Organizing Unions in the New Economy

By New Economy Information Service, July 29, 1999

http://www.newecon.org/organizing7-29-99.html

Is there a New Economy which is significantly changing the nature of work? If so, are trade unions adapting their structures and strategies to provide what workers want and need? These were the questions discussed at a forum held on July 29, 1999, led by three prominent and successful trade union organizing directors: Larry Cohen of the Communication Workers of America, Phil Kugler of the American Federation of Teachers and Jeff Hermanson of the Carpenters Union. The forum was held in Washington, DC, and was sponsored by the New Economy Information Service and the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). Panelists and discussion participants debated the need for unions to build on human and social capital, expand worker choice, and create multi-employer representation. The discussion, including the disagreements, are essential reading for those concerned about how the New Economy is affecting workers and the future of democracy.

David Jessup, Executive Director of the New Economy Information Service

Larry Cohen, Executive Vice President of the Communication Workers of America

Phil Kugler, Organizing Director of the American Federation of Teachers

Jeff Hermanson, former Organizing Director of UNITE, currently on special assignment with the Carpenters Union in Las Vegas, Nevada

Discussion (inluding Eugenia Kemble, Joel Freedman, Larry Liles, Seymour Martin Lipset, Bruce Herman, and Lou Nayman)

Concluding Remarks:

Larry Cohen

Phil Kugler

Jeff Hermanson

Related Documents:

Teachers Advocate "New Paradigm" Bargaining to Improve Education, By Sandra Feldman, July 9, 1999

Congress Releases American Worker Project, POSTED: September 15, 1999

What's New About New Economy Unionism? By Stephen Herzenberg, January 22, 1999


Is there a New Economy which is significantly changing the nature of work? If so, are trade unions adapting their structures and strategies to provide what workers want and need? These were the questions discussed at a Forum on July 29, 1999, led by three prominent and successful trade union organizing directors. The Forum was held in Washington, DC, and was sponsored by the New Economy Information Service and the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). The forum was moderated by David Jessup, Executive Director of the New Economy Information Service (NEIS). Prior to the discussion, a number of articles and books were circulated to participants dealing with topics related to the New Economy and Unionism:

David Jessup, New Economy Information Service

For many commentators, it is evident we are in the midst of an economic change as profound as the industrial revolution more than a century ago. And depending on the point of view, the results are both good and bad. For many, the key change is the development of Information Technology. This has radically changed the nature of work skills, putting a premium on knowledge as a key factor of production and, in recent years, accelerating productivity growth.

Equally important from the point of view of workers is the explosion of competitive pressures brought on by globalization, privatization and deregulation. New Economy competition brings out the best and worst in companies. The "low-roaders" cut wages, relocate production to repressive, low-wage countries, replace permanent workers with temps to avoid paying benefits, downgrade health and safety protections, or engage in unfair trading practices. To minimize this destructive competition, unions are trying to develop new rules for global worker rights and capital flows. In addition to these long-term strategies, however, workers need some new ways of coping with these changes in the here-and-now.

In this regard it is important to note that even high road competition can be unsettling for workers. Companies that invest in employee training, innovation, quality improvements, horizontal restructuring, teamwork, customer satisfaction, productivity enhancements, and research and development are also merging, downsizing, contracting out, dispersing production, and networking through rapidly changing joint ventures and partnerships. What this continuous churning means for workers, including the fabled "knowledge workers," is tremendous instability and uncertainty. The idea of a permanent job or a fixed skill or craft may be things of the past. There is also a growing disconnect between the employer one works for and the enterprise one works in. This has led a number of researchers and commentators to suggest that workers in the new economy have a new set of wants and needs. That is, in addition to the traditional wages, benefits and grievance procedures, it is claimed that New Economy workers want:

1. New forms of security. Instead of job security, workers want help in moving from job to job without losing their place on the ladder of advancement. They want job placement services, portable health and pension benefits, wage insurance, and transition assistance, to minimize the risks of ever-changing employment.

2. Intellectual capital. Continuous skill upgrades, lifelong learning, certifications, setting professional standards, developing an occupational ethos, increasing their capacity for innovation and problem solving, becoming entrepreneurial in their approach to work.

3. Social capital. Ability to work in teams, provide customer satisfaction, and cooperate to solve problems within horizontally-organized work culture enterprises, and to form occupational networks, connections and "reputation" with others outside the enterprise. These are sometimes known as the "soft skills."

4. Cooperative work relations. Surveys indicate workers seek greater voice and participation in contributing to the mission of the enterprise. They resent arbitrary rules and bureaucratic rigidity, and prefer settings of social equality and mutual respect where they are valued for their contribution and innovation. They want greater independent voice, but in cooperation with management, not in conflict. An increasing number of jobs (but by no means all) are seen as a vehicle for self-fulfillment.

5. Work-family balance. The pressures of holding multiple jobs in a family and in working longer and longer hours has created a time bind. More workers are seeking greater flexibility to meet family needs.

To the extent this assessment of worker needs is valid, the question is, How can such needs be met? Is it a matter of "individualistic bootstrapping," perhaps with the aid of government programs and business initiatives? Or can workers collectively organize to gain these objectives? Are unions destined to disappear like the dinosaur of the industrial age, or can they adapt to the New Economy? To paraphrase Penn Kemble's point in his recent Musings on Guild Unionism, if knowledge has become a more important factor of production, if intellectual capital is as important as financial and physical capital, can workers collectively become the suppliers of that knowledge so as to extract a higher return?

