New strategies for union survival and revival

New Strategies for Union Survival and Revival

N A N C Y MILLS

AFL-CIO Working for America Institute, Washington, DC 20006

I. Introduction

The U.S. labor movement has been significantly more visible on the national scene over the last few years. A few high profile, victorious strikes and job actions (UPS, Boeing, and the United Airlines Pilots); a bolder, more effective political operation; and a sustained pause in membership decline has transformed "Labor's back!" from a wishful slogan to a statement of fact. Labor's new willingness and readiness to agitate and organize on the picket line, in the precinct halls and in the media on behalf of Amer- ica's working families is evident.

Some of these changes have been easy to discern: Labor's new solidarity, for example, has been actually visible. Picket lines and rallies more often are a kaleido- scope of different union colors than the single colored ones of yesterday. The same is true for both electoral campaigns and legislative battles. More solidly coordinated and more substantially financed labor activity in these arenas has effectively erased most of the inter-union tensions which weakened labor's political effectiveness just a few years ago.

What may not be so apparent, however, are some of the other recent changes in how the American trade union movement is renovating itself to meet the challenges that confront it in today's economy. These structural changes (as well as subtle changes in declared mission) hold tremendous potential for increasing labor's effectiveness on behalf of its members both in the workplace and in influencing the rules of the game in today's global economy.

A few examples may prove illuminating. The first is an example of how today's unions are overcoming their occasional parochialism and competition to gain greater power vis-a-vis a common employer. The second is of separate unions uniting through- out a sector in a particular geographic region in order to retain high-wage jobs in that area. The third example is of unions adopting a new lens through which to view their represented jurisdiction: a lens that alters their perspective of their responsibility in that jurisdiction. In all of these examples, restructuring of relationships among unions - - as well as with employers and community organizations - - has resulted in a new emphasis on, as well as new resources and new allies for, bringing new workers into the trade union movement.

Each of these examples functions in a different U.S. industrial sector: the first in health care, the second in manufacturing, and the third in the public sector. They involve

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different national unions in different organizational relationships in different parts of the country. As experiments, they are at different stages of development. Neverthe- less, despite these differences, they have significant similarities in their strategic objectives. What follows is an attempt to reveal the common promise and the common challenges of these experiments for the broader U.S. labor movement.

II. Example 1: The AFL-CIO Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions

Kaiser Permanente is the country's oldest and most highly unionized health mainte- nance organization (HMO). Serving 8 million Americans in twelve states and the Dis- trict of Columbia, Kaiser Permanente (K-P) employs over 90,000 people in hospitals, clinics, and administrative centers. Created originally with significant assistance from the U.S. labor movement in the mid 1900s, dozens of different unions since that time have represented thousands of different workers in hundreds of different classifications - - from housekeepers and food service workers to lab scientists and registered nurses. Workers' salaries range from $25,000 to over $100,000 a year.

The unions range in size from an 18,000-member multi-bargaining unit local in Northern California to a local in Texas with 150 workers in a single bargaining unit. Some of the bargaining units are comprised of a single job classification; others have dozens of classifications within the same bargaining unit.

After fifty years of "go-it-alone," uncoordinated, even competitive relations among all of the unions representing Kaiser Permanente employees, there is now a meaningful Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions which has transformed both those unions and the company while delivering substantial benefits for union members at K-E It's worth exploring some of the history that led to this remarkable development.

Good times and a successful company meant that unions and their members pros- pered even with an uncoordinated - - much less cooperative - - relationship among the unions. Kaiser workers belonging to one international union worked side by with union members from other international unions and the unions rarely, if ever, coordinated bargaining strategies or fully supported each other's struggles with the Company.

When the health care industry started facing both increased price pressures and increased HMO competition in the late 1980s, workers at Kaiser experienced a very different bargaining climate. Take-aways and layoffs led to conflict and strikes involving tens of thousands of workers. Nevertheless, even local unions in the same international union or in the same physical location failed to engage in true coordinated bargaining during this tough time, and rivalries among local and international unions were easily exploited by the Company.

After a decade of pitched battles, the unions were only sometimes holding their own. In 1995, after ten years of bloodletting, twenty-six local unions from seven AFL- CIO international unions (the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees [AFSCME]; the American Federation of Teachers [AFT]; the International Federation of Professional and Technical Employees [IFPTE], the Office and Profes-

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sional Employees International Union [OPEIU]; the Service Employees International Union [SEIU]; the United Food and Commercial Workers Union [UFCW]; and the United Steel Workers of America [USWA]) and one independent Association (the Kaiser Permanente Nurse Anesthetists Association) decided that they had no choice but to work together with a new level of unity and purpose. Together, the Coalition unions represent 63,000 of Kaiser's approximately 75,000 nonmanagerial work force.

