America's unions, committed to transforming themselves to improve the lives of workers, their families and their communities, are making profound changes to help workers win a voice on the job. Since January 2000, more than 524,000 workers have come together to form unions. Union leaders can point with pride to victories—such as 4,000 workers at Boeing Co.'s Wichita, Kan., plant joining the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, an affiliate of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, and to thousands of exploited workers in the poultry and meatpacking industries coming together with United Food and Commercial Workers. Through spirited organizing efforts, more than 10,000 workers at Catholic Healthcare West have won a voice on the job with SEIU in the past two years. Some 10,000 Cingular Wireless workers have joined the Communications Workers of America. Each time workers win a voice at work—whether strawberry pickers in California coming together with the Farm Workers, 1,000-strong city employees in Albuquerque, N.M., joining AFSCME or 2,000 America West Airlines fleet service workers voting to join the Transport Workers—the union movement grows stronger and better able to strengthen our neighborhoods, the nation and the world.

Successes like these stem from unions' willingness to experiment with bold, innovative strategies that maximize the organizing energy of workers thirsting for justice on the job. They are the gains from increasing investments in organizing. As part of the AFL-CIO "changing to organize" initiative, 25 national unions have examined their longtime practices and shifted priorities, resources and people power to organizing, including recruiting and training hundreds of organizers.

Unions have won victories by channeling the bargaining relationships working families already have to grow further, harnessing the strength they have won over the years in contracts with employers and finding opportunities in bargaining to organize. By focusing on a strategic vision, union leaders have examined the core industries and the geographic regions in which they operate and devised campaigns aimed at building strength in smarter ways. Unions also have magnified their strength by coming together in multiunion organizing campaigns.

Union leaders continue to work to change the climate in our country from one that accepts or ignores employer exploitation and abuse of workers struggling to organize to one that supports workers' rights. A key component continues to be the AFL-CIO Voice@Work campaign, aimed at educating the public and elected officials about the obstacles workers face when they try to unionize and engaging the broader community in these struggles. "Community attention puts a spotlight on organizing campaigns," says Phil Kugler, assistant to the president for organizing and field services at AFT, which has used Voice@Work strategies in recent successful drives. "It boosts workers' morale in tough situations when they face bitter employer opposition."

Despite the promise of these strategies, however, the percentage of union members as a proportion of the workforce declined after 1999, a year in which unions organized workers in sufficient numbers to maintain overall membership. But even in the face of setbacks, unions in August 2000 challenged themselves to increase the scale and pace of organizing dramatically, setting a goal of 1 million new members a year. Getting to that level means organizing bigger, better and faster.

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Investing in Organizing

Faced with a decline in union membership—and the diminution of wages, benefits and political power that comes with fewer members—a task force of top elected union leaders in 1996 challenged unions to make a real and long-term investment in organizing. The task force recommended unions "change to organize" and offered a plan to fulfill that vision. The first key component of that plan is to invest in organizing by effectively harnessing financial resources, recruiting and training dedicated staff and mobilizing the support of union members to reach out to unorganized workers. Many are doing so.

The executive board of the United Union of Roofers and Waterproofers, for instance, voted to devote 40 percent of the union's income to organizing, providing the people power to help the union grow by 25 percent in four years. Its most recent victory came in spring 2001 in Phoenix, where an ecumenical group of clergy members supported efforts by the mostly immigrant members of Local 135 to come together and, for the first time, win a strong contract in the city's residential roofing sector. Another union deploying its financial resources is the Laborers, which created eight regional funds to hire new organizers, most of them from the ranks of existing members, resulting in significant wins among construction workers.

A key tool in helping unions develop a growing cadre of organizers has been the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute, which opened its doors in 1989. Since then, thousands of activists—both college students and union members—have graduated from the Organizing Institute, fanning out to campaigns around the country. In 2000 and so far in 2001, 2,125 activists have experienced the intensive three-day program, simulating a real organizing campaign. "I learned from the best organizers in the union movement," says Alan Hanson, a recent Organizing Institute graduate now working for UNITE. "When I graduated from the Organizing Institute, I was not only able to educate workers, I was able to move workers to action." In addition, a half dozen national unions run their own recruitment and training programs.

Because no one understands the benefits of union membership better than union members themselves, many unions are stepping up their recruitment and training of rank-and-file activists. AFSCME, for example, mobilizes, trains and deploys more than 300 volunteer organizers and hosted its first-ever organizing convention in September 2001, attracting more than 1,200 participants.

