursuing that strategy. Health care reform is a crucial part of the AFL-CIO's political platform, and the SEIU co-hosted a presidential forum this year in Las Vegas devoted solely to the issue.

Jane McAlevey, head of the SEIU in Nevada, often says the labor movement must offer a broader vision than just wages or working conditions: It has to be a movement of workers who want better health care, better schools and a better life for all.

Lichtenstein said another priority should be high-profile congressional hearings on the business practices of law firms and major retailers that try to avoid unions. Those would recall congressional hearings in the late 1930s that investigated the union-busting activities of companies such as General Motors and Republic Steel.

Ultimately, some labor leaders say unions must take a hard look at themselves, before relying on politicians to reverse their decline.

"The fortunes of labor will not be decided by politics," said D. Taylor, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Union in Las Vegas. "They will be decided by organizing workers."

Still, friends in the White House and Congress never hurt.

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