Union organizer

A union organizer (sometimes spelled "organiser") is one type of employee or elected official of a trade union. In some unions such as the AMIEU and CFMEU in Australia, organizers are elected by the membership of the union. A majority of unions apoint rather than elect their organizers.

The primary role of an organizer varies between unions and countries, and is sometimes similar to the role of a shop steward. In liberal Australian unions the organizer's role is helping to organize workers under the organizing model. For conservative Australian unions the organizer's role is largely that of servicing members and enforcing work rules. Organizers in Australia may also take on industrial/legal roles such as making representations before Industrial Relations Commissions, tribunals, and courts.

In the United States a union organizer is a labor union representative who "organizes" or unionizes non-union companies. Though some organizers may be volunteers from the workforce or from the union rank and file, they are usually paid professionals. Organizers primarily exist to assist non-union workers in forming chapters, usually by leading them in their efforts.

Methodology

Organizers employ various methods in the practice of their profession to secure "recognition" of the company or department as being a legitimate union chapter, the goal being ultimately a union contract with the employer or "collective bargaining agreement." These methods can be classified as being either top-down organizing or bottom-up organizing. ¹

Top-down organizing focuses on persuading management through salesmanship and/or union pressure tactics. The salesmanship may include offering access to resources such as a well-trained and subsequently skilled supply of labor and access to union cartels for contractors. Union pressure tactics include picketing with the intention of embarrassing management and disrupting business as well as assisting the government in investigating employment law and labor law violations. ² Enforcement of these laws could result in fines but also serves to hurt the violator's chances in a competitive bidding process. Top-down organizing is generally considered easier than bottom-up and is practiced more in the construction industry.

Bottom-up organizing focuses on the workers and usually connotes the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certification process. This process entails the union petitioning the NLRB for an official secret ballot election, the results of which bind the company to recognize and therefore negotiate with the union, provided the majority elects to be represented. It is a democratic process. Under this framework both sides are given a chance to campaign for or against unionization, though management has greater access to the voters as their employees. It is in this electioneering model where the organizer really organizes, organizing meetings and developing an internal structure known as an organizing committee. Committee members may go on later to become shop stewards; low-level on-the-job union representatives empowered to settle disputes and enforce contract provisions. Though some mistake organizing as strictly being a recruitment effort, numerous obstacles emerge which require more than simple enlistment and promotion of the union. During organizing, management has greater means to reward and/or punish workers far overshadowing the union. ³ The National Labor Relations Act guarantees the rights of workers to seek union representation and forbids bribing or threatening workers away from organizing. However, such charges are hard to prove. Labor believes the entire NLRB process to be slanted against them in enforcement and interpretation of labor laws.⁴ Often times organizing involves legal wrangling over issues such as voter eligibility to be settled at the NLRB who serves as a veritable referee during the time leading up to the election vote.

Intrigue during heated campaign races is not uncommon. Both sides have come to spie on each other and employ information gathering techniques tantamount to industrial espionage.

Personality

It takes a certain kind of person to be an organizer as burn-out is high. Organizers must be bold, determined, and charismatic. Organizers must be bold to stand up to the constant confrontation they endure and to take risks in trespassing and in failing. Rates of failure are high and so here also is where determination comes in. Organizers may work under the constraints of having limited resources of the union at their disposal (see sections on organizing as cause and controversies). Organizers are portrayed in popular media and in unions as somewhat dashing figures due to the drama that surrounds organizing such as jobs being on the line. Organizers must be charismatic individuals able to sway others and move groups to action. ⁵

Cause within a cause

Within the labor movement, organizing is the cause within the cause. Organizing has been significantly down paralleling the steady decline of American organized labor's numbers and influence since the 1950s. The heads of unions are well aware of the problem and much debate it in Washington, D.C. Many voices in Labor blame John Sweeney, the current President of the AFL-CIO for not doing enough to organize.⁶ This was given as the stated reason for the internal split within the American labor movement that led to the formation of the Change to Win Federation, a rival umbrella organization of major North American unions set up as an alternative to the AFL-CIO in 2005. Many unions see organizing as a way to safeguard their market share and create jobs for members, thereby ensuring the future of their organizations. Unions who prioritize organizing and are expansionist are said to have the "organizing model" where as most unions have the "service model," spending most of the money on servicing the existing membership and are non-expansionist.

