Can Unions Seize the Post-9-11 Moment?

Tom Robbins, Village Voice
January 3, 2002

Early in December, officials at the AFL-CIO convention in Las Vegas reluctantly acknowledged that their numbers had slipped yet
again -- this time to just 13.5 percent of the nation's workforce. The announcement came at a time when more than 500 union hard hats were at ground zero in New York digging out from destruction, just as they have been
doing around the clock since Sept. 11. Those were the two starkly different images of labor that emerged this year: one of increasing irrelevance, the other of crucial importance.

Immediately after the planes hit, construction
workers around the city dropped their tools
and raced to the scene, arriving hard on the
heels of their fellow unionists, the firefighters,
cops, and emergency service workers. In the
days following the attack, hundreds more
trades workers, organized in work details by
their respective unions, marched to the site to
lend a hand, many of them remaining for weeks.
Unions representing maintenance
workers, restaurant employees, and civil
servants also quickly went to work, lending
comfort and aid to the families of their
murdered members and shoring up those made
jobless by the catastrophe.

But unions themselves barely trumpeted their
own role at the Trade Center. In fact, a
week after the attack, construction unions ran
full-page newspaper ads pleading with
members to return to work; so many were
volunteering at the disaster site that every big
construction job in the city had shut down.

If the terrorist attack reaffirmed a dormant
patriotism in many, as well as a new faith in the
capabilities of government and its public
servants, it also underscored the critical role
unions play in the social fabric.

"Union members proved convincingly they had the
training, the skill, and the will to get a
tough job done," says Jeff Grabelsky of the
AFL-CIO's Building Trades Department. "I
really don't know what would have happened if
the attack had taken place in a non-union
market; the response of construction workers
has everything to do with the fact that they
are union members."

And yet the story of how unions distinguished
themselves under fire remains largely untold.
Instead, the dominant labor story of the
post-Sept. 11 era was the predictable one: that
the number of Americans enrolled in unions had
slipped yet again, following the same
inexorable pattern of earlier years.

The added twist to this year's statistic was
that it was a drop from the 14.9 percent of
workers who were in unions in 1995, when
AFL-CIO president John Sweeney was first
elected, vowing to organize the unorganized.
And there is more slippage to come, labor
officials caution, thanks to massive layoffs in
the post-terror-attack economic downturn.

Sweeney, re-elected to a new term at the helm
of the 13 million-member organization,
beseeched his 66 member unions to undertake
renewed organizing drives in an effort to
stanch the losses. Individual unions should
devote at least 30 percent of their budgets to
organizing efforts, according to a resolution
proposed and passed by the convention. Their
goal, Sweeney urged, should be to boost their
memberships by at least 10 percent.

"Let's be clear, we are talking about massive
change in the way we do business," Service
Employees International Union president Andrew
Stern, a strong Sweeney backer who
co-chairs the organizing committee of the
AFL-CIO executive committee, told the
convention.

For all their eloquence, the unionists still
appear largely to be whistling in the wind. Passing
resolutions is easy, but getting most unions to
take on the grueling and often frustrating
work of organizing remains elusive. Labor
analysts estimate fewer than a dozen unions
have actually committed the resources Sweeney
has asked for, and fewer still have
registered large gains.

"Unfortunately, too many unions have not made a
decision to change who they are and
how they spend their money and their energy,"
says Bruce Raynor, president of UNITE,
the garment and textile workers union. "The
bottom line is that hundreds of thousands of
workers would choose unions if this was a
political election and they had a chance to vote
for them. But every organizing drive meets
vicious resistance from employers."

UNITE, with 250,000 members, currently spends
about one-third of its budget on
organizing, says Raynor. His goal is to
increase the figure to 50 percent. "This isn't about
earning a profit," he says.

Many unions are being tentative about
organizing, says Stanley Aronowitz, professor of
sociology at the City University of New York
Graduate School, because they are reluctant
to commit the funds and energy required for a
major recruitment push until there is a
favorable political environment. "But they're
not going to get it," says Aronowitz. "Their
hope isn't in the rank and file; it is in the
politicians. They will spend millions on the 2002
congressional elections and still lose
members."

