Bargaining in a Recession

— Derek Blackadder

There’s no rocket science to a contract campaign during a recession. But it is different. You can even come out the other side with a stronger union. Here are a few ideas on how.

1. Start now. Even if your contract isn’t up for two years and you think you have some lag time. Or you think your employer isn’t going to be affected for a while. You can’t wait. Can’t.

An aggressive employer is going to use the recession as an excuse to come after your collective agreement. They won’t wait to see how the recession hits your workplace. Or even if.

Do everything you would normally do, but start way sooner, and do much more of it.

2. Inoculate your co-workers. They are continually exposed to stories in the media about how workers somewhere have taken concessions. Think you’ve heard it all about GM? Think again. Municipal workers in Windsor, Ontario, have been on strike for two months over demands for concessions on retiree benefits that use the downturn in the auto industry as the excuse.

To overcome the demoralizing effects of the media and an employer campaign, you need to prepare before it really sinks in. Start collecting success stories. Find workers who were around in the last recession and collect their stories about bargaining then. Even if the stories don’t have a happy ending, knowing how the employer bargains and campaigns (because they will campaign) will be useful.

3. Whether it’s on a wiki or on a blackboard in somebody’s basement, there has to be a plan. One that’s visible, something that can be checked regularly for a progress report. Something with dates, to-do lists, assigned responsibilities, and goals. Note when it will be revisited and amended.

4. Organize the organized. Your co-workers need to be more mobilized, more invested, and more in control of what happens all the way through bargaining than they have ever been before. Sit down with your union’s activists, walk through the process step by step, and maximize their input and control starting from today.

Inventory the union’s resources. Stewards. Research. Communication tools like newsletters, e-mail lists, text-message trees. Map the workplace and start identifying the concerns your co-workers have about this round of bargaining. Who has them? Why? Where are they? Develop your responses and test them.

5. Organize the unorganized. Non-union workers in or connected to your workplace? Develop or check in with your contacts. The insecurity a recession generates can push workers to take an interest in organizing, especially when the unionized workers do well. If they can organize before your bargaining starts, you’ll all be better off.

6. Turn it around on your employer. Is this an opportunity to take the offensive? With many employers, especially in the public sector, this may be your chance to go over the books and the employer’s admin costs with a fine-tooth comb.

In the last recession, Toronto area municipal workers were able to contract in services by arguing that cities were amortizing the cost of roads equipment too quickly. The equipment was lasting up to 10 years but was off the books in four, raising the apparent cost of doing the work in-house.

If cuts are coming, make sure that management takes more than its fair share. Look closely at administrative overhead, especially anything contracted out. Can your co-workers do that work? At what cost? (See Labor Notes October 2008, “Why Privatize? We Can Run It Better!”)

7. Victory isn’t always measured in dollars and cents. If you’re going to get less than you should in compensation, is there anything else you can substitute? Try for language gains or increases in “buried” cost like vacations during a round of recession bargaining.

CUPE social service workers in Ontario, bargaining now, are making big gains in health and safety language and protection from contracting out by coordinating across the province. In more than half the cases they’ve even won pensions for the first time. Better yet, workers are talking about issues that usually don’t get a lot of attention compared with compensation. They’re expanding their bargaining horizons—permanently.

8. Your employer playing nice guy? Proposing job-sharing for junior workers or exit packages or buyouts for the more senior? If there’s even a chance of this, prepare in advance.

Job-sharing may sound like a great idea to workers worried about losing all of their income, but in most cases layoffs come anyway. Unemployment benefits will be based on income prior to layoff. Does it make sense to job-share if it will mean less in benefits after layoff?

Be prepared to walk workers through the costs and benefits of exit packages. They rarely work in the members’ favor, and they foster a focus on individual solutions, not collective ones. If your workforce has a two-tier wage set-up, the union is further weakened when senior workers leave.

Both job-sharing and exit packages can hugely affect workplace morale and mobilization levels. They can make a cost-cutting employer seem humane.

9. Research, research, research. Recession bargaining can be more technical than we’re used to. Know your employer’s markets, customers, and suppliers, its funders and clients.

10. Know the impact on your community if your employer gets concessions. Will potential allies be affected? Don’t overlook a city council worried about its tax base or even a chamber of commerce concerned about lost local buying power.

11. Don’t panic. This isn’t the first recession; it won’t be the last. Workers and unions have gotten through them before; we’ll get through this one. Start your plan early, mobilize your members, do your homework.

Your co-workers will be energized, workplace solidarity will be high, and once the pressure eases you can go from holding the line to moving forward. Use the recession to build organizing capacity for the next round of bargaining.

