Chicago Tribune, August 14, 2005, Sunday

Copyright 2005 Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Copyright 2005 Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune

August 14, 2005, Sunday

HEADLINE: AFL-CIO rift turns allies into enemies

BYLINE: By Barbara Rose

BODY:

A labor war unlike any in decades has broken out in California, where two large unions -- once uneasy allies, now open enemies -- are going door to door from the mountains to the desert competing for members.
"We've been literally bombarded," said an exasperated Pretti Hilton, after two organizers from the same union crossed wires and showed up at the same hour outside her Riverside apartment complex. "Everyone that's come to the door, they tell us this other union has been lying."
This was exactly the kind of ugly, self-defeating scenario that had been predicted for the labor movement just a few weeks ago after three of the country's biggest unions bolted from the AFL-CIO, blaming the national labor federation for the slow decline of America's unions.
The renegades argued that they could do a better job of organizing. But rather than focusing on the 87.5 percent of American workers who don't belong to unions, observers suspected they would find it tempting to gain momentum by raiding each other--despite the long-term damage it might do to the overall labor movement.
"This is the ugly side, the seamy side of the split," said UCLA labor expert Ruth Milkman.
The only surprise is that it took just a few hours for the fratricidal battle to heat up.
The same day the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) quit the AFL-CIO during a high-profile convention in Chicago, the union's president, Andrew Stern, sent a letter to officials in sprawling Riverside County, east of Los Angeles.
Stern declared that his union was no longer bound by the federation rules for keeping labor peace, indicating his union would go full bore in its efforts to take members away from an affiliate of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which still belongs to the AFL-CIO.
It was a defiant move in what has become his union's aggressive statewide campaign to persuade 60,000 low-paid home-health-care workers to defect from AFSCME to join more than 160,000 such workers who are represented elsewhere in California by SEIU.
"This is down and dirty and very intense," said AFSCME's Alan Lee, an organizer from Las Vegas who is working 12-hour days, seven days a week in Riverside County to fend off the SEIU invasion. "There's no mechanism to resolve this other than fighting it out."
Both unions are claiming the moral high ground in the complicated legal dispute, while accusing the other of using scare tactics and deception, throwing around charges of break-ins and tire slashing.
The conflict is a direct fallout from the SEIU's break with the AFL-CIO, which had kept peace for the better part of 50 years.
When SEIU and AFSCME clashed in Illinois earlier this year over organizing rights to 50,000 home child-care workers, the AFL-CIO ruled that AFSCME was out of bounds, and the 1.4 million-member international backed off.
In California the AFL-CIO was trying to get the SEIU to stand down, but with the union's decision to quit the federation the gloves came off, signaling the potential start of a new era of union strife at a time when the overall union movement is in crisis.
Union membership has steadily declined from its peak in the 1950s, when one out of three workers was represented by a union. Today it's one in eight.
All sides recognize that the service industry's rise in the American economy represents fertile ground for labor organizers, and no union has been as aggressive as in pursuing this opportunity as SEIU.
The 1.8 million-member union has reached far beyond the bounds of traditional organizing by going after hard-to-reach workers who provide services in homes under government-subsidized programs. And while recruiting these low-paid workers, it has clashed in several states with AFSCME.
In California, the drama over union membership centers on the United Domestic Workers, a troubled AFSCME affiliate that was founded 26 years ago by protgs of farm worker leader Cesar Chavez.
A dispute over money and control between the affiliate's leaders and AFSCME had been brewing for months in April when SEIU offered the embattled leaders promises of money and organizing support.
AFSCME won a court order to seize control of the affiliate in June, charging its leaders with financial wrongdoing. But the ousted leaders claimed the takeover was to prevent them from affiliating with SEIU.
"It's dividing us, what's going on," said Felice Connolly, 66, who lives on an unpaved road in a mobile-home neighborhood near where $ 400,000 houses are going up. She earns $ 8.50 per hour, or about $ 2,000 per month, caring for her grown mentally disabled daughter.
One union can't challenge another in an election if workers are under contract. But in Riverside County, an area of Southern California that stretches from the far Los Angeles suburbs into the desert, the contract expired June 30--and SEIU seized the open window. It filed more than 3,000 signed union cards July 20, just hours before the domestic workers' union wrapped up contract negotiations.
SEIU is trying to gather enough signatures to win National Labor Relations Board-supervised elections to replace AFSCME.
The SEIU has brought in organizers from around the country to help wage door-to-door, telephone and mail campaigns throughout California, wherever an opportunity now exists to challenge AFSCME.
In Riverside County, they carry round stickers depicting a large quarter marked with the international symbol for "no," urging union members to reject a tentative contract agreement that would increase hourly wages by 25 cents per year over two years, to $ 9 per hour.
SEIU claims the contract is a sweetheart deal pushed through quickly to try to close the window for an election.
AFSCME, meanwhile, appealed for a federal court order to stop what it called SEIU's "illegal raiding," but the judge ruled last week that the dispute should go to arbitration.
AFSCME charges that some workers were duped by false claims into signing cards, and it claims to have collected about 1,000 signatures from members revoking their SEIU cards.
Now Riverside County officials are facing a potential legal mess.
"Not only do we have the issue of what the [SEIU election] petitions mean, we have to decide what representations were made to individuals that signed the petitions," said Ron Komers, Riverside County human resources director.
"Workers are confused," he added.
At Diana Gonzales' house in a working-class neighborhood in Moreno Valley, the 55-year-old warehouse clerk and home-care worker explained why she signed an SEIU card.
"The man came two or three weeks ago and he talked to me," she said. "He told me not to sign any more cards. He sounded honest. He said they would give me an increase."
Gonzales seemed firm in her resolve, but she sighed, "It's confusing because I have so much to do already."
Home-care worker Chris Long, a bargaining committee member, said workers feel like the neglected children in a messy divorce.
"I can't imagine any home-health-care worker who has trouble making car payments wanting their dues money spent on a turf war," said Long, who cares for his disabled wife in Sky Valley, a sparsely populated community near Palm Springs.
SEIU argues home-health-care workers are better served by a single strong union. The two unions had split the state between them, but the SEIU is much larger in California.
"There were thousands of home-care workers who were looking to get a union contract and under the present system, they couldn't do that," said SEIU chief of staff Kirk Adams.
AFSCME claims SEIU is headed down a destructive path.
"It's absolutely raiding, that's transparent," said Paul Booth, assistant to AFSCME President Gerald McEntee.
Whether the California fight will spread to other states is not yet clear.
"I would be quite surprised if this is the only conflict, but I would be even more surprised if it escalates into a broad-scale war of raids and counter-raids," said Cornell University labor expert Richard Hurd.
"It would really be a distressing development for the labor movement if raiding activity were the primary outcome of the split," he added. "That would be a real blow to labor power."
-----
To see more of the Chicago Tribune, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.chicagotribune.com.
Copyright (c) 2005, Chicago Tribune
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.