Seven of the eight national organizations funded the multi-union coalition with close to half a million dollars a year to pay for Coalition staff and other Coalition expenses. The AFL-CIO also contributed staff and overhead to the Coalition and provided an important legitimate overarching umbrella for the various participating unions. With those clear signals from their national bodies, local unions too made significant commitments of time, money, and staff. That investment created additional pressure on the unions to make their investment "pay-off."

In the early years, the Coalition unions took very small steps to build their mutual trust and understanding. Gradually the unions developed a strategy on how to come together to engage Kaiser Permanente more powerfully.

The Coalition required that the key decision-makers in the locals serve and be present at the National Coalition Steering Committee. The union that was the biggest (representing over half of the Coalition's total union membership) didn't dominate the Coalition. Not only was the decision-making structured to allow the small unions to have a meaningful voice, but also the actual conduct of business was done in a way that respected the institutional needs and cultures of the various union participants. For example, ratification votes were conducted by secret ballot in some local unions and by an open show of hands in membership meetings in other local unions. In addition, the Coalition created a larger "advice and consent" body comprised of Kaiser employee union rank-and-file leaders to assure connection to, and buy-in from, the Kaiser union membership in the workplace. (Many of the local union leadership on the Steering Committee were not and had not been Kaiser employees.)

Together, the Steering Committee slowly began to define their common agenda and agree on the strategy that would assure that agenda's victory. This took a couple of years. Creating the common agenda was not a problem. Uniting around an effective strategy to deal with the Company was more difficult.

The coalition's first united strategic activity was to attempt to change the fundamental competitive strategy of K-E The new union coalition launched a public campaign to convince the company to stop trying to compete with other HMOs by slashing and burning and to start working with the unions to offer better care with a committed, involved, well-compensated work force. They proposed a K-P wide labor-management partnership with joint decision-making. And, after more than a year of public battles and private discussions, the company agreed. Together with the unprecedented national partnership on quality, efficiency, and marketing came a K-P commitment of neutrality and card-check union recognition procedures in heretofore nonrepresented units


of K-E The fundamental collective bargaining relationship of the various unions to the Company did not change at this stage, however.

Nevertheless, even the process for establishing the Partnership was done in a way that strengthened both the new relationship among the unions and between the union coalition and the Company. The Partnership Agreement was announced via telecon- ference to all the Coalition local unions simultaneously with a common message and the united recommendation of all the local union leadership. Separate local union rat- ifications followed this very public display of new union unity.

Creation of the Partnership moved the coalition to a new level of coordination and unity. The Partnership created an official, K-P recognized multi-union structure which had the responsibility and the authority to deal with the Company on Partnership-related matters. For the first time, the unions had to negotiate together with their common employer - - albeit not over wages, benefits, and working conditions. The process and experience of negotiating agreements with the Company on Partnership purview matters - - rather than on the issues deemed more critical to the membership such as wages and benefits - - provided a safe place for the unions to test their ability to work effectively together. For example, the unions had to consult each other when trying to solve a Partnership problem - - such as enforcing card check rules in an organizing campaign - - to ensure that all the interests of all the unions were satisfied.

During this stage, the Coalition unions experienced turnovers in both union and company leadership, reorganizations of both the company and the unions, and the con- tinuing struggle to gain legitimacy and structure for the Partnership. In each of those situations they came to an understanding and embarked on common tactical initiatives. They created a track record with each other personally and institutionally.

K-P also experienced dealing with the unions together for the first time, albeit on issues a few steps removed from those which most directly and immediately affected their cost structures.

Despite the lack of a united labor-relations structure, the Partnership delivered concrete victories for the unions during this period:

�9 In Berkeley, CA, management threatened to close an optical lab and eliminate about 100 union jobs. By creating a labor-management partnership at the lab, the unions were able to solve the financial problems, increase job satisfaction, and keep the lab open - - thereby saving jobs.

�9 The same approach greatly increased quality of life at call centers, where tradi- tionally draconian work rules have been eased and jointly designed reorganization has improved morale.

