(The following article by Michelle Amber was posted on the Daily Labor Report website on March 21.)
LAS VEGAS — As part of an effort to organize some 50 million workers in industries where jobs cannot be outsourced easily, the Change to Win federation plans to launch a campaign the week of April 24 targeting major industries in more than 35 cities, CTW Chair Anna Burger said March 20.
The campaign, announced at a press conference during a three-day organizing convention that drew some 2,000 officers, organizers, activists, and members from the seven unions in the federation, is dubbed “Make Work Pay!”
The unions will be reaching out to unorganized workers as well as members of the public and politicians to support the notion that the United States can not exist without a “vibrant middle class,” Burger said.
Middle Class Shrinking, Burger Says
Burger told the convention March 19 that the middle class is shrinking as once good-paying jobs are outsourced. In addition, more and more workers are losing health care insurance and their retirement security, she said.
When a large percentage of the workforce was unionized, labor was able to change low-paid manufacturing jobs into jobs that were the “backbone of the American middle class,” Burger said.
The convention this week will “create an action plan to make the same kind of change happen in jobs that will continue to provide vital services in our communities in the coming years,” she said, including jobs in transportation, distribution, retail, construction, leisure and hospitality, health care, property services, laundries, food production, and processing, and other services. CTW unions represent some workers in all of these industries.
Burger said that some of the actions the week of April 24 will be targeted at employers where the unions already have or are about to kick off organizing drives. She added that the actions that will take place April 24-28 and beyond are being decided at this convention.
“We are creating an action plan to organize in our core industries,” Burger said. Those industries include retail and food processing, hospitality and leisure, health care and social services, construction, transportation and warehousing, and property services.
Teams to Determine Targets
One of the focuses of the convention is the creation of local cross-union campaign teams, which will work together as single entities to unite workers of all the unions in their cities. Breakout sessions are being held to allow each of the teams to determine what targets they should concentrate on in their individual cities or states. For instance, all of the attendees from Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus, Ohio, are meeting as one campaign team.
“We are creating a new model for cross-union organizing,” Burger said. The goal of the teams will be to create strong local organizations that include unions as well as community activists that will have the power to let employers know that when they oppose any group of workers that is trying to organize, they will not be confronted by one union, but by seven unions that represent nearly 6 million workers.
According to CTW Executive Director Greg Tarpinian, since the federation’s founding convention last September, a foundation has been put in place that this convention will build upon. In the last six months, he said, all of the unions have been collaborating as never before; the leadership and staff of each union have been working together; and the unions have integrated their organizing, global, political, and capital power. The unions also have supported each other in various campaigns, he said, giving as an example a successful organizing drive by the Service Employees International Union for some 5,000 Houston janitors.
This will continue in the “make work pay” campaign, according to Burger. A unified effort will encompass the individual campaigns of the affiliates but they will not exist as the effort of just one union. Rather, the campaigns will receive the support and action of all the CTW unions at all levels, she said.
“We’ve long had our individual campaigns to unite workers who drive school buses, who work in hospitals, who build our buildings, who work in ports or drive trucks,” Edgar Romney, vice chair of Change to Win and executive vice president of UNITE HERE, told convention attendees. “But as we run these individual campaigns, we will tie our work together to make it all add up to something bigger.”
According to Tarpinian, the convention will “develop the foundations for new campaigns to unite workers in new sectors with all of us working together to make those campaigns a success,” he added.
The unions in the Change to Win federation are the Service Employees International Union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Laborers International Union, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, UNITE HERE, and the United Farm Workers.