Like you, I'm a CWA member, in fact, twice over. I belong to the Newspaper Guild, or as we now call it, the Northern California Media Workers Guild, and to Workers Education Local 189. And for a brief time a few years ago, I worked for CWA as well, with Virginia Rodriguez, Marie Malliett, the members of Local 9410 in San Francisco, and the workers at La Conexion Familiar.
In 1994, CWA helped the workers of La Conexion Familiar to organize a union. La Conexion was a Spanish-language, telephone solicitation business. A boilerroom. And because of the language used by the workers, most of them were immigrants. I think it's fair to say that Mexican, Central American and other Latino immigrants are the single group of people most interested and involved in organizing unions in California today. So it was no surprise that their response to the high pressure and bad treatment from their supervisors, as well as to the low wages the company paid, was to get organized.
Well, La Conexion was bought out by Sprint, and I'm sure most of you remember what happened. Two weeks before the 200 workers at La Conexion were due to vote in a union representation election, Sprint suddenly announced that it was closing the workplace, and all the workers were fired.
Sprint is one of the most anti-union corporations in America, with a long history of firing workers and closing units when people get organized. The La Conexion workers stuck together for quite a while after their temination, filing legal charges and trying to bring pressure to bear on the company. But despite the legal victories they won, they were never rehired.
Finally, the Mexican telephone workers union, in cooperation with CWA, filed charges with the National Administrative Office of the Mexican Labor Ministry, an agency set up to hear charges under NAFTA's labor side-agreement. The Mexican union charged that the U.S. government was failing to enforce U.S. labor law.
And of course, the charge was true.
The NLRA says that it's illegal to fire workers and close their workplace in retaliation for their union activity, and that's exactly what Sprint had done.
So more hearings were held. Again workers from La Conexion Familiar testified. Again the charges were proven. And in the end, the legal apparatus of the sideagreement imposed the most serious penalty available to it under the treaty -- discussions between Robert Reich, then US Secretary of Labor, and Santiago Oñate, the Mexican labor minister. And that was it.
There is no remedy under the NAFTA sideagreement for violations of workers labor rights, and that's the truth.
But the experience of the La Conexion workers tells us more than that. It tells us the truth about the situation confronting workers who want to organize a union in this country. And that truth is that it's a war zone for workers who join unions, where one worker in every ten involved in an organizing drive can expect to lose her or his job. It's a war zone where the law means little.
Closer to home, workers at the newly merged UCSF-Stanford Health Care are learning the same bitter truth. This is a situation which really concerns UPTE, since your union now represents workers employed by this new private entity.
At the two hospitals on the Stanford campus, about 1500 housekeepers, dieticians, patient transporters and other workers are trying to join SEIU Local 715, the big public workers union in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. The two Stanford hospitals are the private side of this public/private merger, or should I say, ripoff. Like their sisters and brothers in San Francisco before them, workers there are also finding out some bitter truth about the law.
Sue Ramirez, a film librarian in the Radiology department, discovered it last week. Her supervisor called her in, and told her she was being sent to a two-hour session of training in her rights under the NLRA, training that would be conducted by a representative of the labor board.
What she got when she went to this NLRA training was a man named Oliver Bell. Bell works for an outfit called the Burke Group, one of the most notorious union-busting consultant firms in the country. Bell said he came from a neutral-sounding organization called Labor Information Services, and that he was licensed by the government to talk to workers.
Bell treated the workers in this captive audience meeting to a two-hour tirade against SEIU, regaling them with every dirty story he could imagine, and always trying to give himself credibility by inferring that he represented the NLRB.
This wasn't the first time he's tried this trick. Two years ago the Board issued a complaint after a union drive was broken at the new K-Mart store in Oakland. It charged Bell with doing the same thing -- representing himself as an NLRB agent. The drive was broken, and election at K-Mart was never held. One fired worker was given backpay and walked away from her job. K-Mart had to post one of those insulting notices which say that although the company doesn't admit it did anything illegal, it will not interfere with workers rights in the future either.
And Bell was free to find another client, this time Stanford, where he could play the same game. What make it even more ironic is that Stanford is the one place where there really is someone who could tell workers legitimately what their rights are under the law. On the law school faculty is William Gould, who just stepped down as chair of the NLRB after a four-year stint.
But of course Stanford didn't ask him to give workers an education in their NLRA rights because that's not really what UCSF Stanford Health Care wanted at all.
The purpose of the hospital's NLRA training isn't to advise workers of their rights. When an employer, any employer, says it respects our right to decide whether or not we want to form a union, and then say its position is that we shouldn't because a union isn't wanted or necessary in our workplace, we all know what the reality is. The first part of this statement, about respect for our rights, is a legalism, a formality, something said for its PR value. It means nothing. It's the second part of what the employer say that counts. It wants no union here, and it's determined to make sure that we don't organize one. This is the real truth.
