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The
state of the union
Membership
is down, but unions still battle over jobs and benefits
Related
link:
On-site day care helps company
recruit and retain workers
by
John Peters
For
Virginia Business
October 2003
It
came at a time when people needed a diversion, during
the dog days of summer when Virginia’s sweltering
humidity sends people inside and the world seems to
slow down. A good old-fashioned labor slugfest: unionized
telephone operators and technicians, 78,000 strong from
Virginia to Maine, threatened to strike if regional
telephone giant Verizon didn’t agree to a new contract
guaranteeing job security. The union members picketed,
took out full-page newspaper ads and, in a new public
relations twist, created a Web site urging customers
to switch from Verizon to AT&T if the contract negotiations
broke down.
Verizon
fought back. It mounted its own newspaper campaign,
showing warm photos of families, dogs and babies. The
tagline proclaimed: “We don’t just take care
of our employees. We take care of their families.”
The ad’s copy touted the company’s dental
and vision care and fully paid pension benefit. Verizon
executives challenged the Web site tactic, arguing that
if customers switched, the company would lose revenues
and the very jobs the union was trying to protect. Meanwhile,
just in case the unions carried out their threat, Verizon
lined up thousands of replacement workers, seeking to
avoid a huge backlog in repairs and new orders like
the one following an 18-day strike back in 2000.
Federal
mediators jumped in and by September the company averted
a strike by reaching a tentative contract agreement.
It includes fully paid health care premiums for both
active workers and retirees and job-security safeguards
that limit Verizon’s ability to layoff or transfer
unionized workers even though the company wanted more
flexibility to cut its work force because of declines
in land-based phone service. The tradeoff? The provisions
don’t apply to new hires.
So,
did Virginia’s 7,000 members of the Communication
Workers of America and the International Brotherhood
of Electrical Workers come out ahead? The union thinks
so. Besides job security, it walked away with wage increases
of 8 percent over five years — less than the 12
percent increase granted in 2000 — but still not
a bad deal considering the economy’s uncertainty.
Roy Shumaker, president of CWA Local 2201 in Richmond,
says the negotiations show that organized labor remains
strong in Virginia, a somewhat rosy assessment considering
a drop in union membership and a global marketplace
that is gobbling up union jobs. In fact, in spite of
the hard-won Verizon victory, some argue that organized
labor is losing ground in Virginia, for reasons both
specific to the state — there’s still a right-to-work
law on the books — and beyond Virginia’s control.
Today’s
global market and overseas trade agreements that take
jobs offshore where labor is cheap is arguably causing
more harm to labor unions than Virginia’s insistence
on giving employees the right to work, meaning if they
work in a union shop, they don’t have to join or
pay dues to the union, a statute that has always made
the commonwealth a battleground for organized labor.
Historically state economic development officials have
trumpeted Virginia’s right-to-work status to prospective
employers, making the state fertile ground for firms
looking to flee the organized labor strongholds of the
Northeast and Midwest. The increasing automation of
manufacturing shops over the past two decades, which
in some cases has cut jobs by one-half to two-thirds
while increasing productivity, has made union membership
shrink even further.
In
addition, the North American Free Trade Agreement and
economic globalization have shut down many of the state’s
manufacturing firms, taking a bite out of organized
labor. “We have 2.3 million industrial jobs (nationwide)
that are lost and gone forever under the current Bush
(administration),” says Daniel LeBlanc, Virginia
AFL-CIO president. “We’ve lost nearly 3 million
jobs total, and that doesn’t bode well for working
families. … It’s pretty difficult to compete
against China, which has very limited labor costs.”
Even prison labor in the United States is finding it
hard to compete in the global economy, according to
LeBlanc. He said some work that was once done by Maryland
inmates for the Maryland Department of Tourism is now
being done in Pakistan.
In
this climate organized labor’s share of the state’s
labor force has dropped by half since 1983, when 11.7
percent of the state’s work force was unionized.
By the end of 2002 only 5.9 percent, or 189,000 of the
state’s roughly 3.2 million workers, were union
members. Although the 2003 figure represents a slight
increase over 2001, the long-term trend is downward.
Virginia’s figures mirror the trend nationwide,
in which union membership has dropped from 20.1 percent
in 1983 to 13.2 percent in 2002, or 16.1 million workers.
Last year, according to the U. S. Department of Labor,
union membership rates declined in 33 states and increased
in 15 states. Only four states have membership rates
of more than 20 percent: New York, Hawaii, Alaska and
Michigan.
The
pending disappearance of a Southside Virginia union
is a case study of the effects of the global marketplace
on Virginia’s labor movement. The Union of Needletrades,
Industrial and Textile Employees in 1996 won a bitter,
decade-long battle to unionize workers at textile manufacturing
giant Tultex Corp.’s plants in Martinsville and
Henry County. It was one of the union’s biggest
additions in years — giving it a foothold in Southside’s
manufacturing-rich climate.
