Quote of note:
In fact, this was anything but a regional strike. The union's contracts will expire in other parts of the country later this year, but now its strike fund is depleted and the companies can point to the new contract as setting the pattern for the industry. Close to 1 million unionized supermarket jobs may now be downward-bound. And while Americans have focused, understandably, on the ongoing evisceration of manufacturing jobs, the downscaling of service-sector jobs in the age of Wal-Mart poses no less a threat to the existence and idea of a working-class career.
What Wal-Mart Has Wrought
By Harold Meyerson
Friday, March 5, 2004; Page A23
LOS ANGELES -- This city obliterates its past, so it shouldn't be surprising that few Angelenos remember the role that unions played in making Los Angeles the epicenter of America's epochal post-World War II prosperity.
But the greatest new housing boom in world history didn't descend on L.A. through some random selection in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. The huge housing tracts were initially clustered around correspondingly huge aerospace factories, whose unionized workers could afford to buy new homes.
That was then. Since the Cold War's end, the aerospace industry and other unionized manufacturing here have drastically downsized. The service sector waxed as manufacturing waned, but most nonprofessional service-sector jobs are nonunion and low-wage.
The great exception was supermarket work. For decades, the industry and its union -- the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) -- signed contracts that gave supermarket workers employer-paid health insurance and decent wages. Five months ago, however, three major chains put forth a new contract that would turn supermarket employment into low-wage work with few benefits.
Sixty thousand workers across Southern California either struck or were locked out. So many shoppers refused to cross the picket lines that the three chains lost more than $1.5 billion in sales. But late last week, the union threw in the towel. The contract that the unhappy but increasingly desperate workers ratified created a lower pay scale for all new hires. It virtually ended the markets' responsibility for new workers' health coverage: Employers agreed to contribute $4.60 hourly for current workers' health plans but just $1.35 hourly for those of future employees. In the words of one union (but not UFCW) leader, the contract is "the beginning of the road to the Wal-Martization of the industry."
Like many of his peers, this union chief is livid at the industry, but he is also angry at the UFCW. For months the union treated the strike not as a national battle but as a regional one. The union did not organize community and consumer support groups that could have rallied against the chains; it was very slow to leverage union pension funds to go after the corporations' finances. In short, the union really had no plan to win the strike if the companies held out -- and since their outlets outside Southern California were unaffected, the companies could hold out better than workers subsisting on meager strike benefits.
In fact, this was anything but a regional strike. The union's contracts will expire in other parts of the country later this year, but now its strike fund is depleted and the companies can point to the new contract as setting the pattern for the industry. Close to 1 million unionized supermarket jobs may now be downward-bound. And while Americans have focused, understandably, on the ongoing evisceration of manufacturing jobs, the downscaling of service-sector jobs in the age of Wal-Mart poses no less a threat to the existence and idea of a working-class career.
Fortunately, the defeat of the supermarket strikers wasn't the only union news in the past week. Last Thursday two of the nation's most proficient organizing unions (there aren't a lot of them) announced that they were merging. UNITE, the clothing and textile union, and HERE, the hotel and restaurant union, agreed to join forces in what will be a remarkable organization of largely immigrant workers in routinely low-wage industries.
UNITE and HERE may well be the two most tenacious unions out there: UNITE fought for 17 years before organizing J.P. Stevens, while HERE's successful strike against the Frontier Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip -- a strike that ran six years, four months and 10 days without a single worker crossing the picket line -- is the stuff of union legend. But UNITE is situated in an industry that will soon move almost entirely offshore, while HERE, a union in an industry that is anchored in every American city, has more opportunities than it has resources. Their merger creates a powerful force for organizing and upgrading the kind of service-sector jobs that otherwise are being ratcheted downward.
Anyone who doubts the ability of these unions to transform dead-end jobs into productive careers should check out the improbable union city of service-sector America: Las Vegas. By organizing almost every Strip hotel, HERE has created an employer-funded training academy where maids and dishwashers can become cooks and servers and wine stewards, and a hotel workforce that makes enough to purchase new homes. The biggest housing boom in the nation today spreads across the Vegas desert and, as in Los Angeles a half-century ago, it is largely the consequence of unionization.
John Kerry walked a supermarket picket line in Santa Monica last week in the waning hours of the strike, pledging to provide the kind of health insurance that the new supermarket workers will sorely need and to change labor law to protect workers' right to organize. The Wal-Mart political action committee, meanwhile, has abruptly become the largest corporate PAC in the nation, funneling 85 percent of its congressional contributions to Republicans. The battle over the Wal-Martization of America has entered the electoral arena -- one more reason why Kerry has a strong hand in November's presidential election.
Posted by P6 at March 5, 2004 08:03 AM
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Comments
Living wage is the basis of good society. Unions are key to that. The union delivers value to every job and expands the tax base and middle class target market.
We need more of them.
Posted by Mr.Murder at March 7, 2004 04:14 AMWhat he said.
Posted by Al-Muhajabah at March 7, 2004 04:55 PM