http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-unions22-2009feb22,0,322071.story
From the Los Angeles Times
Labor's time has come, but trouble stirs within
With a labor-friendly administration in Washington,
labor's long-sought legislative goals are finally in reach. But union divisions
threaten to derail that agenda.
By Evelyn Larrubia
February 22,
2009
With a Democratic majority in Congress, an economy in meltdown and
what many see as the most labor-friendly White House in generations, unions
would seem to be poised for a comeback. Experts say they are at a defining
moment to rebuild their forces by putting their strength behind an effort to
revamp labor laws.
So why are some of the most prominent and progressive
labor leaders spending time and energy fighting one another for workers who are
already members? Will they squander their big chance?
"No question about
it. That's what's at stake," said Marshall Ganz, a legendary community organizer
and lecturer at Harvard University. "This is not a setting in which you want to
have a Hatfield-and-McCoy struggle on."
As political institutions, labor
unions are no strangers to controversy. But the current level of conflict is
unusual, Ganz and others said, as is the public forum that it has been
taking.
The leaders of Unite Here and representatives of its affiliates
recently filed a series of lawsuits against each other, laced with complaints of
fraud and theft, making public what had been an internal clash over power and
organizing methods at the garment, hotel and laundry workers union.
The
laundry and garment representatives, led by Unite Here General President Bruce
Raynor, accuse hotel worker representatives of failing to increase membership
and squandering the savings they brought into the union through a 2004 merger.
Citing irreconcilable differences, Raynor wants a divorce.
"We tried to
resolve it quietly," he said, "but we couldn't."
The hotel
representatives, led by Unite Here's hospitality president, John Wilhelm, accuse
their rivals of sabotaging democracy by conducting mass firings of union
officials at locals in Detroit and Phoenix and by filing a lawsuit after the
union's executive board voted against a breakup.
The dispute comes on the
heels of last month's public skirmishes between the giant Service Employees
International Union and its 150,000-member Oakland-based local, United
Healthcare Workers-West. SEIU removed UHW leaders after they had refused to give
up their home health aides to a new local.
The ousted officers, led by
former UHW President Sal Rosselli, formed National Union of Healthcare Workers
and began a massive campaign to court UHW members. More than a hundred SEIU
staffers from around the country have descended on California to keep the UHW
members and take over running the local. The fight made national news.
By
at least one measure, the two fights are connected: SEIU President Andrew Stern
has invited one or both sides of Unite Here to be absorbed into his
2-million-member international union.
"It's ugly," acknowledged Lowell
Turner, a professor of comparative labor at Cornell University. But he said it
might stand to reason that unions at the forefront of re-energizing the labor
movement would find themselves in deep disputes over how exactly to do
it.
"The timing is related to the fact that the unions are pushing much
harder now to organize workers and pushing much harder politically now," Turner
said.
Unite Here was formed when Unite, a union with lots of cash but
facing a dwindling garment industry, merged with Here, a union with lots of
hotel and food service prospects, but little cash.
Unite Here and SEIU
are among a bloc of unions that formed Change to Win in 2005 and broke away from
the AFL-CIO, saying they wanted to aggressively expand membership. Since the
split, both groups have stepped up their organizing efforts, experts
said.
In the last two years, unions nationwide have seen an increase in
membership. In 2008, their ranks rose by 428,000 workers, the largest gain since
the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping track in 1983 -- which underscores
how bad things had been rather than how good they have become.
In the
1950s, about 35% of U.S. workers were unionized. Last year, it was 12.4%
overall, with only 7% in the public sector.
Labor experts say there
hasn't been a particularly union-friendly president in the White House since
John F. Kennedy. Until now.
"I do not view the labor movement as part of
the problem," President Obama said last month. "To me, it's part of the
solution."
Labor advocates point to signs large and small of Obama's
labor leanings: the buy-American provisions in the stimulus package; his public
support of sit-down strikers; his choice of Rep. Hilda L. Solis (D-El Monte) as
Labor secretary, who has yet to be confirmed by a divided Senate. When the
president meets with labor leaders, he's been known to open up his jacket to
show its union-made label -- and to threaten to check theirs.
Obama, as
the junior senator from Illinois, was one of 233 congressional legislators who
sponsored the Employee Free Choice Act of 2007. It is labor's dream bill to make
it easier for workers to unionize and get a first contract, and to stiffen
penalties for employers who threaten, fire or harass employees during union
drives. They say it will balance power in the workplace.
Labor spent an
estimated $450 million to help Obama get elected, with the hope of passing the
legislation. He has vowed to sign it. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is leading an
aggressive campaign to stop it from reaching his desk.
"They can't expect
the president of the United States to encourage unionization when those that are
unionized are fighting wars against each other," said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive
director of the California Nurses Assn., which is in its own long-running fight
with SEIU. "It's embarrassing to put that in front of Obama."
Several of
the feuding union leaders agree this is a bad time for negative press, but say
their issues are too deep to put aside. Whether the battles will torpedo their
legislative goals, or merely be a sideshow, remains to be seen.
"It's a
black eye," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at UC Berkeley. But he
added that he thought it could be overcome: "The labor movement has a lot of
ideological and political resources at their command right now."
The
White House declined to comment on the matter.
Stern, the SEIU president,
said he met with Obama and 27 senators last week, and that no one indicated that
the union's internal conflicts were causing a problem. He sees the media
attention as a sign that labor's prominence is finally increasing, he
said.
"For a long time, the labor movement couldn't buy a newspaper story
about anything, unless it was a strike," Stern said. "Now people are covering
our internal politics. Part of me thinks that we're testing the theory that
there's no bad publicity," he said.
evelyn.larrubia@latimes.com