Workplace Blog

Sweeney preaches solidarity amid rifts

June 20, 2005
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:58 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — AFL-CIO President John Sweeney pledged Monday to do everything he can to hold the labor federation together amid a rift with some of the biggest unions in the country.

”Only our enemies are cheering” for divisions in the labor movement, Sweeney said as union leaders representing over 60 percent of the AFL-CIO’s 13 million members lined up in favor of his re-election.

”The millions of workers who need us don’t need to see the house of labor divided,” Sweeney said.

At a news conference, Sweeney said the federation will continue a conversation with the five unions opposing him.

Those unions, including the AFL-CIO’s largest, the Service Employees International Union, blame Sweeney’s 10-year tenure for declining union membership and fewer worker protections.Union membership has been on a downward slide for 50 years, now representing 12.5 percent of all U.S. workers. The private sector union membership level is 8 percent. A half-century ago, one-third of workers in the private sector belonged to unions.

The 1.8 million-member SEIU wants the federation to cut its budget by more than 50 percent and use the savings to increase organizing by its member unions.

The SEIU, once headed by Sweeney, is threatening to leave the AFL-CIO, along with the United Food and Commercial Workers and Unite Here, which represents employees in the hotel and restaurant industries and textile manufacturing. The Teamsters board will vote in July on whether to give President James Hoffa authority to disaffiliate.

The five dissident unions formed an alliance last week they call the Change to Win Coalition. The other participant is the Laborers International Union.

The AFL-CIO laid off 167 employees recently as part of Sweeney’s plan to increase spending on union membership drives, a move his critics called too little, too late.

Flanking Sweeney, his supporters expressed the hope that a healthy discussion will help clarify the future course of organized labor.

”At the end of that debate we should be stronger, not weaker,” Morton Bahr, president of the Communications Workers of America, said.

Sweeney has focused on political action over the years, a push reflected in an increase in union households as a percentage of voters.

Voters from union households represented 26 percent of the overall vote in 2000, compared with 23 percent in 1996 and 19 percent in 1992.

The complaining unions say the AFL-CIO has wasted time and money on politics and has not done enough to combat the steady decline in union membership.

Sweeney faces re-election at the federation’s convention in July in Chicago, where he is expected to win another four-year term.

NYU Moves to Disband Graduate Student Union

The New York Times
June 17, 2005
By KAREN W. ARENSON

New York University is moving to close down its graduate students union at the end of the summer, the labor movement’s only toehold among graduate students at private universities.

Union officials quickly attacked N.Y.U. ‘s plan and vowed to fight the university in any way they could.

In a memo circulated yesterday, N.Y.U.’s provost, David W. McLaughlin, and its executive vice president, Jacob J. Lew, said that they had proposed that the university stop recognizing the five-year-old union when its contract expires Aug. 31.

They said the collective-bargaining process had produced benefits for student teaching and research assistants, like better compensation and clearer work rules, but that union grievances had threatened academic decision-making.”We were surprised and discouraged to confront grievances that sought to undermine those academic management rights,” the memo said.

N.Y.U. is widely expected to make the decision official after a 30-day comment period that will include a town-hall meeting.

“This is pretty disgusting,” said Philip A. Wheeler, director of the United Automobile Workers region that includes New York. “They saw a way to get out of having the union, and they took it. They are as disgusting as Wal-Mart.”

He said the union, which will continue to operate on campus representing a different group of teachers -adjuncts, or part-time instructors – would look for as many ways as it could to create problems for the university.

“They will have a fight they regret,” Mr. Wheeler said. “Anything and everything we can do, we will. If there is a procedure where we can take them to court, we will. We will work to expose them politically. We will lobby against them. We will look at the whole gamut of possibilities. They are not going to treat us in this fashion.”

N.Y.U. became the only private university with unionized graduate students five years ago, when the National Labor Relations Board reversed its longstanding position that graduate student workers were essentially students, not employees. It directed N.Y.U. to permit its student workers to unionize.

The students affiliated with the U.A.W. and won substantial increases in compensation and benefits. The contract approved in 2002, retroactive to 2000, raised stipends for many student assistants by nearly 40 percent, provided health care benefits and paid them overtime if they worked more than 20 hours a week.

Students on other campuses, including Columbia and Brown, raced to follow N.Y.U. ‘s lead, but were stymied when their universities appealed their cases to the National Labor Relations Board.