Many of the commentators on this topic believe the answer is yes. They talk about union involvement in training programs in order to provide a reliable and ever-improving pool of responsible and skilled labor to employers who must increasingly compete for this in order to make money. They talk about extending the building trades model of apprenticeship programs and hiring hall services to other sectors of the workforce. They highlight new multi-employer forms of representation, as with the Pennsylvania child care workers and the California home-care workers. They speak of union involvement in certification and setting of professional standards, and a resurrection of guild unionism. They advocate a more cooperative form of union-management relationship, rather than the adversarial model. And they point to brand new forms of worker organization, such as Working Today and union acquisition or creation of temp agencies.

It's one thing to write about these issues, and quite another to encounter them on the ground. That is why we have asked a number of prominent and successful practitioners of the art of organizing to comment on these notions of New Economy Unionism. As one wit once said, nothing concentrates the mind so much as the prospect of an NLRB election.

I'm especially eager to hear how these practitioners grapple with the central dilemma posed in Richard Freeman and Joel Rogers' book, What Workers Want. Workers apparently want an independent voice on the job, and they are dissatisfied with employer run participation schemes. But they want to cooperate with management and avoid conflict. How do you organize workers under such circumstances?

Larry Cohen, Communication Workers of America

Both Jeff Hermanson and Phil Kugler have pioneered new and innovative approaches to organizing. About five years ago I observed Jeff's work with immigrant worker centers in New York City in what was, at the time, probably the most significant break from traditional organizing. The focus was not on "winning an election to get recognition," but rather on individual workers in the clothing industry. The focus was on work from their perspective, and how to build groups out of that.

I have also learned a lot from Phil Kugler about how to build worker organizations that aren't necessarily rooted in collective bargaining. Our work in CWA has benefited from the example of the AFT, particularly in the South. Again, those efforts were very much focused on individual teachers, then networks of teachers that might lead to more traditional unions with collective bargaining, as in Dallas, Texas.

Many of the ideas we are working on in CWA come from others, particularly from Phil and Jeff, so it's interesting that we have been brought together for this discussion.

I want to talk about four situations where we have tried to build worker organizations in the so-called New Economy, meaning new, information-dense, high-tech firms and new growth centers of existing firms. These include Microsoft, Amazon.com, IBM in mid-state New York, and the wireless telephone industry.

This last situation is more traditional, but it is as important for us as any of the others. Until recently, workers involved in the wide variety of technologies that provide PCS or cellular phones were unorganized in the U.S. Our organizing effort is designed to extend traditional collective bargaining at companies where we already have a significant membership. This would include companies like SBC, with 80,000 CWA members at Southwestern Bell and Pacific Bell. Cellular One is SBC's national brand for wireless. Also in this category are AT&T Wireless, Bell Atlantic Mobile, and others. Although the work force in this industry is young and new, all working with technology that didn't exist 10 years ago, our organizing effort is focused on collective bargaining since we have large memberships with bargaining at each firm.

The main barrier to extending collective bargaining is not so much the character of the work force but the resistance of the employer. But change is also important for unions. New forms of organization need to embody new types of looking at work.

But I would not agree with Freeman and Rogers. [What Workers Want, by Richard Freeman and Joel Rogers]. They conclude that workers themselves want a different form of organization. But 33% of the workers in their surveys want collective bargaining and would support a union where they work. Everybody here knows that if 33% of the work force had collective bargaining, the whole political economy of the United States would be turned on its head. The U.S. would be more like Canada or northern Europe. Health care would be universalized, and we'd have child care, and we wouldn't have a debate on Social Security.

In general, I would reject the argument that workers in the new economy and the service sector -- at least the information side of the service sector -- want something different from what unions offer. In the past two years, five thousand workers in wireless telephone organized and joined CWA, mostly through card check or expedited elections. This demonstrates that even on the cutting edge of the new work force, organizing for collective bargaining remains a viable option. The difference is that in those organizing efforts, management mostly stayed out of it.

The other three examples I wish to discuss may appear to contradict this assertion. But the difference in organizing stems from the conflict that employers often introduce into organizing. We need to minimize that conflict and focus solely on the employer. This is the approach we are taking at Microsoft and Amazon.com. Employers view any independent worker organization as a threat, so in response they often create conflict, separating out those workers who are trying to organize and then attacking those workers.

There is a line in a song by The Who that goes, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." In a similar vein we might say, "meet the new economy, same as the old economy," because the bosses' attitudes about worker organization are, if anything, more harsh today. They are not gentler, they are not based on cooperation. They're based on the sense that control is primary.

Even at Microsoft, control is important, especially total control of workers' time. Physically, Microsoft doesn't look like an old knitting mill in the 19th Century. There are soccer fields and free drinks. But the system of control is just as strong. Around a third of the professional work force at Microsoft is hired through one of 20 "temporary" agencies. This is true even if you work full time. After the workers are selected, they are assigned to one of these agencies, and the agency becomes the employer. These agency employees are denoted by an orange badge, as compared to the blue badge "Microsoft people." And then there's the brown badge, for vendors - food service workers hired through Marriott, shuttle bus drivers, and others. (CWA recently organized the shuttle bus drivers at Microsoft.)

Everybody gets free drinks at Microsoft: blue, orange and brown badges. When you go into a building at Microsoft, you see cases of drinks, in glass cases. It looks like a 7-11 or a WaWa, except there is no cashier. You can have as many canned drinks as you want, in these beautiful cafeterias, no matter what color of badge. But, you can only play soccer on their field if you have a blue badge. You can only get benefits and stock options if you have a blue badge. This is the new caste system.

At Microsoft, some workers are trying to build an organization inside a $500 billion corporation. Microsoft's enormous market capitalization matters because it's the source of their economic power. It's about eight times the size of General Motors in terms of capitalization, even though there are only 25,000 people who work there. It's three times the size of AT&T, even though Microsoft has 1/6 the number of employees. Capitalization is the single best measurement of Microsoft's ability to impact the world economy and impact society, because it can acquire other companies with those shares; and Microsoft does that every day.