David Jessup, Executive Director of the New Economy Information Service

Larry Cohen, Executive Vice President of the Communication Workers of America

Phil Kugler, Organizing Director of the American Federation of Teachers

Jeff Hermanson, former Organizing Director of UNITE, currently on special assignment with the Carpenters Union in Las Vegas, Nevada

Discussion (inluding Eugenia Kemble, Joel Freedman, Larry Liles, Seymour Martin Lipset, Bruce Herman, and Lou Nayman)

Concluding Remarks:

Larry Cohen

Phil Kugler

Jeff Hermanson

Related Documents:

Teachers Advocate "New Paradigm" Bargaining to Improve Education, By Sandra Feldman, July 9, 1999

Congress Releases American Worker Project, POSTED: September 15, 1999

What's New About New Economy Unionism? By Stephen Herzenberg, January 22, 1999

David Jessup, New Economy Information Service

For many commentators, it is evident we are in the midst of an economic change as profound as the industrial revolution more than a century ago. And depending on the point of view, the results are both good and bad. For many, the key change is the development of Information Technology. This has radically changed the nature of work skills, putting a premium on knowledge as a key factor of production and, in recent years, accelerating productivity growth.

Equally important from the point of view of workers is the explosion of competitive pressures brought on by globalization, privatization and deregulation. New Economy competition brings out the best and worst in companies. The "low-roaders" cut wages, relocate production to repressive, low-wage countries, replace permanent workers with temps to avoid paying benefits, downgrade health and safety protections, or engage in unfair trading practices. To minimize this destructive competition, unions are trying to develop new rules for global worker rights and capital flows. In addition to these long-term strategies, however, workers need some new ways of coping with these changes in the here-and-now.

In this regard it is important to note that even high road competition can be unsettling for workers. Companies that invest in employee training, innovation, quality improvements, horizontal restructuring, teamwork, customer satisfaction, productivity enhancements, and research and development are also merging, downsizing, contracting out, dispersing production, and networking through rapidly changing joint ventures and partnerships. What this continuous churning means for workers, including the fabled "knowledge workers," is tremendous instability and uncertainty. The idea of a permanent job or a fixed skill or craft may be things of the past. There is also a growing disconnect between the employer one works for and the enterprise one works in. This has led a number of researchers and commentators to suggest that workers in the new economy have a new set of wants and needs. That is, in addition to the traditional wages, benefits and grievance procedures, it is claimed that New Economy workers want:

1. New forms of security. Instead of job security, workers want help in moving from job to job without losing their place on the ladder of advancement. They want job placement services, portable health and pension benefits, wage insurance, and transition assistance, to minimize the risks of ever-changing employment.

2. Intellectual capital. Continuous skill upgrades, lifelong learning, certifications, setting professional standards, developing an occupational ethos, increasing their capacity for innovation and problem solving, becoming entrepreneurial in their approach to work.

3. Social capital. Ability to work in teams, provide customer satisfaction, and cooperate to solve problems within horizontally-organized work culture enterprises, and to form occupational networks, connections and "reputation" with others outside the enterprise. These are sometimes known as the "soft skills."

4. Cooperative work relations. Surveys indicate workers seek greater voice and participation in contributing to the mission of the enterprise. They resent arbitrary rules and bureaucratic rigidity, and prefer settings of social equality and mutual respect where they are valued for their contribution and innovation. They want greater independent voice, but in cooperation with management, not in conflict. An increasing number of jobs (but by no means all) are seen as a vehicle for self-fulfillment.

5. Work-family balance. The pressures of holding multiple jobs in a family and in working longer and longer hours has created a time bind. More workers are seeking greater flexibility to meet family needs.

To the extent this assessment of worker needs is valid, the question is, How can such needs be met? Is it a matter of "individualistic bootstrapping," perhaps with the aid of government programs and business initiatives? Or can workers collectively organize to gain these objectives? Are unions destined to disappear like the dinosaur of the industrial age, or can they adapt to the New Economy? To paraphrase Penn Kemble's point in his recent Musings on Guild Unionism, if knowledge has become a more important factor of production, if intellectual capital is as important as financial and physical capital, can workers collectively become the suppliers of that knowledge so as to extract a higher return?

Many of the commentators on this topic believe the answer is yes. They talk about union involvement in training programs in order to provide a reliable and ever-improving pool of responsible and skilled labor to employers who must increasingly compete for this in order to make money. They talk about extending the building trades model of apprenticeship programs and hiring hall services to other sectors of the workforce. They highlight new multi-employer forms of representation, as with the Pennsylvania child care workers and the California home-care workers. They speak of union involvement in certification and setting of professional standards, and a resurrection of guild unionism. They advocate a more cooperative form of union-management relationship, rather than the adversarial model. And they point to brand new forms of worker organization, such as Working Today and union acquisition or creation of temp agencies.

It's one thing to write about these issues, and quite another to encounter them on the ground. That is why we have asked a number of prominent and successful practitioners of the art of organizing to comment on these notions of New Economy Unionism. As one wit once said, nothing concentrates the mind so much as the prospect of an NLRB election.

I'm especially eager to hear how these practitioners grapple with the central dilemma posed in Richard Freeman and Joel Rogers' book, What Workers Want. Workers apparently want an independent voice on the job, and they are dissatisfied with employer run participation schemes. But they want to cooperate with management and avoid conflict. How do you organize workers under such circumstances?

Larry Cohen, Communication Workers of America

Both Jeff Hermanson and Phil Kugler have pioneered new and innovative approaches to organizing. About five years ago I observed Jeff's work with immigrant worker centers in New York City in what was, at the time, probably the most significant break from traditional organizing. The focus was not on "winning an election to get recognition," but rather on individual workers in the clothing industry. The focus was on work from their perspective, and how to build groups out of that.

I have also learned a lot from Phil Kugler about how to build worker organizations that aren't necessarily rooted in collective bargaining. Our work in CWA has benefited from the example of the AFT, particularly in the South. Again, those efforts were very much focused on individual teachers, then networks of teachers that might lead to more traditional unions with collective bargaining, as in Dallas, Texas.

Many of the ideas we are working on in CWA come from others, particularly from Phil and Jeff, so it's interesting that we have been brought together for this discussion.

I want to talk about four situations where we have tried to build worker organizations in the so-called New Economy, meaning new, information-dense, high-tech firms and new growth centers of existing firms. These include Microsoft, Amazon.com, IBM in mid-state New York, and the wireless telephone industry.

This last situation is more traditional, but it is as important for us as any of the others. Until recently, workers involved in the wide variety of technologies that provide PCS or cellular phones were unorganized in the U.S. Our organizing effort is designed to extend traditional collective bargaining at companies where we already have a significant membership. This would include companies like SBC, with 80,000 CWA members at Southwestern Bell and Pacific Bell. Cellular One is SBC's national brand for wireless. Also in this category are AT&T Wireless, Bell Atlantic Mobile, and others. Although the work force in this industry is young and new, all working with technology that didn't exist 10 years ago, our organizing effort is focused on collective bargaining since we have large memberships with bargaining at each firm.

