Joe Kenehan Center

Connecting the Dots

Harold Meyerson weaves it all together in his Washington Post column -- the Southern California grocery strike, the rise of Wal-Mart (which has launched the largest PAC in the country, giving 85 percent of its contributions to the GOP), the new momentum of UNITE HERE, and good jobs for ordinary families.

Fallout from the Grocery Strike/Lockout

* Doug Dority, the union’s international president, has resigned.

* The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik continues to provide insightful coverage.

The damage done by this dispute to the principle of providing a living wage and adequate healthcare coverage for employees will be felt by workers — union and nonunion — around the state and across the country. First to face the music will be the 50,000 Northern California supermarket employees whose contracts expire in July and September.

Among those who gained from this ugly fight are the supermarket executives who provoked it. Their initial proposal for a contract that they knew the workers would reject made a strike inevitable, and their intransigence in negotiations needlessly prolonged it.

It will be instructive to see whether they pass their lower labor costs on to customers. Will shoppers see huge price breaks at Vons to keep them from driving out to a Wal-Mart in Chino? Outside of a few weeks of discounts to lure shoppers back into their neighborhood stores, I wouldn't bet on it. We're much more likely to see the companies boast fatter profit margins and pay fatter bonuses to the executives who steered these companies through the white water of a union-busting campaign.

And:

In the end, supermarket union leaders say they've learned a lot from what happened during the strike — including the folly of waging a regional campaign against the giant grocery chains, as opposed to a truly national effort.

"Watch what we do in Northern California," Stemerman says. "You can bet we'll do things differently."

In the LA Weekly, Robert Greene joins an emerging consensus that unions’ internal structure make it more difficult to take on major battles like the fight to maintain access to affordable care:

How could this happen? UFCW is in many ways a throwback to an earlier time when the grocery industry was made up of locally owned chains. Ralphs, Vons and Safeway were all homegrown Southern California stores, and as recently as the 1980s the CEO of Vons did commercials for his stores on local TV. The seven locals around Southern California were a good match for the supermarkets.

In the ’80s and ’90s, though, consolidation gobbled up chains like Hughes, Boys, Lucky and Alpha Beta, leaving three corporate giants. Kroger became the largest grocer in the world — until 2002, when it was overtaken by Wal-Mart.

The three chains’ coast-to-coast presence gave them the financial power to weather hard economic times, or strikes, in one part of the country as long as shoppers were still rolling their carts through checkout lanes in other regions. UFCW, though, remained fractured, promoting local and separate control while other unions were coming to terms with the need to centralize finances, strategy and organizing . . . The drawbacks of Dority’s approach became apparent as seven Southern California leaders squabbled over strategy, failed to acknowledge the corporate willingness to forgo short-term profits, and stumbled over outreach to other unions that stood ready with resources and good will.

There isn’t a lot of time to regroup. Grocery workers in Washington, D.C., Northern California, and Seattle are also getting ready to negotiate their contracts. In Seattle, grocery workers will be taking on same three chains that the went up against in Southern California—Alberson’s, Safeway, and Kroger:

Negotiating as a bloc, the three chains have said they must reduce the health benefits and premiums they pay from the current 100 percent. They'd also like to institute a wage structure that would allow new hires to be paid less than existing workers.

Paige Gets Detention

Conservatives fixate on a handful of magic bullet solutions for improving public education, usually focusing on charter schools or vouchers.

But their real bogeyman for all things educational is teacher unions. Conservatives get really mad when anyone says anything about the need for classroom teachers to participate in making change in education (which will best happen through a union, after all.)

They're not talking about teachers, they rage. They're talking about the unions, which they see as a different entity all together.

But that theory took quite a blow when Bush education secretary Rod Paige -- a week after insulting teachers by calling their union a "terrorist organization" -- met with a delegation of actual classroom teachers.Award-winning, locally renowned teachers who gave Paige an F for his behavior and made it very clear they don't see the NEA as an evil force that conspires to oppress them:

Betsy Rogers, who last year received the National Teacher of the Year award from President Bush at a White House ceremony, said in an interview after the meeting that Dr. Paige told the teachers twice that "he wished that he could take back his remarks."

"We're not going to focus on it any more," Ms. Rogers said, "but I don't think teachers will ever forget his insulting remark."

And:

Participants in the meeting said that one teacher, Elspeth Corrigan Moore, a librarian at Memorial High School in West New York, N.J., wept as she discussed Dr. Paige's comparison of the teachers union to terrorists. Ms. Moore said after the meeting that because her school had a direct line of sight to downtown Manhattan, she and many students could see the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

"I watched it burn, and I smelled it burn, so I take the word terrorist personally," she said.

Sickening

Another scandal of crony corruption, this time with Tom Delay's former press secretary Michael Scanlon making millions selling access to conservative lawmakers for the gambling industry.

"Scanlon, 33, made more than $30 million, contracts and tribal documents show."

What Will It Take to Win?

Some important allies of the labor movement -- journalist Kelly Candaele and academic Peter Dreier -- weigh in with some thoughts on what went wrong with the Southern California grocery workers' strike/lockout. UPDATE: An expanded, better version of this piece appeared on AlterNet.

