All across the union movement, unions are tackling the problem of low or falling membership in their industries - and the difficulties that presents for winning improvements for workers. Nowhere is the problem more acute than in the construction industry, where union density dropped by half in 30 years. The Building and Construction Trades knew reversing that trend and rebuilding construction union strength would take a tough, big response. Today, they're working together to make it happen.

The key, they're finding, may be multitrade organizing, an ambitious plan to organize construction workers - from brick masons to carpenters to laborers to plumbers - in an entire market through a joint campaign by all 15 of the building trades unions. In early 1997, the building trades launched a pilot organizing campaign in Las Vegas, BTOP (Building Trades Organizing Project). Two years later, membership in building and construction trade unions in Las Vegas is up by 7,000 - 35 percent. And while unions say they learned a lot that can improve future efforts, increased membership already has brought about better results at the bargaining table and the ballot box, according to Bob Ozinga, the Las Vegas BTOP organizing director. So far, more than 300 new Las Vegas contractors and subcontractors have signed collective bargaining agreements.

And as membership increases, union political influence grows. In the 1998 elections, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., was re-elected by 5,000 votes, a margin he said resulted from the building trades support and the unions' returned strength in numbers.

The union difference
Julio Garcia knows the difference a stronger union movement makes. Now a member of Plasterers' and Cement Masons' Local 797, Garcia is earning more than $23 an hour, $6 more in pay and $7 more in benefits than he made working the same job for a nonunion company. The money is a big help in supporting his family; he has two young children and one on the way. But Garcia says the most important thing about belonging to a union is that "they appreciate what you do."

"When you work nonunion, they treat us like animals. When you work union, they treat us the way we ought to be treated."

This past July, Garcia, 22, and his two brothers were among 130 workers who walked out to protest nonunion Kukurin Concrete's unfair labor practices. When some of his co-workers returned to work, Garcia refused. "I wanted to go union. I told them I would make this company go union by myself." He volunteered to work 18 hours a day to organize. He even brought his children, now 3 years old and 10 months old, to the job site, hoping that one day they would understand how important having a union is in their lives. Now working for a union firm, Lehrer McGovern Bovis, Garcia says, "Whatever I lost during the strike, I won back when I got the chance to join the union."

A strategic partnership
With many distinct unions representing two or more trades and a highly skilled workforce, the construction industry is complex and diverse, says Robert Georgine, president of the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department. It is not unusual for 20 contractors and subcontractors to work on one construction site.

"Construction workers constantly find themselves working in close proximity to and needing to communicate with workers from other trades," Georgine says. "The rationale for multi-trade organizing is therefore both practical and strategic: Practical, because multi-trade organizing reflects what our industry looks like in the field; strategic, because it allows us to organize on a scale to win."

Multitrade organizing promotes solidarity and that, in turn, helps unions increase political and collective bargaining influence and stimulates organizing training, says Laborers President Arthur Coia. When unions are solid and united, combining their resources for a common goal, nonunion workers and contractors "see we mean business," he says. Employers and politicians understand they are dealing with many unions united in a common cause.

Unions also learn successful strategies from each other in multitrade organizing campaigns, says Coia, who co-chairs the AFL-CIO's Organizing Committee.

Iron Workers President Jake West says projects like the one in Las Vegas are "damned important" to the labor movement. "There's not another group of unions organizing this way. You have 15 different unions with a common cause. This is the best opportunity to get all the building trades unions working together."

Changing to organize
In the 1960s, more than 40 percent of the construction industry was union. Today, building trades unions represent 17.8 percent of the workforce. The decline resulted from several factors. Periodic recessions intensified competition and enabled nonunion operations to secure footholds in traditionally strong union markets. In many of the recent construction recessions, building trades unions lost one out of three jobs; in the recoveries that followed, they gained one out of nine new jobs.

The construction unions also suffered because of the hostile legal and political environment that made it easier for companies to EURdouble-breast" (in which companies with a union contract create a nonunion subsidiary to avoid hiring union workers) or to abandon union contracts altogether.

Corporations shifted construction work from the more densely organized Northeast to the less-unionized South and Southwest, where many states have so-called right-to-work laws. At the same time, large corporate construction clients launched a successful "open shop" movement that weakened union influence.

To combat these forces, building trades unions began to emphasize organizing and to remove internal barriers to organizing. More than some 150,000 members were trained over 10 years through the COMET (Construction Organizing Membership Education Training) program, launched by the Electrical Workers in 1988. COMET demonstrates to rank-and-file construction workers the importance and benefits of organizing to build membership support for and participation in organizing.

Armed with the knowledge of organizing's importance, COMET participants returned to their locals and formed a nucleus of support for changing to organize. Unions experimented with diverse organizing tactics. As a result, building trades membership rose by 86,000 in 1996 and 73,000 in 1997, an increase of 9.5 percent and 7.3 percent, respectively. With an increase in total construction employment factored in, union density rose 0.8 percent in 1996 and 0.1 percent in 1997.