�9 In Baldwin Park, CA, an entirely new hospital was opened up in a record six months' time, with all procedures, equipment, budgeting and staffing created jointly by labor-management teams.

�9 As a result of the Partnership's neutrality and card-check recognition agreements, the unions targeted about 7,000 unorganized workers across the country. To date about 3,200 of them have been organized, and the rest of them are being actively organized now. All but two of the eight national unions have gained members.

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While the unions worked together with one another and the Company on Partner- ship-purview matters, on other more usual industrial relations matters, the Union Steer- ing Committee simply continued its information sharing. During this period many individual unions had minor or even major skirmishes with the Company - - many of which they deemed union defeats. Those experiences were shared and debriefed together. Eventually the unions agreed that the only way to get K-P to deal with its unions respect- fully was to wield a big stick and be willing and ready to use that stick if they had to. They also agreed that the only stick big enough to influence the mammoth KP was one which all Coalition unions would be holding and ready to wield together. The AFL- CIO Coalition of K-P unions was now strong enough to take on the Company over the traditional bread and butter issues deemed so critical to their members.

This recognition of the need for a more aggressive and more united strategy led the unions to their next significant decision: to come together and fundamentally change the way they dealt with the Company in contract negotiations. For half a century, the unions had placed their individual right and responsibility to represent their separate bargaining units over the potentially increased power and leverage of uniting with other unions. That approach had routinely led to management whipsawing and manipulat- ing unions against each other which in turn led to lots of finger-pointing about why members were not getting the kinds of contracts they wanted and deserved. Thus, the unions faced their biggest test when they prepared for a two-year period during which most of their contracts would expire.

After much hard work, soul-searching, and deliberation, the unions proposed single-table bargaining to the company. K-P initially refused. The Company during this period tried to wreck their unions' growing unity by inviting some unions to bargain early; only one union took the bait. After that display of solidarity and some persua- sive pressure, K-P agreed to an innovative bargaining model that put the 26 local unions at one table on national issues.

Clearly, in addition to the effectiveness of the unions' tactics, K-P had also come to recognize its self-interest in settling all the contracts at once and having longer peri- ods of sustained labor peace. The progress of the Partnership - - the very ability of the Partnership to transform Kaiser into the highest quality HMO provider and the undis- puted employer of choice - - was threatened by the specter of different contracts open- ing up every month and their accompanying contentiousness.

So, five years after the establishment of the AFL-CIO Coalition of Kaiser Per- manente unions, the Company and the Unions were ready to sit down and talk at one table about wages, benefits, and working conditions. Nevertheless, the decision to embark on a joint bargaining process was just another step in a long and difficult road. The logistical, structural and political hurdles were many and serious.

The unions had to decide how they would actually bargain together, how they would have common contract provisions, how local bargaining would unfold, etc. The Company as well, had to unite a disparate group of independent regional managers who faced significantly different local market conditions at one common human


resource and industrial relations table - - a formidable challenge. Luckily, both the unions and the Company had a bargaining safety net. They could each opt out. They could actually revert to their old ways of bargaining if the joint process didn't suc- ceed. The unions therefore were not under as much legal and membership pressure as might otherwise have been the case. Only two unions actually had their contracts open and these were RN units who already had significant bargaining leverage due to labor market shortages. The two largest Coalition locals' contracts were due to open later within the same time period.

Also, without a doubt, another advantage was that these were very mature collective bargaining agreements. K-P unions had been bargaining with the Company for almost 50 years in many areas with long, albeit stormy, relationships. The fact that workers had fairly decent standards to build on also helped set bargaining expecta- tions at reasonable levels - - always helpful in novel negotiating situations.

The Company and the unions opted for a mutual gains process and a very inclu- sive structure for the joint bargaining. It involved a large number of people (110 stew- ards and union leaders and another 110 operational managers and human resource managers) taking an open-ended approach to the various policy areas (i.e., wages, benefits, performance, work-life balance, etc.). The joint labor and management groups did this work all together across regions - - getting the Company to talk seriously about issues such as staffing, changing pensions, and changing the time-off program for the first time. These efforts alone represented major headway over previous frustrating single union attempts to engage the Company on these subjects.