The main barrier to extending collective bargaining is not so much the character of the work force but the resistance of the employer. But change is also important for unions. New forms of organization need to embody new types of looking at work.

But I would not agree with Freeman and Rogers. [What Workers Want, by Richard Freeman and Joel Rogers]. They conclude that workers themselves want a different form of organization. But 33% of the workers in their surveys want collective bargaining and would support a union where they work. Everybody here knows that if 33% of the work force had collective bargaining, the whole political economy of the United States would be turned on its head. The U.S. would be more like Canada or northern Europe. Health care would be universalized, and we'd have child care, and we wouldn't have a debate on Social Security.

In general, I would reject the argument that workers in the new economy and the service sector -- at least the information side of the service sector -- want something different from what unions offer. In the past two years, five thousand workers in wireless telephone organized and joined CWA, mostly through card check or expedited elections. This demonstrates that even on the cutting edge of the new work force, organizing for collective bargaining remains a viable option. The difference is that in those organizing efforts, management mostly stayed out of it.

The other three examples I wish to discuss may appear to contradict this assertion. But the difference in organizing stems from the conflict that employers often introduce into organizing. We need to minimize that conflict and focus solely on the employer. This is the approach we are taking at Microsoft and Amazon.com. Employers view any independent worker organization as a threat, so in response they often create conflict, separating out those workers who are trying to organize and then attacking those workers.

There is a line in a song by The Who that goes, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." In a similar vein we might say, "meet the new economy, same as the old economy," because the bosses' attitudes about worker organization are, if anything, more harsh today. They are not gentler, they are not based on cooperation. They're based on the sense that control is primary.

Even at Microsoft, control is important, especially total control of workers' time. Physically, Microsoft doesn't look like an old knitting mill in the 19th Century. There are soccer fields and free drinks. But the system of control is just as strong. Around a third of the professional work force at Microsoft is hired through one of 20 "temporary" agencies. This is true even if you work full time. After the workers are selected, they are assigned to one of these agencies, and the agency becomes the employer. These agency employees are denoted by an orange badge, as compared to the blue badge "Microsoft people." And then there's the brown badge, for vendors - food service workers hired through Marriott, shuttle bus drivers, and others. (CWA recently organized the shuttle bus drivers at Microsoft.)

Everybody gets free drinks at Microsoft: blue, orange and brown badges. When you go into a building at Microsoft, you see cases of drinks, in glass cases. It looks like a 7-11 or a WaWa, except there is no cashier. You can have as many canned drinks as you want, in these beautiful cafeterias, no matter what color of badge. But, you can only play soccer on their field if you have a blue badge. You can only get benefits and stock options if you have a blue badge. This is the new caste system.

At Microsoft, some workers are trying to build an organization inside a $500 billion corporation. Microsoft's enormous market capitalization matters because it's the source of their economic power. It's about eight times the size of General Motors in terms of capitalization, even though there are only 25,000 people who work there. It's three times the size of AT&T, even though Microsoft has 1/6 the number of employees. Capitalization is the single best measurement of Microsoft's ability to impact the world economy and impact society, because it can acquire other companies with those shares; and Microsoft does that every day.

About a year ago, a group of workers at Microsoft started to build an organization they named "WashTech," Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, and soon affiliated as a CWA Newspaper Guild local. They were mostly orange badge plus some permanent staffers, primarily writers and testers. Microsoft has a huge demand for writers because Microsoft Network and its various Web sites need constant development of new content. They also need writers for help screens for their programs, and for Encarta, which is their encyclopedia. Testers have very labor intensive jobs, looking for bugs and fixing bugs in software.

Most of the writers hired at Microsoft are hired through agencies. They are first interviewed by a Microsoft staffer, a blue badge supervisor. After a successful interview, the supervisor might say, "Okay, you have the job -- now go over to Kelly's Services, here's the address, and they'll process you, and then we'll see you tomorrow morning." The next hired might be sent to Manpower. Through a process like this, a Microsoft work group of 25 writers might get created, working closely together at Microsoft, but "employed" by perhaps five different agencies.

Since there are 20 agencies that are approved at Microsoft, and since there is almost never a situation in which all 25 workers would be hired by the same agency, traditional organizing becomes impossible. There is no "employer" under the law, and that is no accident. But changing employment status is on the longer term agenda at best. This is a $500 billion company, with enormous resources. Our members start with a series of issues that they want to address, including agency choice, overtime pay and mandatory work hours.

WashTech organizing is quite computer focused. Websites and e-mail, combine with face-to-face, building by building organizing. At the WashTech web site, workers can sign on as subscribers in the same way they would at an e-commerce site. There are now about 2,000 subscribers to the Wash Tech News. There is a lot of information on the WashTech web site, and information is a key element in this organizing. Members create the content and share opinions by commenting in "chat" areas.

CWA has a membership category for people who don't have collective bargaining. We have about 35,000 members of this type, including more than 200 in WashTech. They are voting members of our union but pay dues at a reduced rate. They receive some consumer benefits, but the main reason they join is to support issue campaigns.

Another important benefit of membership is skill development, such as classes in Java script. WashTech organizers the classes with members paying one-half the non-member rate. Members also teach the courses, and are paid. This is similar to the Worker Center that Jeff started back at the ILGWU. Skill development was just as critical in the garment industry as advanced Java script is for people in the high-tech industry in Seattle. In Jeff's case, the skill might have been learning English, but the process is the same.

Equally important is "worker ownership" of the organizing campaign. Members need to believe that their union is their organization and that they have the ability to run it. In the case of WashTech, there are four organizers, and two of them came from Microsoft, both orange badge folks, one was a writer and the other, a tester who quit Microsoft to work full time to build their organization.

At Amazon.com, the workforce is primarily young college graduates. Most of our organizing is among customer service staff. At most firms, customer service staffers spend most of their time on the phone at 1-800 calling centers, answering questions like "Why am I being charged for this phone call I never made?" At Amazon it's e-mail. Each customer service staffer has to answer 500 e-mails a week. They must work 50 hours a week, and typically are only paid $10 an hour. Meanwhile the founder of the company has made $5 billion in three years.

At Amazon, each new worker receives stock options on the day they are hired based on that day's closing price. A customer service staffer with two years at Amazon making $25,000 a year with over-time might have $300,000 worth of stock. But since the stock vests after five years, Amazon has tremendous control over its workforce. Many Amazon workers are angry, but at the same time they are scared they'll get fired and lose the value of their stock options.

The Amazon workers in CWA are also part of WashTech and have an Amazon section at the WashTech Web site. There are vivid discussions about the pressure and control at Amazon.

Our Amazon members are trying to build a more traditional union organization because they are all employees -- there are no blue badge, orange badge, or brown badge workers. It is a difficult process because of the amount of control exercised over the work force through the stock options and because many feel that this is a rapidly growing company in which good workers are likely to become managers.

