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Labor/Work
The following article originally appeared in Salt of the Earth. It is posted here for private use only. It may not be reprinted in whole or in part without the permission of Salt of the Earth magazine.
Four places where unions
still have a job to do
Kevin Clarke
CARMEN IVARRA WORKED SEWING TOGETHER BLUE JEANS for 23 years in El Paso. She doesn't even know what brand of jeans they were. That's not too surprising, though. She didn't work for a brand name, just a Texas subcontractor. That makes things easier for the client company when an inevitable round of layoffs begin.
She never made much more than whatever the minimum wage of the era happened to be.
"And they tell you, 'If you don't like that pay, you can leave.' "
She never got paid holidays, vacation, benefits. One thing she did get was a bit of a surprise one day a few years ago when she went to work and discovered her job had shipped out to Mexico.
IVARRA IS CURRENTLY THE DIRECTOR of El Paso's Mujer Obrera, an educational and advocacy agency for the Hispanic women who work in the city's garment industry.
During her working life in the industry, she remembers laboring under tough conditions and under male supervisors who didn't speak her language, who daily treated her and her co-workers with contempt.
"They would be always patting you, touching you—especially the pretty [women], the young ones. They would say, 'If you want to work here, you have to go out with me,' and do, you know, what they asked. But what could you do? These women had two or three children at home to support. You don't want to lose your job."
Throughout the hot Texas summers she worked in warehouses without air conditioning or proper ventilation; in the winter without heat. She worked long hours on unannounced overtime shifts that left her worrying about her children but unable to leave to check on them under the familiar threat of losing her job.
Her supervisors rained abuse on the workers. "That was harder on the ones who spoke English because they could understand all the nasty things they were saying," she says.
WHILE SOME LIKE TO ARGUE THAT UNIONISM has outlived its usefulness in the United States, Ivarra's experience is depressing evidence that as the nation approaches the 21st century, the need for the protection and support of trade unionism in a variety of U.S. industries has perhaps never been greater. As unions are dislocated from good-paying, heavy industrial jobs finding homes in other nations, they have begun to reach out to the low-paying, semi- or low-skilled, often minority work force that Ivarra and her co-workers represent.
But Ivarra's story also functions as a cautionary tale for union organizers.
Ivarra says she remembers union organizers with bitterness—as people insensitive to the women they were trying to organize, even racist. And when push came to shove with employers in El Paso, too often those organizers were not around to share in the women's hardships.
"Here in El Paso, the community is anti-union," Ivarra says flatly. That is why, she says, El Paso's working women turn instead to Mujer Obrera for help—not to the unions.
"[Unions] have to change," Ivarra says, "if they want to help the workers. They have to change."
A number of labor activists agree. In fact, they think it's absolutely critical that organized labor begin to reach people like Ivarra if it's going to survive at all.
Working for pin money?
THE NONUNION WOMEN WORKERS OF EL PASO are not alone. Of the nation's approximately 52 million working women, only about 12 percent—or a little over 6 million—are organized. But that percentage has been increasing; two out of every three new union members are women.
Many working women in the U.S. earn their paychecks in clerical, office, and other low-level white-collar jobs—the kind of work that Rondy Murray, president of the Clerical-Technical Union of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, believes could easily go union.
"When organizing clerical workers you have to have a different language than when you're talking to auto-workers.
"Clerical workers don't necessarily think of themselves as being part of a culture of unionism—they see it as a male, factory [experience].
"Clerical workers develop a loyalty to their immediate boss. The intimacy of the relationship works against unionizing," Murray says. "You hear things like: 'I really like my professor; I don't want him to be mad at me if I ask for a raise.' "
She says it took five years for most women workers at her university to finally call their organization a union instead of an "association."
Murray thinks that sort of reluctance is the result of women being "taught to devalue their jobs" for so long—not just by their supervisors, but by the union movement itself, which has historically paid little attention to organizing women.
Too many women tell themselves "I'm just working for pin money—this is not really a career," says Murray. "Women workers have a big self-esteem problem."
WHILE IT MAY BE HARD TO ENVISION GROUPS OF WOMEN gathering for sweaty, cigar-chomping union-hall meetings —in fact, most of Murray's cigar-free union meetings are held during lunch so women can be home with their children in the evening—Murray argues that trade unionism offers a lot to women workers in terms of health protection, safety assurances, and bargaining strength.
"We have an epidemic of women being disabled by repetitive-motion syndrome," she says. If it weren't for unions pushing the issue, she argues, the danger of repetitive-motion syndrome might not have been acknowledged by clerical employers.
