Working to rules: US unionists reorganise

By KEVIN TAYLOR

The declining American union movement is preparing another attempt at securing laws more favourable to organising the workplace.

At its peak in the 1950s, 35 per cent of the US workforce was unionised. Membership is now about 13 per cent with density concentrated in blue collar and the public sectors.

A major reason for the decline is traditionally unionised industries such as manufacturing are moving to countries where labour is cheaper.

In New Zealand, union membership is just above 20 per cent of the workforce - as is the percentage of wage and salary workers in collectives.

But people in US collectives total about 13-14 per cent.

On the other hand, New Zealand workers who attempt to organise a workplace are generally not fired for their efforts.

Firings occur in about a quarter of unionising drives in the US, says the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO).

AFL-CIO international affairs department deputy director Tim Beatty said the sackings were intimidating and had a "chilling" effect on the workplace.

Workers allege more than 20,000 breaches of labour practices annually, many of which are subsequently found proven after investigation by the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency charged with running workplace union elections and following up complaints.

In half of US states if a union election succeeds, workers must pay union fees even if they voted "no". In the other half - so-called right to work states like Florida - laws allow workers to hold a job without joining a union or paying its fees.

New Zealand has voluntary unionism and there is little prospect of that changing.

With the odds stacked against them, US unions find it hard to win workplace elections.

Beatty said there were about 16 million union members but research showed another 40 million would join if they weren't so scared about losing their jobs.

The union movement was planning another attempt at getting laws more favourable to union organising in the next few months. Legislation will be introduced through friendly congressmen to make it easier to get legal recognition when a majority of workers indicate they want a union.

Beatty said that since the early 1980s when President Ronald Reagan fired air traffic controllers striking illegally, there had been a marked increase in employers wanting elections for unions instead of just voluntarily allowing them in.

Elections can be time consuming and in the lead-up employers hold compulsory staff meetings where they can "predict" but not "threaten" plant closure if a union's voted in. The meetings can be group and one-on-one.

He said unions wanted limits on what employers could say and tough penalties for violators.

But Charles Baird, a liberal professor of economics at California State University, finds the lack of freedom of workers to choose whether to belong to a union offensive to notions of freedom, but he didn't believe in unions anyway.

On the door of his office are pictures of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. There's also a sticker: "America Works Best Union Free. UnionFreeAmerica.com".

Baird said the deck was stacked against employers in the US, not the other way around.

"The employer is for example forbidden to say, 'If you unionise I'm going to close this plant'. Yet if there's a threat that you are going to be union-impaired why shouldn't you as a basic human right say, 'To hell with this, I'm going to close up'.

"You can't even say that unionisation will increase your costs - there are all these rules that deal with minutiae that employers can and can't say."

Despite union claims, he said worker preference actually accounted for a large part of the reason why workers were not interested in unionisation.

Beatty said unions got more than 500,000 new members in 2001 and 2002 but membership had remained the same at about 16 million because so many union jobs had been lost.

"We have made some gains in the service sector in the last couple of years but not enough to compensate for the loss of jobs."

He said the jobs lost tended to be higher-paying relative to the jobs that remained and that was affecting the spread between rich and poor.

Beatty and others familiar with US labour issues acknowledge the union movement still had an image problem associated with past violence.

But he said many business-associated groups highlight "every little thing that happens on the picket line" to back up claims unions were violent.

Henry Bayer, executive director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31 in Chicago, said the history of the labour movement had been much more violent than other countries because employers had been much more anti-union.

The impact of declining membership had been seen in the reduction in benefits granted to workers. There were now more than 40 million Americans who did not have health insurance, and those that cannot pay their hospital bills can be pursued to bankruptcy.

"If you are real poor the Government has a Medicaid programme, but as the percentage of the workforce that's organised has declined, the benefits that go to people have declined at the same time."

Bayer attributed much of the decline in union membership on the laws - and on the labour movement for not being more aggressive about its rights.

"There was a time when the labour movement got very comfortable in the 50s and 60s. Living standards were rising, there was healthy membership and people lost sight of the fact that they needed to keep organising. In those days there was less employer resistance," he said.

"To me this issue needs to be front and centre ... because the labour movement won't survive unless it can organise."

Unionisation

* The US level of collective bargaining is equal to about 14 per cent of the workforce. NZ has a union membership level of about 20 per cent. About 22 per cent of wage and salary workers are in collectives.

US unions say a quarter of employers illegally fire workers involved in union activity, and that research shows nearly 40 million workers would join a union tomorrow if they had a "free and fair" choice.

* TOMORROW: The looming US labour crisis

* Kevin Taylor visited the US to study employment law after jointly winning the 2002 Business Roundtable Douglas Myers media scholarship.