Union Friday

Let’s start with the local news:

• At Harvard, the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) has begun a “Right to Organize Campaign”.  The campaign requests that Harvard only do business with companies which take a neutral position on union organizing.  These neutrality agreements were central to one of last year’s major victory, the organizing of 5,000 janitors in Houston within SEIU, and are key to CWA’s success in organizing workers at Cingular.

  SLAM is also requesting that Harvard demand AlliedBarton Security offer “card check neutrality” to its workers.  Card check agreements provide that the company will recognize a bargaining unit if a majority of eligible workers sign cards indicating their willingness to join a union.  Consequently, the union can organize a one-on-one campaign, rather than battle a company’s anti-union propaganda campaign.  Presumably, this demand is meant to ally with SEIU’s campaign to organize Boston-area security guards.

  SLAM has also attached a controversial plank to its request letter, asking Harvard to refuse to offer Coca Cola products on campus, and divest its share of Coca Cola, until Coca Cola adopts a human rights code of conduct (presumably including organizing rights).  The Harvard Democrats signed on to the letter, although not without some fairly serious debate – apparently most of it targeted at this provision.

  Harvard students have always been on the forefront of student-labor action.  Five years ago, the Harvard Living Wage campaign awoke the nation to the problem of low wages, at Harvard but also at other wealthy private institutions, by sitting a month-long sit-in at the college’s main administration building.  Harvard eventually agreed to a living wage for its employees.

• The Teamsters are protesting recent contract proposals from the Cambridge Housing Authority.  At issue are several provisions which severely restrict traditional rights of union members: CHA managers would have the power to require overtime and subcontract out certain jobs.  Union members would lose the right to investigate greivances (they would have to obtain written permission to do so on work time), and the right to set pay increases.  John Murphy, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 122, rightly claims that these provisions make the contract meaningless.

  Behind the scenes, this battle pits the CHA against several city councillors, including Mayor Ken Reeves, Brian Murphy, and Marjorie Decker, all of whom are sympathetic to the union’s protests.  CHA is under new management as of 2004, when former Executive Director Daniel Wuenschel retired.  The union has been working without a contract since the last one, negotiated under Wuenschel, expired.

  I’m not yet sure how this situation will move forward – I’m not entirely familiar with the levers of pressure on the CHA – but presumably having three city councillors on the Teamster’s side is a good start.  I hope that the other progressive councillors, especially Denise Simmons (who DFA Cambridge endorsed last fall), join the first three in supporting the Teamsters.

And now, for the national.  There have been some major developments at the AFL-CIO this week, presumably the result of competition from the Change to Win coalition.

• The AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Teachers have created a new partnership.  NEA chapters will now be able to join AFL-CIO local labor councils in “solidarity charters”, while the NEA remains independent.  This move is apparently an extension of last fall’s action on behalf of the AFL-CIO, to allow Change to Win union locals to join AFL-CIO union locals inside of local labor councils.

  I’m curious to see what the long-term effect of these solidarity charters will be.  More cohesive political action?  More resources and coordinated campaigns for union organizing?  It’s hard to say, but it’s certainly a development worth watching.

  What is particularly interesting is that not very long ago, AFL-CIO reported that it would stop allowing outside unions to join its local labor councils (in mid-January, I think).  At the time, many thought that this move was targeted at the Laborers International Union, which had just left the AFL-CIO’s Building Trades Council.  There seems to be an interesting double-standard at play here, and unfortunately my instincts tell me that all of the monkeying with the solidarity charter concept amounts to an effort to improve the bottom line in the federation’s budget.

• Two new Industry Coordinating Councils are almost ready to launch at the AFL-CIO – Arts, Entertainment and Media, and State and Local Governments.

  I am very excited by these developments.  Perhaps the key reason why Change to Win separated from AFL-CIO last summer was the lack of an industry-wide approach to organizing.  Workers across an industry tend to face the same challenges, so collaboration makes sense.  Moreover, industry-wide collaboration is an effective way to fight the trend toward conglomeration in the corporate sector.

  Organizing in media and in government should prove for some very interesting development in future years, as these two sectors are among the most political industries.  Government in particular has proven a fertile ground for labor organizing over the past decade or so, because governments tend to be less likely to be hostile to union organizing efforts.  Hopefully consolidating strength in this area will provide the AFL-CIO with the additional resources it needs to re-establish itself in other industries where organizing has been more difficult lately.

Finally, although it’s not exactly news, I encourage you to read Reflections on a Four-Year Labor Strike, a diary at DailyKos which made the rounds this week.  It’s a great illustration of the power of labor unions to permanently alter the lives of workers and their families.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first installment of Union Friday.  If you like what you see, let me know and I’ll try to make this a recurring series.

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