"There were no standards for treatment until the unions stepped in constantly publicizing that this is a problem—and more importantly, that this is a work-related injury.
"A lot of employers were trying to deny the connection."
Joan Suarez, the Southwest Regional Director of organizing for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), says that for a lot of the women workers she reaches, wages and benefits are only part of the reason they want to organize. Getting "basic respect on the job" is the simple demand of many who join the union.
DISTRICT 925, A NATIONAL, PREDOMINANTLY FEMALE UNION of clerical workers, evolved out of the women's labor advocacy agency "9 to 5"—hence its slightly unorthodox district designation. The union includes a "dignity" clause in all of its negotiated contracts so that managers can be held responsible for demeaning treatment of the people they supervise.
What's most important about that clause to 925's president Debbie Schneider isn't that it provides a foundation for the prosecution of sexual harassment or other dehumanizing treatment. To her, the best aspect of a formal statement is that it discourages a mess of rotten office encounters from happening in the first place.
Another issue that unions may be able to help women clerical workers address is job classification. In an era where corporate downsizing has trickled down responsibility, skills, and stress—but somehow managed to avoid trickling down salary and benefit increases—how a job is classified can make a crucial difference to clerical employees.
"We're seeing fewer clerical workers doing more work under the guise of better technology somehow making jobs easier," says Murray. "What we find is better technology only means more work." Unions can "see that jobs get properly classified and described."
Since Murray's union is 95 percent women, 40 percent of whom are heads of households or single parents, health insurance is naturally a major concern. Getting health coverage is one benefit organized clerical employees can count on.
Murray likes to tell the story of the wife of the president of a Midwestern university. Soliciting donations to the United Way at a lunch gathering, she described the plight of one uninsured worker. This woman worker's wages were so bad she had to decide between paying her rent or her monthly $200 health-insurance premium and ended up living out of her car.
The punch line, at least as far as Murray is concerned, is that the president's wife was describing the plight of a clerical worker at her husband's own university whose $17,000 annual salary, sans benefits, forced her to have to choose between health care and a home.
Coming clean on immigrant workers
THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS doesn't regularly track the number of people who have come from other nations to work in the United States, whether documented or undocumented. But a 1989 report projected that just under 10 million of the nation's 109 million workers are immigrants.
One labor advocate says, because of their "newness," immigrants entering the U.S. labor force are "wide open for exploitation." Many don't speak English and, as a result, don't understand the work agreements they're signing. That can mean, for instance, that they end up accepting overtime agreements that would make even the most cold-blooded capitalist blush.
Many immigrant workers don't know or understand their civil and labor rights under U.S. law and don't know where to turn when those rights have been abused. Many are working in the United States without the proper documentation and unwilling to get involved with anything official-looking like union paperwork.
They can be easily intimidated by employers who threaten them with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). One union organizer tells the story of a meat-packing plant about to "go union." When the plant's workers, most of them Mexican, voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), managers contacted the INS and organized a raid on their own factory.
OFTEN A PARTICULARLY ABHORRENT TACTIC is to pit the latest immigrant group against another ethnic labor population that may have itself been used to displace a previous group. For example, Mexican workers who may have been hired to bust a union in a meat-packing plant find their own jobs jeopardized by Southeast Asian workers being recruited for even less money than they accepted.
"That [strategy has] been used in a lot of places," says the Textile Workers' Suarez.
"What you have to do then is make clear to [both groups of workers] their common interests and make them understand that they are not enemies."
Suarez interrupts herself with a related thought: "That goes for workers across the border [in Mexico] as well."
TO COMBAT THOSE KINDS OF STRATEGIES, unions are hiring organizers right out of the ethnic communities they are attempting to organize. Vietnamese organizers go after Vietnamese laborers; Spanish-speaking organizers reach out to Mexican and Central American workers.
"Having people who look like you, who understand your culture, organizing for you—and finding them on your shop floor best of all—this whole emphasis on understanding culture and language can't be diminished," says Jim Benn of Chicago's Federation for Industrial Retention and Renewal.
That sensitivity to culture and ethnicity means that whether they intend it or not, many unions focusing on immigrant workers have found themselves at the forefront of the fight for racial tolerance in some communities.
"You can't say [to immigrant workers] you're going to be union without embracing their cause," says Benn.
THAT HAS BEEN PART OF THE STRATEGY at the heart of the nationwide Justice for Janitors campaign. Stephen Lerner is working on that effort as an organizer for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Lerner says his union has found itself battling on such nonwork issues as affordable housing and police brutality.
"The overwhelming number of the workers we're organizing are immigrants. They work in terrible conditions, and we've been very successful in organizing them."
