GR EXTRA!

Tie unionization drives to first contracts

Mark Gruenberg

05 Mar 2010

Press Associates, Inc.

To succeed more in unionization drives, the nation’s unions must tie their organizing efforts and their goals for a first contract together, says the AFL-CIO’s new Organizing Director.

             Elizabeth Bunn, now UAW Secretary-Treasurer, was named to the post during the federation’s Executive Council meeting in Orlando, Fla.  Bunn will split time between the two posts until she retires from the UAW in June.

            Communications Workers President Larry Cohen, chair of the federation’s Organizing Committee, added new methods must be tried regardless of the fate of the Employee Free Choice Act.  The legislation is designed to help level the playing field between workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining those first contracts.  “There is no path right now to pass EFCA” through the Senate, Cohen said.  

            That leaves unions up to their own devices, though hampered by a labor law that Bunn said allows “brutal, fierce, unrelenting employer opposition in the private sector” to unions.  Federal data show just over 7% of private sector workers are unionized, compared to more than 37% of public workers.

             Recently successful organizing is in the public sector, fed figures show.  There, workers are on a more level playing field.  From 2008-2009, only five unions -- all of public workers -- grew by more than 5,000 members each: AFSCME (43,851), AFT (29,286), AFGE (15,568), the Postal Workers (11,781) and the Fire Fighters (7,250).

             The Organizing Department will not be directly tied to each drive, both pointed out.  Organizing will still be left to the AFL-CIO’s individual unions -- some of whom are actively organizing new workers, while others are not. 

             Where the Organizing Department can help, they said, is promoting inter-union cooperation in organizing and modeling new organizing approaches.  It can provide “a centralized focus” for organizing, Bunn said. 

            Jobs With Justice head Sarita Gupta added that the Organizing Department can help “take the fight in organizing and bargaining from being a set of workers versus the employer to a set of workers and the community versus the employer.”