Unions divided over role of recruitment, politics

AP ^ | 7/31/5 | ADAM GELLER

[SmithL]

An angry rift between union leaders filled the spotlight at last week's AFL-CIO gathering in Chicago. But to figure out what labor's divide might actually mean for workers and employers, look beyond the dueling press conferences and listen to the union talk at places like Grandma's House, a child-care center Angenita Tanner runs from her basement apartment on the city's South Side.

Tanner is one of Illinois' 49,000 home child-care workers, who voted overwhelmingly this spring to be represented by the Service Employees International Union.

The vote capped a nine-year campaign by the SEIU, and a bitter fight with a rival union for the low-paid service workers. The workers, nearly all women and most minorities, once would have been far outside the muscle and manufacturing mainstream of organized labor.

"There's power in numbers," said Tanner, trying to keep her voice in check as the seven children in her charge nap. "You cannot go to (the state Capitol in) Springfield by yourself and talk to senators and representatives and get heard ... but if you go as part of a group, being represented as part of the masses, they're going to listen."

The unions' drive to sign up the child-care providers - and another recent campaign in Illinois for home health aides - are principally about winning higher pay and health insurance. But they also reflect the split in organized labor, one experts say could fuel increased competition by unions for workers, particularly in service industries that are becoming the economy's mainstay.

"The story of home-care workers and child-care workers in Illinois is a nice sort of case study of what's been writ large in Chicago this week," said Robert Bruno, an associate professor of labor and industrial relations at the University of Illinois's Chicago campus.

The SEIU leads the group of unions breaking away from the AFL-CIO umbrella federation, arguing it is past time for the struggling labor movement to focus its resources on signing up new workers. Its rival in the Chicago child-care worker fight was the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, one of the loudest voices for maintaining labor solidarity.

Some labor experts say labor's split into two camps reminds them of 1930, when a similar rift occurred. That was followed by two decades of fierce competition over workers that took union membership to record highs in the mid-1950s. That momentum stalled when the rift was healed with the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955.

"For the last 50 years the unions have worked to avoid competing with each other and ironically, that coincided with the decline in the union movement," said David B. Lipsky, a professor at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

With the new split, "the constraints will come off and they'll be in direct competition for a lot of those same people."

Employers may interpret the labor infighting as disarray that offers a window for ignoring or breaking unions, said Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. But some labor experts say the divide could actually create more challenges for employers, as competing unions try to best each other.

The labor rift "should be a huge wake-up call for employers," said Philip Rosen, who leads the labor practice group at Jackson Lewis LLP, a law firm representing companies in workplace cases. "They really need to look at it and say: 'The fight is coming to my worksite tomorrow.' "

Unions are already locked in scrums for some workers, although most of those have been in the public sector.

In Iowa, for example, the SEIU and AFSCME have also been competing vigorously for the right to sign up child-care workers. The workers are not state employees, per se, but run their own businesses and receive payments from the state for caring for the children of lower income working parents.

The SEIU has long focused on service workers, including nurses, other health-care workers and janitors. But the bid for the child-care workers was a reach, one that has since been broadened to campaigns by the union in six other states.

"It is different in a lot of ways from what a lot of people think of as the traditional union organizing drive," said Brynn Seibert, child-care director for SEIU Local 880. "The impact of this is definitely big and far reaching."

The SEIU, with 1.8 million members, has increasingly made such scope a hallmark of its campaigns. It has merged many of its locals into larger regional unions better equipped to pressure employers. And it has taken local disputes on the road, as recently when member janitors in other cities staged one-day sympathy strikes in support of custodians in Houston and Philadelphia.

Chicago organizers found Tanner in 1996, not long after she'd left her job as a truant officer at a public high school. She'd set herself up as a child-care provider, but a state backlog in issuing reimbursement checks left her struggling to pay bills after she'd been open about six months.

She recalled crying one afternoon, explaining to her assistant why she would not be able to pay her. A few minutes later, the doorbell rang, and an organizer asked her if she'd be interested in coming to a meeting of other home-care workers. As she listened to the 50 other women in that room talk about the strain of running their own centers, Tanner said she no longer felt stranded.

Tanner joined a union representing workers without any actual employer. They were paid by the state, but with a Republican governor disinclined to recognize a union.

So the SEIU - which ironically has called for unions to focus less on lobbying and campaigning and more on organizing - worked to become a political player. It contributed more than $800,000 to the gubernatorial campaign of Democrat Rod Blagojevich. It paid off when Blagojevich approved an order earlier this year allowing a union to bargain with the state on the workers' behalf.

But in stepped AFSCME, the nation's largest union of government employees. Its organizers argued that the child-care providers were part of their constituency, and it accused the SEIU of not working stridently enough to represent workers' interests.

Shortly before workers were set for a union vote, AFSCME stepped aside, although it remained on the ballot. The workers chose unionization by a vote of 13,484 to 359.

The SEIU and state officials are currently negotiating a contract. And the two unions' pursuit of the child-care providers hints at what could follow elsewhere.

"There's a lot of nontraditional work that's been created in this new service economy ... that's where labor should definitely be casting its net," Bruno said.

[xcamel]

Here is a simple answer...

Outlaw Unions

Especially Gummint ones.

[goldstategop]

We need private sector unions strengthened and public sector unions weakened.

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[Joe Boucher]

As a kid of 15 I got a job at an Alpha Beta market in North Hollywood calif. I was told I had to join a union, the teamsters.
I was a kid but when the union went on strike I was told not to go to work. I tried anyway and when I got there a couple of big goons told me they'd break my legs if I crossed their picket line.
Hey unions and unions boys, up yours.
If your whole union thing goes down the toilet, good you friken thugs.