Less
than four years later, though, Tultex and its 2,000
union jobs were gone. The company closed shop in early
2000 and was liquidated through bankruptcy. Other area
textile and furniture firms followed suit, either going
out of business or closing plants and transferring jobs
overseas. The textile employees union lost its last
Henry County-based jobs earlier this year when Pillowtex
filed Chapter 7 petitions to liquidate, sending nearly
1,000 workers to the unemployment line.
Still,
as the contract fight at Verizon showed, organized labor
isn’t dead. Had all the union members in CWA, the
IBEW and the AFL-CIO from across the country switched
phone companies — and if they had convinced members
of the public to do so — Verizon stood to lose
revenues, as much as $800 million, the unions say. The
company declined to comment on that figure, pointing
out that its employees receive discounted local phone
service, so their phone bills likely would have gone
up if they switched. Above all, what the Verizon contract
dispute showed, is that the changing marketplace is
a central issue in how companies deal with unions. For
instance, Verizon officials say that its landline-based
business division, where more than 7,000 unionized Virginia
workers are employed, is shrinking while its wireless
business, home to 4,500 non-union workers in Virginia,
is growing. That’s why it wanted to be able to
transfer employees. The concessions the company did
get include some increases in employee copays and deductibles
in health care plans — representing about a half
a billion dollars in savings to Verizon over the life
of the contract — and the right to fire future
hires. All in all, it appeared satisfied with the agreement,
which still must be ratified. “Our contract with
the CWA will help Verizon remain competitive during
these very challenging times. It allows Verizon to better
control its costs, while at the same time being fair
to our employees. Verizon will continue to pay wages
and benefits that are among the best in the industry.
The five-year agreement, which is unprecedented, provides
stability and certainty for both the company and our
employees,” says Paul Miller, a Verizon spokesman.
Shumaker
says the agreement proves that organized labor is ready
to work with companies. “The union kept its job
security and benefits for its active jobs and retirees,
and the company has the ability to grow its employee
base and the ability to lay off the new people,”
he says. To belong to the union, CWA members pay 2.25
hours of their monthly salary as dues. The dues give
them representation and, in Shumaker’s estimation,
considerably better pay and benefits than they’d
have otherwise. He points to former non-union GTE workers
in Warsaw, Tappahannock and Gloucester, who have seen
wages double in the three years since GTE and Bell Atlantic
became Verizon.
Yet
Gary Shoesmith, an economist at North Carolina State
University, says continuing globalization means unions
will find it increasingly difficult to maintain a foothold.
“I don’t see how a union could help someone,
other than price themselves right out of a job, unless
the union can work with a company to try to preserve
jobs by decreasing costs, by encouraging companies to
automate. Even then, the union would be helping to decrease
the number of workers. In that case, what purpose is
the union really serving? It’s a tough situation
for unions right now.”
So
tough that state economic development officials say
they don’t put as much emphasis on the state’s
right-to-work law when recruiting business. “In
the old days, I used to characterize the right-to-work
law like the old American Express ad, ‘I wouldn’t
leave home without it,’” says Hugh Keogh,
president of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce. “Twenty
years ago, or especially 30 years ago when most of the
business development was in manufacturing, it (Virginia’s
right-to-work status) was much more important than it
is today. Now, it’s not an especially compelling
factor.”
The
law doesn’t stop unions from expansion efforts.
“We are seeing the light of day on some expansion
in Hampton Roads, with an increase in productivity and
hiring there,” says LeBlanc. “The shipbuilding
industry is stable right now. … We just have to
get out our message that you’re a hell of a lot
better with union representation than without it.”
A
key audience for that message is younger workers, who
often know little about unions, Shumaker says. CWA has
hired two full-time organizers in Virginia in the past
three years to help it crack non-union companies and
reach younger workers. Currently, Shumaker says, CWA
is targeting Adelphia, Comcast, and even going into
smaller markets such as Martinsville, where it’s
targeting the local Sprint work force.
And
there’s always the tried and true tactic of trying
to elicit public pressure on business to prompt change.
Shumaker says the standoff with Verizon was primarily
over allowing union workers from the company’s
shrinking land-line based business to have first dibs
on jobs in the non-unionized wireless division, thus
increasing the union’s influence in this growing
field. Ultimately, he says, the ability of unions to
survive will come down to analyzing what’s happening
in the marketplace and developing new strategies for
unions to help workers. “The numbers are down,”
concedes Shumaker. “If you don’t see it you’re
crazy or blind. We need to get out there and organize
the unorganized. If we don’t, we’re going
to shrink and we’re not going to have a union anymore.”
For
about another year the union has the ability to go into
Verizon wireless operations and unionize without working
through the National Labor Relations Board and an expensive
election. Prospective union members can simply sign
up to unionize — called a card-check. But that
right expires in 2004. Labor leaders are looking to
card-checks and other strategies to help organized labor
regain some of the numbers it has lost over the past
decades. Otherwise, the future could be bleak for unions
in Virginia.
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