Controversies

Within Labor there is resistance to organizing, though more in deed than in word. Organizing is seen as a big expense with diminished returns with results tenuous.⁷ Most U.S. unions adopt a service model and eschew organizing programs. In transient industries such as construction the supply of jobs may dwindle bellow what an increased membership can absorb, increased from newly organized companies.

Most disputes between unions are jurisdictional (territorial). Union jurisdiction is based on geographic scope, craft, industry, historical claim, and compromise. Unions have overlapping jurisdictions and organizing brings light to these border issues. Critics within Labor have blamed Labor itself for the fractured movement, that is to say union-on-union competition is to blame. The expansionism and scramble for numbers (of members) in many organizing programs challenges jurisdiction.

Management and business opponents to organizing would argue that unionization divides labor against management and drives up costs. Such accusations are not without foundation. Indeed, organizing usually benefits the union at the expense of management. Critics often circulate horror stories about plant closures and retaliatory firings to discourage union activity among the workforce. Whether real or imagined, such horror stories are taken as warnings and have a real chilling effect on voting. Though illegal,⁸ retaliatory terminations remain a problem for organizers to overcome.⁹ Fear is a leading obstacle to organizing. ¹⁰

Counter organizing

In bottom-up organizing management and labor are pitted against each other and management often times fights back with aggressive tactics to break the chapter, called "union-busting" in the parlance of Labor. The intention of such union-busting may be to bust the union, essentially "nipping it in the bud" before getting locked into a costly union contract (i.e. wage and benefit hikes) or it may be to retaliate against worker disobedience and perceived disloyalty. ¹¹ In this endeavor management may hire anti-union consultants or lawyers known as "union-busters" or "union avoidance consultants." With the offer to thwart organizing, Union-busters typically have a two-pronged approach; working through management they cut deals with workers to betray the union and intimidate the weak links and two, abuse loopholes in labor law to derail or sandbag the election process. Their emergence as an industry is a relatively new phenomenon and is described in Martin Levitt's book "Confessions of a Union Buster." Before this union avoidance industry materialized the practitioners of this dark art were mainly what can only be described as "goon squads," also used for strike-breaking. ¹² The largest and most well-known was the Pinkerton Detective Agency, ¹³ still active today though in a different capacity. William W. Delaney's "My Father Was Killed By Pinkerton Men" is a song about the violence that often surrounded early American labor strife.

Organizing in popular culture

The most famous movie about organizing is the 1979 factually-based Norma Rae, the story of a Jewish organizer from New York organizing a textile mill in the South and Sally Fields as Norma Rae, his top union activist inside who defies management at personal risk.

The 1987 production of Matewan is another factually-based story of a Socialist organizer who visits a small town mining town in West Virginia and unites rival ethnic groups against a common enemy; the company.

Both of these stories feature outsiders entering rural company towns and stirring workers up against exploitative management. This is a common theme in organizing stories and in organizing itself as depicted by unions. The workers are cast as simple commoners being oppressed by powerful managers cast in the villain role. The organizer is shown as a liberator. Indeed, companies did historically hire armed "detectives" to break-up workers trying to organize through various means which would today be considered unethical and oppressive. This theme of workers as what Rousseau called the "Noble Savage" and management as an oppressor is one of the central themes of Communism. American unions of today, though still left-leaning, have distanced themselves greatly from the Communists of the Red Scare era.¹⁴ Modern U.S. unions work much within the system, rather than against it, with political action programs. Also, unions have reinvented themselves as streamlined, professional machines.¹⁵

10,000 Black Men Named George, released in 2002 is another movie based on the real life story of A. Philip Randolph, the famous black organizer who organized the black Pullman Porters who worked for the railroad company.