The issues that David Jessup summarized at the beginning of this discussion -- particularly the issues of work- family balance, a cooperative work place, social capital, security -- these are all issues at Amazon and many other high tech workplaces.

Finally, and most recently, at IBM, the organizing was sparked by new company pension policy. In a year in which IBM profits were up 24 percent, the company forcibly switched people from defined-benefit pensions to cash balance accounts. Most workers calculated the value of the new plan as less than the value of the defined-benefit pension, and that set a rebellion in motion. Mass meetings were held in Poughkeepsie, New York, where 500 workers showed up at what was supposed to be an organizing committee meeting. These workers see a sharp difference between their own treatment at IBM and that of CEO Louis Gerstner, who received about $60 million last year, including his stock options. They are also angry at the way in which IBM is replacing permanent workers with temporary workers from Manpower, at every level, from production to engineering. They work side by side, at the same jobs, with very different compensation. All this is leading to a very traditional form of organizing, even though it is occurring in a very advanced, high-tech outpost of the New Economy.

Phil Kugler, American Federation of Teachers

I want to thank Dave and NEIS for the opportunity for this conversation. I think it's very timely and important for those who know that there's a need for a viable healthy labor movement in this country. It is very important because we're in trouble. Today only 13% of the labor force, and less than 10% in the private sector, are represented by unions.

Although we at American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have been a successful union in terms of growth, we know full well that the strength of private-sector unions was crucial for us in winning basic collective bargaining rights in the first place. And so we must turn the trend around before we reach a stage of political irrelevancy. In fact we've already seen it in bedrock states like Michigan and Illinois where they've come after public sector rights with a vengeance.

This discussion is also timely because there is currently a lively discussion under way in the labor movement about the need to organize and the need to grow. In fact, just last week there was a discussion at a meeting of International Union presidents about some very significant changes in direction, in analysis of tactics and approach, that could have far-reaching consequences. This is healthy, but we need to be extremely careful in how we go about such change. An error now could have tremendous negative effects on our ability to organize and grow.

Since I'm from a teachers' organization, I've got a couple of visual aids with me. (laughter) This chart shows some Labor Department material that Jack Golodner, President of the Department of Professional Employees, gave me some time ago. It projects the growth of various occupational categories out to 2006. The fastest job growth is among professionals and technicians. It is growing faster than any other grouping. If the labor movement is to be successful, it is absolutely essential to figure out how to successfully organize more professional and technical workers.

I believe, as I know all of us do, that all workers should be organized. Certainly low-wage workers, such as those who work on farms or in chicken processing plants or in low-wage service and maintenance jobs, desperately need unions. We should do all that we can to help them.

But these statistics indicate that if we don't make significant progress in the professional and technical areas, the percentage of union representation in the total work force is going to continue to decline, and with it a significant erosion of political power and political presence.

There may be some lessons for us in our own history. The AFT pioneered collective bargaining in education, with leadership from people like Al Shanker, as well as Dave Selden and Charlie Cogan in New York City in 1960 and 1961. We had a lot of help from the private sector labor movement of Walter Ruther in the industrial union department, as well as the Central Labor Council in New York City, with leaders of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union playing a particularly important role.

At that time, the National Education Association (NEA) opposed collective bargaining as "unprofessional." Yet teachers were poorly paid and poorly treated. They had no voice; they were told what to do and when to do it. They weren't treated like professionals. Al Shanker used to say that in the context of public school education, the word "professional" really signifies a propped up dead person -- In other words, someone who wouldn't ask any questions, wouldn't rock the boat. If you did, you were being "unprofessional."

What our union did to change this mentality was to capture the imagination of teachers by encouraging a vision of change. The NEA eventually learned; first agreeing to something they called "professional negotiations" and then fully embracing collective bargaining. Throughout this period of the 1970s, our organizing message essentially was: "we do it better, we pioneered it, we know what it's all about, they're just starting." When I became Al's assistant in 1981, those arguments were beginning to run out of steam, and our success was slowing down significantly.

Al Shanker suggested we needed to check our assumptions. He said that before we could present a vision of what a union can mean, we should find out more about teachers' needs and aspirations.

One way we did that was to engage the services of some professional pollsters. We don't go into a major campaign now without doing polling and focus group work. We have done hundreds of these sessions with hundreds of thousands of teachers in every conceivable situation: with and without collective bargaining, in the North, East, South and West, in big cities, in inner suburban rings.

This next chart shows some of the results. We asked teachers what they look for in a union, and what the union should concentrate on. Forty percent said they wanted the union to concentrate exclusively on professional issues; 24 percent said they wanted the union to concentrate exclusively on collective bargaining; and 33 percent said both.

Through focus groups and additional polling questions, we developed a greater sense of what teachers meant by "professional issues." We found significant satisfaction with teaching, a strong commitment to the occupation, and a strong interest in issues like standards, the quality of education, and the success of public education. They wanted their union to let people know about their commitment to constantly improving the quality of schools, and that they wanted to be involved in decisions related to curriculum, discipline policy, and the choice of textbooks.

They also had a strong desire to raise standards in their own performance and to constantly improve their own skills. And they wanted their union to help them and their colleagues do a better job, keep abreast of what was happening in the field, and gain the freedom to exercise independent judgment. Today, we have a whole series of programs in our union that directly relate to these needs and aspirations.

It became clear that for teachers, these professional issues are even more important than the traditional tasks of collective bargaining, wages, hours, working conditions, and job security. In fact, it became clear that if the union were not active in these professional areas, we would not really be representing our members, let alone building the kind of commitment and loyalty that allows you to go over the top in an organizing campaign. All of this has enormous implications for our union's message, how we train our staff, and how we train our leadership to help them understand what members want.

Now some might object that teachers are in the public sector, which is relatively benign in terms of employer opposition. So I will give you another example, from the health care division within the AFT-- the Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals. As you are aware, recent trends in the health care industry are anything but benign -- mergers, interlocking arrangements, privatization, non-profits becoming profits, managed care, bottom-line thinking, outsiders brought in to make managerial decisions far away from the basic facility, second guessing professional judgments, deskilling and downsizing of staff, and something called "floating," which means eliminating specialty nurses in intensive care units or maternity wards. Instead it's "every nurse is just a nurse."

A few years ago nurses at the Alliance Memorial Hospital in Burlington, New Jersey, decided to organize. Burlington is not a hotbed of unionism. But the nurses' pay was lagging behind other hospitals; the directors were making unilateral staffing decisions, and bringing in nurses' aides to do more of the nursing work. A new manager, some guy from Chicago, was brought in.

At first the organizing campaign was pretty traditional -- we were attackiing the boss, and it became a very polarized situation. It became clear we weren't going to go over the top; we estimated that we would have only about 40% support.

But then we discovered that almost everyone took pride in the hospital's reputation and services. The hospital was considered the premier facility in a 50 or 60 mile radius. The nurses were proud to be nurses; they were committed to quality and good practice, and they were cautious with regard to conflict, the issue that organizing might bring.