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Using Our Power

Union activists striving for a voice on the job for working families build on the current strengths of the union movement to maximize organizing successes. The strong foundations unions build on include using the clout of existing contracts with employers, focusing on specific geographic areas and core industries and cooperating in multiunion campaigns.

Bargaining to Organize
Union members who win strong contracts succeed in building better lives for their families and communities. And those who go one step further and fight for provisions in their contracts to reduce employer opposition when workers in other sections of their company seek to join the union build even more strength by "bargaining to organize." As unions link the bargaining process to organizing, they boost the strength and security of all members.

Communications Workers of America leaders saw that telecommunications companies were focusing their growth on the high-tech—and least unionized—sectors of their firms. They devised a strategy leveraging the strength of existing union members. During contract negotiations, they won provisions allowing workers in the newer, higher-tech sectors, such as wireless phones and cable, to choose a union without employer harassment through an expedited system bypassing time-consuming National Labor Relations Board elections. More than 10,000 workers have joined CWA since January 2000, thanks to these bargaining-to-organize provisions in telecommunications (most recently at Cingular Wireless), health care and other industries. " ëBargaining to organize' is an important tool for members who want to build their union and their future," says Larry Cohen, CWA executive vice president. "Unions must use collective bargaining and community and political action to win the organizing rights and worker protections that federal labor laws fail to guarantee."

Even with these agreements, however, CWA workers have had to remain vigilant against employer resistance. CWA members at Verizon went on strike in summer 2000 in part to gain organizing rights and opportunities for workers at Verizon Wireless and Verizon Information Services. A year later, it was clear the company was harassing and intimidating workers who wanted to join the union. CWA launched a campaign urging Verizon to keep its word. The New York region of the National Labor Relations Board is preparing an 86-count complaint against Verizon, alleging violations ranging from physical assault of a worker by a supervisor to threats of job loss at the company's VIS operations in New York State, where workers sell ads in the Yellow Pages.

In Las Vegas, since March 1999 Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Local 226's bargaining-to-organize provisions with major hotel chains have helped 8,000 workers win a voice on the job, including 2,200 at the Paris hotel in September 1999. Patricia Tabet, a food server and shop steward at the Paris, says it might have taken up to seven years to win a union had it not been for the card-check and neutrality provisions. "People who had never been in a union were amazed" when they found out about the injustices nonunion workers at neighboring hotels suffered, such as having their hours cut and paying high prices for benefits, Tabet says. During the union drive, "they saw people standing together."

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Focusing on a Strategic Vision
In the past two years, more and more unions have taken a strategic approach to organizing, focusing their attention and resources on specific industries or geographic regions they know are crucial in building the strength they need to improve workers' lives. Union leaders know that having a larger proportion of union members in an industry reduces corporations' ability to undercut union members' gains and pit groups of workers against each other. After examining their bases of existing strength and deciding on their goal, union leaders increasingly are choosing from a menu of effective methods—such as teaming up with other unions or insisting on card-check agreements—to win organizing campaigns. The research and planning it takes to lay the foundation for a strategic campaign enables unions to focus their efforts. "The work environment and the workforce are changing all the time, so we have to constantly change the way we think about organizing," says Mike Leonard, an international executive vice president and director of strategic programs at United Food and Commercial Workers. "We need to look at our core industries and take on the big guys in those industries. That's the only way we can set employment standards, and the only way to generate a dynamic union movement," he says, citing UFCW's strategic campaign at Wal-Mart as an example.

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To magnify their strengths during organizing campaigns, affiliates are coming together into strategic partnerships. Multiunion campaigns are succeeding as union leaders work to build trust, involve workers in each others' struggles and pool research, organizing and political resources. For instance, the Detroit Casino Council, involving HERE, the Teamsters, Operating Engineers and UAW, organized 6,600 workers at three newly built casinos in 2000 and 2001.

Among the multiunion organizing campaigns that have taken off in recent years are efforts at airports around the country. At Los Angeles International Airport, the partnership between HERE Local 814 and SEIU Local 1877 has resulted in 2,000 baggage handlers, security screeners and food service workers becoming union members since the Respect at LAX project began in summer 1998, in addition to a successful campaign to include airport workers in the city's living wage law. An organizing effort involving HERE, Machinists, Office and Professional Employees, SEIU, IBT and UFCW at San Francisco International Airport brought a voice on the job to more than 2,000 workers in less than two years.

