Hollywood, Fla.
Despite increased efforts to help the tens of millions of workers who want a union get one, the organized strength of workers in America has continued to decline. The percentage of workers with collective bargaining rights has dropped below 9 percent in the private sector, and it is about 38 percent in the public sector. Every other industrial democracy in the world has rates of unionization that are at least two times greater in the private sector and 75 percent in the public sector. Workers want to organize but can’t. About half of all U.S. workers say they would vote for a union in their workplace, according to 2003 research by Peter D. Hart Research Associates. But with ferocity and regularity, employers block the freedom of working men and women to make their own decision about forming a union. Even workers who succeed in winning recognition through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) process often find their struggle futile—one-third of employers never negotiate first contracts. Faced with this reality, unions too often fail to invest sufficiently in helping workers organize. The failure to help workers join together in unions in sufficient numbers to grow and strengthen unions is not a small problem. A new report by the World Bank points to the role collective bargaining plays worldwide in increasing productivity, economic stability and workers’ economic status. Workers in unions in the United States are far more likely to have good wages, health care coverage and pensions. Through their unions, workers have rights on the job, so that they cannot be taken advantage of, discriminated against or treated unfairly, and they have a stronger voice on such issues as safety and the best ways to get the job done. Good-paying union jobs help the economy and the community and they reap real productivity gains for employers. And unions stand up for all working people on important issues such as affordable health care, Social Security and a higher minimum wage. So when the share of workers covered under collective bargaining agreements is low, working families, our communities and our economy all suffer. It means a weaker counterweight to unchecked corporate power, with a profoundly negative impact: lower wages overall and rising income inequality; fewer working families with health care, pensions and the ability to send their children to college; stressed families and society; declining American political participation; and finally, control of the White House and both houses of Congress by elected officials hostile to the concerns of working families, deepening the cycle. The decline in the level of collective bargaining also affects current union members’ ability to protect decent standards of living, health care protections and other benefits in their own contracts. Reversing this failure is the central moral challenge for today’s union leaders. History will judge us by whether we rise to it. The unions of the AFL-CIO must devote the full measure of energy and resources necessary and available to us to help working men and women come together to improve their lives, and to protect the collective bargaining rights of current union members from attack, especially federal employees. And we must do so despite the most assiduous attempts in a generation by our federal government to weaken unions. To build a bigger labor movement and increase power for America’s workers, we must do three things: (1) We must dramatically multiply our unions’ investments in organizing—financial as well as the recruitment and training of organizers; (2) We must use our current power and influence to support organizing, leveraging our strength in core industries through bargaining and every means available; (3) And we must radically change the climate for organizing by building a public understanding of the value of collective bargaining to workers and society, generating broad support for workers who are organizing as well as current members whose rights are under attack and neutralizing employer violations of workers’ freedom to organize. All three of these building blocks require our focused attention and a huge commitment of resources. Today we launch an unprecedented, unified campaign to achieve the third of these—to radically change the climate for organizing. We must bring about nothing short of a revolution in culture and attitudes, and it will require a revolution-like commitment by our unions. We must educate, engage and mobilize literally millions of union members and people of conscience—a job we are uniquely qualified to do collectively as a labor movement. For five years, we have developed organizing approaches that help guarantee workers the freedom to choose a “voice at work.” Those efforts have yielded important successes and learning, but they are not enough. We undertake this campaign at a moment of extraordinary opportunity. Workers express more interest in organizing than has been seen in decades. Young workers and college students are increasingly interested in collective bargaining and workplace justice. Distrust of employers and corporations is high. The naked political attacks on working people provide potential for galvanizing support. And recent experiences, including state-level initiatives expanding workers’ collective bargaining rights, point to the potential for greater success. But while solid public support exists for strong laws to protect workers’ collective bargaining rights, the level of ignorance of workers’ current inability to exercise those rights under the system of NLRB elections is stunning. Even union members have scant understanding of what workers who attempt to organize face today, despite members’ strong support for legal protections and for organizing as a priority for their unions. To ensure the freedom of workers to have a voice at work, our new campaign will undertake four over-arching strategies that will be pursued simultaneously, although each builds upon the others: 1. We will change the way we organize, building new alignments of community and political support for organizing and opening our campaigns to expose the ugliness of employer retaliation. By taking our campaigns public, we will make the public case for the benefits of collective bargaining and for the urgency of protecting the freedom of workers to organize. Many unions already have begun to do exactly this, with federation support. We will build a movement for change out of our collective campaigns. We will develop tools, share best practices and provide support to help every union implement “Voice at Work” approaches in their organizing campaigns. We will join with the building trades in a national public campaign to help construction workers organize. And we will work with the labor movement at every level, especially with state federations and central labor councils, to build ongoing public and community support networks for escalated worker organizing. 