> Labor Unions in Florida: A Long Climb
>
> Because of Florida's insignificant manufacturing sector and
> its right-to-work provision, unions can't find a path to power
>
> By Barry Flynn OF THE [Orlando] SENTINEL STAFF [9/5/99]
>
> When organized labor flexed its meager political muscle at this
> year's session of the Florida Legislature, the biggest trophy it
> brought home was a resolution--not a law, just a non-binding
> resolution-- that recognized workers' already longestablished
> legal right to join unions.
>
> That, the president of the Florida chapter of the American
> Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations
> conceded recently, was the union movement's greatest
> achievement of the legislative session.
>
> Such are the depths on this Labor Day weekend from which
> organized labor would have to climb before it became a
> significant political force in Florida.
>
> The politics of unions in Florida are in some ways both a
> cause and an effect of the power realities: Only about one
> in every 16 Florida workers carries a union card, one of the
> lowest rates in the United States.
>
> This situation is not something thatstems from Republican
> control of state government. This is the first year since Reconstruction
> that Republicans have held the governorship and both houses
> of the Legislature.
>
> On the contrary, Florida has a long history of hostility toward
> unions, and a crippling anti-union provision has been enshrined
> in the state Constitution for more than three decades.
>
> That constitutional stricture is a socalled right-to-work provision.
> It permits people who are represented by a union to forego
> membership in that union.
>
> In most states outside the South, unions that have been chosen
> by a majority of a bargaining unit to represent them may require
> all members of the group to join the union or at least to pay dues.
>
> But Florida's right-to-work provision--and those of some other
> southern and western states -- does not allow unions to collect
> dues from those who choose not to join their ranks. In states without
> "right-to-work" laws,unions can collect money in lieu of dues from all
> workers they represent to support bargaining and grievance procedures.
>
> More important, the right-to-work provision also leaves large numbers
> of workers outside the voting processes of the union, thus further
> fracturing what otherwise likely would be a more united front in
> dealing with a company.
>
> At Walt Disney World, for example, the Service Trades Council Union
> negotiated a contract last year for about 1 23,000 hourly workers. But
> only about 40 percent of those employees belonged to the union and
> were qualified to vote on either the contract offer or, potentially, a
> strike proposal.
>
> With such a small portion of the employees participating, support
> for the union's decisions was likely to be weak. Union leaders
> bitterly refer to the constitutional provision as the "right-to
> work-for-less."
>
> The so-called right-to-work provision in the state constitution
> is one of the two biggest stumbling blocks facing unions in
> Florida, according to Walter A. Bogumil, an associate professor
> of management at the University of Central Florida who, in effect,
> teaches his students how to deal with or resist unions. Organized
> labor's other problem, BoIgumil said: "We don't produce a hell of a lot her=
> e."
>
> By that, he means that Florida does not have a large manufacturing
> sector, in which unions traditionally have been most successful.
> Moreover, he said, unions have yet to learn how to organize in the
> swiftly growing service sector that is such a large part of the Florida
> economy.
>
> Still, unions in Florida slog on.
>
> On this Labor Day, a holiday created 117 years ago at the behest
> of and in celebration of the American union movement, organized
> labor in Florida falls far short of the strength reached during the
> '50s and '60s in the industrialized states of the Northeast and Midwest.
>
> But the movement in Florida is far from moribund.
>
> Indeed, Florida AFL-CIO President Marilyn Lenard said she sees
> the state's labor movement as newly aggressive. While she could
> hardly be expected to say anything different, there is some evidence
> to support her contention, if not absolute proof.
>
> =46or one thing, the hemorrhaging of union members seems to have
> stopped or at least slowed to a trickle. Union membership in Florida
> --always low-- grew slightly last year in absolute numbers from 403,000
> to 408,000, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
>
> Even so the percentage of the state's workers belonging to a union
> slipped a bit as growth in the total workforce outpaced unionization.
> Union members accounted for just 6.7 percent of the state's non-agricultura=
> l
> workers last year, down from 6.8 percent the year before, the
> Department of Labor said.