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Derek Blackadder is a Canadian Union of Public Employees national rep.

Building a Union-Community Alliance that Lasts

— Jeff Crosby

Workers and homeowners, union members and community activists—all had a reason to march against Bank of America this spring. In Lynn, Massachusetts, our protest was another step in building the relationship between unionized working people and working-class community organizations, especially among immigrants. It’s a relationship that the North Shore Labor Council has been carefully nurturing for years.

The march brought together 300 union members and community allies, both to support “labor’s issue”—the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which Bank of America has attacked—and to denounce the bank’s home foreclosures. Jobs with Justice had led 30 protests of Bank of America across the state, and our alliance in Lynn produced the largest and most diverse one.

People joined from the street in a mile-long march through a foreclosure-hit neighborhood adjacent to the downtown bank. Two community members gave unplanned testimony about the seizures of their homes by predatory lenders.

A city councilor who belongs to my union (IUE-CWA Local 201, the largest in the council) spoke about the impact of foreclosures on his neighborhood. A worker who had organized the local wastewater treatment plant spoke of management’s campaign of intimidation and firings.

The goal, in the words of council organizer Rosa Blumenfeld, was to reframe EFCA as a fight for the community and working people in general, not as a payback to a “special interest”—us, the unions. Boston television and the local Spanish-language papers covered the protest.

Lynn, an old mill town of 95,000 people 16 miles north of Boston, is the site of the longest continuous large-scale manufacturing in the United States. The shoe industry began here in the 1830s, overlapping in the 20th century with General Electric’s production of aircraft engines. GE still makes them here in a plant with more than 2,000 Local 201 members. The town is changing as it becomes home to Dominicans and Guatemalans, but also Russians, Africans, and Cambodians.

SENDING DOWN ROOTS

The rally was preceded by weeks of coalition meetings, where the common program of protest against foreclosures and for EFCA was worked out together. The lines separating us are not sharp: union members are losing homes and community members can see the benefit of organizing unions.

The roots of the alliance go back much further. Years ago the North Shore Labor Council made a strategic decision to build an alliance with community and faith-based groups. The Council wanted to tie together largely white union members and the fast-growing pro-union (but often non-union) immigrant communities. We took on practical work:

• A dozen years ago unions started a program to train new machinists, working with the Essex County Community Organization, a church- and temple-based coalition. While other job-training programs were shutting down, ours trained and placed some 180 machinists.

• Electoral and legislative work with a largely Latino voter empowerment group—housed at the Local 201 hall—led to strategy discussions on the electoral front. When the local Democratic Party didn’t support the Obama campaign early on, Local 201 opened its phone lines to the Lynn for Obama activists, and the close relationship has continued as the Obama group morphed into Lynn for Change after the campaign.

• Two years ago the school employees union, AFSCME Local 1736, lent critical leadership and an extraordinary member mobilization to the election of Maria Carrasco to the school board. White union members campaigned with her in white neighborhoods to give her easier access to their neighbors. Carrasco is the only person of color to hold an elected position in Lynn, which is only about half white. She has become a staunch voice for both the unions and Lynn’s communities of color, recently attending an AFL-CIO Central Labor Council training conference and chairing the Bank of America rally.

The Council rejects the “lowest common denominator” approach, preferring to address tough issues, provide education, and build an increasing level of political unity.

The Council sponsors occasional films and speakers, including a visit by progressive Senator Jorge Robledo from Colombia. Last summer 15 union and community leaders held a successful study group on corporate globalization (or neoliberalism). Bilingual readings and a popular education approach were used.

Union workers whose forefathers immigrated from Ireland and Italy described the Lynn that their parents or great-grandparents found upon arrival. Then immigrants from the Dominican Republic described what Lynn was like when they got there in recent decades. The discussion drew a sharp contrast between pre- and post-1980s Lynn. The negative impact of privatization, deregulation, free trade, and union-bashing on the lives of working people here was very clear.

EDUCATION AND POLITICS

The purpose was both to educate participants on what we are up against and to weld a closer unity among the leaders of the different working-class organizations, to better withstand inevitable stress between us in the future.

Such stresses are addressed. Immigrants who are union members, unaccustomed to legalistic grievance procedures to handle work problems, grow frustrated. Trusted union allies try to help get issues resolved.

In the run-up to the Bank of America protest, it became clear that some older union members bought into the right-wing populist argument that poor workers—especially Blacks and Latinos—brought on the economic crisis by taking home loans they couldn’t afford. Their bumper stickers (“honk if I am paying your mortgage”) dot Lynn.