Common Issues Bargaining - - despite fears to the contrary - - resulted in unions putting long-term interests above short-term interests. For example, the economic aspects of the settlements were slightly different for California locations compared to those regions outside of California (ROCs) due to differing Company financial and competitive situations. The ROC unions determined that in the long run it was better for them to stay with the Coalition than to demand complete wage parity at this time. In another example, although the unions representing service classifications are the largest by far in the coalition, they accepted wage increases which were higher for RN classifications than those for their own members. In the long run, the national contract and the increased power and leverage achieved by national bargaining was deemed more important than winning the exact same wage package for all Coalition union members.

The contract was a good one for union members:

�9 4 percent-plus wage increases; with 6 percent for RNs and related classifications;

�9 additional money, over and above the base wage, for workers to share in success if the company meets financial targets (targets that will be jointly set with the unions);

�9 many improvements in health benefits and pension benefits - - including new or improved coverage for dependents, domestic partners, prescription drugs, durable medical equipment, and more;

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�9 clear contractual agreements for joint decision making - - involving workers and their unions with an equal say to management's in staffing, budget, planning, finances, operations, etc. This higher level of Partnership will also now be supported by contributions from the Company to a Joint Trust, allowing the national unions to significantly reduce the amount of their financial contribution to the Part- nership aspects of the Coalition over time.

Every local union ratified the contract with higher than average voter turnout. Most unions reported ratification rates of around 85 percent to 95 percent, with only one union reporting a close vote.

Kaiser Permanente is now really on its way to becoming a different kind of company than it had been. It now deals with basic Industrial Relations issues in a coordinated national way. There are no more regional fiefdoms at K-P. The Company now makes labor relations and human resource decisions in a centralized, consistent way for all its locations.

The greater transformation is within and among the unions however. While preserving local union autonomy and local union culture and structures, 26 local unions from eight national unions came together to deal as one united force with their common employer. That transformation, while resource intensive at first, has proven to yield significantly increased rewards for K-P's unionized workers, their unions, and the patients they serve. And from now on in, the participating national unions' and the AFL-CIO's resource commitments can be redirected without threatening the continued viability of the Coalition.

What 's also significant about this development is how it reverses a trend that had developed over the last few decades - - a trend that broke up company-wide bargaining and pattern bargaining within an industrial sector in favor of more enterprise-based contracts. Recent national discussion of potential labor law reform has focused largely on proposed modifications of the National Labor Relations Act to encourage wider and more substantive worker involvement in managerial decision making in nonunion companies. Some policy makers and scholars in those discussions had taken as givens the wisdom of, and the inexorable trend towards, greater enterprise and plant autonomy in labor relations - - providing another reason for nonunion forms of employee repre- sentation. The AFL-CIO Coalition of Kaiser Permanente unions and the Company decided instead to centralize industrial relations and joint union-management decision- making on key business decisions while promoting rank-and-file union member and local management decision making at the enterprise level within parameters set by the national partners. Such a decision reveals an important more union-friendly alternative for encouraging worker involvement in heretofore managerial decision-making.

The unions are happy with the Coalition's work to date. They've taken major steps forward toward improving the work lives of their members at K-P while doing so in a way that expands their membership numbers and frees up resources for other union priorities. They realize however that they must continue to find ways to work together to secure and expand their gains at Kaiser Permanente. Their major challenges will


be: (1) the ability of the unions to continue to add value to K-P's efficiency and quality through the Partnership; (2) the process and commitment to organize K-P's low- wage competition in the HMO field; and (3) the replication of this kind of union coalition - - with or without the K-P type partnership - -wi th other shared employers in the rest of the health care industry. Whether these unions will aggressively pursue those three agendas at all, much less in the same kind of rational and mutually sup- portive way that they engaged K-P to date, is yet to be seen. Nevertheless, the future of K-P unionized workers and the unions that represent them looks a lot rosier than it looked five short years ago.

III. Example 2: The Wisconsin Industrial Union Project

The State of Wisconsin has long been a strong base for the U.S. labor movement. Union density was higher than the national average, and workers in Wisconsin generally enjoyed higher than U.S. average wages and benefits due to the upward pressures on compensation created by aggressive collective bargaining within the unionized sector. Just as in the rest of the country, until the second half of the 20th Century, union strength was largely concentrated in the manufacturing sector. The USWA, the United Auto Workers (UAW), the International Association of Machinists (IAM), and the Paper- workers (now Paper and Chemical Employees Union-PACE) all had (and still have relative to their overall memberships) substantial membership in Wisconsin.

But just as the 1980s sent the K-P unions reeling, so too did the 1970s and 1980s hit the WI manufacturing unions hard. Manufacturing plant closures, layoffs, and concessionary bargaining all led to dramatic losses in overall union membership and in reduced union morale in the state.