One of the strongest adherents to the
organizing gospel is Terence O'Sullivan, the new
president of the Laborers International Union.
Long under the thumb of a corrupt and
mob-tied leadership, the Laborers have emerged
as an activist union, eager to sign up
unorganized workers. In New Jersey, the union
recently managed to recruit low-paid,
non-union asbestos removal workers by combining
political pressure with attention to the
needs and culture of the largely immigrant and
foreign-language-speaking workforce.

International union officials appointed Juan
Mazlymian, an Uruguayan-born rank-and-file
member, to head the New Jersey asbestos local,
and recruited organizers fluent in
Spanish, Polish, and Serbo-Croatian, the
languages spoken by the majority of the asbestos
workers. The union then went after disreputable
contractors who charged government
agencies prevailing wage rates while paying
workers well below that level.

"Asbestos is a very bottom-of-the-barrel
industry," says Dave Johnson, the Laborers'
organizing director. "We researched
contractors, documenting their safety violations, their
wage practices. Then we presented that
information to local school boards and town
councils that were awarding these contracts all
over the state."

Since the organizing campaign was launched in
March, Local 1030 of the Laborers has
expanded from 150 members to 565. "We estimate
we represent more than 65 percent of
the asbestos removal market now," says Johnson.
"Before it was about 5 percent."

It's a success story other unions would love to
duplicate, if they could muster the energy
and resources.

"There is an unwillingness among many unions to
break old habits," says Johnson. "The
workforce, particularly among construction, is
radically changing. It is no longer mostly
English-speaking, native-born workers. They
speak different languages, have different
cultures, and have a different set of needs."

There also has to be a willingness to seize the
moment. It is hard to imagine a potentially
more favorable climate, in terms of public
attitudes, than the one that has emerged since
Sept. 11. Labor, long accustomed to public
embarrassment, is at least temporarily on a
moral high ground.

"The 9-11 response showed labor at its best,"
says Raynor. "America's heroes became
workers, not politicians or fighter pilots. It
showed unions are an integral part of what
makes America a great country."

"One of the things we learned," says Grabelsky
of the AFL-CIO, "is that in a time of
national crisis, working people are ready for
sacrifice and lots of corporations are ready
for breathtaking greed. The corporate world has
been shameless in advancing their
agenda, while the labor movement has been
tentative and ambivalent. That's partially for
good reasons; they want to be sensitive about
not exploiting the tragedy. But this moment
can quickly dissipate."

Questions about how the political and economic
environment for unions has changed in the
wake of the attacks were raised at a small
workshop at the Las Vegas convention held by
Grabelsky and Bill Granfield,
secretary-treasurer of Hotel and Restaurant Employees
Union Local 100, which saw 43 members working
at Windows on the World killed in the
attack and another 400 rendered jobless.

"We spend a lot of time trying to explain to
people why you belong to a union. Well, there
isn't a better way to explain it than right
now. The value of union membership is really
clear," says Grabelsky.

Some 27 members of the building maintenance
workers union died in the Trade Center's
collapse, and several hundred more lost jobs in
the economic aftershocks. Their union,
Local 32B-J of the Service Employees
International Union, quickly pulled together to help
its members and their families.

The union did something else unusual in the
crisis: It got building owners to agree to an
early contract renewal in order to avoid the
usual end-of-year crisis that afflicts the industry
when the contract expires. "There's a sense in
the city that employers and unions need to
work together right now," says union president
Mark Fishman.

"Labor has done a heroic job, not just at the
[Trade Center] site, but with the broader
community," he adds. "We have to start talking
about that story. The real losers are the
non-union workers who have no safety net of any
kind. They're suffering incredibly right
now. They have no advocate, no group that
brings them together as a family."

Tom Robbins writes for the Village Voice, where
this article originally appeared.