Union Trends Steelworkers adopt $40 million organizing program.
The Steelworkers adopted an expanded organizing program and dedicated a one-cent per hour dues payment for a new $40 million organizing fund starting next year. An additional penny per hour will go into the fund starting Jan. 1, 2000.
Despite the need to change labor law that makes it easy for employers to thwart organizing drives, USWA President George Becker declared, "Laws don't organize; people organize. It takes money and it takes commitment. And we're going to have the money and the people."
The Steelworkers are aiming to reverse declining membership and start growing by 10% a year. Once growth through mergers is taken out, the union has lost 100,000 members since 1987, according to Secretary-Treasurer Leo Gerard, who headed the Organizing Task Force that proposed the organizing fund.
Half of the fund, created through a constitutional amendment, will be used to pay for organizing plans at the level of the Steelworkers 12 Districts or at the local level; one fourth of it will be used to help fund industry-wide, multi-district organizing programs; and one fourth is earmarked for training and development of local union organizers.
"We want to have the same kind of foresight our predecessors did in the 1930s," District 11 Director David Foster said at a meeting of the Organizing Task Force. "They were participating in a labor movement that represented 10% of workers and dreamed what could be done if they had 40%. We're back where we started."