We take responsibility to challenge these ideas. We explain to members that financial firms packaging and reselling home loans changed the mortgage industry. We put on an education program by Labor Notes on the causes of the financial crisis: lax financial regulation, stagnant wages, huge corporate debt. Member Tom O’Shea wrote articles in the Local 201 News like “Why I Should Care about Someone Else’s Mortgage.” Nothing was swept under the rug. The resistance died down.

In a small council with limited resources, doing one thing means not doing something else. Less attention has been paid to municipal elections in other towns, and the Council’s activist base among more conservative local unions is not what it should be. We don’t accept these weaknesses as permanent.

In the short term, the right choices resulted in a successful protest. In the long term, we intend to redefine what the labor movement is all about.

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Jeff Crosby is president of the North Shore Labor Council

Taking a Contract Campaign Public

— Carol Lambiase

As town leaders in Wallingford, Connecticut, grudgingly lined up to approve health care benefits for the school district’s paraprofessionals, they complained they felt browbeaten into taking their toughest vote ever.

They didn’t mean to, but the city officials were acknowledging the effectiveness of a public campaign built by the paraprofessionals before and after their contract expiration last June.

The school district’s 190 “paras” had never received health benefits. In previous negotiations, the issue had divided the membership, because a majority received health benefits through their spouses and supported larger wage increases instead. But after their union affiliated with the United Electrical Workers (UE), a contract survey revealed that more than half the members rated health insurance the most important issue in upcoming negotiations.

Health benefits would run the city a million dollars a year, making a public campaign necessary to build support and convince the Board of Education.

Over the years the role of school paraprofessionals has changed dramatically. Paras now provide frontline support enabling the inclusion of children with special needs in public schools, and provide individualized attention in reading, math, and science. Paras are overwhelmingly women, and not surprisingly, pay and benefits have not kept up with the leap in responsibilities and expectations.

Union leaders began to gather information about how the lack of health insurance affected members. While the contract didn’t expire until June 2008, in the fall of 2007 lunchtime meetings were held at all 13 schools in the district, and paras without health benefits were asked to talk. Some said they used their entire paycheck to pay for insurance. For others it meant going without or going deeply into debt. Their stories were moving and helped to build support among paras who already had health benefits.

The next step was to publicize the stories. In the past negotiations had always taken place behind closed doors, and at first members were reluctant to put themselves before the public. But union leaders kept emphasizing that getting health benefits required a public campaign.

GET THE WORD OUT

The union contacted local videographers working with a statewide health care advocacy group, who volunteered to film interviews. As word spread, more and more paras agreed to be interviewed on film.

After 17 interviews were completed, a short video was distributed to the paras and politicians, and went up on YouTube (search “Wallingford Paras”). Paras talked to local newspapers and one ran the YouTube link on its front page. The local community news channel aired the video continuously.

By January 2008, building reps were holding strategy meetings to bring community support to the campaign. A petition was developed and paras began approaching teachers, parents, and local residents. Hardly anyone refused to sign the petition, and paras learned that they had a lot more support than they had thought.

At one strategy meeting, paras decided to hold a public hearing, and had local groups help recruit prominent members of the community to form a panel and hear testimony.

Paras mobilized members to attend and to bring desserts. The hearing was attended by 150 people, far more than had ever attended any local union event. When the panel issued its findings on the need for health insurance, paras delivered them personally to school board members.

Paras continued to circulate petitions, attend Board of Education meetings, and approach members outside of meetings.

DON’T GAG NEGOTIATIONS

Negotiations began in May. In the past there had been a gag rule in place during bargaining, but UE does not agree to gag rules. For the first time, members were invited to sit in during negotiations. There were regular reports back to the membership.

Open negotiations greatly increased members’ activity. Members wrote letters to the editor, wore stickers, made signs, and took to the streets, picketing before and after work in downtown Wallingford.

Paras filled the room at a Board of Education meeting in November and their children spoke during the public comments period. Letters from parents were presented.

Finally, after six months of negotiations, the Board of Ed proposed to phase-in health benefits. The contract was ratified overwhelmingly and the benefits will begin July 1. While not everything the union wanted, the deal has the district picking up 50 percent of the premium in the first year, increasing each year until it reaches 80 percent. Despite the downturn in the economy, town leaders funded the contract.

The struggle transformed the local, whose president, Annie MacDonald, reports that members used to ask what they got for their dues.

“Now today, we have members who are willing to actively stand up for their rights and are not afraid to speak out for what they believe in,” she said.

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Carol Lambiase ia a UE International Representative.