So we changed strategy. We decided to support the institution, the hospital, even right down to the union logo -- a heart. The hospital's insignia was a heart. We called it the Alliance of Hearts, and the message of our campaign was that a "yes" vote meant giving the nurses a say over patient care and professional conditions, it meant standing up for the hospital's terrific reputation, it meant defending the quality care from the bad decisions of an outside manager who was brought in. Ultimately, it meant extending a hand to work together in partnership with the institution to maintain quality.

We won that campaign, in spite of an outside, union-busting consultant. It taught us an extremely important lesson. Of course there were also the standard elements of traditional organizing: you have a lead, you build a committee, you file a petition, you have a representation election, you win the election, you negotiate a contract, and then you get members. But the discipline of our message was that we fighting for something worthwhile, over and above the expected things that unions fight for. And we overcame the challenges of everything the employer threw at us.

There are other new ideas being tried. Some years ago in Louisiana, we thought, "Why not make it easier for people to join the union even before we achieve collective bargaining?" We got lists of teachers, we mass-mailed, and, in effect, we offered an introductory membership that involved legislative advocacy, a professional issues magazine, and an invitation to skill-development workshops. We worked on hot issues in the state. We developed a list of 1(800) numbers. We tracked these individuals, and where we saw clumps in particular locations, we pulled them together and tried to forge some sense of group consciousness and put them on the track to a more traditional local union organizing. Today we have members in every single school district in Louisiana.

Another example of successful organizing is adjunct professors in higher education. There are now 45% of professors in colleges and universities who are part-timers. They are horribly exploited. In most cases they don't have any health insurance or pension benefits. They work two, three, four, sometimes five jobs at different institutions to cobble together a living. We represent 35,000 in traditional collective bargaining contracts, but we're looking to go a lot further than that. We hope to reach these people as individuals and offer benefit packages, like health insurance and a job referral service. If we reach a critical mass we can go into traditional collective bargaining and advocacy.

Finally, I want to present the case of psychologists who work in schools. A number of these school psychologists sit on the board of state psychological associations. In New York, they are members of the New York State Psychological Association, which is made up of both employed psychologists and individual practitioners. Like doctors, they have been clubbed by the managed care "bottom line" mentality. The issues they are concerned about include the reduction in reimbursements, second-guessing decision making, paperwork, and arbitrary cutoffs in treating patients.

So we forged an affiliation with the New York State's Psychological Association. We're going to help them with membership recruitment, political support, and advocacy on quality of benefits. We may even use the leverage of our 300,000-member teacher union in New York State to leverage improved psychological services in union contracts. This is being watched very closely by the American Psychological Association, and they are taking a friendly view toward this.

This same kind of thing is happening in other professional associations as the economic pressures build. Quality is being sacrificed, autonomy in setting standards is being lost. The trade union movement has a tremendous opportunity here. This is not the traditional route. We are thinking outside the box and stepping into territory that is somewhat new.

Much of what David Jessup outlined at the beginning of this discussion -- the quality of service, concern over product, standards, an advocacy agenda, and skill development -- represents what workers want and what we must beging providing to our member. And we must engage with employers on n all of these dimensions, not just the standard areas of wages, hours, and working conditions.

Thank you.

Jeff Hermanson, United Brotherhood of Carpenters

I want to thank David Jessup for inviting me to speak on this distinguished panel, all of whom are good friends and colleagues.

David mentioned our work together in the Dominican Republic, which I believe was some of the finest work I've ever had the honor to do in this movement. It was dealing with the New Economy and with globalization, because the garment industry has been fleeing this country for the Third World, and the Dominican Republic was one of the first places to which it fled. One of the ways our union dealt with the problem was to assist our brothers and sisters in the Dominican Republic and in other countries to organize and bargain for a better standard of living.

And we were successful. In the three or four years of the project, we organized nine of the free-trade zone factories, which made apparel for the U.S. market. Each of those factories had about 500 workers, mostly young women, 18 to 25 years old. Most of the factories were owned by Koreans, who were subcontractors for major American firms. They had the most abusive sweat shop conditions that one could imagine -- no drinking water, no fans, no ventilation -- in a country where the average temperature is above 90 degrees and the humidity is about the same. These conditions are also part of the face of the New Economy.

I wish I could tell you that we achieved collective bargaining in the DR without struggle and conflict, but that would be a lie. Every single one of those campaigns, with possibly one exception, required a strike to get the owner to the bargaining table and recognize the union. I guess I'm an unreformed representative of the old unionism. But sometimes what's old becomes new again. In some sectors of this economy, we have to look back to the old unionism.

Most of the documents about the New Economy either ignore low wage, low-skill, labor intensive work, or just accept that such work is inevitable. It's like the poor -- they'll always be with us. And unfortunately, they say, we can't do anything for them. I would argue that is far from true. Although it is clear that manufacturing and construction are not growing as a percentage of the total work force in the United States, we certainly should not give up what has been our strongest base, our strongest sector of the economy. We shouldn't declare defeat. We shouldn't walk away from it. We should find a way to build that base even stronger, and organize in the newer and more rapidly growing sectors of the economy. That is the struggle I've devoted the last 22 years to.

Where are we now? We're in pretty bad shape. We have less than 10% of the private sector economy. That is the road to extinction. But we know where we want to go. We want to have a strong position in the economy for organized labor. We want to move companies onto the high road of high wages, best practices, cooperative work places with well-trained and highly skilled workers. We want to move forward as an economy and as a movement. But the question is, how do we get there?

The basic way to get there is the same as it has always been: finding a way to mobilize workers and win their support and active participation in self-organization. That is the basis of our power. It always has been and always will be. That power must be used intelligently.

One of the themes of the papers that were circulated is that if we offer skilled labor to employers and persuade them that this is of great value, they will accept unionization. But I'm afraid we will have to offer more than a carrot, because I have tried it many times. I always try to go nicely to the employer and say, "The majority of your workers would like to be represented by the union, and we would love to sit down with you and work out a way that could be to our mutual benefit." I even put those terms in my letter of demands to employers, asking for a mutually beneficial, non-adversarial relationship.

I don't think that approach has ever been accepted, in my experience. I've worked for unions that are well respected and well known as providers of very skilled and disciplined labor. Unfortunately, employers are not ready to accept our offer of the carrot. So we have to resort to the stick. If we're going to offer that labor we also have to be ready to withhold that labor--the traditional downing of the tools.

I'm not saying that we can't enter into cooperative relationships. But as some of the papers pointed out, it is abuse by the employers that creates worker organization. It is the low-road practices that build worker resentment and anger, that create the motivation, the power, to organize. When intelligently used, that power can lead the employer onto the high road. It can push him up to the high road. That is what I think we have to do.

We will not be able to get where we want to go by giving up the struggle, no matter how much we might like to reinvent ourselves as providers of skilled labor. It is not going to do the trick.