The film Bread and Roses (film) in 2001 depicts the Service Employees International Union's "Justice for Janitors" campaign organizing cleaners. The story is also a love story between an idealistic, young organizer and a female, Hispanic immigrant cleaner he is organizing.

Both of these stories incorporate pro-union messages with ethnic determination. In the case of the Pullman Porters, Randolph is remembered as a civil rights hero where as the Justice for Janitors campaign is about immigrants rights, as many of the organized janitors are from Hispanic or Slavic countries. The status of the characters as minorities paints a picture of them as being outside of or on the margins of the American Dream, further casting the pro-union workers (and workers in general) as underdogs. The underdog theme is an archetype in myth in that it inspires.

In the 2005 action movie Four Brothers, one of the characters who is a former union activist turns the bad guy's henchmen against him by informally organizing them against their boss based on the common organizing themes of a greater share in the profits and respect on the job.

In the 1997 action movie Grosse Pointe Blank, Dan Akroyd's villainous character pursues fellow assassin John Cusack in order to include him in a ridiculous assassins' union.

Both of these movies use organizing as a plot device though they are in black market businesses and far-fetched for this reason. Nonetheless, they demonstrate how absent an official union's presence the same issues arise in any vocation which workers organize around. Also, both of the movies take place in the Detroit, Michigan area, a city which has historically produced some great organizers.

The fictional 1993 action movie 36 Hours To Die, is unique as it depicts an organizer as a villain. The main character is a brewery owner who faces a threatening mobster who uses union organizing as a pretense to "muscle in" on his business. Though far from modern day reality, the story offers a glimpse into how anti-union business owners and managers view organizing. This feeling of being threatened leads companies to drastically fight organizing and organizers are characterized as interlopers to their workers.

The 1992 production Hoffa, starring Jack Nicholson as famed labor leader Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters begins the story where Hoffa's career began, organizing Truck Drivers and Warehouse Workers in the Detroit area. Jimmy Hoffa later went on to become one of the most powerful labor leaders in U.S. history and his trials and disappearance still haunt labor.

The 1978 movie F.I.S.T, tells the same story of Hoffa's beginnings as an organizer and rise to power, albeit with more liberties taken. Sylvester Stallone plays the fearless Hoffa as a man with good intentions dogged on both sides by Attorney General Robert Kennedy and organized crime.

Both Hoffa stories feature Hoffa as a tough "man of the people" and chronicle how his organizing swelled the ranks of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Hoffa was famous for being this sort of leader and infamous for taking an "ends justifies the means" approach to organizing which is what ultimately led to his downfall. This organizer's legacy still remains; his son James P. Hoffa is the current General President of the Teamsters.

The 1973 animated film Heavy Traffic featured a scene in which a gangster tries to stop a factory from organizing by giving a speech to the workers where he threatens to replace them with black workers. (Pitting ethnic and racial groups against each other is a long-time anti-union tactic, especially as replacements.) The plan backfires on the hoodlum when the godfather who owns the plant objects to hiring blacks.

In an episode of the popular American sit-com The Office the characters hold an organizing meeting which ends with a manager threatening to fire everyone involved, a realistic scenario. The character played by comedian Patrice O'Neal tells the boss, "This isn't over."

The Fred Savage sit-com Working had an episode where the main character organizes his fellow workers into a union and tells management it’s because he really cares about the well-being of his coworkers. Such unity and standing up to management is the ideal in organizing. Labor refers to it as "solidarity."

The song "Solidarity Forever" by Ralph Chaplin has become the anthem of the American labor movement.

