Unions are focusing on bills to help them rebuild their membership rolls, and to protect workers in a rapidly changing economy.

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By Alyssa Rosenberg, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Monday, Jan. 29, 2007

On November 7, labor unions demonstrated that they can still turn out large numbers of Democratic voters. Some 11.9 million voters were union members. And three-quarters of them voted Democratic in House and Senate races, according to an Election Night survey by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the AFL-CIO.

Bolstered by those findings, the AFL-CIO and its breakaway sister federation, Change to Win, are pushing the Democratic-controlled Congress to quickly pass several signature bills -- including ones affecting the minimum wage, negotiated drug prices, and executive compensation -- that labor leaders hope will build momentum for still more items on their legislative wish list.

The unions are working hard to present their congressional allies with a unified front and to make sure those allies know what is wanted from them. "There will be ... those [lawmakers] who believe that a vote for [raising the] minimum wage is enough to satisfy labor. That's not going to be the case," said Mike Mathis, the Teamsters' director of government affairs. "We are going to hold the [Democratic] leadership accountable for the promises they made during the campaign."

Those promises span a range of topics as diverse as union members themselves: tax policy, transportation safety, school funding, and Internet access, among others. But the labor movement's lobbying will especially focus on issues that address its core challenges as it attempts to rebuild its membership rolls and protect its workers in a rapidly changing economy.

Collective Bargaining
The first item on labor's ambitious agenda to change how employees secure union representation is the Employee Free Choice Act. That bill would require employers and the National Labor Relations Board to recognize unions formed when a majority of employees sign authorization cards.

Business groups maintain that the current system, which requires employees to vote on whether to unionize, preserves a democratic right to a secret ballot.

But union leaders insist that elections provide an opportunity for employers to intimidate employees and manipulate the results. The NLRB announced this month that from 2005 to '06, petitions for union representation declined by a quarter, a drop that the AFL-CIO promptly cited as evidence of intimidation.

Union lobbyists think that the Employee Free Choice Act is likely to pass in the House but could have real trouble in the Senate. And, according to AFL-CIO Political Director Karen Ackerman, "There's no question that it would be vetoed by the president."

In the view of Bill Samuel, the AFL-CIO's legislative director, the measure "could be a very big issue in the 2008 election." He added, "There are few major social advances made in one year. The Civil Rights Act had been debated and voted on numerous times over a decade."

Various unions also plan to push narrower bills that would preserve the rights of workers to join unions and current members to stay in them. At the top of this list is legislation to overturn an NLRB ruling last September that employers may classify employees who perform minor management tasks, such as assigning schedules, as "supervisors" who cannot belong to unions. "We're going to be supporting legislation to change the definition of 'supervisor' so collective bargaining applies to our nurses, office workers, people in the skilled trades," said Chuck Loveless, legislative director of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees.

The Service Employees International Union might push legislation to change the legal definition of "independent contractor," another term that is used to determine which workers are eligible for unionization. "More and more [independent contractors] are just workers," said SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger, chair of Change to Win. "They have no independence in terms of their judgment, in terms of their hours, in terms of almost anything about their lives, but employers have figured out how to take away their [own] responsibility to treat [the contractors] fairly."

Some unions will also be pushing for industry-specific changes to make more workers eligible to organize. The Employer-Employee Cooperation Act would guarantee firefighters and other public safety employees the right to collective bargaining. The right to bargain can enhance public safety because of the concerns "that our people often bring to the bargaining table," said Barry Kasinitz, director of government affairs for the International Association of Fire Fighters.

The House bill implementing many of the 9/11 commission's recommendations would allow Transportation Security Administration screeners to form unions, a major goal of the American Federation of Government Employees.

Trade
In the 12 years since the Democrats last controlled the Capitol, the trade debate has shifted dramatically. Opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement and other international agreements has risen along with Americans' worries about globalization. The public-interest group Public Citizen reports that trade was a wedge issue in 115 congressional campaigns last year.

With the Doha Round of trade negotiations deadlocked, unions are likely to target upcoming bilateral trade deals with Colombia, Panama, Peru, and South Korea and to fight renewal of the president's "fast-track" trade-promotion authority, which is set to expire at the end of June. Rather than wanting the deals to be rejected outright, the unions want labor standards to become integral elements of new pacts.

Current international labor standards "are not enforceable -- they're treated like a stepchild in the trade agreements," says Yvette Pena Lopes, a legislative representative for the Teamsters. She vows that unless labor standards receive more weight, renewal of "fast-track as we know it is a nonstarter."

Immigration
The SEIU's support for the McCain-Kennedy comprehensive immigration bill, which passed the Senate last year and which would have created a new path to citizenship for illegal aliens, led some observers to think that disagreements over the measure's guest-worker program could widen the split between the AFL-CIO and Change to Win. But leaders of the two labor factions don't sound far apart:

"Those who agreed with the business community and the White House that we need a permanent, unlimited supply of guest workers without rights are wrong," said the AFL-CIO's Samuel.

Meanwhile, Burger of the SEIU and Change to Win says, "We agreed to support [McCain-Kennedy] because we thought it was the best that could go through at that point in time.

"We do believe in a comprehensive approach, that we need to figure out a solution for the immigrants who are here now, to get people out of the shadows and to allow them to be full participants in society.... I don't think we are actively supporting a guest-worker program. What we want to do is figure out what is the right flow [of immigrants] and how do we do that."

Health Care
Union leaders across the labor movement describe universal health insurance as an urgent priority. And individual unions have more-limited health care goals.

The IAFF wants the federal government to follow the example of three dozen states and assume that if firefighters contract particular illnesses, the condition is work-related. "There are certain diseases we know are associated with firefighting," Kasinitz said. "[For] the 12,000 firefighters who work for the federal government, mostly protecting military installations, those diseases aren't considered work-related. And if they have to go on disability, their pensions are seriously decreased."

Loveless said that AFSCME plans to focus on reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program and increasing its funding.

After so many years of feeling shut out by the Republicans who ran Congress, organized labor wants much more than could possibly be accomplished in a few days, no matter how grateful the Democrats are for union members' votes. "We think the 100-hours strategy is really a first step." Burger said. "But we really need much more, much greater change in this country to rebalance it for working families, to rebuild the middle class, to give them security again."

Labor Unions Key Players: AFL-CIO; Change to Win; American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; Service Employees International Union; Teamsters On the Front Burner: Raise the minimum wage; make it easier for workers to form unions; move toward universal health care; formulate a new model for trade deals Sleeper Issue: Change the definition of "supervisor" to make more workers eligible to join unionshere text goes here -- Alyssa Rosenberg

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