For a decade or so, the Wisconsin manufacturing unions' response was one primarily of blaming corporate greed spurred on by a "race to the bottom" approach to the globalization of trade and production. The unions bemoaned the lack of labor's national political clout and earnestly tried to beef up their congressional and political effectiveness at the same time they tried to keep up their members morale through aggressive contract and layoff fights. They saw little else they could do stem the tide of manufacturing union losses in the state.

Then new leadership within the State AFL-CIO in the mid-1990s brought these same manufacturing unions together to analyze and strategize together on what might be done to preserve manufacturing unionism in Wisconsin. They started by enlisting the Center on Wisconsin Strategies (COWS) at the University of Wisconsin to research just what the facts actually were about manufacturing in Wisconsin. To their surprise they found that rather than a decline in employment, manufacturing jobs in Wiscon- sin were growing! COWS identified significant growth in nonunion, low-wage manufacturing in the state. Wisconsin was de-unionizing more than de-industrializing.

That finding led to a variety of initiatives by these manufacturing unions. The two that this article will focus on are cooperative multi-union efforts to retain high-wage

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manufacturing in Wisconsin and to increase the frequency and the effectiveness of organizing of new manufacturing units in the state.

The high-wage manufacturing retention effort has a number of components: (a) legislative initiatives designed to direct public economic and work force development resources towards high-wage employers; (b) a multi-union and multi-employer employee recruitment and training partnership for high-wage manufacturers in the Greater Milwaukee area (the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership-WRTP); and, (c) efforts to assist high-wage employers with modernization and other production and marketing challenges.

Probably most successful to date is the WRTP and its relationship to the feder- ally sponsored Manufacturing Extension Program. Through a widespread survey of Wisconsin manufacturers, the unions identified new employee recruitment, training, and retention as a significant challenge for their own manufacturing employers. Not only was that challenge making it hard for their employers to meet production dead- lines, but it was also raising recruitment and training costs, increasing scrap production and other quality shortcomings and it was contributing to increased workers' compensations claims due to greater deployment of inexperienced staff. All of these consequences had significant adverse business effects in the newly competitive manufacturing environment.

These findings led the unions to approach high-wage manufacturing employers (union and nonunion) to deal together with these threats to their continued success in Wisconsin. WRTP grew from that outreach.

Funded by federal, state, local and philanthropic money, WRTP - - a joint employer and union tax-exempt organization - - has managed to fill participant companies' recruitment and training needs economically and successfully thereby reducing the unnecessary costs alluded to above. Labor is given much of the credit for these developments as WRTP is perceived as not only labor-supported but also labor led. Participating employers are grateful to WRTP for their new efficiency. Public work force development agencies and educational facilities are grateful for the swift and successful placement of their clients and students in family-supporting jobs. The representatives and leaders of disadvantaged communities within the Milwaukee area who have seen former welfare recipients more than double their average annual incomes through the WRTP programs are also newly appreciative of labor's commitment to increase and diversify access to the high-wage jobs they fought to create.

Another aspect of the WRTP work has been its cooperation with the State's admin- istration of the federal Manufacturing Extension Program (MEP). Wisconsin's labor movement won the designation of specific union liaison staff in order to assure that modernization and other manufacturing preservation efforts are substantially aimed at the high-wage (union) part of the sector in the state. Rather than bemoan the program's tendency to prop up just the low-wage marginal manufacturing companies as has been done in other states, WRTP and WI MEP has made it a conscious part of their strat-


egy to direct public resources to those companies who provide family-supporting wages to Wisconsin's workers.

It has worked. One unionized manufacturing plant was saved from an already- announced closing. An early-warning system developed in partnership with WI's many manufacturing unions has also resulted in the stabilization of employment among WRTP's member companies while average employment in non-WRTP manufacturing companies declined over the same period of time.