References

Von Drehle, David Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (2003) Atlantic Monthly Press

Murolo, Priscilla; Chitty, A.B. From The Folks Who Brought You The Weekend (2001) The New Press

Diamond, Virginia R. Organizing Guide for Local Unions (1992) George Meany Center for Labor Studies

Diamond, Virginia R. Labor Law Handbook for Organizing Unions Under the National Labor Relations Act (1991) George Meany Center for Labor Studies

La Botz, Dan A Troublemaker's Handbook (1991) Labor Notes

International Union of Operating Engineers, AFL-CIO Corporate Investigation Manual (1994) IUOE

United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America New Tools for the Trade (1987) UBC

N.L.R.B. Office of General Counsel A Guide to Basic Labor Law and Procedures Under the National Labor Relations Act (1997) U.S. Government printing office

Bai, Matt Is There a Place for Unions in the 21st-Century Economy? (January, 2005) New York Times Magazine

Levitt, Martin Confessions of a Union Buster (1993) Crown Publishers

Pleasure, Robert J. Construction Organizing: An Organizing and Contract Enforcement Guide (1995) Labor's Heritage Press

Breslin, Mark Organize or Die (2003) McAlly Internatioanl Press

Kelber, Harry My 70 Years in the Labor Movement (2006) Labor Educator Press

Rundle, Michael Starbucks Union Battle Goes Before Labor Board (Tuesday, July 10, 2007) Metro

DeFreitas, Gregory Can Construction Unions Organize New Immigrants? (2006) Regional Labor Review, Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy, Hofstra University

DeFreitas, Gregory Anxious Anniversary: Is Recession STalking the 5-Year-Old Recovery? (2006) Regional Labor Review, Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy, Hofstra University

External links

Footnotes

1. ^Breslin, Mark Organize or Die (2003) McAlly Internatioanl Press pg. 17

2. ^DeFreitas, Gregory Can Construction Unions Organize New Immigrants? (2006) Regional Labor Review, Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy, Hofstra University pgs. 26-27

3. ^Diamond, Virginia R. Organizing Guide for Local Unions (1992) George Meany Center for Labor Studies p. 52; La Botz, Dan A Troublemaker's Handbook (1991) Labor Notes pg. 8; Kelber, Harry My 70 Years in the Labor Movement (2006) Labor Educator Press pgs. 29-30

4. ^Bai, Matt Is There a Place for Unions in the 21-Century Economy? (January, 2005) New York Times Magazine pg. 40; DeFreitas, Gregory Anxious Anniversary: Is Recession STalking the 5-Year-Old Recovery? (2006) Regional Labor Review, Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy, Hofstra University pg. 8

5. ^Bai, Matt Is There a Place for Unions in the 21-Century Economy? (January, 2005) New York Times Magazine p. 44; La Botz, Dan A Troublemaker's Handbook (1991) Labor Notes pg. 211

Kelber, Harry My 70 Years in the Labor Movement (2006) Labor Educator Press pgs. 343, 359-360

7. ^Kelber, Harry My 70 Years in the Labor Movement (2006) Labor Educator Press pg. 362

8. ^N.L.R.B. Office of General Counsel A Guide To Basic Law and Procedure Under the National Labor Relations Act (1997) U.S. Government Printing Office pgs. 19, 23

9. ^Diamond, Virginia R. Labor Law Handbook for Organizing Unions Under the National Labor Relations Act (1991) George Meany Center for Labor Studies pg. 20; Kelber, Harry My 70 Years in the Labor Movement (2006) Labor Educator Press pgs. 29-30; Rundle, Michael Starbucks Union Battle Goes Before Labor Board (Tuesday, July 10, 2007) Metro pg. 4;

10. ^La Botz, Dan A Troublemaker's Handbook (1991) Labor Notes pg. 178; DeFreitas, Gregory Can Construction Unions Organize New Immigrants? (2006) Regional Labor Review, Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy, Hofstra University pg. 28

11. ^Kelber, Harry My 70 Years in the Labor Movement (2006) Labor Educator Press pg. 39

12. ^Kelber, Harry My 70 Years in the Labor Movement (2006) Labor Educator Press pg. 24

13. ^Murolo, Priscilla; Chitty, A.B. From The Folks Who Brought You The Weekend (2001) The New Press pgs, 105, 131

14. ^Kelber, Harry My 70 Years in the Labor Movement (2006) Labor Educator Press pgs. 345-346

15. ^Bai, Matt Is There a Place for Unions in the 21-Century Economy? (January, 2005) New York Times Magazine pgs. 41, 42; Breslin, Mark Organize or Die (2003) McAlly Internatioanl Press pg. 9