A Contract Campaign Across Unions

— Doug Swanson

As Wisconsin faces a nearly $6 billion budget deficit, state employee unions are determined to make sure the crisis isn’t “solved” on our backs. All union contracts with the state will expire June 30. As we strategize, we’re remembering our successful campaign—“A Deal’s a Deal”—from 2003.

In February 2003 a joint committee of the Wisconsin legislature refused to approve 16 agreements that had been ratified by the members of six state employees’ unions. Over the years, state employees had consistently been used as punching bags by many of the legislators holding the contracts hostage.

For years they had told citizens that high taxes were the fault of state employees, ignoring the fact that the employees implemented programs created by the legislators themselves. The unions needed to build support not just for the contracts but for the state workers who provided valued services.

‘A DEAL’S A DEAL’

The unions knew they needed a message that was short and clear. “A Deal’s a Deal!” was born. It didn’t matter whether you liked unions or state employees—everyone understood that a deal’s a deal.

If the politicians were allowed to dishonor an agreement negotiated with their employees, what would they back out of next? It was a message adaptable to any environment or audience.

The campaign depended on four factors: mobilized members; consistent individual efforts; intensive education of and pressure on legislators; and support from the public and the media.

To mobilize members statewide and in many different bargaining units, the unions used cross-union meetings. At that time most of the unions—American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin (AFT-W), National Education Association, Service Employees (SEIU), AFSCME, and the building trades—did not work well together. But through this crisis, walls came down and coalitions were built.

If the politicians were allowed to dishonor an agreement negotiated with their employees, what would they back out of next?

In buildings where members of multiple bargaining units worked, cross-union “brown bag” meetings were held and all members were encouraged to attend. Members would wear buttons in solidarity and share information from their locals and other state employee groups.

With each two-week cycle, the number of meetings grew as more members became involved. Flyers gave updates on the campaign and laid out what was coming next. They were easily distributed to members who didn’t come. AFT-W prepared a recording on an 800 number for an “update of the day.”

“A Deal’s a Deal” posters went up in work sites, and more than one were seen facing the state capitol building.

At the local Labor Temple in Madison, the state capital, ad hoc meetings were called every four to six weeks where anyone could talk about what was and was not being done.

The unions held rallies and vigils at the capitol building over lunch hours, organized through e-mails and the 800 number. AFSCME held rallies at prisons outside of Madison as well.

The unions created “union bucks” for members to pass out when they shopped or to enclose when they paid their bills. These were slips of paper about the size of a dollar bill, with a message on the front about the value state employees provided to the community and the Wisconsin economy.

The reverse was blank, and members were encouraged to write personal notes about their jobs. Members passed out the union bucks by the thousands.

One member wrote to each of the car dealers in his area detailing the age and model of his car. He said he had planned to replace his old car with the raise he would have received if the legislature had approved his contract.

His creativity spurred others to write to resorts and recreation centers in the districts where some legislative leaders lived.

EDUCATING LEGISLATORS

It was a challenge to educate new legislators on the valuable contributions of state employees, on how collective bargaining works, and on why contracts could not be changed once ratified. Members sent letters and e-mails and made calls, but more effective were face-to-face meetings, back at the district offices and at the capitol.

The campaign bought radio ads on the “A Deal’s a Deal” theme, and members wrote letters to the editor, articulating how unfair their contracts were when compared to the raises politicians were receiving.

If the politicians were allowed to bargain in bad faith, they argued, the government’s credibility would be called into question. These letters led to meetings with editorial boards from major papers around the state and drew significant attention to the campaign.

In May the contracts were sent back to the joint committee, unmodified. They went through the Assembly and the Senate and were finally signed by the governor.

The lasting effect of “A Deal’s A Deal” was the coalition built among the unions. Six years later, the coalition that the employer calls “the Gang of 18” still meets monthly.

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Doug Swanson is a staff representative for AFT-Wisconsin.

How Republic Workers Occupied Their Plant

— Leah Fried

December 5 was to be the last day of work at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago. But managers soon realized that workers would not go quietly: they had voted to occupy the factory.

Members of United Electrical Workers (UE) Local 1110, they’d made plans to scatter throughout the plant, chain themselves to machines, and risk arrest. This is the story of how they did it.

The occupation that won workers their back pay and the admiration of union members around the world didn’t happen out of the blue. It was the culmination of years of struggle to build a democratic, fighting union able to take on the boss.

LAYING THE FOUNDATION

In early 2004 workers at Republic suffered under a gangster “union” that represented the boss more than the workers. Chicago is one of the last bastions of these old-school outfits that help companies keep workers down.

Workers had their wages frozen at $8 an hour for three years and had seen hundreds of their co-workers fired for no good reason. Discrimination, unfair treatment, and low wages were the hallmark of their former union, Novelty and Production Workers Local 16. So workers sought a change.

