Union Push Shows Scant Payoff for American Labor

Despite a high-profile campaign by the nation’s top labor leaders over the past two years to revitalize America’s unions, efforts to recruit new members have yet to pay off in a significant way.

Soon-to-be-released federal figures show that union recruiting has risen only modestly during the government fiscal year that ended in September. Those recruiting gains, experts say, remain too small to keep pace with the growth of the overall work force or to offset job losses in traditional union industries.

The new statistics underscore the difficult job that labor organizers face in trying to persuade workers to join unions and the success of employers’ hard-nosed tactics in fighting union campaigns.

Some union backers, while acknowledging disappointment with the slow pace of labor organizing, say the latest figures present an incomplete picture. These labor advocates, noting that successful union-recruiting campaigns often take years, say they remain convinced that organized labor is close to turning around its fortunes after decades of decline.

Yet organized labor needs to recruit an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 members every year just to maintain its 14.5% share of the work force, and it appears to be falling far short of that target.

Private-sector union representation elections, in which workers are given a chance to vote on whether they want unions at their company, brought the labor movement only about 120,000 new members during the last federal fiscal year, according to the preliminary statistics.

That figure is up from just over 76,000 the year before, and the tally is likely to be revised further upward. But those modest increases in election victories, and other membership gains, aren’t enough to halt a downward trend that has reduced the share of the work force belonging to unions from a peak of 35% in the 1950s.

The recruiting improvement “is simply too small to signal a resurgence,” said Thomas Kochan, an industrial relations expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s going to take a lot more than that.”

Kochan said declining union membership stems from a variety of factors. For starters, he and other experts said, employers have found they can get away with firing union organizers and delay recognizing or negotiating with unions for years without incurring serious penalties under federal law.

To win a traditional organizing drive under current labor law, Kochan said, “more than 50% of the people in a bargaining unit have to be dissatisfied and willing to stick around long enough to do something about it.”

Even though polls have shown increasing interest in unions among American workers, Kochan said, not many are willing to stay with a bad employer long enough to organize. Thus, he said, unions might find that their best solution is to organize entire occupations or industries, rather than single work sites.

Last year’s results came despite the nation’s low unemployment rate, a situation that normally emboldens dissatisfied workers to organize unions.

Organized labor has lost its appeal to some workers because it no longer has as much bargaining clout, said Joseph Herman, a Los Angeles lawyer who has represented employers battling unions. As a result of international competition and deregulation in the U.S. economy, “the ability of a union to raise the wages that an employer will offer is dramatically less than it was 10 or 20 years ago.”

Laws against wrongful dismissal and discrimination in the workplace also, in the minds of some workers, have precluded the need for unions, Herman said.

The latest union-recruiting figures come two years after new activist leaders won control of the national AFL-CIO. Led by John Sweeney, who recently was reelected to an expanded four-year term as president, the labor federation has vastly stepped up its recruiting and political efforts.

Along the way, the AFL-CIO and some of its member unions have garnered favorable publicity for their new initiatives. In addition, a largely successful two-week strike in August by the Teamsters union against United Parcel Service of America appeared to signal a reemergence of organized labor clout.

Then, in September, organized labor scored its biggest organizing victory in a decade at US Airways. A group of nearly 10,000 workers, including ticket counter, reservations and airport gate personnel, voted to be represented by the Communications Workers of America.

But the news for unions lately has been mixed. Some of the nation’s top union leaders have been plagued by controversies that threaten organized labor’s efforts to improve its image and attract new workers.

Ron Carey, president of the Teamsters, the nation’s biggest private-sector union, is under federal investigation in connection with fund-raising abuses in his campaign for reelection last year. His narrow victory was voided by a federal election overseer, and a former federal judge will decide shortly whether to allow him to participate in a rerun scheduled for early next year.

Federal authorities also have been looking into whether other top AFL-CIO officials broke the law by improperly funneling money to the Carey campaign or Democratic politicians’ reelection effort last year, allegations that the AFL-CIO leaders deny.

Meanwhile, even when workers get the opportunity to vote on whether they want a union, they often reject the idea. The National Labor Relations Board, which supervises the vast majority of the nation’s union representation elections, reports that unions won only 50.4% of the 3,075 concluded elections it held in the 1997 fiscal year.

That was up from a 47.3% win rate last year but back to the same level that unions achieved in 1995.

“The steep decline has been arrested. We’re stabilizing . . . but we’re not where we want to be,” said Denise Mitchell, spokeswoman for the AFL-CIO in Washington. “We know there’s a lot more organizing activity, but it will take years to pay off.”

The tough going for union organizers has been apparent in California.

Leaders of one of the highest-profile organizing efforts in the nation--a campaign to unionize the state’s 20,000 strawberry pickers--recently backed away from their goal of calling their first representation elections this year, putting that step off until next year.

In Southern California, efforts to organize apparel workers at Guess Inc. have triggered anti-union counterdemonstrations. And the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project, once hailed as an innovative program to organize immigrant workers, recently gave up its push to recruit tortilla plant workers and slashed half of its staff.

Also dispiriting for local union activists has been the campaign to decertify the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union at the Miramar Sheraton Hotel in Santa Monica, the city’s last unionized hotel. Workers voted last month, 114-106, in favor of ousting the union, although federal authorities have yet to announce a decision on 17 uncounted, disputed ballots.

“I’m a strong employee, and I don’t feel I need the union for anything,” said Alicia Ojeda, a cashier and restaurant host at the hotel for the last five years, and a supporter of the decertification effort.

Union officials and community leaders, however, have decried hotel management union-busting tactics such as putting up a poster that portrayed a union organizer with a resemblance to Adolf Hitler.

In another labor dispute reflecting alleged anti-union tactics, the National Labor Relations Board this week issued an unfair-labor practices complaint against St. Erne Hospital in Inglewood. The agency said its preliminary investigation found that the private nursing home’s management tried to thwart a union campaign by, among other things, threatening to sell or close the facility if workers voted for the union.