The massive layoffs in airline-related industries in the wake of terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., mean a voice at work is more critical than ever for employees at the nation's airports, and union leaders in Los Angeles and San Francisco as well as those in Seattle and Denver plan to continue their organizing efforts. In fact, the Sept. 11 tragedies have highlighted issues—such as paying security guards a living wage to reduce turnover and improve job performance—that long have been part of efforts in helping workers win a voice at work. A recent study from the University of California at Berkeley's Institute for Labor and Employment suggests that better pay and training drastically cut down on turnover, improve job performance and help employers recruit better-skilled applicants—all at a modest cost to travelers. Making the connection between safety issues and how workers are treated will be a major issue in upcoming organizing efforts at airports: Activists at the San Francisco airport, where a Quality Standards Program requires minimum pay of $10 an hour (or $11.25 if health benefits aren't provided), along with hiring, training and performance standards that in many ways exceed proposed Federal Aviation Administration standards, hope to work with union leaders at other airports to develop similar programs.

A group of unions came together as Offshore Mariners United, focusing on organizing the 15,000 offshore mariners and others along the Gulf of Mexico whose workplace is the sea. The unions—Marine Engineers' Beneficial Association, Seafarers, Masters, Mates and Pilots, National Maritime Union and American Maritime Officers—have worked together to build community and international support for offshore mariners who want a voice when it comes to safety issues. OMU also enlisted the support of maritime union members in Norway, Brazil and Australia. Although breaking new ground in an industry is a slow, arduous process, momentum is building for workers' rights in the Gulf: After a 1999 victory for helicopter pilots who joined OPEIU, 830 oil rig workers at the J. Ray McDermott Offshore Platform Fabrication Yard joined IOUE Local 406.

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UAW leaders knew they had a long-standing, strong base among the Big Three automakers. But the workers at independent companies that make auto parts often had no voice on the job. UAW began a campaign to organize workers at parts plants, bringing in 25,000 new members. A key aspect of the campaigns at parts shops were shows of solidarity from UAW members employed at the Big Three, who sometimes traveled hundreds of miles to make house calls and attend rallies in the days before union elections.

A similar strategy for a very different group of workers has shown success for AFSCME. During its industrywide organizing strategy in Illinois, Council 31 has focused its efforts on bringing a voice on the job to more than 4,000 direct care workers who care for developmentally disabled clients. They work at group homes that are publicly funded but privately run. Union activists involved in the Campaign for Care and Dignity have been able to surmount the challenge of building support among workers at several sites because of AFSCME's strategic focus on the industry. Political action goes hand in hand with the organizing campaign, as workers educate state legislators about the need to raise wages. "As workers, we shouldn't be torn between taking care of these very special people and supporting our families," says Sylvia Twardowski, president of the council's Local 1555.

In an example of unions building strength in a specific geographic area, SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaign used its strong foundation in New York to bring a voice at work to office cleaners in other sections of the Northeast, including Baltimore, suburban New Jersey and Philadelphia. Today, about 4,000 janitors in the New Jersey and Pennsylvania suburbs have a union contract with better wages and health insurance, as do about 500 janitors in Baltimore. The workers in different cities often traveled to aid their fellow janitors' struggles.

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Changing the Environment: Voice@Work

At a time when working people increasingly are trying to join together in unions to win better pay, health care and retirement security, safer jobs and time for their families and communities, employers routinely are resorting to legal—and sometimes illegal—tactics to block workers' freedom to choose a union.

Some 92 percent of employers force employees to attend anti-union meetings designed to intimidate employees seeking a voice at work, and 79 percent of employers instruct supervisors to pressure workers in one-on-one meetings when employees try to join together in a union. And in one-third of all organizing campaigns, employers illegally fire workers, according to Cornell University scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner, who documented these facts in her recent study for the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission, "Uneasy Terrain: The Impact of Capital Mobility on Workers, Wages and Union Organizing." A report by Human Rights Watch found that workers' basic rights are violated routinely in the United States because U.S. labor law is feebly enforced and filled with loopholes.

But while most Americans think such employer tactics are wrong, polls show only a third of the public knows they are used routinely. In an effort to shine a light on employer tactics, the AFL-CIO in 1999 launched a national campaign to help ensure the freedom of every worker to join a union and gain a Voice@Work. Through the Voice@Work initiative, unions seek to reduce employer interference so more workers can join unions. Over the long term, the initiative aims to change the rules governing organizing, including reforming laws to ensure workers can freely join unions.

Efforts growing out of the Voice@Work program mobilize the community, including elected officials, religious leaders, civil rights groups and community organizations, to stand with working people to protect their freedom to choose a union and speak out against employers who block that freedom. The campaign also is helping unions sustain lasting relationships with their communities by building permanent coalitions that support workers and their families.