2. We will build an environment of public support in which organizing can flourish and unions can win better contracts, as well as policy changes to support good jobs and strong communities. The first major focus will be on building the active support of current union members through education and mobilization at their worksites, culminating in 2003 with a massive common mobilization led by the AFL-CIO. We will build an army of informed, engaged union members acting in their own self-interest and standing up for the rights of all workers who will talk to their neighbors, friends, employers, clergy and elected officials. Our membership education program will be modeled on the successes of the Building Trades COMET member organizing education program. Union members will work together with our national and community allies to mobilize an undeniable wave of public support, including the support of national and community opinion leaders, for the fundamental freedom to organize and for collective bargaining rights. The job of building public understanding of the benefits of collective bargaining and the reality of employer opposition is a daunting task that will require all the coordinated efforts we can organize. To accomplish this, we will work together with Jobs with Justice, the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, AFL-CIO constituency groups and other workers’ and civil rights coalitions. To augment federation-based efforts, we also will help facilitate the formation of an independent organization to join with us in establishing the right of workers to form a union as a fundamental freedom, understood and cherished just as are freedom of speech, freedom of religion and other rights of association such as the right to join a professional organization, political party or religious congregation. The independent organization will play a key role in recruiting allies and building an echo chamber to make the case with politicians and the public that coercive employer behavior directed against organizing efforts is an abuse of fundamental human and civil rights 3. We will harness political gains at the state and local levels to expand workers’ rights and power, targeting and winning new workers’ rights initiatives in 2003 and 2004. Recent examples of “linking politics and organizing” in communities and states inform and inspire a new generation of efforts to expand workers’ collective bargaining rights. State-level initiatives such as New York’s card check law for non-NLRA private-sector employees, Washington State’s expansion of collective bargaining rights for a range of state and state-funded employees and California’s law requiring mediation of first contracts for farm workers provide valuable models for expanding workers’ rights. We will also target 2003 and 2004 state and local political races for campaigns to advance workers’ rights, from electing union members to electing mayors and governors who support workers’ rights. And we will provide a clearinghouse to share tactics and models for effective state and local initiatives. 4. Finally, we must and will build majority support in the U.S. Congress and support in the White House for protections of existing collective bargaining rights and for legal reform that protects the free and fair choice of employees to form a union without interference from management and enables more workers to enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining. We will target and implement a comprehensive program of congressional education and mobilization in Washington, D.C., as well as congressional districts nationwide, and we will create a congressional workers’ rights caucus in 2003. We will develop and advance proposals for federal labor law reform that we will ask 2004 candidates for federal office, including presidential candidates, to endorse. As the respected international human rights organization Human Rights Watch confirmed in a book-length September 2000 report, the current legal framework utterly fails to protect workers’ democratic rights. “Loophole-ridden laws, paralyzing delays and feeble enforcement have led to a culture of impunity in many areas of U.S. labor law and practice. Legal obstacles tilt the playing field so steeply against workers’ freedom of association that the United States is in violation of international human rights standards for workers,” Human Rights Watch reported. Our laws must be reformed to prevent employers from suppressing workers’ freedom to form a union and bargain collectively, with a focus on protections for voluntary recognition of workers’ unions; workers who choose to be represented by a union must have a meaningful right to collective bargaining that ultimately results in a contract on fair terms; employers who break the law must be held accountable, with punishment that fits the crime and is severe enough to deter violation; and protections of the law must be extended to all workers, regardless of their placement in easily manipulated, contingent workforce categories, in recognition of changing employment relations in the new economy. In addition, we will fully integrate workers’ rights as an issue in our national election work, targeting federal races to elect candidates who support workers’ freedom to organize. A campaign of this magnitude requires dedicated resources at the AFL-CIO, coordination among our unions and an unparalleled level of engagement of the labor movement at every level. The need is urgent. Our response must be similarly urgent. We will not shrink from the challenge.