Talking about La Conexion and Stanford today is important because it helps me tell you what UPTE represents to the unions and workers around you -- why your experience is important to other people, why in some ways it doesn't belong just to you alone.
You've been able to turn this anti-union playing field upside down.
In the fall of 1994, 4000 technical workers at UC voted in favor of UPTE.
Less than two years later, 3800 reseasrch employees did the same thing.
Last year, another 2000 health care professionals voted to join the union.
From an organization which didn't exist four years ago, you now have the potential to be one of the largest unions in California.
You have your first big contract, won for the technical unit and ratified last year. And recently you signed a side agreement for research associates at the Rad Lab.
These contracts have important improvements. Training and development leave. Improved hours of work. The first across-the-board raise ever at the Rad Lab.
And most important, you've been able to break the back of the merit system.
You need to understand what this represents, not just to your own members, but to others as well. Last year my own union won a new agreement at the Fresno Bee, after years without a contract. And at the Oakland Tribune, where our members were summarily dumped ten years ago after the paper was bought up by the Alameda Newspaper Group, and their contract torn into shreds, we finally have a new agreement as well. But these contracts have come at a price. And that price is the merit system. That's what we had to eat to win our contracts back.
Well, UPTE is breaking the back of that system here at UC. What you've done is important to us, and the reason is simple: in the long run, what you can do, we can do.
The University obviously doesn't like it, and wants things to return to the old days. I'm sure you're not going to let that happen.
What has the university worried is that UPTE ha been able to make real changes in the working lives of UC workers. That's why people organized the union to begin with -- not because they believed ideologically that unions are progressive institutions (although they are), but because they wanted to win concrete changes in the conditions of their daily lives.
Whats given UPTE the strength and ability to do this?
It's that you have an organization, a union, that you control yourself. And the struggle of UPTE's members for this goal is also part of a larger movement, just as your organizing drives have been.
It's not just a movement here in this country. In Tijuana, workers at the Han Young factory have been on strike since last May for that same right - the right to a union they control themselves.
These 100 workers are employed by a contract plant that produces for Hyundai, one of the world's largest industrial corporations. And the conditions they work in make it clear why they want a real union.
They build truck chassis and big shipping containers -- mostly metal welding and sheet metal work. When it rains, water pours through holes in the roof and collects in puddles on the floor. The workers call these lagunas, or lakes. Fraying cables to the arc-welding machines, carring 440 volts of electricity, snake through the water. It's a miracle no one has been electrocuted. Yet.
Cranes lift and carry chassis around the shop, each wieghing several tons. The controls are broken, and sometimes the loads hit each other, and fall to the floor below, as workers run for their lives.
Metal fumes from the welding burn eyes and skin -- there's no ventilation.
Miguel Angel Solorzano, one of the members of the strike committee, worked at the plant for four years when he fell while working on top of one of the chassis. He broke his arm, and the company wouldn't provide him adequate medical care. As a result, when he stretches out his arm, you can see it's crooked because the bone wasn't set properly. He still can't make a complete fist with the hand on that arm.
Miguel worked six days a week, eight to ten hours a day. He was making 60 pesos a day. I won't tell you what that is in dollars -- that's not what counts. What counts is that when he goes to the supermarket to buy a gallon of milk for his family, he has to pay 20 pesos. Miguel is working three hours, almost half a day, for just a gallon of milk. Han Young sells each chassis for $48,000, and the plant, when it's not on strike, turns out 18-20 a day.
It's no wonder Hyundai wants to keep this factory going.
A year and a half ago, the workers got sick of this situation and decided to change it. And the first big obstacle they confronted was that they already had a union, but not one that was willing to help them to fight. This union, affiliated to the government, collected payments directly from the company -- these so-called dues weren't even deducted from the workers paychecks.
It took the Han Young workers a year before they won the legal right to fight and bargain over the plant's wages and conditions. They had a series of one and two day wildcat strikes. Union activists went on a hunger strike in downtown Tijuana and chained themselves to the doors of city hall. They voted for their union in four separate union elections, each time, in the Mexican style, out loud in front of company supervisors and goons from the company union.
They finally won the right to strike in May, and since then, the government has flat out refused to enforce the law which requires that the company bargain, and keep the plant closed until a contract is signed.
We have a common problem, on both sides of the border.
We have a legal structure, which our parents and grandparents fought for, which unions fought for and won, decades ago. That law is supposed to protect us. But it doesn't.
In Mexico or in the US, if we want to win significant improvements in our working lives, if we want our rights respected, we have to use the power of workers in the workplace.
And on both sides of the border, we've found remarkably similar answers about what it takes to do that. If we want change and we're willing to fight for it, we must have organizations that are democratic, that we control ourselves, and that are committed to militant struggle.