Lerner's union has had to adjust to a dizzying gamut of languages and cultures in its efforts to organize building-maintenance workers.
"We had to hire a new and totally different staff to reflect that change; our organizers have got to be bilingual, and they're no longer [predominantly] white."
IN THE BAY AREA OF CALIFORNIA ALONE, building-maintenance workers represent some 35 different ethnic groups.
In cities like Chicago and Seattle a large number of Polish and Eastern European immigrants have moved into the work force while in other communities Mexican, Central American, and Southeast Asian peoples have found jobs cleaning up the nation's offices.
The industry that Lerner is attempting to organize has undergone a drastic transformation in only a few short years. Not only has the work force shifted to primarily immigrant labor, but maintenance employees have become pawns in a perplexing new corporate strategy.
While in the past janitors may have worked directly for specific building owners, they now find themselves working for "maintenance contractors," businesses that bid among each other for cleaning contracts.
Often the competitive edge contractors seek is sharpened on the salaries of their employees.
"Workers will go to the contractor and say they need to be paid more money, and he'll say, 'I'm sorry, I haven't got any more; that's what we bid for. Go talk to the building owner,' " Lerner says.
"When they talk to the building owner they're told, 'It's not my problem; I don't have any employees.'
"A big real-estate corporation would never admit that it's operating under these conditions . . . contracting out to skip the responsibility of paying the workers. Some people call it competitiveness and some people say it is increasing productivity, but all it is is passing the buck.
"There's been a dramatic decline in wage rates, and the working conditions just get worse and worse."
JOBS THAT HAD BEEN WELL-PAYING now are falling to minimum-wage levels. And sometimes even below that, Lerner says.
"There's a number of scams to get around the minimum wage," he says, such as keeping workers on an extended "apprentice" status or informing them that they are no longer employees but "entrepreneurs" who aren't on a clock but contracting as individual "businesses" for work.
Under that scheme, cleaning companies subcontract a job they've received to a specific maintenance worker, offering him or her a predetermined, unadjustable rate for cleaning a building, say $400 a week or a flat annual fee.
Desperate to get the job, workers cornered in this manner often enlist their families to help with the cleaning job (often violating child-labor laws in the process) so that when the total worker hours are factored in, a maintenance "subcontractor" can be earning significantly less than minimum wage.
"I call janitors the invisible work force," says Lerner, trying to explain why his workers have endured such a rough ride over the last few years.
"They come in at night, and they do their work when nobody's around. In one sense, it's easy to pay them poorly."
BUT THAT'S NOT THE ONLY REASON for the downturn in building workers' real income. Lerner says it would be hard to prove, but he thinks in the late 1980s there was a deliberate attempt to hire immigrant labor in an effort to break janitors' unions.
In 1984, says Lerner, maintenance workers in San Francisco—most commonly African American—were earning on average $7.49 an hour with full health and other union benefits.
In just three years the work force had shifted to immigrant workers earning minimum wage, and the union was totally broken.
"Just as [companies] had searched out African Americans because they thought they would be more vulnerable, they looked for workers they could exploit."
In SEIU's efforts to rebuild the union, however, Lerner is discovering their supposed vulnerability is only one of many possible misperceptions regarding immigrant workers. Lerner and other organizers are finding that immigrant workers are not only interested in unionizing, but that many of them had been leaders of far more dangerous trade-unionist fights back in their native lands.
"When I come into a room full of El Salvadoran workers and I . . . try to warn them 'This is going to be a tough fight and some of you may lose your jobs and some of you may get harassed somehow,' they look at me and say, 'Is that all? You mean they don't shoot you for joining a union here?' "
And immigrant workers are no longer easily pegged by union members as "the enemy." Lerner cites the willingness of immigrant workers to join unions as one of the reasons wage rates in Los Angeles have been bumped back up from minimum to an average of $6.80 an hour.
The meat of the matter
ANOTHER U.S. INDUSTRY EMPLOYING increasing numbers of immigrants—most frequently Mexican and Southeast Asian—is meat packing and processing. And it's in attempts to organize those workers that activists are encountering some of the nakedly anti-union tactics perhaps most associated in the public mind with the great and sometimes violent union struggles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Unfortunately, that kind of resistance to trade unionism by management is hardly limited to the meat-packing industry.
Most organizers can tell tales similar to the horror stories the United Food and Commercial Workers' Greg Dineer recounts.
A well-worn tactic employed by one of the largest meat-packing companies in the country is simply to close down a plant when its workers vote in a union—opening another plant in another city with nonunion workers or simply waiting awhile and reopening the same plant with newly recruited workers.