Candaele and Dreier argue that the locally-structured unions will struggle to take on national corporations like the ones that now dominate groceries and many other industries:

Heading into the conflict, the three giant supermarket chains involved — Safeway (which owns Vons), Kroger (which owns Ralphs) and Albertsons — had most of the advantages. They understood that although the United Food and Commercial Workers was a national organization with more than a million members, the main battle would be with the seven independent locals in Southern California.

The public was very sympathetic with the strikers. But in a classic divide-and-conquer strategy, the chains calculated in advance that they could take millions of dollars in losses in their Southern California stores but cushion their losses by operating unimpeded throughout the rest of the nation. The chains convinced most institutional investors that the corporations could beat down their labor costs significantly nationwide by starting in California.

To earn wider public support, unions may have to think of new ways to help the community understand who is leading the corporations' fight to take away access to affordable health care:

It took three months before public attention was directed toward Vons Chief Executive Steve Burd, when a group of clergy marched on his house. The union could have focused on other potential targets — such as Peter Magowan, a Safeway board member and the president of the San Francisco Giants. How would Magowan have reacted to a "Giants Fans for Social Justice" group that threatened to picket Giant games unless he pressured Burd to ease his more extreme demands?

UPDATE: An expanded, better version of this piece appeared on AlterNet.

The Battle of Ohio

David Moberg takes a look at the operation Ohio unions are setting up to mobilize for the November election:

While there are 128,000 union members in Cuyahoga County, including Cleveland and suburbs, there are about 40,000 retirees as well whom unions can reach. The retirees council has already proved its clout: It spearheaded a successful campaign to win lower prescription drug prices in the state and its early opposition to the war in Iraq pushed the Cleveland AFL-CIO to become one of the first labor councils to oppose the war. Now the council is gearing up to register retirees and drive home a message that Bush's Medicare prescription drug plan is a recipe for destruction of Medicare. But the retirees have a deeper concern that motivates them as well. "We are dismayed at what is happening to our Republic," said council president and retired ironworker C. Richard Henderson. "They're tearing the Republic apart. They're taking the pride out of being an American, for God's sake."

To get an idea of how crucial Ohio is, look at this map on John Edwards' web site. You can add up the electoral college numbers yourself -- it's hard to see how the candidate who wins in Ohio doesn't also end up winning the White House.

We Have Issues

Most political journalists, to the extent that they write about unions’ issues at all, usually portray the labor movement as focused single-mindedly on NAFTA and other trade agreements.

Certainly, fair trade is a key issue for working people. But it’s not the only thing that matters.

As rising health costs eat up most new wage gains, affordable health care will be an important issue.

But another issue that has already become just as important as NAFTA and trade is the freedom to form new unions.

People who want to form unions are effectively barred by outdated labor laws that are decisively biased in favor of employers. Reform of those laws will restore the freedom to organize unions, which will go a long way towards giving ordinary Americans the opportunity to make changes on health care, secure retirement, housing, and a host of other issues.

To his credit, Al Gore seemed to understand the importance of this issue and talked about it often with unions, even if the media ignored anything he said about it.

This year, all of the Democratic candidates have spoken out plainly in favor of restoring the freedom to form a union.

This is a remarkable step forward, but it's gone unnoticed by most of the media. This might start to change in the future and this this LA Times piece by Ronald Brownstein could be a sign of things to come.

Brownstein notices that this is not a trivial issue to unions:

As Kerry and Edwards noted, employers have stiffened their resistance in those election campaigns, utilizing tactics that unions say intimidate workers — like firing activists or interminably delaying the vote. The result has been that unions lose most representation elections, especially at firms that actively oppose them.

"The way the law gets played out today in union organizing campaigns, it is very, very difficult for unions to win," says Fred Feinstein, the general counsel at the National Labor Relations Board under Clinton.

Kerry and Edwards would reshape the playing field with a reform known as card-check recognition. That would force employers to recognize a union if a majority of workers simply sign cards or petitions indicating they want to join.

By eliminating the election stage where management exerts its greatest leverage, that approach could greatly increase labor's prospects of adding new members. To underscore the point, Kerry and Edwards would also toughen penalties on companies that use unfair labor practices, and establish time limits, with binding arbitration, for firms to reach an initial contract with a new union. Kerry says he would even give preference in federal contracts to companies that remain neutral in organizing drives.

We’re still a long way off from a Wagner Act for the 21st Century, however:

Republicans would fiercely resist any drive to rewrite the labor laws; many Democrats from Southern states with little union presence would inevitably join them. Kerry and Edwards, as well as AFL-CIO leaders, recognize that labor law reform won't be politically possible any time soon, even if Democrats retake the White House this fall.

Yet simply forcing the cause of organizing reform onto the campaign agenda represents an enormous advance for unions. By binding the Democrats more closely to this cause, and publicizing it more widely, the unions have increased their leverage to pursue it through means other than congressional legislation, such as local initiatives providing preference in contracting to companies that allow card-check recognition.

"You had an entire Democratic field this time that embraced organizing rights, which is quite extraordinary given the way unions were perceived 10 or 15 years ago," says Steve Rosenthal, the former political director for the AFL-CIO. "That is a monumental change."