>
> Nationally, only about 13.9 percent of wage and salary workers
> belonged to a union in 1998, the Department of Labor said. That's
> much less than half of unions' highwater mark, said Dan Cornfield,
> a Vanderbilt University labor sociologist.
>
> "Union density rose from about 10 percent in the 1920s to an all-time
> high of about 35 percent during the late 1940s. It plateaued at this level
> through the 1950s and, beginning in the early 1960s, declined steadily
> to 14 percent today," he said.
>
> Despite this overall trend, however, in Florida, as in much of the nation,
> there has been an increase in union membership among government
> employees. Union penetration was quite low among government workers
> two and three deaces ago when private sector penetration was highest.
>
> =46lorida is still one of the least unionized states, with just a fraction=
> of the
> unionization rates of states like New York, where more than a quarter
> of all workers belong to a union, and Michigan, New Jersey and Washington,
> where unionization is well above 20 percent of the workforce.
>
> Despite its handicaps, organized lar has won some important victories in
> Florida during the past year.
>
> After a long struggle for recognition the bargaining representative of
> employees of a north Florida mushroom grower, the United Farm
> Workers of America won a contract in July that included pay raises
> for 250 workers at Quincy Farms, which is based in Quincy. That
> agreement is the only one in Florida in six years for the California-based
> union. The United Farm Workers was founded and led for years by the
> late Cesar Chavez, who in the 1960s made the exploitation of migrant
> field hands a national issue.
>
> The United Farm Workers' campaign to win recognition used
> demonstrations by members of other unions and a boycott of
> Quincy's products. Unionized aire flight attendants helped out
> last year with a demonstration at a Kissimmee Publix supermarket.
>
> In another union victory, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters
> won a representation election in June to bargain for about 360
> nurses at the Lawnwood Regional Medical Center, a Fort Pierce hospital.
>
> The Teamsters, most often thought of representing only long-haul
> truckers, include a wide range of other categories and have been
> making a push among nurses and other medical workers in Florida.
>
> A year earlier, Teamsters Local 769 of Miami, the same one that
> organized the Fort Pierce hospital, won an election to represent
> about 400 nurses at Indian River Memorial Hospital in Vero Beach.
>
> Michael K. Scott, a Teamsters organizer who worked on both
> campaigns, said that nurses have been drawn to unions by
> non-pay issues. This particularly includes working conditions
> and staffing, which nurses feel have deteriorated as managed
> health care and federal medical payment programs have squeezed
> spending out of the healthcare system, he said.
>
> Even as unions have made inroads however, there have been continued
> disappointments for them.
>
> This past spring, the union movement took a high-profile hit at Universal
> Studios Escape in,Orlando, when the Actors Equity Association lost a
> bid to represent entertainers at the theme park.
>
> The loss was the fourth such setback for various unions seeking
> to represent different groups at Universal in its nineyear history.
> The defeat left the fast growing theme park complex still union-free.
>
> Actors Equity organizers, who brought in Hollywood actors to
> make cameo appearances to promote a yes vote, were stunned
> by the setback. They blamed it on an anti-union campaign and
> lies by the company. Universal officials said employees rejected
> a "third party" intrusion in the relationship between company and workers.
>
> While the potential bargaining unit was small, just about 300
> people, a victory would: have had symbolic importance at Universal,
> which has about 12,000 Orlando-area employees.
>
> "That was a major setback," Paul Vasquez, Florida field director
> of the national AFL-CIO, said reeently of the Universal vote.
> "I thought if we could have pulled that off, that we would have
> sent a loud message to the company."
>
> Meanwhile, at heavily unionized Disney, the contract
> that members of the Service Trades Council ultimately
> approved this past December--after two previous votes
> to reject--was a bitter pill for many of the union members.
>
> Many workers complained that their 3.5-percent and 4.5-percent
> wage increases would be eaten up, and then some, by sharply
> higher health insurance premiums that in some cases doubled
> under the new contract.