When we find employers who take the high road -- and there are some employers who do this -- then we must be ready to work cooperatively with them to provide the skilled labor and do everything else in our power to improve their market position. Both the Government Workers and the Carpenters have done that through training programs and by providing portable benefits, and by working with multi-employer groups to level the playing field. We've also sought to organize the competition of our high-road employers. We have also worked with different labor-management institutions, like the Government Industry Development Corporation, which Bruce Herman directed in New York City before assuming his present position, to recruit trained workers and supervisors for a restructured state-of-the-art workplace. We increased productivity in the workplace by 20, 30, 40 percent. We helped increase quality standards tremendously in JC Penney and Liz Claiborne and other companies. And employers loved us while we did it.

But as soon as the project was over and the employer was raking in the money, he didn't really want to share it with his workers. He would go from being a very friendly guy to being our enemy once again. That doesn't mean we were wrong to offer the skilled labor, the training, the portable benefits, a hiring hall, and the cooperative style of workplace. But we had to demand respect from the employer. Respect is going to be based on our power.

I believe that getting to the high road requires more militancy, not less. Adversarial relations can become good harmonious relations, cooperative relations, when the employers realize that they have to respect their organized employees. And I hope we don't forget that.

Historically, the garment industry was much like the New Economy in its use of seasonable temporary employees, its complex subcontracting relationships, and its very instability. This history shows that because of this instability and constant change -- fashion being the driving force -- the union had to become the most stable element in the industry. The union had to take over many management functions. It had to train, it had to provide the hiring hall, it even had to become the advocate for the industry in legislation. And I think that experience needs to be learned from and used.

Unfortunately, in the past when unions have succeeded in gaining a strong position in a segment of the industry, they sometimes wall themselves in. They close the doors. They erect entrance barriers and try to maintain themselves as a privileged sector of the industry. Inevitably, in this kind of a situation, the non-union competition grows. The unionized sector becomes narrower and narrower. That happened in the garment industry, and it's happened in the construction trades. The gap between the union scale and the average wage in the industry grows greater and greater. Quite often there are ethnic differences that reinforce these barriers.

I think this has been a great danger to the labor movement in the past, but we are starting to deal with it. Some parts of the movement have had more success than others. We must create a continuous opening at the bottom of our unions. We cannot remain satisfied even with a good, strong position in the market, which we have in some industries and some localities. We have to be very vigilant to changes in the market and spend a lot of time and effort to organize the yet-unorganized sectors.

To illustrate some of these points, I want to talk about a recent Carpenters' Union campaign in Las Vegas to organize the mill cabinet shops that provide all of the fancy architectural woodwork for the casinos and hotels.

This was all non-union, even though the rest of the hotel and casino construction is unionized. All the cabinetry and woodwork being put into place were being made in non-union shops. The average wage was $8 an hour, compared to a unionized construction carpenter in Las Vegas making between $22.80 and $23.45 an hour, plus about $10 in benefits. So these were sweatshops with no benefits, and a majority of workers were immigrants.

We identified this market segment and the key firms in it. We used our industry leverage -- the fact that our members were installing the cabinets -- to pressure the employers from the top. We used the industry-wide approach to assure employers that they weren't the only ones being organized. We told them we were going to organize everyone. Most importantly, we did bottom-up organizing and agitation in the shops. And we really threw the doors open. We hired Latino organizers because most of the workers were Latinos. We changed our whole approach.

We also established an apprenticeship program for cabinet work which we did not have prior to this. We also established an evaluation, certification, and dispatch system. This happened before we had any shops organized. But we knew we would eventually have to do these things as part of our collective bargaining.

Using these methods for two years, we were successful in organizing the 10 shops that provided 90 percent of the cabinet work for the casinos. We signed them to a short-term two-year contract and everybody's contract expires at the same date. Although the employers did not bargain as an association, as individual they all signed the same contract, with very significant wage and benefit increases.

With these workers organized, we are now looking to the next segment, the light commercial cabinet shops, of which there are another 10 or 15 shops employing many of the same workers. In this occupation, most workers start at the bottom in the cheap cabinet shops, then move into the custom residential shops, then move up to the light commercial shops, then into the custom workshops for the casinos. So we are moving to the light commercial and and try to bring those workers on up.

In other words, we are taking an industry-wide approach. This strategy doesn't mean that all shops have to be organized at the same time, or that we must call for a general strike., But we must take an industry-wide approach or we will never be able to convince these employers that they can survive with the union.

To do this we have to mobilize the power of workers and build an organization that is capable of threatening employers' very existence. At the same time we have to hold out the carrot, and show that if an employer accepts the union he will have access to some pretty darn good carpenters and well-trained cabinet makers. And the employer will get union help in evaluating and certifying skilled labor.

Workers in this industry have extremely seasonal work. People go from one cabinet shop to another. Most of our members have been in at least three or four shops in the last two years. Although employers didn't want a union, as soon as the first one was organized, they wanted the apprenticeship program. They wanted to help set it up and modify it. Also, the hiring hall certification process is of great value to the employers. They used pay a premium -- above the non-union scale, of course, not above our scale -- to keep workers and hold on to them even when they had no work. Sometimes they would have the best carpenters sweeping up the shop. One of the advantages of this approach, the multi-employer bargaining approach, is that now the employer no longer needs to keep a journeyman cabinetmaker employed if there is no work for him. And the truth is that currently we don't have a lot of unemployed cabinetmakers because if they are well-trained they go immediately from one shop to another shop.

Some of the documents that were distributed discuss the shortage of skilled labor in the construction trades. There is a general shortage of skilled workers in other industries, including teachers in many places. We can use this shortage to significantly improve our position in the market. If we don't take advantage of this tight labor market to organize right now, then what are we going to do when the downturn comes -- which it will. I don't believe that the New Economy is recession proof.

Discussion

Eugenia Kemble, Albert Shanker Institute:

The AFT took the lead on a number of quality questions: issuing reports evaluating state standards for student achievement, taking a stand on accreditation of teacher education schools, commenting on the quality of state tests, coming around to support peer evaluation and review, and offering its own training programs in key areas like reading and how to teach math.

I site these accomplishments because they have enabled the AFT to change the attitude on the other side of the table about what the union is. Cooperative team building between teachers and the administration has begun. At the last big AFT-sponsored education conference in Washington last month, 17 teams came which included district superintendents and principals. Management is now beginning to view the union as a quality service deliverer, which is different from the view of 20 years ago.

This raises a question about how to relate to health care and other professionals. I was listening to the description of Wash Tech and the fact that CWA is now offering these incredible training programs. If these training programs are so good, will they serve as leverage to help expand organizing at Microsoft? Do unions need to re-define what they do? Should they become more like guilds, involved in job placement and deciding who gets the jobs? These are some of the issues we need to discuss.

Joel Freedman, International Union of Bricklayers:

Jeff Hermanson commented that everything old is new again, and I see that when I look back at the history of American labor. The first successful unions were the skilled craft unions, and today, the same unions are having the most success in organizing. In Las Vegas, for example, the carpenters and the bricklayers are among the few who really succeeded in that effort. The bricklayers grew by an enormous percentage, and the carpenters grew by a very large number. There weren't that many others who did. The core of what we do is the same thing that craft trade unions have done all along.

