Faced with higher business and political hostility to workers and organizing, 150 top union organizers will gather in Washington Jan. 10-11 to discuss new tactics and methods for convincing workers to join unions.

The summit includes a new Paul Wellstone Award, in honor of the public official 'who has been most supportive of organizing.' It is named for the late DFL senator from Minnesota who was killed in a plane crash Oct. 25.

In terms of organizing, 'We know our way out of the swamp,' says new AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff, who will lead the conference. But it's a matter, he adds, of getting everyone on board.

'The list of unions that are changing their focus' to organizing as the top priority 'is growing all the time,' but it's not complete, he admits.

'It's always hard to change resources in a union. And in some, it requires a culture shift from a focus on your present members to a focus on organizing non-members.'

Enormous challenge
The challenge facing Acuff and his colleagues is enormous. Just to keep its membership at present levels, the AFL-CIO needs to organize approximately 400,000 new members every year, to offset retirements, illegal firings and layoffs.

And the federation's top leaders set an ambitious goal - but not a date to achieve it - of organizing 1 million new members a year. In contrast, the federation reports organizing 230,231 new members in 2002, as of Dec. 20.

In addition, the new National Labor Relations Board, with two of its three sitting members named by President George W. Bush, has started reversing lower-level decisions citing companies for labor law-breaking.

Faced with all that and more, Acuff and his colleagues have their work cut out for them, he said in a telephone interview.

Experience since the AFL-CIO made organizing a top priority, five years ago 'has taught us that American labor laws don't provide workers with the right to organize, and that the solution to that problem requires both short-term and long-term perspective and changes,' he said.

The short-term perspective revolves around new ways to organize outside the slow, business-friendly NLRB process.

Company neutrality
One way is for unions established in one section of a firm - such as at a telecom company - to negotiate for company neutrality and card-check recognition in future organizing drives. The Communications Workers, UAW and UNITE have been in the forefront of such card-check recognition, Acuff said. That's how UAW built from its base in four Johnson Controls, Inc., plants, to card-check recognition in all of the auto parts supplier's factories.

'Where employers have agreed to card check, it's been extremely successful--and generally a neutrality agreement comes with it,' Acuff notes. 'But we also have to think about other opportunities for organizing leverage.'

They include:

• The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees' decision to enter negotiations between a city and a developer for a new hotel - before construction even starts. Typically, construction unions get involved in such talks, seeking agreements to cover the whole job site. But HERE goes to the two sides and lobbies for card-check recognition for workers at the new hotel, once it is built.
• Organizing international pressure and solidarity to get a multinational corporation to order its U.S. subsidiaries to follow U.S. labor law. Acuff cited UNITE and its lobbying to get the foreign owners of Brylane, Inc., an Indianapolis mail order catalogue firm, to obey labor law. A majority of Brylane workers signed cards by late 2001. And PACE linked up with Taiwanese workers to pressure the overseas owners of Continental Carbon, Inc., to obey labor and environmental laws at Continental's Ponca City, Okla., plant.
• Avoiding management's captive-audience meetings and constant surveillance at job sites - two features of organizing drives. That's where door-to-door shoe leather work, home visits and the Internet come in, Acuff says. 'It takes organizing off the company's turf,' he notes.

But all those are short-term methods. The long-term solution must change the political climate to aid the right to organize, Acuff points out. That means political action.

It was political action, he noted, that elected the state legislators and governors in California, Washington and elsewhere who legalized county home health care agencies. Those agencies then became employers and thousands of previously unprotected home health care workers became 'employees' organizable under labor law, because now they have employers to negotiate with.

The Service Employees and AFSCME have since organized more than 100,000 home health care workers in California, Washington, Illinois and Wisconsin combined.

It is not so much the specifics of that California political campaign that matter, Acuff notes, as it is 'a way of thinking' that boosts the right to organize.

The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees followed that pattern in Washington, D.C. HERE and the local Chamber of Commerce pushed legislation through the city council mandating that any hotel developer who receives at least $1 million in city economic aid must forge peaceful agreements with unions on such issues as organizing - n advance.

Mark Gruenberg writes for Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.

For more information

Visit the national AFL-CIO website: www.aflcio.org