First they approached several worker centers, which arranged a meeting with UE organizers. Workers were impressed with UE’s record of democratic, aggressive unionism. In November 2004 they organized an election, joined UE, and went on to win their best contract ever.

In the contract fight of 2005, workers regularly wore UE buttons and stickers with contract demands. They organized marches to the boss’s office, practiced picketing, and voted and publicly vowed to strike if necessary. A contract was won on the eve of the planned strike, with raises of $1.75 immediately and improvements to working conditions and benefits. This struggle set the tone for years to come.

Unity, however, wasn’t automatic. Democratic unionism doesn’t exist without some growing pains.

Republic workers are a diverse workforce: 80 percent Latino, 20 percent Black, and 25 percent women. Hotly contested elections for stewards and officers, intense debate, divisions based on race or gender—all took place in this local.

Leaders had to work hard to build black-brown unity, overcome factionalism, and be willing to lose some debates (such as one over a dues increase) in order to create a local in which all the workers felt ownership.

Some leaders of the occupation had campaigned against each other in elections and each had their own following. But in the end, the workers were able to come together every time they needed to fight the boss.

UE had also been dedicated to building alliances in the community and the labor movement. Years of work to forge links with worker centers, religious groups, community organizations, and immigrants rights organizations laid the base for solidarity.

Rank-and-file members’ longstanding participation in solidarity activities, Jobs with Justice, and immigrant rights marches in Chicago helped local leaders get to know UE better. And regular participation in national political action helped lawmakers know UE as well.

PLANNING AHEAD

UE began planning for a possible plant occupation in November, when machinery started disappearing from the plant. Local leaders were prepared for the worst-case scenarios.

We bought chains with locks and organized a core group committed to civil disobedience if necessary. We knew it might come down to getting arrested. Workers understood they had to keep the company’s assets from leaving the factory.

As workers met again and again to talk over what might happen and organize for a fight, we developed a strategy that focused on Bank of America. The bank, which had just received $25 billion in bailout funds, would decide whether Republic would continue to receive financing.

UE reached out to allies and elected officials to mobilize public pressure on the bank, including a big picket of its offices in Chicago two days before the occupation. Members of Congress, most significantly Representative Luis Gutierrez, pressed the bank to negotiate with the union.

The occupation was launched after the company didn’t show up to a meeting with the bank and UE. Workers came to their last day of work and decided unanimously not to leave until their demands were met: vacation pay, 60 days’ severance as the law required, and two months’ health insurance.

The company was informed of the workers’ vote to occupy the factory. They knew they faced more than 200 angry and organized workers who were not about to leave quietly.

Management called the police, but at the same time our longstanding allies mobilized hundreds of supporters, via urgent alerts and phone calls, to come to the plant.

By this time the press had become a steady presence. The idea of the whole world seeing 200 workers dragged out by the cops in front of a supportive crowd rallying outside the factory—it all helped the company decide not to fight the union.

The police left, and the chains stayed in their bags. The workers had taken the plant.

As word of the factory takeover spread, solidarity started pouring in, from unions and community, religious, immigrant rights, and civil rights organizations. The messages visitors left on posters in the plant lobby, the donations, and letters from all over the world were key in strengthening the workers’ resolve.

But most important was the unity of the workers, who despite their differences, rose to the occasion and showed incredible strength.

The day the occupation began the local executive board and stewards organized their co-workers into three shifts, round the clock. UE organizers also took shifts (although those tended to last 20 hours).

Rules were agreed upon and posted in the cafeteria: No alcohol, smoking, or drugs. Non-UE members, unless immediate family, were not allowed onto the factory floor.

Committees for welcoming and security at the door, clean-up, food, and patrols to keep the assets safe were staffed in eight-hour shifts. At the beginning of each shift all the workers and organizers would meet to give updates, take volunteers for each committee, and review what would happen that day.

Workers kept busy with rallies and press interviews outside the plant in addition to their committee responsibilities. Children accompanied their parents, doing homework and playing amid the adults’ work. Donated food, blankets, and two TVs (one for news, the other for sports) were shared equally by all.

After six long days, the lead committee made up of shop leaders and UE reps came back with a settlement that workers voted enthusiastically to accept. We had won all our demands and then some.

Now, we are working to reopen the factory with all the workers back on the job. But we know that something beyond jobs or money owed has been won. We have inspired millions to know that the world is what we fight to make it, that we can win.

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Leah Fried is a UE organizer.

For information about the UE workers' nationwide "Resistance and Recovery Tour", visit http://labornotes.org/republictour