(The following article by Steven Greenhouse was posted on the New York Times website on April 22.)
NEW YORK — In their first major initiative since quitting the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the breakaway unions are beginning a drive to increase the wages of, and perhaps unionize, 50 million service workers.
The effort will focus on workers whose jobs cannot be shipped overseas — hotel maids, nursing-home aides, school bus drivers, truck drivers at seaports and others — with the goal of assuring them affordable health insurance, retirement security and higher wages.
The new federation, named Change to Win, has been largely quiet since the service employees, Teamsters and several other major unions left the A.F.L.-C.I.O. in July. With their new campaign, called Make Work Pay!, the seven unions in the new federation are trying to gather momentum and public attention in an effort to help workers at a time when wages for most Americans have failed to keep up with inflation.
“There are 50 million workers in this country who work hard every day and who play by the rules, but they can’t make ends meet,” the president of Change to Win, Anna Burger, said. “Our unions came together because we believe we have to organize workers again in our country so they can have a loud-enough voice to have their work valued.”
The campaign is ambitious — some critics say unrealistically so — and starts as many unions are struggling to reverse declines in membership. The effort to unionize millions of workers is likely to face intense opposition from companies.
Over the next month, the Change to Win unions, which have more than five million members, are planning 40 demonstrations to mobilize support. Next week, the federation will hold rallies in Seattle for port truck drivers, in San Diego for workers at Children’s Hospital, in Kansas City for immigrant construction workers and in Chicago to demand higher wages for Wal-Mart workers.
The new federation kicks off its campaign tomorrow with television advertisements criticizing the gap between the pay of chief executives and that of average workers.
The group said yesterday that two cable networks, MSNBC and Comedy Central, had refused to broadcast the advertisement, which says that chief executives’ pay increased 27 percent last year, to an average of $11.3 million, while that of most workers languished.
Spokesmen for the two networks said they had rejected the advertisement because of policies against issue-advocacy advertisements.
When the Change to Win unions broke from the A.F.L.-C.I.O., they said it was doing too little to unionize workers. A.F.L.-C.I.O. officials asserted that the departing unions were hurting labor’s solidarity and image and were doing little different from its member unions.
The seven unions in Change to Win are the Teamsters, the carpenters, the service employees, the laborers, the United Farm Workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers and Unite Here, which represents hotel, restaurant and apparel workers. Of the seven unions, just the laborers have not quit the A.F.L.-C.I.O.