This old/new type of unionism can be applied to professionals. If they are interested in skill development, in training and certification, if they have pride in their work and want a greater say in their professional life, that is what a craft union has always offered. And that is one of the fundamental ways in which we recruit --by providing people with skills. In this period of skills shortage, we are providing people with an opportunity to work. And in periods when work isn't available, we help bricklayers become tile setters, and we train them in other types of trowel work that is available.

Our union organizes multi-employer systems for that kind of training, as well as for portable pensions, health and welfare benefits. These programs are jointly trusteed. Some people are now talking about pension power, which has been used since the 1970s by the building trades. This may be a new discovery for some, but unions in the building trades did this a long time ago and are continuing to do it on a rather large scale.

Job referrals, or hiring halls, are another fundamental way in which craft unions operate. The self-organizing that was talked about, the Comet program, came through the building trades.

Ultimately it is in the quality of the product we sell -- that our people can produce a better product and are proud of their work -- that our power as an organization lies. This old model, the craft model, can be put to use in other places and in other ways for professional workers.

Larry Liles, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers:

I'm an electrician who spent seven years in research, and now I'm back in the construction department of the IBEW. We started organizing in the construction side in 1987. We were among the most country club of the crafts, and we had to overcome a whole bunch of dinosaur attitudes. We had to change the way our members were thinking, and they are finally coming around. In the last two years we have gained 19,000 members in our construction division, over and above the attrition through retirement.

For a time we didn't really know how much of our market was unionized. Now we know that we have 35 to 42% of the market. Of that, we have to understand how much is in residential construction, so that we can look more closely at the industrial-commercial area. When we do that we find we have skill shortages all over the place. We are spending $60 million a year in developing our craft skills and trying to get into the new technologies, like voice daily. We have similar problems in the utility sector, with deregulation coming in new technologies being developed, like fuel sales, solar, and the new micro turbines that are installed on buildings. Construction is growing and changing. This can become a threat if we simply rest on our laurels once we get a piece of the action. You have to keep at it full-time.

For example, I surveyed all of our employer-participation programs in six or seven industries. I talked to the people in each of them. We found that a lot of our employer participation was a very passive sort of thing. It was management led, management dominated, and it had the potential of destroying our unions. We now have a draft plan that has been kicked around for a year and a half with a lot of internal discussion. It is designed to make sure that one of the prerequisites of any employer participation plan is the building of a strong union. What we found in some of the best models is that a strong, union-centered employee participation plan poses a distinct threat to middle management. They feel that they are being replaced by us. When we start carrying out these intelligent functions that middle management was doing, it really increases the efficiency of the enterprise.

Seymour Martin Lipset, Shanker Institute:

The focus here has been on how to organize and on ways to organize. I would like to raise the question of what happened to the people who were in unions, given the fact that unions now represent less than 10 percent of the employees in private industry.

Part of the answer is that they quit, or dropped out, or got older and weren't replaced. Why aren't they being replaced? Answering this question would shed light on the question of how to organize people. We need to ask how to get them what they want instead of just asking people what they want out of unions.

In addition to attitudes, there are other differences. We have been operating a reasonably full employment economy. Even with recessions, the period from World War II down to the present has been a pretty prosperous period. It has also been a period with a big increase in women in the labor force, creating a large number of two-income families. The family income is pretty high, and that raises the question of whether people are reacting to economic downturns. It's also a better-educated labor force, and in some ways, a more skilled labor force.

Many on the Left contend that most of the new jobs are crummy jobs. They aren't. Lionel Jospin, the socialist premier of France, was here in Washington a couple of months ago, and he returned home denouncing the French Left intellectuals who misled him about jobs in the United States. What he discovered while looking around America was that there had been an increase in good jobs.

All these factors may help answer the question about the decrease in union membership. Another has to do with the employers. Some have argued that employers are anti-union. Well, when were they pro-union? The question is, has there been an increase in anti-union efforts? There was a long period in which academics argued that employers had given up opposing unions. That turned out not to be true. The question is what's new in this situation, if anything.

Another factor involves the question of organizing. How strenuous was the union movement in its organizing efforts? I have the impression that the Canadians, in part because they're more linked to the social democratic movement, were more committed, worked harder, and viewed organizing as more of a priority than did a lot of American unions.

Markley Roberts, retired from AFL-CIO:

I want to pose a question about community organizing in connection with the Las Vegas construction industry effort. I understand there was a coordinated community effort. Many of the academics who advise the labor movement are focused on social justice issues, and they frequently say that labor unions should do more organizing around issues of social justice instead of focusing on what I consider to be the bread and butter issues. This is a view that I find a little hard to accept. I would like our panelists or anyone else here to comment on whether there is any potential in community organizing around social issues, and whether you can get the community concerned about an organizing drive. Where you have isolated small towns, maybe it is possible to get the community involved in a organizing drive. I'm somewhat skeptical, but I'm open to any positive ideas or negative ideas on this community organizing angle.

Jessup: Larry Cohen just informed us that he's got another meeting to attend, so I'm going to give him a chance to make concluding comments, and then we will continue.

Larry Cohen:

In response to Mark Roberts' comments, the CWA spent twelve years building job coalitions in 30 cities. There are many cases in which mobilizing a community, meaning community organizations, civil rights groups, religious groups, and student groups, has been decisive in making the difference between success and failure, measured in terms of collective bargaining contracts. About 14 of those coalitions have worker rights boards, in which community leaders hold hearings on cases of worker abuse and then put pressure on employers to resolve them. These coalitions are supported by a wide range of unions and independent civil rights groups which have their own legitimacy apart from labor.

That is not the case at IBM. But with mid-size and smaller employers, as well as in certain cases of public employers that were anti-union, these community coalitions have made a difference. Although none of us said much about it, these techniques involving the community have been a factor in the Las Vegas effort. As Jeff Hermanson puts it, this is better than leaving the struggle solely up to the workers involved. In fact, particularly at the larger companies, it is a pretty dim prospect that the workers themselves can turn the tide. There has got to be community pressure, national pressure, and international pressure, all of which require organization, in order to have influence in the New Economy. In the older economy, and continuing today in northern Europe, workers have rights because they have been supported by community organizations and by brothers and sisters in other unions.

Joyce Miller, Labor Consultant:

Incidentally, in today's New York Times there is a letter to the editor from someone in Virginia asking why the CWA is organizing people in high tech fields when the union is not organizing people in its own jurisdiction.

Regarding the New Economy, I agree with those who said things will never change, although we do have to find new and creative ways to give people the kind of benefits that David Jessup listed at the beginning of this discussion.

