With the presidential election over, labor will once again push organizing--hard.

And to that end, AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff plans new ways to raise the profile of organizing as an issue, involve rank-and-file union members in it, and get unions to undertake more, and more-comprehensive, strategic campaigns.

Efforts by Acuff and his counterparts at unions large and small--from internationals down to the local level--are needed. Unions now represent only one of every eight workers overall and one in 12 in the private sector.

Fifty years ago, when the AFL and CIO merged, unions represented almost one-third of all U.S. workers.

The decline accelerated since the late GOP President Ronald Reagan fired unionized air traffic controllers after they struck over safety issues in 1981.

And labor faces four more years of business and government ultra-hostility, and efforts to dismantle or destroy unions, now that George W. Bush won the White House.

One labor response, Acuff said in an interview with Press Associates Union News Service, will be to raise public pressure for congressional passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

That bill, authored by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and based on legislation by the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., would level the playing field in organizing drives.

Its provisions include equal access to worksites, outlawing "captive audience" management-run anti-union meetings, hefty penalties for labor law-breaking, better labor law enforcement and mandatory arbitration of first contracts where the two sides can't reach agreement.

Keeping organizing in the forefront
"We've got to continue to raise the issue of freedom to unionize," Acuff says. That doesn't just mean rounding up co-sponsors for the bill, but also getting the lawmakers--and other officials--into active front-line support of organizing drives.

"We'll ask them to do concrete things to help workers: Letters to employers" to bargain or recognize unions, attending rallies, even "marching on the boss," he says. "We have to drive the issue into the national political culture--and then connect it with national union organizing drives," he adds.

But politics isn't the only route to increasing organizing. Another--and it's one he says all unions must take--is to raise participation in organizing by their own rank-and-file members.

Those members, Acuff adds, are labor's most-underused and most-credible resource for organizing. "We have to build the capacity of unions" to train them for the task, he admits. "You can't have complete organizing without them," he says.

"But it's not that hard to motivate them, once they learn that union density equals bargaining power," in their industry or geographic area, Acuff notes. The catch, is to get members "to believe in their union" as CWA and UAW do, he says.

Debate on organizing strategies
Building organizing, or at least devoting more resources to it, is included in several of the AFL-CIO reorganization plans unions are offering. Both SEIU President Andrew Stern--who touched off the AFL-CIO revamp debate--and the Teamsters call for increasing money for organizing.

Stern wants national and local unions to devote a grand total, combined, of $2 billion to organizing--plus a separate $25 million campaign to expose and organize Wal-Mart, the nation's biggest, and virulently anti-union, retailer.

The Teamsters propose rebating half of any union's AFL-CIO dues to any union that devotes at least 10 percent of its revenue, or $2 million, whichever is greater, to strategic organizing with comprehensive plans that pass federation muster.

Acuff, meanwhile, concentrates on the nuts and bolts of increasing organizing capacity, working with unions ranging from the International Longshore and Warehouse Union to the Iron Workers to the Mine Workers to the Steel Workers on hiring new and energetic organizing directors, training members and constructing campaigns to take on large employers in their areas.

Considering alternatives
But at the same time, he adds, unions must push their organizing focus outside the National Labor Relations Board elections process, which labor views as too slow, too business-oriented and too delay-ridden to be effective.

That means emphasizing alternative ways to get recognition. They include card-check after employer neutrality pacts and enlisting the aid of foreign unions whose employers resist union drives in their U.S. subsidiaries.

"We have to develop global cooperation on organizing. More and more American enterprises are owned by Western European and Asian corporations," Acuff points out. Often those firms recognize workers' rights in their home countries, but not in the U.S.

PACE successfully used that contrast as part of its campaign to end a 3-1/2-year lockout of its 86 workers at Continental Carbon's plant in Ponca City, Okla. But Acuff says the international angle affects far-bigger unions and firms.

He cites the Service Employees' current drive to organize security personnel at Wackenhut and other big firms as an example. Several of those firms are foreign-owned.

Though there has been progress in increasing unions' organizing capacity, Acuff says not all unions achieved that goal. He rattles off the list of unions that were in the forefront of organizing five years ago--SEIU, HERE, UNITE, the Laborers, CWA and AFSCME, and that's it.

Now, he says, you can add the Steel Workers, Teamsters, the Roofers, the Teachers, IBEW, the Iron Workers, UAW, the Mine Workers, ILWU and GCIU "and the Machinists just devoted a big chunk of their budget to break new organizing ground."

That leaves yet another new task for Acuff and the Organizing Department he heads: "Bringing the whole labor movement to big fights that are greater than just one union."

"Right-to-work" battles
And with the anti-worker GOP in charge in Washington, many of those battles will be in state capitols and local city councils--and Acuff says labor must plan to work politically in those venues for the right to organize.

There, ironically, the Republican regimes may help union organizing, by trying to increase the number of right-to-work states. Right to work, which labor calls "right to work for less," bans union shop contracts. As a practical matter, it harms organizing drives and drives down wages and benefits.

But a GOP right-to-work campaign also drives up union political activism, Acuff says. "The best way to increase the percentage of union members who vote for pro-union candidates is for the Republicans to push right-to-work," he comments.

"We usually win those fights, and they pay off for us in the long run."

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