The joint organizing effort is also noteworthy. The Wisconsin Industrial Orga- nizing Campaign - - while not as broadly supported by the unions as is WRTP - - nevertheless represents an important coming together of significant Wisconsin manufacturing unions to face common challenges. The Wisconsin USWA, IAM, and Industrial Coun- cil of Carpenters have come together to research potential manufacturing organizing targets, to negotiate the assignment of those targets to one of the three participating unions, to develop more effective organizing techniques, and to support one another's organizing efforts in the State. Their national unions' commitments of leadership as well as local staff time and support for WIOC organizing campaigns has been matched by both the State AFL-CIO and the National AFL-CIO with donations of staff and overhead for the WIOC effort. Although the victories are still too few to crow about, the volume and incidence of manufacturing organizing activity in the state is already significantly increased. That alone reverses a trend that alarmed labor sympathizers in the U.S. The trade movement in this country won't grow if the unions don't try to organize. WI manufacturing unions are now trying, buoyed by their newfound unity and effectiveness in holding onto the units they currently have, and strengthened by the support of both their national unions and their labor federations.

There's still much to do to assure labor's future in Wisconsin. If the prevalence of high-wage jobs in the state's industrial sector doesn't grow, the unions and their partnering employers will probably lose the ability to persuade policy makers of the legitimate and overall wage-enhancing public purpose of supporting the high-wage segment of the industry. And if high-wage employment grows but unionization doesn't, we can predict that the strategies will change. And needless to say, no manner of efficiency and quality improvement will in the long run make up for the lack of a national policy aimed at retaining high-wage, value-added manufacturing in this country.

Training and modernization and quality improvement alone, even with trade reg- ulation and enforcement friendlier to America's manufacturing workers than that of today, won't assure a domestic manufacturing industry in these days of ever increasing global production, global markets, and global capital. Product and process innova- tion as well as new business and marketing strategies will have to surface more quickly and more pervasively in order to preserve high-wage manufacturing in the U.S. Find- ing and training workers in a tight labor market is just one small step compared to what's needed to retain high-wage (union) jobs in this country. WI's manufacturing unions will need to be thinking about the other ways to get their employers - - and their members - - to face up to the other changes they will have to make to secure their jobs and standards of living in the years to come.

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And lastly, these sectoral approaches to preserving and growing high-wage jobs in Wisconsin should be just as relevant to other unionized sectors in the state. Already the Wisconsin State Federation is introducing similar concepts to the health care and hospitality union leaders in the state. Time will tell whether those union leaders will choose to wait until they face the kind of precipitous decline that their brothers (for they are mostly brothers) faced in manufacturing before they choose to change union "business as usual" to secure their own and their members ' futures.

IV. Example 3: The Renovation o f the Public Sector Labor-Management Committee

Partnering with employers is not the new strategy that this article is showcasing. Sin- gle union partnerships with their employers have been around for quite a while - - usu- ally growing out of severe threats to employment security or living standards or as thinly veiled face-savers for concessionary contracts. In only a few situations, however, did those partnerships or institutionalized employer-union relationships involve more than one union or even less often extend beyond a single employer to an entire sector.

One of these rare sector-wide efforts was in the nation's public sector. America's public sector is its most unionized part of the economy. Almost 60 percent of public sector workers in the U.S. are collectively represented. Globalization of trade and production threatened the jobs and livelihoods of America's manufacturing workers. So too did the decline in private sector union density and the resulting disparity between unionized public workers' compensation and that of nonunion private sector workers help to fuel the anti-government, pro-privatization forces of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

That privatization challenge, coupled with the desire of public sector unions to showcase a less confrontational side in order to bolster their efforts to secure collective bargaining rights in many states which didn't yet have such enabling legislation, prompted the public sector unions to give birth to the State and Local Government Labor Management Committee (S&LGLMC) in the latter half of the 1980s.

The S&LGLMC was made up of representatives of almost all of the national unions which had members in the public sector (AFSCME, AFT, SEIU, the Laborers, the Police, Firefighters, and others) as well as representatives of the large public sector management associations such as the National Governors Association, the National Conference of Mayors, the National Association of Counties, the Association of Fire Chiefs, etc.

The S&LGLMC was housed in the offices of the Public Employee Department of the AFL-CIO and supported primarily through PED contributions of overhead together with grants and contracts with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Ser- vice. Its programs focused on advocating for labor management cooperation in the public sector and the sharing of best-process practices among union and management practitioners in government.

The closing of the Public Employee Department and a general withdrawal of both union and management investment in the Committee (with the exception of some activ-


ides among education unions and five of their school board employers) led to real uncer- tainty about the future of the Committee as the end of its funding cycle approached in mid- 1999.

The national AFL-CIO took this opportunity to explore with the present and past union participants in the Committee what kind, if any, joint labor-management process would be useful to their own institutional and membership needs. The result of that process was quite conclusive.