"The conditions in a meat-processing plant in the late 20th century are not terribly different from those of the late 19th century—both in terms of the way workers are treated and in terms of the sanitary conditions.
"We have to fight the same kinds of battles," Dineer says.
"In fact, the sanitary conditions in the plants are part of the health and safety [concerns the workers have]. If you have unsanitary conditions in a plant, then it's generally not a safe place for workers, and it's generally not good for producing safe food."
UPTON SINCLAIR WOULD HAVE LITTLE PROBLEM producing a sequel to The Jungle, according to Dineer, if he were around to tour the meat-packing industry today.
Conditions in poultry-processing facilities can be among the worst.
"If you went to a poultry plant, you might never eat chicken again," Dineer says with a short laugh. At one Tyson facility, he adds, workers had to bring in their own drinking water because the plant's system had become so contaminated. Workers at a hog-processing facility have contracted brucellosis, a bacterial infection leading to fever and chills usually limited to livestock. It can be hard to treat in humans.
Beyond issues of health and safety, Dineer say meat packers face an almost constant barrage of threats and intimidation when they raise the issue of organizing. Creating tension between one ethnic group and another is only part of the union-busting tactics he has encountered. The shutdown of a union plant is frequently used as an example—and thinly veiled threat—when workers at other plants seek a wage hike.
Over the past 15 years or so, those tactics were successful—driving down wages and nearly driving the UFCW off the industrial map. But Dineer's union has waged a comeback.
"We have successfully reorganized. It's the first time in history that an industry became disorganized and is now majority union again."
THE UFCW CURRENTLY REPRESENTS 180,000 FOOD- and meat-packing industry workers—over 60 percent of the nation's beef-processing workers and lower percentages of hog and poultry workers. Increasing these percentages is important, Dineer says, because "the nonunion plants will set the wage rates if they are the dominant force in the industry." Almost 400,000 people are currently employed in the meat-packing industry.
Professional sweatshops
DISTRICT 925'S SCHNEIDER CALLS THEM "ELECTRONIC SWEATSHOPS": offices where men and women labor before buzzing computer terminals—not blasting furnaces—engaged in data processing, accepting airplane and hotel reservations, taking telephone sales orders, or otherwise moving information along. Equipped with trusty headset and keyboard, these workers represent what may become a large part of the nation's future employment profile.
They will join the 18 million people now working in the nation's administrative and clerical jobs. Only about 2.3 million of those workers are organized, which is unfortunate by at least one standard. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union administrative and clerical workers earn a median weekly income of $493; nonunion counterparts take home $363.
The number of organized office workers has to go up, says Schneider. "More and more people are working in these office factories," Schneider says.
Her use of "factories" is no slip of the tongue.
IN HER VIEW, UNION REPRESENTATION WILL BE critical to the office workers of the future as they begin to face the same treatment previously unheard of outside of manufacturing industries.
An information-service employer, for instance, may hire large numbers of computer jockeys during peak activity periods, then fall back on the cycle of layoffs and rehiring that workers in other industries have become painfully familiar with.
And as they're treated like any other assembly-line employee, those information and communication workers of the future can expect the same kind of harassment from clock-watching supervisors with unsympathetic production quotas to fill. Schneider's already seeing signs of future times.
"There are no personal relationships anymore [in many offices], no loyalty. . . . People are being laid off."
WAGES ARE AN ISSUE NOW AND LIKELY TO BE in the future. "Office workers have always been paid extremely low for the kinds of skills they've needed to have," Schneider says.
But unions have another, more positive role to play in the workplace of the future, according to U.S. Steelworkers Union President Lynn Williams. Team management and a gamut of other worker-participation and empowerment programs have been part of the manufacturing mantra since the 1980s.
"Having a say in how work is performed is an absolutely essential element in producing in a high-quality, highly competitive enterprise," Williams says. He cites the successes of Saturn and a recently resurgent Xerox Corporation as two instances where union-worker participation made the difference in putting out a high-quality, technologically sophisticated product.
But, Williams argues, it's only in a union environment that significant worker participation can be achieved.
"A lot of employers say they want to hear your opinion. They want to hear you speak up. Well . . . maybe you can and maybe you can't," he says.
Unions provide workers not only with an assurance that they can participate—that they can speak their minds without retribution—but also with the infrastructure, the platform, to do it upon. "You can't create a democracy without a constitution," Williams says.
"People need to feel confident and able to be candid and open in that process." And, last but certainly not least, unions help workers define through collective bargaining what their share in their industry's success will be.—END
©1999 by Claretian Publications