A history of working together
In the 1890s, the Carpenters led the movement for the eight-hour day, but all the construction unions were involved, says Jeff Grabelsky, director of the Cornell University Construction Industry Program. The latest move toward multi-trade organizing began in the 1980s, he adds, because individual unions rediscovered they could not affect standards or gain significant membership by organizing one employer at a time.

With 4 million construction workers still unorganized in the early 1990s, the building trades recognized the need to step up their tactics. In an open shop environment, organizing one site at a time was not producing enough results to stem the decline in market density. When one shop was organized and a collective bargaining agreement signed, its nonunion competitors, which paid lower wages and provided few benefits, would bid lower and get the contracts.

One solution was Las Vegas BTOP. This is not a new idea in building trades organizing, says Grabelsky. Although individual unions organized within their own crafts, the most dramatic gains in membership have occurred when construction unions organized across an industry.

Multitrade organizing works
By the 1990s, the famous Las Vegas Strip was booming. Casinos, hotels and new homes were sprouting up across the city, increasing demand for skilled labor. Building on the strong construction trades presence in the city and good labor--management relations, BTOP launched a large and visible organizing campaign that garnered strong support from the local construction unions and the community. About 65 organizers - 20 from the building trades international unions, 10 from the BCTD and 30 to 35 from local unions - worked up to 15 hours a day, contacting the nonunion workers on the job at dawn or during house calls at night. The face-to-face contact allowed the organizers to establish credibility and create a bond with workers. Each worker's name was placed in a database for education and mobilization.

Organizers learned, Ozinga says, that nonunion workers were as concerned about dignity on the job as bread-and-butter issues of pay and benefits. "These guys wanted basic justice, wanting to feel respected, to feel that they count, that they are valued as human beings."

Workers began to mobilize. By mid-1998, hundreds of unorganized commercial and residential concrete workers were demonstrating against unfair labor practices and unfair working conditions and were demanding their right to organize. Simultaneously, unorganized roofers and concrete workers began organizing in their shops. In June, the workers started to strike. "That really shook the industry. Traditionally, companies associated strikes with unions, and here you have unorganized workers walking out," Ozinga says. By July, 500 nonunion construction workers were on strike.

The workers decided to escalate the fight and began holding rallies and candlelight vigils to dramatize their plight. Local religious leaders joined the pickets. Then the workers decided to hold sit-downs at the worksites. This led to civil disobedience and arrests, but it got the companies' attention. Some of those employers now have signed collective bargaining agreements, while others significantly have diminished their presence in the market, he says.

To Mike Sullivan, president of the Sheet Metal Workers, BTOP demonstrates how crucial multi-trade organizing is to success. "Organizing is the foundation of our union. Projects like BTOP develop relationships between the crafts for a common goal," he says.

Mike Monroe, president of the Painters and Allied Trades, agrees. "You can't maintain any of your programs if you don't organize," he says. "The trades are so dependent on each other on a job, it was a natural move to join together to organize."

Several key lessons can be learned from the BTOP experience, Ozinga says. First, a successful drive must be based in the workforce. Although the organizers planted the seeds, the workers set the tone and drove the actions that led to recognition.

Second, the campaign must include all the building trades unions. The trades and the work they do are so connected that one union cannot organize workers without affecting the others. Last, a strategic effort must be marketwide, not one employer at a time. "There are over 200,000 contractors in the United States; most of them are small, employing 10 to 20 people. You can't organize them one by one," he says.

Building on multitrade action
In the year ahead, multitrade organizing will move to other areas. Washington State, with its active Trade Organizers of Puget Sound (TOPS), is a possiblility. The Seattle-area council has embraced the "Milestones to Organizing" program, a systematic approach developed by the BCTD for local building trades councils to plan and implement multitrade, marketwide workforce organizing campaigns.

To accomplish these goals, local unions prepare for organizing by educating workers about the need to organize, researching the economic structure of the local construction market and understanding important job site issues for nonunion workers.

Pointing to a $300,000 fund established for organizing, Jack Gilchrist, executive secretary of the Seattle-King County Building Trades Council, says the local unions are committed to organizing. All the TOPS members, including Gilchrist, volunteer to work as organizers. "If union leadership shows it's committed to organizing, others will follow," he says.

The commitment is showing progress. About 1,000 workers have signed pledge cards to help organize. "The rank and file is revved up and ready to go," Gilchrist says, and adds that volunteers have contacted more than 600 nonunion workers.

Seattle is in the midst of a construction boom. "This boom is expected to last five to 10 years. If you don't use these years to organize, the contractors will take us out. I look at this as live or die."

As West says, "If we don't organize, we're going out of business. If we have a concentrated effort, it will have a bearing on our membership. Organizing is our future."

This article is reprinted from the June issue of America@Work magazine