Public sector unions wanted, among some other important objectives, to showcase and to stimulate more examples of public sector workers, through their unions, promoting good government. They wanted less emphasis on the process of partnership and more emphasis on the results of improved public services for taxpayers, service recipients, and communities. And they wanted those efforts to be widely publicized both in order to encourage public sector policy makers and managers to embrace improvement through partnership as well as to associate the unions with improved public services in the eyes of the general public. The unions had determined that they needed allies in their own anti-privatization fights, their routine collective bargaining, and in their efforts to organize workers in other both public and private jurisdictions.

So, with these newly refined objectives in mind, the unions went to their management counterparts and sought agreement on a restructuring of the Committee and support for a new grant proposal to the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. As of this fall, the new Public Sector Labor Management Committee will be led by a larger joint Steering Committee (it used to have one management and one labor co- chair). The new Steering Committee is comprised of one labor representative and one management representative from each of four jurisdictions: State Government, Local Government, Education, and Public Safety. All but the Education jurisdiction are currently going about the task of identifying a public service delivery area which is primarily delivered in that jurisdiction for which they will work to create labor-management and potentially other stakeholder "communities of excellence." (Education is working to identify the best way to incorporate parent and community voice in their ongoing school improvement efforts.)

The notion is that in each of these national communities of excellence there will be at least one site wherein management and labor has worked together to improve the quality or efficiency of the public service, e.g., water treatment. There will also be two additional sites in the same service (in this example, water treatment departments or authorities in other municipalities) that are ready to work through a labor-management partnership to improve the quality or the efficiency of those services.

The "communities of excellence" will draw on research provided by Harvard Uni- versity about the appropriate quality and efficiency benchmarks for their identified service. They will attempt to define some common targets for such improvement. They will agree to report out their accomplishments to all interested stakeholders. And they will allow the PSLMC to promote their achievements and share their lessons both within their own service constituencies and to the broader public.

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The PSLMC has hired a new Executive Director to carry out these and other tasks. The unions and management in the Committee have indeed identified water treatment as one of the three service delivery areas that it wants to focus on. They are still in the process of deciding on the other two. The PSLMC is being housed at the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute (a labor affiliated, but independent, nonprofit organization) which is contributing some administrative services and overhead. The Commit- tee, together with Harvard University, and the Cascade Center at the University of Washington are also currently engaged in developing some additional funding strategies to expand the activities and the communications strategies for its work.

What's new here is both the focus on the specific content of the work rather than on the process of labor-management cooperation and the multi-union participation in the communities of excellence. Education and Public Safety labor and management have had an uneven but nevertheless long history of engagement on how best to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of their respective services. It is very new for industrial public sector unions to actively seek to "carve out" their various memberships into departmental or service delivery arenas - - especially for the purpose of influencing the nature and quality and cost-effectiveness of those services.

AFSCME, for example, the largest public sector U.S. union, has recently re-organized its Research Staff so that it has resident experts on the "business strategies and challenges" of particular public sector areas of service. So when the PSLMC looks at water treatment, for example, the AFSCME units will be supported by national union staff who specializes in water and waste water and sewage treatment "business" strategies and work processes. This is certainly a relatively new development for AFSCME which represents public employees in hundreds of public sector departments in state and local and regional governments and authorities. Such a move not only permits the union to engage more meaningfully in the public sector work redesign or quality improvement efforts, it also makes it easier for the union to represent and seek to represent workers in water, waste water treatment, or sewage treatment (and related busi- nesses) who may have already been privatized. SEIU had started to pro-actively organize privatized public sector workers in the early 1990s through a similar approach.

The multi-union approach to the communities of excellence provides a place for two or more unions that represent workers in the same service delivery to come together. These bi- or multi-lateral union efforts will differ from past ones. Previous coalition efforts focused on matters of public sector funding and/or general public sector labor relations. The PSLMC will engage the unions in providing joint leadership to their members on improving public services. Emphasizing their common challenges and their common strengths rather than their competition to become "THE" union of water treatment workers, the PSLMC gives the public sector unions a new basis for working together.

Again there are still many challenges for the PSLMC and for the public sector unions. Are the unions going to be able to sustain and spread their interest in improving the public services when and if privatization is not a threat to their members' job


security and quality of life? How will the PSLMC national union and management organizations build a stable funding base for this activity? (The management organizations are currently comprised of both unionized and nonunion public jurisdictions. To date they have been unwilling or unable to devote cash resources to the PSLMC.) And will this effort hold the same kind of promise for improved retention, represen- tational and organizing efforts that the K-P Coalition and the Wisconsin Industrial Union Project represents? Time will tell whether the new union unity on the PSLMC will translate into more effective and coordinated efforts in the vast array of private sector workplaces where the work closely approximates the work of the current public sector union members.