Last year, in a case involving Brown University, the board, whose composition had changed since the N.Y.U. decision, reversed the position it took four years earlier, giving N.Y.U. an opportunity to back away from collective bargaining. (Public universities, which are subject to state labor laws rather than federal regulation, have had graduate students unions for several decades.)

As N.Y.U. prepared to release its decision in late May, union officials tried to convince it to keep the union. The union brought in public figures, like the Rev. Jesse Jackson and City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, to make their case to the university. Mr. Wheeler said that the union had even offered to soften its demands concerning grievances.

“We gave them 100 percent of what they wanted,” he said. “We said we will eliminate that problem; you write the language.”

But Mr. Lew said that N.Y.U. had tried to frame language that insulated it from such grievances when the contract was first written, and it had not worked.

“The fundamental issue behind the grievances was: Who decides who can teach and what they can teach?” he said. “The grievances came in different forms, but they all boiled down to that.”

Michael Palm, a doctoral student in American studies and chairman of the graduate students union, which represented about 1,000 students last semester, said he and others were “appalled by N.Y.U.’s decision and appalled that a supposedly liberal institution would not respect the overwhelming desire of its graduate students to bargain collectively as a union.”

He said he and his colleagues would immediately start organizing for recognition again.

The N.Y.U. memo said that the university hoped to keep and improve the benefits graduate employees had won through collective bargaining, and to find other ways for graduate students to express their views.

It said it planned to increase graduate student stipends $1,000 a year for the next three years, which would raise the minimum annual base for doctoral students to $21,000, from $18,000, and that it would continue to pay for health insurance.

The university also said it would work with graduate students to develop a grievance process.

It said that N.Y.U. had come to understand the importance of giving graduate assistants “a strong collective voice” to help the university “better understand their desires, needs and concerns,” and that it hoped to create a new organization to represent students.

University lecturers in Britain voted last month to overturn a controversial boycott of Israeli institutions.

In April, the Association of University Teachers approved a motion to sever all academic links with two Israeli universities — the University of Haifa for alleged violations of academic freedom and Bar Ilan University for developing programs with a college operating in the occupied West Bank territory. Both universities have denied the claims.

The boycott would have encouraged AUT members to “refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration, or joint projects” with the two institutions.

But last month, at an AUT special council meeting, delegates voted overwhelmingly to “revoke all existing boycotts of Israeli institutions.”

From The Black Commentator:

Even as unions struggle to respond to forces bent on their annihilation, they remain deformed by racism — the same plague that has crippled the U.S. labor movement at every stage in its history. Black workers, the most enthusiastic “joiners” and activists, also face the most dire consequences of labor’s historical weaknesses. Yet, too often, their white comrades — including those who proudly consider themselves “progressives” — seek “solutions” to labor’s problems at Black workers’ institutional expense.

From The Black Commentator, Bill Flectcher, Jr. on the debate over the future of the AFL-CIO

…The US trade union movement has badly needed a debate about its own future, but the culture of the US union movement generally precludes honest debates. When individuals or groups of individuals raise allegedly unpopular positions — or positions critical of the leadership — they can often find themselves isolated or undermined. Rather than a free flow of constructive ideas, most union leaders surround themselves with a protective bubble to keep out any “bad news” and/or provocative suggestions. Thus, it should not surprise anyone that the union movement has, over time, become pickled in its own juices. With leaders who stay in office for what to many feels to be an eternity, and with the suppression of dissent, too many of those who wish to see change introduced are forced out, or, as a friend of mine says, are “beached.”

It is, therefore, amazing to witness the spectacle of some unions threatening to leave the AFL-CIO and others threatening to drive others out after so little and so pitiful a discussion. All this is taking place while rank and file union activists find themselves increasingly alienated by the debate or outright fearful of the outcome. No attempt has been made by either side in this debate to bring the debate to the members. The members have not been asked their opinions, nor has there been much effort toward constructive and principled debates. Instead members find themselves feeling that they are at the base of Mount Olympus while the gods fight out the final battle thousands of feet above their heads…

Professor Ruth Needleman needs letters of support and emails sent to Indiana University administrators in order to maintain the Division of Labor Studies at a regional campus. Tenure-track faculty and staff have been laid-off already. See Needleman’s requst at Labourstart </i