ORGANIZING

‘The president wants you to join a union!”

That was the message labor organizers passed on to garment workers, coal miners and lumbermen during the depths of the Great Depression almost 65 years ago. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal opened the door to a wave of organizing that built the big industrial unions, doubled living standards and transformed U.S. politics for two generations.

Could it happen again? The recent election giving a Los Angeles union the right to represent 74,000 home health-care workers may well have been the dress rehearsal for such a new social drama. It was labor’s largest organizing win in more than a half century, a huge shot in the arm to the fast-growing Service Employees International Union, which enrolls 1.3 million nationwide. SEIU President Andrew Stern says this is but the first of many organizing “waves,” each one building on the momentum generated by the last.

The union win was impressive in its own right. These home-care workers toil at tens of thousands of work sites across the county. An organizer can’t just pass out a factory-gate leaflet and sign up the masses. Instead, SEIU Local 434-B, which organized home health-care workers, conducted a community campaign that won the confidence of the workers, their elderly clients, disabled advocates and local Democratic Party establishments. A heavily immigrant, middle-aged, largely African American and Latina work force gave the union more than 80% of their votes. It was a remarkable, decade-long effort, led since 1995 by 30-year-old David Rolf, deputy general manager for Local 434-B, who recalls such savvy, hard-driving unionists as Harry Bridges and Walter Reuther, who were just about his age when they built the CIO.

Rolf’s local is up to its gills in politics, and thus emulates the unions that burst upon the scene during the 1930s. This is not a question of making a few campaign contributions or getting your members to vote for a friendly candidate. In the 1930s, unions won a huge following because they demonstrated that the interests of the workers they sought to organize were identical to those of the Depression-weary nation itself. “Cut-throat” competition among businessmen kept wages too low, prolonged the economic slump and generated the kind of political instability that gave right-wing demagogues and left-wing radicals an opening.

The New Dealers set up an alphabet soup of government agencies to tame U.S. capitalism and restore prosperity. But without a strong labor movement, these agencies would have just been paper-shuffling bureaucracies in Washington. The unions supplied the political army that extended the New Deal into every nook and cranny of American life. They “policed” the new wage and hour laws, raised and equalized pay in a thousand workplaces and mobilized a vast new constituency for the Democrats. That’s why Roosevelt was happy when organizers used his prestige to get workers to join the union.

The SEIU victory reassembled many of these New Deal ingredients. California’s 200,000 home health-care workers have been paid the minimum wage, so turnover is rapid, care untutored and the consumers are anxious. Moreover, like millions of other workers, many defined as independent contractors, these home-care providers are practically “stateless.” They have no legal employer who can be held responsible for their pay, supervision and benefits. Thus, in order to win, SEIU had to “organize” not just the workers, but their employers as well. In 1992, the state passed a law permitting each county to set up a consumer-controlled authority to oversee the home-care workers; and in 1997, after much prodding by the SEIU, Los Angeles established its own Personal Assistance Services Council. This is the entity with which the SEIU will now bargain.

Right-wing Republicans hate this kind of union politics. They call it a racket, a conspiracy between liberal politicians and militant unions designed to fleece the taxpayer. Last year, they tried and failed to snuff it out with Proposition 226, which would have limited the ability of unions to use membership dues for political education and mobilization.

But this is the kind of virtuous conspiracy that made the New Deal sing. The SEIU victory will raise wages, stabilize the work force and improve the quality of home health care, thus saving the taxpayers money that would have gone to pay for patient care in expensive nursing homes.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, industrial workers made cities like Flint, Mich., Akron, Ohio, and Detroit, Mich., synonymous with labor’s new potency. The unions and their New Deal allies transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of tire builders and auto workers. With millions of other unionized industrial workers, they became the backbone of the nation’s postwar middle class. For nearly a generation, every Democratic Party candidate for president launched his campaign with a Labor Day speech in Detroit’s Cadillac Square.

That world of mass-production industry has been replaced by a vast service economy, in which tens of millions of low-wage workers struggle. Today, Los Angeles is ground zero for the union effort to transform this economy. The city contains the nation’s largest immigrant community and is home to hundreds of thousands of labor-intensive jobs in tourism, entertainment, health care and retail trade. Unlike manufacturing, most of these jobs cannot be shifted to Mexico or Thailand. This is the social battlefield on which the unions fight to construct the nation’s new middle class. Already, the SEIU has organized almost 200,000 of these workers.

But union organizing victories do more than raise wages. They help to build a democratic America. The booming U.S. economy does not work for a huge portion of the population. Poverty and income inequality eat at the heart of our democracy because poor, powerless people neither vote nor care. Government is an alien institution, unresponsive to their needs. And joining a union in too many contemporary work places requires something close to an “heroic commitment,” complains the SEIU’s Roth.

But it does not have to be that way. During the 1930s, voting-participation rates soared to their 20th-century apogee because working people finally had a voice that made them feel the state was responsive to their needs and aspirations. Roosevelt gave stirring speeches, but union power at the workplace and in the polling booth was key to turning millions of immigrant, alienated workers into active, alert citizens. The nation did it then. We can do it again.