My question involves targeting. I recall the J.P. Stevens campaign, and I believe there is a difference between the manufacturing sector, which I represent, and the building trades and hospitals and teachers. We spent $35 million in 17 years to organize J.P. Stevens and said, "Now we're going to expand throughout the Southwest." But it never happened. And now, the JP Stevens workforce has shrunk from thousands of workers to maybe 500 at most, probably closer to 300. So I am wondering: where do we go in terms of targeting? Do we say we're only going to go after those industries that can't move or won't move? I would like to kno, both in terms of my own union and in general, what the labor movement should do in terms of targeting?

Bruce Herman, AFL-CIO Working for America Institute:

I wanted to agree with some of the points I heard, particularly from Jeff Hermanson, about the need for us to look creatively at our history and pull out some of the tools that have been traditionally effective and apply them in new situations.

Our organization is attempting to document what we call "high-road regional partnerships." These partnerships are instructive in a number of ways. All of them have significant growth components to them, as well as organizing components. Some of them are mentioned in the literature that was distributed for this discussion, particularly a description of Amy Dean's operation in the South Bay Central Labor Council in Silicon Valley. That effort gets a lot more notoriety, perhaps because of its location, than we got in Chinatown in New York City even though we were doing some very similar things. There are other case studies that we describe in our literature, including cases involving the Carpenters and CWA, which we can provide.

One of the key factors that seems to lead to success in organizing and growth is that these initiatives are multi-employer. They are industry sector initiatives. The problem with single company partnerships is that in order to maintain that partnership, we sometimes wind up sacrificing our values along the way, so the partnership itself becomes the be all and end all of the relationship, and we lose our direction as trade unionists along the way. In contrast, when we have multi-employer partnerships like in New York City's garment industry, when one employer leaves we are not wedded to that relationship. We have a whole series of other relationships that we could continue to work on.

These high-road partnerships, which exist in the traditional construction industry as well as in high-tech traditional manufacturing, all have multi-employer sectoral basis. Training is a significant carrot, but it is not sufficient in and of itself to bring employers to the table. But training does often bring workers to the table before they are union members.

It is very important to have a relationship with workers before they sign the union card, because they know the risk they take by signing that card. They understand it involves the threat of dismissal, the threat of blacklisting, and a direct threat to their own and their family's well-being. Relationships outside the work place are also very important. Relationships with workers where they worship and where they go for entertainment in their communities. Relationships with community-based organizations and inter-faith organizations. All these are networks that we can use to build a relationship with workers. Besides, we share the values of many of these organizations, and those shared values are an important way to bring these coalitions together.

When we talk about social inclusion, the need to involve diverse communities in the economy and in the democratic process, we then can quickly enter into a conversation about economic justice for workers. Workers, particularly those workers who are people of color, minorities, or new immigrants, respond very positively to these appeals.

Lou Nayman, American Federation of Teachers:

I would like to comment on the issue of "the stick," which is what brought a lot of us into the movement when I was younger. I thought wielding a stick was pretty good. But more and more you see it turned against us. I can't remember the last strike for recognition that was successful. The teachers had the equivalent of strikes for recognition a while ago, but that was in the public sector. Among professionals and many of the New Economy occupations, before we can develop an effective stick, we've got to figure out where these folks are and speak to them in terms of what's important and realistic to them.

Currently our own credibility, in terms of a stick, is in jeopardy. I don't think as many people are influenced by sanctions as we would like to think. Before we can even imagine exerting that kind of punishment on employers or subcontractors or sub-subcontractors, we must find ways of speaking to folks in a credible way on issues that have importance to them, so that we can organize them in some manner.

For unions this will mean a lot of up-front investment with no immediate pay-off. We will have to invest a great deal of our own real capital in experiments, in organizing people in ways that don't necessarily increase dues for a long time. But we have to go through this period before we can build a strategy that realistically looks like a stick. Of course, there will be situations that present themselves where, if you're quick and jump on them, you can find a way to hurt the boss, but these are largely serendipitous. Until we can speak to these new technology workers who aren't employees in the traditional sense, I'm not sure what stick we can use. And we may not know it until it's used on us.

David Graceson, computer tech writer:

I used to work with the labor movement, and now I'm a technical writer. I had hoped to hear Larry Cohen's response to my comments. Maybe I'll send him an e-mail or something. (laughter)

The statistics that I have seen indicate that the software or IT industry is now the biggest industry in the U.S. If you could organize that industry it would be awesome. In considering how this might be done, here are some thoughts based on my experience.

One idea is to set up an IT club or an IT hotline that gives people reliable advice about how to do things in Microsoft Word or Oracle or Powerpoint that befuddle them every day. This would eventually get a great deal of recognition, attention and respect. Another issue to be taken up is merit pay. That would push forward organizing efforts.

One difficulty to be faced is how to set up a union pay increase structure. I have worked for three employers in a little less than three years, and each time I have gotten a huge pay increase because I am pretty good at what I do. How are you going to build that into a union pay increase structure? I doubt it can be done, but it is something to be looked into.

The other issue to keep in mind is how to deal with specific software skills. I have had employers tell me that because I didn't know Lotus Notes, they would not interview me as a technical writer. That is absurd, because these programs are all Windows-based, and I could work with any particular system. But if a union could set up a system for helping workers gain exposure to certain skills so they could can claim those on resumes and get new jobs, they might be more likely to join.

Another issue is contract work. Once a large contract is finished at one of these high-tech firms, the people who were working on that contract are either assigned a new contract with billable hours, like lawyers, or they are fired. In my case, I could get more per hour as a temp tech writer than I am receiving as a permanent employee, but I opted for the benefits that go along with permanent employment. Unions should address the issue of a person just being dumped if they're not on a current contract at a large IT company. That is a very real and prevalent issue for IT workers.

Finally, if unions could set up something like a technical workers association, maybe some of us snobby professional types might join. Instead of joining a union we could call ourselves an association. If you invested 80 or 100 million bucks you could easily get people who would want to be part of that association. And then, like the AMA, they would all unionize. (laughter) Thanks for listening to someone from the grassroots here.

David Jessup:

My question relates to something I heard from Phil Kugler a couple of days ago. He was talking about the bus drivers in the school system and some of the other people organized by the AFT who are at the low-end of the scale--the janitors and other school personnel. His point was that these people see themselves as engaged in the enterprise of helping children. They want more skills. The bus drivers, the first ones to see the kids at the beginning of the day, don't just want to drive the bus, they want to make a contribution to helping kids. Although we have talked mostly about the high-tech and professional worker, there are a lot of jobs in this New Economy at the low end of the scale: child care workers in Philadelphia and home care workers out in California, the ones that recently organized. Even though they're at the low end of the scale, many of these workers are concerned about issues job satisfaction. Can unions can be a vehicle for them to realize those aspirations?

Phil Kugler:

The AFT represents about 175,000 school support personnel--cafeteria workers, maintenance people, bus drivers. They clearly identify with the mission of school systems and want to make a contribution. They want recognition for their contribution. They also want much of the same training and skills provided to teachers. The bus drivers, for example, wanted training in how to discipline youngsters effectively.

