Portland, OR
The AFL-CIO and Red Cross have a historic relationship spanning several decades. Red Cross is both a national employer of health care workers and a national charity with primary responsibility for the nation's blood supply. The AFL-CIO and its affiliates interact with Red Cross at both levels.
This relationship serves to increase the contributions of both labor and Red Cross to our communities. At its best, the relationship has helped our communities recover from natural disasters such as hurricanes and served our communities through blood donations. Through this relationship with Red Cross, labor has mobilized its members and its dollars to help our communities.
By most estimates, unions donate over 40 percent of Red Cross's income in the form of blood donations, direct donations and disaster relief volunteers and equipment. AFL-CIO members in conjunction with Red Cross have provided critical assistance in natural disasters such as Hurricane Hugo and the Northridge Earthquake.
As a national employer, Red Cross has over 13,000 employees in its blood service division and nearly $1 billion in revenue. Roughly twenty-five percent of Red Cross's workforce is represented by AFL-CIO affiliated unions. Red Cross's blood services regions cover the country from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Juneau, Alaska.
We stand at a crossroads in our relationship with the American Red Cross. We find ourselves at this point because of the way that Red Cross has chosen to respond to the fundamental challenges facing it as a result of more than a decade of serious management problems and shortcomings in the quality of its handling of the nation's blood supply.
Peat Marwick's recent study of Red Cross raised serious questions about the organization's internal financial controls. Peat Marwick concluded: "Most of the functions needed to support and integrate management systems are dispersed, dysfunctional or nonexistent." Through unions and members, the labor movement contributes hundreds of millions of dollars to Red Cross each year. The AFL-CIO is deeply concerned that labor's contributions are used in the most effective manner possible.
Red Cross is restructuring its operation. During this restructuring, Red Cross's determination to drive down wages and cut benefits have undermined Red Cross workers. Work classifications are being changed in an arbitrary fashion. Red Cross is acting more like a ruthless Wall Street firm than a time-honored national charity. Red Cross workers are bearing the stress and strain of these changes.
Over the last eighteen months, Red Cross has imposed a contract on the USWA, forced SEIU members out on strike, hired union-busting lawyers to stop CWA's organizing drives, taken a dozen months to bargain a first contract with AFSCME, and even mocked the Machinists union during an organizing drive.
This breakdown threatens one of the ways that labor gives to the community, and it damages Red Cross's credibility when it reaches out to the labor movement. Red Cross's aggressive anti-union position as an employer resonates throughout the labor movement. A strike in West Virginia or a bitter anti-union attack on an organized drive in Baltimore poisons the well of labor's charity.
The AFL-CIO calls on the Red Cross to treat unionized or newly organizing members with the same respect as Red Cross treats labor donors by remaining neutral during AFL-CIO organizing drives and determining union representation through non-NLRB procedures. It is inconsistent for Red Cross to work with unions to provide charitable services to their communities and in the same city run an aggressive anti-union campaign against their own employees and their local unions.
The AFL-CIO calls upon Red Cross to rationalize its labor agreements and to enter into national bargaining with unions to establish parameters to guide local bargaining. The AFL-CIO calls for Red Cross to make a commitment to work in partnership with employees by sharing information and developing joint responses to meet the challenges faced by Red Cross to ensure the quality and adequacy of the nation's blood supply into the 21st century.
The AFL-CIO re-affirms its support of charitable giving to our communities and hopes that high-level dialogue between Red Cross and the AFL-CIO can remedy this breakdown in our relationship. The AFL-CIO will identify alternative charities and develop effective means of communicating its findings to union members, as circumstances warrants.