SEIU’s been facing an increasing amount of scrutiny from the press and from the left lately for its unconventional approach to bargaining to organize. This has been prompted in large part by the California Nurses Association’s controversial decision to intervene in a carefully negotiated and long-planned “neutrality” organizing campaign by SEIU in Ohio, and SEIU’s shockingly violent response at the 2008 Labor Notes conference. In the midst of this controversy, the Wall Street Journal reports details of some of these “secret organizing deals.” The website requires subscription, so I’ve posted relevant quotes below:
Two of the nation’s largest labor unions have struck confidential agreements with large employers that give the companies the right to designate which of their locations, and how many workers, the unions can seek to organize.The agreements are raising questions about union transparency and workers’ rights. A summary document put together by the unions says it is critical to the success of the partnership “that we honor the confidentiality and not publicly disclose the existence of these agreements.” That includes not disclosing them to union members.
[snip]
The agreements reached with Sodexho and Compass in 2005 give the companies “the right to designate the sites” where unions may try to organize workers, according to a confidential summary of the agreements reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. The companies wouldn’t comment on how locations were selected for organizing.
The agreements, which expire at then end of 2008, stipulate the number of employees that the unions can try to organize: 11,000 Sodexho workers and 20,000 Compass workers.
The unions gave up the right to strike and to post derogatory language about the companies on bulletin boards. With Compass, the unions agreed to these restrictions “anywhere in the world.” In exchange, the companies agree not to oppose union organizing at the designated locations.
But limits are also set. “Local unions are not free to engage in organizing activities at any Compass or Sodexho locations unless the sites have been designated,” says the confidential summary.
Mr. Stern said that if workers wanted to join a union at a location the companies had ruled out, having these agreements would enable a union to negotiate on the matter. “If workers want a union we can discuss that,” he said. “Trust me, a lot more workers are coming in than being excluded by the agreement.”
[snip]
The agreements enable the unions to organize workers through a simple card-signing process in which the companies agree to remain neutral, rather than a secret-ballot election. The companies agree to provide the unions with lists of employees and access to workers. The unions give up the ability to strike and agree that they will present issues before a labor-management committee before engaging in leafleting or rallies.
These organizing deals need to be put into the context of the bloody war most employers will fight against a unionization drive, that results, for instance, one in five union activists being fired for union activity. There’s lots of material on the web about how nasty the fight can get and how few true protections workers have these days, so I assume anybody reading my website is familiar with this.
One of the main reasons that employers fight organizing drives so viciously is that with unionization of private sector firms hovering around eight percent, a union contract really can affect a firm’s competitiveness. As traditional organizing tactics have failed to bring employers to the table, unions have relied increasingly on huge (and hugely embarrassing) P.R. and community campaigns to force employers to recognize a union and agree to a contract. Smart employers have begun to take themselves out of the fight by signing the kinds of deals profiled in the WSJ piece. I don’t have any theoretical opposition to these kinds of agreements, and for the most part I think it’s a smart way for union’s to marshall their resources against the truly intransigent employers and to increase density for future bargaining.
The problem that I do have with SEIU’s application of this strategy is that the future always gets further and further away. As noted in the article, the “no strike / no disparagement / no organize” clauses of these agreements have expiration dates. As long as they are relatively brief, workers aren’t really losing much. A bottom up organizing campaign at any worksite with more than 1000 employees can often take two years or more anyhow. If the workers are impatient, the union can potentially re-negotiate the neutrality deal to incorporate a hot shop. Failing that, the workers are free to organize with a different union (although, without neutrality, good luck to them).
Without the ability to strike, unions are only able to win modest wage and benefits improvements and very little in terms of the “work rules” that make the biggest impact on the quality of one’s working life. As long as we’re talking about a two or three year period that allows the union to get its foot in the door at one employer while fighting to drag his main competitors to the table in order to bargain for greater gains at all of the employers in the next contract cycle, what’s the problem? The problem comes from these agreements being stretched out for longer and longer – seven or eight years in some cases – while the union fetishizes “density” at the expense of meaningful contractual gains for the new members it has organized. SEIU, I’m sure, is not unaware of this conflict. In my brief stint as an SEIU organizer three years ago, I worked on a home care organizing campaign that went down in flames. Part of the reason was that some of the employees, who make so little that they work for two or three agencies at the same time – already were SEIU members at their other jobs. They voted as a bloc against the union, in part because they hasn’t felt that being in the union had made an impressionable difference in their lives.
This problem is compounded by SEIU’s reorganization of smaller locals into giant “megalocals.” SEIU is ostensibly aping the structure of the giant corporations it goes up against to better marshall resources against them. Obviously, however, this means a significant curtailing of local union democracy and naturally serves to minimize voices of dissent. Andy Stern and Dennis Rivera, who both had to run insurgent campaigns in order to “take back” their unions, should be more sensitive to this problem. Speaking cynically, perhaps they are all too sensitive to it. Andy Stern aside, neutrality deals such as these should not be dismissed out of hand by trade union activists. They are a good idea, but anyone negotiating such deals necessarily walks a fine line between density and democracy.