Food service workers wind up making choices on matters of nutrition and understand the connection between a nutrition at lunch, which can often be, for many, many children, the best meal that they receive during the day.

I believe you are right in saying that the school support staff want a system of certification and an opportunity to develop their skills. Even though I emphasize the professional end, I also believe that lower-skilled workers want many of the same things that we've been talking about, and this has implications for union building.

Eugenia Kemble talked about the achievements of the AFT in promoting quality and its effect on management, which someone else also mentioned. At our professional issues conference we had three big-city superintendents talk about the value of partnership with the union--the superintendent of New York, the superintendent of Chicago, and the superintendent here in Washington, D.C. It was made clear that they could never accomplish meaningful change in their school districts without developing that partnership. They need it to achieve quality, reorganize schools, turn around low-performing schools, promote staff development, and teach to higher academic standards.

One of the things we are considering is how to engender a greater sense of community among school managers that hold to this point of view. We would like to help them publicize their success stories among other managers, and encourage them to talk about it on the golf courses rather than talking about how they bashed the unions.

Such partnerships are necessary for quality improvement because school management is often the most unstable part of the school system. The average stay for a school superintendent is three years. School boards turn over all the time. As Jeff Hermanson noted about the garment industry, the union is the most stable force in the system.

Regarding employee-involvement schemes, I recognize the difference between the private and public sectors, but one of the untold stories about how teachers organized in New York is the successful infiltration of an employee-involvement program. The program was put in place by the school administration. The union began offering suggestions for people who were involved in the employee-involvement scheme -- member and non-member alike. We came up with agendas, raised issues, and asked questions. When we brought about change to the involvement scheme, the union took credit for the victory. When we were unsuccessful in making change, we were able to illustrate the nonsense of the employee-involvement scheme. So we gained recognition and built consciousness about the shortcomings of the employment-involvement program, and educated teachers about the need for true collective bargaining.

Martin Lipset asked a question about organizing. As successful as our union has been, we have to avoid the unfortunate tendency to rest on our laurels. There is a transition that occurs from an organizing mentality – agitation, building group consciousness and all that goes with it – to a narrow service mentality -- collective bargaining and handling grievances. A shrinking number of people are involved in decision making in the union itself.

In states that comprise about 80% of our membership, the only organizing that is going on is that which is fostered by the national union. This means that at the local union level, organizing is becoming a lost art. There are plenty of opportunities, not only among the new teachers but among new groups like child care professionals. But there is no capacity at the local union level or the state union level to take advantage of this potential. They have become enmeshed in a service mode. The staff, who at one time were organizers, are now handling the negotiations and arbitrations. End of story. Sometimes it even gets perverse, with some calculating that if more people are organized, the staff service workload will get heavier.

Lou Nayman made a point about the stick and how we relate to people to be organized. In our core industry, education, we're facing a tremendous turnover. We estimate 50% of our members are going to be retiring in the next six or seven years. A tremendous number of new teachers will be brought into schools. I worry about our approach to these new, young people coming in, most of whom do not have a clue about what unionism is all about. Too often our orientation approach is to send them videos of the strike in 1967 emphasizing that what was achieved then is the reason why we now have health benefits.

Unfortunately, most of these young people don't even understand what's in the union newspaper. Terms like "arbitration" and "grievance" are understood by the generation that came through the wars to achieve collective bargaining, but these new folks don't have a clue. Reaching these people on issues they care about is the way to go. For these new young teachers, these include support and professional development, because the state of teacher training is so abysmal -- it's far, far from the realities of the classroom.

If the union can create buddy systems to help younger teachers with staff development and support, I believe we can forge the kind of a relationship that will build commitment to the union as an institution. The union needs to provide them significant help on the great needs that they have. Once you have the kind of commitment necessary to open their horizons about the reasons for a strong union, then you are able to get to a point where you can carry off militant action if necessary. But getting there will require a tremendous amount of work!

Jeff Hermanson:

Regarding the community organizing strategy, I've always believed that basically we are organizing a community of workers. We should look for allies within that community of workers, in the places where they worship and where they have recreation, and try to build a movement that involves all of those allies.

Quite often, including the Las Vegas campaign, we have one community of workers who are union and basically white, and another community of workers who are non-union and basically Latino immigrants. We had to get into that community to be successful. We had to convince our first community – the ones we already represented -- that they had to include the new community. It wasn't an easy thing, but we were able to do it.

When it comes to building a relationship with the community of workers, one of the most important things we try to offer is some degree of control over their destiny, both as individuals and as a community. What I tried to do with the garment workers in New York and what we're trying to do with the immigrant carpenters in Las Vegas, is to bring them out of poverty and into the middle class. That is a major step, and it changes their lives. It's a tremendous undertaking, but we can do it. We did it a generation ago, and we can do it in this generation.

In targeting, we can't give up manufacturing, and we can't give up on the low wage, supposedly low-skill, labor-intensive trades. We'd be fools to give that up. But we do have to target firms and segments of industry that we can successfully organize. In manufacturing, where globalization is a factor, we have to find a way to deal with that. We have to build a global labor movement -- it's that simple. If we stop short of that, we are not going to be able to save manufacturing or save our traditional base in this country-- and it's worth saving.

As for the stick, I don't know what it is in the information technology sector. It might be just refusing to sign on. I don't know what the downing of tools means in this industry, or how we get people to that point. But I'll tell you this: in both manufacturing and construction, workers don't want conflict, but they do want collective bargaining and they do want to improve their lives. There has to be some willingness to engage in open confrontation and conflict, in spite of the fact that we would rather not. We would rather not, the workers would rather not, but if you're going to lead somebody into this arena you had better be prepared to deal with conflict because it's going to come at you. And you had better prepare workers to deal with it, too.

I never say, "I want to go out on strike" or "We're going to go out on strike." I say, "One of the things we can do, one of our rights under the National Labor Relations Act, is to go on strike. There are two kinds of strikes -- economic strikes and an unfair labor practice strikes . I would never take you out on an economic strike because it's foolish, you can be replaced." But I don't ever have to worry about that, because the employer will invariably perpetrate an unfair labor practice that is sufficient to generate a strike in which workers retain the right to return to work.

In Las Vegas I'm engaged in a recognition strike right now. I think we are going to win it. There have been quite a few strikes for recognition that I've waged successfully. And UNITE has recently waged some successful recognition strikes up in Massachusetts.

It's not that we like to strike or want to strike; it's that sometimes we have no choice. In the Las Vegas situation, over a third of the workforce is temporary, hired through an agency. In fact, every worker in the company was at one time a temporary hired through an agency. The temps work for 90 to 120 days, and then they become permanent. During this time, who is their employer? If I go to the National Relations board, these temporary workers are all excluded. When we demanded recognition, the employer told the temporaries to take the union shirt off because they didn't have the right to participate. In fact, that's what started the strike. Then the employer had the temp agency call in the workers to give them their paychecks and tell them that they could be sent to another employer the following week and that they had no business participating in a union organizing drive. So what choice was left? We had to strike, and hopefully, we'll win.