Through town hall meetings and other events, workers are speaking from their own experiences to educate elected officials—from city council members to state legislators and members of Congress—about the obstacles they face when they try to organize. In those struggles, elected officials are intervening in the organizing struggles that benefit the working families in the communities they represent. For example, when Philadelphia city council members passed a resolution supporting graduate employees' right to organize with AFT, the student-workers' campaign at Temple University got a critical boost, helping them to their victory in March 2001.

In July 2001, union leaders challenged our movement to step up involvement of elected officials after seeing that workers often can organize more successfully when political leaders play an active role in their campaigns. The AFL-CIO endorsed a statement of principles that unions can use to educate elected leaders about the obstacles workers face when seeking a voice on the job and to mobilize their support. The statement commits elected officials who sign it to support organizing in an environment free from interference, intimidation, coercion, harassment, reprisals or delay—and to take strong public actions to demonstrate this support, such as issuing public statements and attending rallies. The statement also binds signers to urge employers to respect their employees' right to form unions.

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Already, state federation and central labor council leaders in several states have enlisted candidates and elected leaders to sign the statement. At Florida's state federation convention in September 2001, a panel of three workers involved in organizing drives educated the top Democratic candidates for governor about their struggles. All the candidates were moved to sign the pledge. Top elected officials in New Hampshire and Vermont also have signed.

Similarly, when employers see the entire community stands behind workers, they are more likely to negotiate fairly—and unions have spent the past several years reaching out to civil rights and women's rights groups, religious congregations and other social justice organizations.

• More than 750 workers at Northwest Hospital in Seattle won a voice on the job after supporters who live in the community and use the facility's services banded together and convinced managers to remain neutral during the organizing campaign.
• When graduate employees at Michigan State University were forming a union with AFT, activists kept elected officials up to date on the administration's taxpayer-financed anti-union campaign. "They expressed outrage at the tactics," says the AFT's Phil Kugler. "Some joined the phone banks and made calls to the graduate assistants. That helped build morale." Now, Kugler says, AFT leaders are examining all of their organizing campaigns to see how they can integrate components of the Voice@Work program.
• Religious and community allies, as well as elected officials, played a key role in helping members of UNITE win a fair contract with Up-to-Date Laundry this summer in Baltimore by coming to rallies and passing a city council resolution in support of the workers.
• Community and religious leaders rallied to the side of immigrant workers in Minneapolis who not only were fired when they tried to organize a union at the Holiday Inn Express Hotel but also turned over to Immigration and Naturalization Service agents and threatened with deportation. After investigations by the National Labor Relations Board and other federal agencies, the hotel eventually agreed to compensate the workers for the retaliation, and most were allowed to stay in the United States for two years. Today, the hotel workers at Holiday Inn Express are members of HERE Local 17 and have a contract.
• Omaha Together/One Community, a strong union, community and religious coalition in Nebraska, has boosted UFCW's campaign for justice among meatpacking workers. In summer 2001, in an historic victory, workers at ConAgra's Armour-Swift-Eckrich plant ratified the first union contract in the company's history. Organizing efforts continue at other plants.
• In Kansas City, Mo., a strong community and religious coalition is supporting nurses organizing with AFT at several Health Midwest facilities, in which workers have already won three victories.

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Unions bring together all the Voice@Work strategies every year during 7 Days in June. What began in 1998 as one day of nationwide events to focus attention on workers' organizing efforts has grown to more than a week of actions—hundreds of rallies, marches and other activities involving central labor councils, state federations and local unions that have played pivotal roles in helping workers win. The 120 events in 38 states in 1999 mushroomed to 150 events in 2001.

7 Days in June events often serve as the kickoff for longer struggles, as in the case of 800 workers employed by the city of Savannah, Ga., who recently voted to join SEIU Local 1985. In 1999, activists staged a huge rally and convinced the city council to support a resolution backing workers' freedom to organize for a voice on the job. That effort proved to be the kernel around which the activists built a two-year campaign involving community, religious and political allies.

"The proclamation was a way to hold elected officials accountable," says Brett Hulme, president of the Savannah and Vicinity, AFL-CIO Trades and Labor Assembly. "Creating support for the rally and the proclamation built the coalition for the campaign."

The challenge for unions today is to harness the strength of these winning strategies in bigger campaigns and at a faster pace—a renewed commitment critical for the union movement to make strides in improving the lives of working families.