Chicago Tribune, January 7, 2006, Saturday

Copyright 2006 Chicago Tribune Company
Chicago Tribune

January 7, 2006 Saturday
Chicago Final Edition

SECTION: BUSINESS ; ZONE C; Pg. 1

HEADLINE: Child-care coup only a baby step for labor

SERIES: OUTLOOK 2006: LABOR

BYLINE: By Stephen Franklin, Tribune staff reporter

BODY:
While the two children napped, Sandra Koen, who has seen her share of tough times, happily added up some recent good news.
She will be getting a $2-a-day pay hike come spring with health-care coverage down the road. She now has a union to lean on. And with the union's guidance, she is sure she will get a state child-care license, which will mean more money.
"Everything is just so much better," she said with a broad smile in the living room of her small South Side apartment, where she runs her tiny child-care center, earning just $9.48 per day per child. "If you are without a union, you are just on your own."
In contrast with organized labor's many broken dreams in 2005, there are breakthrough victories such as the one that helped boost the earnings potential of workers like Sandra Koen.
Her union--the Service Employees International Union--won a precedent-setting contract with the state for 49,000 child-care workers, marking the first such agreement in the nation, and the largest single organizing drive in decades in Illinois.
Like Koen, many of the child-care workers are women, African-American, and folks who have scraped by for years on miserably low wages or on welfare.
It remains to be seen whether labor can make similar strides in 2006, though there are stirrings that did not exist before. More than ever, however, there is a foreboding that labor's time may soon run out if it doesn't get back on its feet.
Indeed, labor's laments only grew in 2005.
Unions continued to suffer losses as employers shipped blue-collar and white-collar jobs to lower wage countries, as technological changes wiped out once secure-seeming positions, and as more firms turned themselves into virtual businesses, spinning off basic jobs to layers of contractors.
At the same time, public employee unions, long labor's salvation because of their insulation from the kinds of resistance mounted by private employers, have begun to face budget-cutting job losses, privatization or the outright loss of bargaining rights.
With less than 8 percent of the private workforce unionized, a nearly historic low, many unions are more vulnerable than ever to employers' demands for concessions.
As a result, the goodies that unions offer members such as pensions, health-care coverage and premium wages have continued to shrink.
Nor does labor seem likely to gain an upper hand anytime soon in Congress or in state legislatures.
When researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago examined unions' organizing efforts in Chicago recently, they expected to find fewer employers mounting fierce battles and unions doing better than elsewhere. That wasn't the case.
"We often think of Chicago as a strong union town, but we certainly did not find that," said Nik Theodore, who headed the study partially supported by a pro-labor think tank, American Rights at Work. The dread over what's ahead is largely what drove the AFL-CIO apart at its July convention in Chicago. Seven unions with six million members promptly set up their own federation, saying the 50-year-old labor group was unlikely to rescue labor from its woes.
That left the AFL-CIO with 53 unions and their 9 million members. It had suffered a deep financial wound and profound sense of betrayal. Its leaders readied themselves for an all-out war with their former allies, whom they expected to try to steal away their members.
War did not break out, though there have been skirmishes. But it is hardly clear what's ahead as the two seem so far to be circling and sizing each other up as they prepare to show what they can do on their own.
The new coalition is made up of unions who do not share the same liberal political tradition but are grounded in service jobs, a disdain for a central bureaucracy, and a vow to organize. And the AFL-CIO remains a loose federation of disparate unions with the sense that it is still the voice of labor. Fearful of bringing feuding unions together, and terrified that his group's future plans had evaporated, Dennis Gannon, head of the Chicago Federation of Labor, did not call any meetings of Chicago unions for several months after the July convention.
But his fears went away, he said recently, when the AFL-CIO agreed to let members of the dissident labor group belong to local groups like his, and Chicago-based locals went along with the deal.
Nonetheless, AFL-CIO officials say the dissident unions' departure forced the Washington-based group to carry out job cutbacks that are likely to lead to similar belt-tightening in the future.
Union officials from both sides point with praise to the winning battle they waged last fall against California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was pushing ballot initiatives that unions said would have weakened their political strength and bargaining powers.
Paul Booth, a high-ranking official with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), said the California victory lifted spirits still down from the AFL-CIO's break-up.
Yet AFL-CIO spokeswoman Denise Mitchell laments the new burdens faced by her organization.
"We won the [California] election, but it was harder and costlier than it should have been," she said. "It is just a tragedy that they pulled away from the center, when we have more going on for us."
On the other side of the fence, SEIU President Andy Stern, the architect of the break-up, sees his dissident group "moving ahead" while the "AFL-CIO is still looking backwards and trying to apportion the blame for the split."
So, too, his group, the Change to Win Federation, is willing to discuss political strategies with the AFL-CIO, and ways of sharing in the many multiunion benefits offered by the AFL-CIO, he says. But, so far, he says, nothing has come from the other side.
The difference between the new federation and the AFL-CIO, he says, is that his group's members have agreed to coordinate their efforts. That, he says, was not the way of thinking in the AFL-CIO.
As for a major organizing drive that would galvanize the newfederation, Stern says that is still down the road. "This is a big ship, not a speedboat," he said.
Part of the federation's thinking, he says, is coming up with a new model to sign up workers, a model that would let workers go from employer to employer and keep their benefits without any losses.
"By the end of the decade we will be able to tell whether the current model of unionism will survive, or whether others will take its place," he says.
To Cornell University labor expert Harry Katz, it's an encouraging sign that the AFL-CIO broke apart amid a debate over its future. "It's hard to imagine the labor movement being worse off," he added. "It's not obvious to me that the status quo was effective."
Nor is Tom Juravich, a labor expert at the University of Massachusetts, discouraged by what's happened. More than ever, he says, unions are turning to more sophisticated ways to deal with employers.
Indeed, the SEIU used all of its charms, as well as campaign financial support, with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to open the door for its child-care members.
The payoff for years of organizing and lobbying was a 39-month contract, reached in December, that gives the workers a 35 percent boost in their daily rates, incentives to boost their training and health-care coverage in the last year of the contract.
What's unique is the governor's agreement to negotiate a contract with the workers, who care for about 200,000 children from low-income and moderate-income families, whose child-care costs are picked up by the state and federal governments.
For Sandra Koen, who raised four children on her own and relies on food stamps as a financial crutch, that means an added $1 per child per day in April.
"It's not much, but it's better than nothing," she said.
sfranklin@tribune.com

GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Sandra Koen holds Dartavius Head, 5 months, with his brother DeShawn, at her child-care facility. Koen's earnings are expected to rise because of a union agreement with the State of Illinois. Tribune photo by Phil Velasquez.
PHOTO