Financial Times (London, England) July 9, 2004 Friday

Copyright 2004 The Financial Times Limited
Financial Times (London, England)
July 9, 2004 Friday
London Edition 1
SECTION: THE AMERICAS; Pg. 9
HEADLINE: US service industry labour unions merge
BYLINE: By AMY YEE
DATELINE: NEW YORK

Delegates from two large US labour unions voted yesterday to merge, in a move that highlights strategic alliances among unions, especially those representing growing numbers of service industry workers.

At a joint convention in Chicago, HERE, the hotel and restaurant workers union, and Unite, the clothing, textile and laundry union, merged to form Unite Here, which represents 440,000 active members and more than 400,000 retired people.

"This merger substantially increases our ability to fight for the rights of our members and the tens of thousands of new members that we will represent in the future," said John Wilhelm, president of Unite Here.

The merger will be signed today. John Edwards, the newly chosen running mate of the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, will address the convention tomorrow. Mr Edwards is known as a champion of the working and middle classes.

Manufacturing jobs were the core of the US labour industry 50 years ago. However, as more manufacturing jobs are transferred overseas, the US economy is shifting toward service industries. According to forecasts published this year by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, seven of the 10 occupations with the greatest growth through 2012 will be in low-wage, service fields.

"There wouldn't be as much attention on service if the manufacturing jobs had stayed," says Cletus Daniel, professor of labour history at Cornell University. While most other unions have been losing numbers, the Service Employees International Union has grown rapidly and is now the largest union in the US. SEIU, which represents hospital orderlies and nursing home workers among others, has doubled in size to 1.6m members since 1996 through aggressive organising.

Both Here and Unite are part of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), a federation of 61 national and international labour unions that represents 13m members. But critics have said the unions within the AFL-CIO are too disparate and fragmented to effectively mobilise.

"The thought is that there are too many small unions in the US," says Nelson Lichtenstein, professor of labour history at University of California Santa Barbara. "If a union wants to show it can have an impact on the character of a job, it has to have a certain level of density."

Unite's origins lie with representing textile manufacturers and seamstresses, but as those jobs have left North America, the union has focused more on retail and distribution.

Linda Chavez, author of Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics, says more powerful unions in the textile industry threaten to make the US uncompetitive in world markets.

"When you've got unions breathing down your neck on one hand and cheap imports on the other, companies are stuck in the middle," says Ms Chavez. "They're being hit on both sides."