10-04-05, 8:59 am
ST. LOUIS (PAI)--The unions in the new Change to Win federation plan to spend at least $750 million on organizing during the next 12 months, their leaders said during the group’s founding convention in St. Louis on Sept. 27. But there is more, or maybe less, to that figure than meets the eye.
That’s because the figure includes not just what the international unions in the new federation--the Service Employees, Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers, UNITE HERE, the Laborers, Carpenters and the United Farm Workers--spend on organizing, but what their locals, councils and affiliates spend, too.
What may be more important than the actual sums is how the unions are going to spend the money to organize, and which industries they’ll concentrate on.
Change to Win Organizing Director Tom Woodruff--who came to that position from SEIU--identified groups of workers that each of the founding unions would pursue. They include retail workers (10.5 million unorganized), leisure and hospitality workers (10.5 million), transportation (3.5 million), construction (5.5 million), food manufacturing (2.5 million), utilities (500,000), laundry workers (300,000) and health care and social assistance workers (12.5 million).
And they want to launch campaigns by the end of this year to organize 500,000 of those unorganized workers, he added.
To organize them, Change to Win will create a Strategic Organizing Center, from its unions, that will plan, evaluate and oversee joint organizing campaigns. “There will also be strategic research on how to get the boss out of the way” of organizing drives, Woodruff added--a reference to captive-audience meetings and other pro-management delays and obstruction built into federal labor law.
The Change to Win federation will also use its power to enforce its member unions to work together on joint efforts, through coordinating committees, with one
committee for each of 17 industrial sectors it identified. Those panels will also have the power to make sure one member union in joint bargaining doesn’t sign contracts with employers that undercut its colleagues.
That power to order creation and implementation of joint organizing drives is also different from practice at the AFL-CIO, which five of the Change to Win member unions--all but the Laborers and Farm Workers--have left. And the Laborers will leave as soon as technical details are worked out, adds union President Terry O’Sullivan.
“Voluntarism doesn’t work any more,” Woodruff said.
He also noted that while Change to Win’s unions added 86,000 members in the last five years, that 1.5 percent growth is not good enough. “We need to change direction,” he declared.
From International Labor Communications Association.
