The New York Times, February 27, 2006, Monday

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

February 27, 2006 Monday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section A; Column 5; National Desk; Pg. 10

HEADLINE: Labor Leaders to Convene, Faced With Uphill Battles

BYLINE: By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

DATELINE: SAN DIEGO, Feb. 26

BODY:
When the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s leaders gather this week at a luxury seaside resort here, they will once again be on the defensive, a situation made worse by the split the labor federation suffered last year.
Wages for the nation's workers failed to keep up with inflation last year, and unions in the beleaguered automobile, steel and airline industries are bat-tling management's efforts to cut pay and benefits.
Unions face an uphill battle in recruiting more workers because many compa-nies fight so hard to remain nonunion. And as a result of the split, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. has cut its budget by 25 percent and shut down its magazine and its health and safety department.
But labor leaders insist that they are moving forward, not backward. They boast that they played an instrumental role in getting several states to raise their minimum wage and in blocking President Bush's plans to revamp Social Secu-rity. And they say their lobbying in Maryland and other states to force compa-nies to pay more for health insurance has pressured Wal-Mart to improve its benefits.
Leaders of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., a federation of 52 unions representing nine million workers, say the damage from last summer's schism has not been as bad as feared. Last year, four major unions -- the service employees; the Teamsters; the food and commercial workers; and Unite Here, representing apparel, hotel and restaurant workers -- quit the federation, insisting that it was doing too lit-tle to reverse labor's decline. Those unions, which accounted for nearly one-third the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s membership, have formed a rival federation, called Change to Win.
In a surprise, while those unions severed ties on the national level, they pushed hard to continue cooperating with the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s affiliates at the state and local level. Indeed, 516 union locals from the breakaway unions have signed agreements enabling them to remain part of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s state and local labor federations. This has meant that the rival factions can cooperate in state and local political campaigns and lobbying.
''It's really significant that we're reuniting at the state and local level,'' said Denise Mitchell, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s communications director. ''This shows that people still want to work together and not disrupt this rela-tionship.''
Nonetheless, at the national level, the two sides often exchange harsh words, accusing each other, for instance, of doing far less union organizing than they had promised. If the two sides agree on anything, it is that labor's biggest challenge is reversing its decline in numbers. Only 12.5 percent of the nation's workers belong to unions, and just 7.8 percent in the private sector, down from 35 percent in the 1950's.
The A.F.L.-C.I.O. is proud that one of its unions, the communications work-ers, recently organized 16,500 workers at Cingular, the cellphone giant, while Change to Win boasts that the service employees have unionized nearly 5,000 im-migrant janitors in Houston.
The breakaway unions promised to be far more aggressive about organizing than the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s unions, saying they would focus on campaigns that would unionize thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of workers. But so far Change to Win has begun few new efforts.
''We're still mapping out plans,'' said Greg Tarpinian, Change to Win's ex-ecutive director. ''You're not going to see results tomorrow.''
He pointed to one ambitious effort -- Unite Here announced an effort this month to unionize workers at Starwood, Hilton and Marriott hotels. John Edwards, the former senator and Democratic candidate for vice president, helped kick off the campaign, which asserts that hotel workers need a union because so many earn less than $8 an hour and live in poverty.
''Change to Win still hasn't shown that they can establish momentum,'' said Richard W. Hurd, a labor relations professor at Cornell University. ''But they have a clear idea of what they want to do.''
The A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s unions say they are gearing up for major campaigns to organize construction workers in Arizona and Denver and mining workers at Pea-body Energy.
But labor experts say reversing labor's fortunes will not be easy. ''Are unions going to go back to 30 percent of the work force? No,'' said Charles B. Craver, a labor law professor at George Washington University. ''But they might be able to get to a point where they represent 10 percent in the private sector, and that might cause nonunion companies to be afraid of them, but right now they're not.''
One big fear about the schism was that the two sides would raid each other's members. Last fall there was a huge battle in California when the ser-vice employees sought to attract thousands of workers who belonged to the Ameri-can Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, but those two unions signed a truce. Still, the two unions have battled each other in trying to sign up child care workers in Iowa and municipal employees in Houston.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has sought to raid several other unions in Chicago. It has also enraged the machinists' union by trying to take away the machinists' members at US Airways after it merged with America West.
A.F.L.-C.I.O. officials assert that such raids betray union solidarity. Mr. Tarpinian of Change to Win, who is a longtime consultant to the Teamsters, said: ''Where there is raiding, it's localized. It's not directed at the national level. One can argue that it doesn't go beyond what existed when everyone was in the A.F.L.-C.I.O.''
Officials with the A.F.L.-C.I.O. plan to use the winter meeting to show the federation is on the mend. It will announce that several small unions, including the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and the Utility Workers Union, will join the federation. On Monday, the nation's largest union, the National Education Asso-ciation, will announce that it will allow its local chapters -- there are 13,200 -- to join the A.F.L.-C.I.O., a move that could increase the federation's mem-bership by nearly a million over the next five years.

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