GMCS Editorial: Is a stepped
process to organizing the new way forward?
WASHINGTON - If the mood of America's top union leaders here
is any indication, they are fighting mad, and they and the workers they
represent are not going to take it anymore. Meeting here this week, members of
the AFL-CIO Executive Council vow to continue to fight the corporate and
right-wing attacks on labor, which has implications for union organizing
itself.
When he came out of a closed door session of the council
here July 30 Larry Cohen, the chair of the AFL-CIO's organizing committee, said
that from here on out union organizing is going to take on a different face:
"You're going to see, as you did with the auto workers in Chattanooga, the
establishment by workers of more and more 'membership organizations,' groups
that workers join voluntarily to fight for their rights, groups that don't, at
first, have collective bargaining contracts in place but get there after they
grow."
Cohen spoke about the different approach after a meeting in
which executive council members grappled with the issue of how to corporations
and right-wing tea party lawmakers who are more determined than ever to deplete
unions of their resources, silence workers who might join them and cripple
their ability to take action.
His reference to Chattanooga had to do with the announcement
in early July by the United Auto Workers and pro-union workers at the
Volkswagen plant there, that they were setting up UAW Local 42 (the number that
appeared on Baseball player Jackie Robinson's uniform).
The local was established despite the fact that the union
lost a representation election at the plant by a vote of 712 to 626. Although
VW had remained officially neutral the state's Republican governor and
Republican U.S. Sen. Bob Corker ran round-the-clock ad campaigns telling
workers they would lose their jobs if they voted for the union.
Although Local 42 is not the official collective bargaining
agent for the workers yet, "we fully expect that it will be recognized by
the company for that purpose when a majority of the workers have joined."
In the meantime, union leaders note, the enormous number of
workers at the plant who do want the union have at least some form of
representation and a good tool with which to win official collective bargaining
status.
"I fully expect that the UAW is going to do this at a
lot of the transplants all over the South," Cohen said. By
"transplants" he was referring to the many foreign-owned auto plants
that have been opening across the South. Unlike Volkswagen, not all of those
companies want to see a union in place with Nissan, which has a huge operation
in Canton, Mississippi, being at the top of that list.
"We have to fight for representation for workers with
or without collective bargaining contracts," Cohen said.
His own union has a history of working on the membership
organization approach to union organizing, he said.
"The Mississippi Alliance of State Employees is part of
CWA and it started out as the State Workers Organizing Committee," Cohen
said. "We got the idea of the name from the Steel Workers Organizing Committee
back in the 1930's." The SOC was the representation that steelworkers had
until the movement eventually grew into a powerful Steelworkers union.
And it's not just unions that can lend support to setting up
the new membership organizations that would represent unrepresented workers, he
said, pointing to major assistance from Mississippi NAACP members in organizing
city and state workers in Jackson, Mississippi. The CWA has also organized
Texas state employees into Local 6186, another union local established, in this
case where collective bargaining rights do not exist for the public workers
involved.
Cohen said not waiting to establish representative groups,
including union locals, until there is official collective bargaining is
critical for a host of reasons, including the ability to influence political
events. "Look at Seattle," he said, "and the ability of fast
food workers there to put on the pressure to win the $15 minimum wage.
"What's being done with this different, if not totally
new, form of organizing is at the core of what has to be done to defeat the
right wing," he said, "and it is a critical part of what workers are
doing to defend their own interests and advance their rights."
Labor leaders here say none of this means, however, that
traditional forms of union organizing will be abandoned and some, in fact,
report huge successes there despite the political power wielded by anti-union
forces.
The 1.6 million-member American Federation of State, County
and Municipal Employees, for example, reported 90,000 new members since January
and attributes much of that growth, particularly among EMT's and home health
aids, to "face-to-face" organizing.
"We understand what it means to be tossed around in
rough seas," said Lee Saunders, president of the AFSCME. The goal is
getting to where workers have their just due and that takes keeping your sights
on where you are going, courage and perspective."
Source: PeoplesWorld.org
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