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NONUNION ORGANIZATIONS -
Vol. XVIII, No. 11 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. November 1995
1 Issue in Brief I News
NLRB Expands Jurisdiction Over Government Contractors
Union Corruption
From the Editor
How Unions Assess the Costs of Organizing
Preventive Tactics
IJsing Gain Sharing as a Union Prevention Device
Positive Discipline
Union Vulnerability Audit: Discipline
Campaign Workshop
Union Can Serenade Workers on Election Day
False In forma tion from Union
Union Tactics
Corporate Campaign Update
“Pushbutton” Unionism
Unions Argue for More Access
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Americans Support Stronger Labor Movement
In a recent random poll, a majority(58 percent) ofAmericans felt that the country would be better 13ff with a stronger labor movement. Only 27 percent believed that the c0untr.y would be better off with a weaker labor movement. In the survey of 1,010 aclults conducted for the Labor Research Association, 49 percent believed that unions have a positive effect on the country, while 37 percent thought that they have a negative effect. Nevertheless, how much organizing benefit can unions reap from these positive sentiments?
Certainly not as much as they would like until their standing in some of the other survey result:; improves. Only 19 percent of those surveyed said that unions are doing a good job of representing workers’ interests in Washington. Almost half the respondents believed that unions are either somewhat weak or verj weak.
Low- Wage Workers Increase Union Membership
After long periods of decline, the number of U.S. workers represented by unions actually increased 3 percent over the past two years to 16.7 million. Observers attribute much of the gain to two changes in union tactics: (1) devoting more money tci organizing and (2) targeting very low-paid service workers who, until recently, were largely ignored by unions.
In Baltimore, 4,000 mostly minimum wage workers employed by city service contractors votl3d to join a public-employees union. In July, 600 manual workers at a Morganton, North Carolina, poultry plant voted in a union. Low-wage workers are also organizing in the airline industry among the newer carriers that undercut major airlines’ fares (in part, by paying lower wages than their unionized competitors).
What’s Behind the Union Strategy? Unions are recruiting low-wage workers because of their membership
losses among employee; in the better paying industrial sectors, which has left unions searching for ways to bring in more members. The widening movement to target theae mostly service workers was inspired in large part by the success of the ten-year-old “Justice for Janitors” campaign of the Service Employees Intel-national Union (SEIU), which has organized 35,000 new members in 20 cities. A similar but less publicized SEIU campaign for home health care workers has brought in about the same number of new members. The Laborer:; International Union, which increased its national organizing budget from nothing two years ago to $5 million today, is among the unions now trying its own version of the SEIU strategy. The union is
0 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.