When Miguel Angel Solorzano looks north of the border, what does he see? He sees brothers and sisters in the same fight, and in the case of UPTE, succeeding in that fight. He sees the Committee to Support Maquiladora Workers, founded by UPTE members and other San Diego trade unionists five years ago. Without the work of that committee, without the understanding that led UPTE members to reach out across the border, the union effort at Han Young could never have survived.
And when we look south, what do we see?
Perhaps there are some lessons here for us too. We need to ask -- what makes the Han Young workers willing to fight, willing to risk everthing?
It's not union security. In that plant they've never had any regulation which said workers had to join the independent union. Far from it -- the company did everything it could to discourage workers from doing that.
It's not strike benefits. The independent union has none. What little resources it has come from supporters on both sides of the border.
Han Young workers are fighting because they're convinced it's the only way. A battle has been fought and won for the heart and mind of each worker involved. That's what that strike depends on.
This is the lesson for us.
UC unions, like most university unions, have a curse -- the curse of being minority unions -- representing large numbers of workers, but with a small membership. Winning the hearts and minds of workers on the campuses is the big problem.
Can it be done?
I used to belong to another union which faced this same problem -- the United Electrical Workers, the UE. In the great upsurge of workers in this country in the 1930s, the UE grew to become one of the most powerful and progressive of the industrial unions of the era, in the same movement which built the longshoremens union, the autoworkers, and others.
The UE did what everyone before had said could never be done. It won a contract with what is now the largest industrial corporation in the world -- General Electric.
That first contract was just the company rulebook. With one key addition. When the UE and GE signed that agreement, GE had to agree to a key demand, the most important of all. It had to recognize the union and the workers' right to bargain.
That right, over sixty years, has produced a master agreement in the electrical industry which is one of the strongest contracts in the country today.
And since that first round of negotiations in 1938, at every bargaining session, the company asks the same thing. If you give up the right to strike over grievances, we'll give you union security and dues checkoff.
And every time the union says thanks, but no thanks.
The UE don't need it. Union membership in GE's UE plants is over 90% in every one. And the reason isn't hard to see. The union is able to fight successfully on the plant floor to win grievances, better contracts, and better conditions. And that ability wins it the support of the workers. The union treats every grievance as an opportunity to organize, to prove that the union and collective action on the shop floor works.
They're mutually dependent -- if the union is effective, workers support it. And it's their support that makes it effective.
Organizing doesn't stop when you win an election or get a contract.
Many unions say the goal of organizing is to achieve a stable bargaining relationship, but that mistakes the means for the end. Sure, we want respect and movement at the bargaining table. But we bargain to change conditions, and it's our ability to change conditions that wins consciousness and organization and loyalty among our members. With that, over time, we can take any company rulebook and change it into a strong contract.
This is the kind of unionism UPTE represents, one which is changing the lives of UC employees for the better.
In your union newsletter, you describe the fight by UPTE members at the research lab in Hunters Point against racism and health and safety dangers. As steward Olivia Gorostiza says, the union has filed grievances, workers have worn buttons and signed petitions, and created a general uproar for two years in the workplace. The union has won community support, and made the situation a political issue in San Francisco. Now it looks like the supervisor responsible is on her way out. No wonder union membership at the site is 95%.
Just before the election for the health care professional unit, UCLA laid off over 200 lab techs. The message from the administration was clear. There's no point in voting for the union because the university has the power. No matter what you do, you can't change that.
Where UCLA said no, you can't, UPTE said, yes, we can.
Directly challenging management, UPTE won a decision giving workers 30 days pay. I know it's not all the union wanted, but it was a concrete achievement for people. So it's no wonder workers vote for the union . They could see that it's possible to fight UC and win.
That's why UC won't print the contract -- because the university doesn't want workers to use it to organize and change conditions on the campuses.
The issue is power.
UC doesn't want a union where rank-and-fle workers have the power, and use it to fight and win.
When UC says, you can't do this, you can't have your own democratic, rank-and-file union, UPTE says -- YES WE CAN!
Like the farmworkers say, ¡SI SE PUEDE!
When UC says, you can't organize and win elections, UPTE says -- YES WE CAN!
When UC says, you can win elections, but you can't get a contract that's worth anything, UPTE says -- YES WE CAN!
When UC says, you can get a contract, but you can't make us actually change anything that will make a difference in the lives of UC workers, UPTE says -- YES WE CAN!
When UC says, you don't have union security, so you'll never be a majority union, UPTE says -- YES WE CAN!
And when corporate America, standing behind the regents and the president and the chancellors, says -- maybe you can get some changes made on a university campus, but you can't change us, you can't win social and economic justice for workers in this country, we all say -- YES WE CAN!
Thank you.
--------------------------------------------------------------- david bacon - labornet email david bacon internet: dbacon at igc.apc.org 1631 channing way phone: 510.549.0291 berkeley, ca 94703 ---------------------------------------------------------------