V. Common Elements among the Three Examples

As I mentioned, the circumstances and the players and the structures of these three cases differ significantly. Nevertheless there are some common elements which unite them and which may hint at the future of the U.S. labor movement. All three of these examples involve new forms of cooperation among and between unions in their efforts to better represent their current members. All three were motivated at least partially by a desire to increase union ability to organize the unorganized. All three received support from both national union organizations and from labor federations (in all three cases, the national AFL-CIO; in one, the State Federation as well). In all three cases as they involve unions in mature, high-wage sectors of the economy, an important aspect of the effort is demonstrating the added value to the employer's organization of working with (a) motivated, sophisticated labor organization(s). All three of these efforts rely on both in-kind or cash contributions from labor and management as well as either or both public sector or philanthropic funding.

These kinds of common elements are not purely accidental nor are they driven solely by changes in the external circumstances in which unions find themselves today. The decline of union density has been steady for decades. Union set-backs because of the emphasis on competition rather than on cooperation when they share common employers or common sectoral challenges has been going on for decades as well.

So what has changed? And why do we postulate that this "back-to-the-future" new cooperation to represent and organize workers in today's economy holds seeds of tomorrow's unions' metamorphosis?

One major change has been a change in labor's leadership - - not just at the Fed- eration level with the election of John J. Sweeney, Richard L. Trumka, and Linda Chavez-Thompson to head the AFL-CIO - - but also at the head of national unions and at the head of state federations. That new leadership has been willing to take much of the responsibility for reversing the course of labor's demise rather than denying it or primarily blaming outside forces. That leadership has looked for new and new-old ways to re-invigorate labor's energy, its creativity, and its inherent class solidarity.

They have supported these initiatives with money, staff, and in-kind services thus assuring that good ideas don't fail for lack of resources. They have created and sup-

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ported the creation of new AFL-CIO departments (Corporate Affairs, Center for Strate- gic Research, Center for Collective Bargaining, Center for Working Capital) and the strengthening of other Federation departments, such as Field Mobilization and Orga- nizing which can help these new efforts. They have also created new organizations (such as the Working for America Institute) which can and do support these efforts to "pave the high road" through research, technical assistance and capacity development assistance.

That leadership change would not have occurred had not there been a more fundamental change in labor's ideology concerning how to relate to the greater U.S. soci- ety. All three of these examples represent the recognition that the union movement needs allies to accomplish its goals. These unions have reached out to:

�9 the patients that Kaiser serves and the health plan providers who pay the Kaiser bills;

�9 the disenfranchised communities who want access to the good high-wage jobs in Greater Milwaukee and the greater public policy community who understand the value of maintaining a high tax base for Wisconsin's communities;

�9 the public who wants improved public services; and

�9 even their employers who want and need new ways of doing business in order to compensate for the higher costs that aggressive union distributive bargaining has imposed.

Such a search for allies has changed some encrusted union ways of doing business. Unions start to work together in order to pursue longer-term goals for the greater good of larger numbers of workers' rather than the shorter-term victories fought for narrower union constituencies. Such an effort to win allies also means that unions start identifying themselves with pro-active ways to contribute to the sustainable success of their employers rather than shrugging off their responsibilities in that regard. And pretty soon, rather than being perceived as defenders of a small aristocracy of the nation's workers, unions are being viewed as champions of the needs of all working families in this country: A development that, if coupled with reduced employer opposition to workers exercising their right to have a voice at work, has the greatest potential to increase labor's ranks.

And make no mistake about it. That will be the ultimate test of the success of these examples. The test will not be how many more service improvement partnerships or joint training programs or coordinated bargaining councils or modernized union manufacturing facilities there are. The test in the short run will instead be how successful have these new approaches to representing workers been in retaining unionized workplaces and union members? Then how successful have they been in freeing up union resources and will to organize more workers into the labor movement? And then lastly, and certainly most importantly to the labor movement and to the country, how successful have they been in contributing to actual growth in union density in this country?

Although it is still too early to evaluate the success of these relatively new efforts in this regard, the future of American unions looks a lot more promising because of them.

Documents

New strategies for union survival and revival