Workers have less muscle in fight for wages, benefits

Concessions from supermarket employees illustrate the risks of regional strikes against national corporations. Are unions still the force that helps to level the playing field between workers and employers?

For the better part of the 20th century, organized labor has proved to be the critical link between jobs and quality of life for many Americans. At the close of World War II, more than 36 percent of American workers were unionized, and the products of their solidarity were tangible. From the 1940s to the 1970s, the size of the median paycheck of Americans doubled. Unions and their members enjoyed a string of important legislative successes, including the passage of landmark anti-discrimination laws in the 1960s.

But the last three decades have seen steady erosion in labor’s influence. Today’s atrophied union movement — representing only 12.9 percent of the workforce in 2003 — is increasingly focused on the plight of service employees, such as Southern California supermarket workers, whose recent strike failed to give them the benefits they had sought to hold on to. Instead, the protracted walkout resulted in wage and health concessions by the grocery workers’ union, illustrating the risks of running regional campaigns against national corporations.

Among the causes of labor’s decline: stagnant and aging membership, job losses in sectors that are traditionally highly unionized coupled with failure to reach out to workers in new and growing industries, and an inability to effectively organize and mobilize new immigrants — particularly in areas with large and highly segregated immigrant populations, such as Southern California.

The immigrant population is especially troubling for unions in the Los Angeles area, because new immigrants most often fill the kinds of low-skilled jobs that have long been union strongholds, writes UCLA sociology professor Ruth Milkman in the book “Organizing Immigrants: The Challenge for Unions in Contemporary California.” The willingness of these recent immigrants to work for far less than more established laborers undermines the unions’ ability to bargain for better wages and benefits for their members.

When grocery employees in Southern California walked off the job on Oct. 11, 2003, to protest a proposed contract that would curtail their health insurance benefits and pension plans, many expected a quick resolution to the strike.

“We were hoping it would be over by the holidays,” said Willy Cuadros, a checkout clerk at a Westside Albertsons.

But the United Food and Commercial Workers appeared to have gravely misjudged the supermarket chains’ determination to cut costs — evident in the union’s capitulation to most of their demands by the time the strike concluded on March 1, 2004, almost five months after it began. The chains argued they couldn’t afford the workers’ demands because they are engaged in an even bigger battle — trying to stay competitive with discount retailer Wal-Mart, which is just beginning to enter the grocery business in Southern California.

The UCFW, which had no recent experience with a strike, was poorly prepared to execute one, said Daniel J.B. Mitchell, a professor at UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management who specializes in industrial relations.

“The union really hasn’t been able to capitalize on its message,” Mitchell said, citing inconsistency in the reasons given for the strike and illogic in the tactics used.

For example, “They didn’t have to strike on the day the contract expired,” Mitchell said. Instead, the union could have waited and timed the strike to start around Thanksgiving — traditionally the busiest time of year for grocery stores — when a walkout would have had the greatest effect.

In one of the most successful strikes in Southern California, the Service Employees International Union managed to mobilize immigrant custodial workers for a campaign called Justice for Janitors, which culminated in a 1990 strike. SEIU used aggressive tactics to expand its base in the building-services sector in the late 1980s, focusing specifically on Latino immigrants through the use of Spanish-speaking organizers. Then it began to apply pressure — not on the building-services firms, which employed most of its members, but on building managers and tenants, who would be directly affected by a strike.

According to Mitchell, the union needed to draw the attention of building managers, because putting pressure only on the building-services firms would likely have resulted in building managers moving their business to cheaper, non-union firms.

The strike resulted in added dental and drug coverage for many employees, along with annual raises of 20-45 cents per hour.

“Justice for Janitors was a strategic campaign,” Mitchell said. “There was a lot of research involved.”

By comparison, Mitchell says, the supermarket strike seemed hurriedly organized and poorly thought out. Mitchell notes that the UFCW, the grocery workers’ union, rejected an offer of help from SEIU, the union behind the successful janitors’ campaign.

In the end, the UFCW’s failure may come down to a question of economics. It is increasingly difficult for unions to prevail in regional strikes when they are dealing with bigger and bigger corporations, whose profitable operations elsewhere help offset huge losses in the strike area. As the grocery strike dragged on in Southern California, the companies involved — Albertsons, Kroger and Safeway — weren’t hit as hard as a small, local chain might have been, so they were able to essentially outlast the union. Albertsons even managed to stay profitable throughout the ordeal.

John Wilhelm, president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), has a plan for combating this problem: If a national union can align its locals’ contracts so that a large number of them expire at the same time, it can put pressure on corporations nationwide, rather than just in one spot. The threat of a national strike will give HERE the clout it is looking for.

In the meantime, however, hotel workers in Los Angeles Local 11 must negotiate a new contract — the current one expired April 15 — without the benefit of a national campaign. The 4,000 HERE members working at the 17 Los Angeles-area hotels covered by the contract are seeking higher wages and continued family healthcare benefits. Talks began in March amid a slump in the tourism industry that has made hotel managers reluctant to concede much.

Success stories in organized labor are increasingly rare as corporations grow, union membership dwindles and traditional union industries shrink or move offshore. The grocery workers of the UFCW in Southern California were casualties of this trend. But as the environment becomes more unfriendly to unions, campaigns such as Justice for Janitors and HERE’s push for higher wages show that organized labor is working hard to adapt — giving members hope that their unions can remain relevant and effective.