>
> Even before the final vote, Disney quietly fired at least 11 people
> who worked as costumed characters in its parks for allegedly
> trying to organize a sickout to protest the terms of Disney's contract offer=
> =2E
>
> Bill Ingram, a parade performer at the Animal. Kingdom park who
> was fired, said recently that the grievance he filed protesting his
> dismissal has resulted only in frustration. He has not been
> reinstated at Disney, is still waiting for a resolution and is now working
> as a nanny.
>
> The experience has left him seemingly angrier with the union than
> with the company. "One thing I've learned is, never fight for someone
> who won't fight for himself," he said.
>
> As union membership rates in Floria and nationwide hover
> near all-time lows, even someone on the business side of
> the street such as Bogumil, the UCF management professor,
> see unions surviving and even thriving forever. "There's a one-word
> answer why unions will always be around," he said. "Greed."
>
> Greed among both workers and employers, he said.
>
> =46rom the worker's perspective, "A unionized worker is still making
> several dollars an hour more than a non-unionized worker" in
> the same job, he said.
>
> And from the management point of view, he asked, "If you were
> running a company, would you pay your employees as much as
> they wanted or as much as you wanted?"
>
> ****************************************************************************=
> ****
> ******
>
> 'No' vote at TGH a setback to effort to unionize nurses
>
> By DAVID KARP
>
> =A9 St. Petersburg Times, published September 4, 1999
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> TAMPA -- Workers who want to organize a union at St. Joseph's Hospital
> watched this week as ballots were counted in a labor election across town at
> Tampa General.
>
> They didn't like what they saw.
>
> Nurses at Tampa General Hospital voted 428-336 against allowing a labor
> union into the formerlypublic, 877-bed hospital on Davis Islands.
>
> The failed union vote will only make it harder for workers to organize at
> other places, union officials said.
>
> "It's disappointing to us," said Glenn Harris, assistant to the regional
> director of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union,
> which represents nurses at Lakeland Regional Medical Center and is
> organizing workers at St. Joseph's.
>
> "If Tampa General would have voted the union in and gotten a contract, that
> would have helped us," Harris said. "We think the only way to change the
> industry is to get more than one hospital in Central Florida organized."
>
> The defeat comes just as more nurses, squeezed like doctors by managed care
> companies, are joining unions. This summer, nurses at Holy Cross Hospital in
> =46ort Lauderdale and Lawnwood Regional Medical Center in Fort Pierce voted =
> to
> accept a union.
>
> But unions still face huge obstacles to organizing in hospitals, where
> nurses often see themselves as professionals who don't belong in labor
> organizations.
>
> Hospital executives can also spend thousands to defeat union drives.
>
> At St. Joseph's, executives have already produced a video about unions and
> met with managers about the issue.
>
> "We don't believe that unions have a commitment to our patients, our
> employees or our community," hospital spokesman Holly Kickliter said Friday.
>
> At Tampa General, the hospital met regularly with workers about the union
> drive, held town hall meetings, put up anti-union posters, produced a video,
> filled mailboxes with anti-union letters, and distributed buttons for
> workers to wear.
>
> "They ran an aggressive anti-union campaign, and they were quite pleased
> with themselves," said Daryl Mencher, a nurse who worked for the union
> cause.
>
> She thinks nurses need a union to give them a voice when negotiating wages,
> benefits and schedules.
>
> The union couldn't come into the hospital to spread its message, so it had
> to visit nurses' homes, make nightly phone calls and hand out pamphlets in
> the hospital's parking garage. Those tactics annoyed some nurses, who
> considered it harassment.
>
> "Strangers knocking on your door at 9 o'clock at night was not received
> well," said Daphne Allen, another nurse who supported the union.
>
> She said nurses who backed the union were worried about losing their jobs.
>
> Tampa General president Bruce Siegel promised Friday that the hospital would
> not retaliate against nurses who worked for the union. Doing so would be
> illegal.
>
> "We are not going to tolerate anything like that," Siegel said. "We are
> family, and we have our family spats so to speak, but now it is over and we
> are back (together) again."
>
> Union supporters had a chance to speak up at town hall meetings, Siegel
> said.
>
> And, he said, the more nurses heard about the union, the more they realized
> that joining a union would actually take away their voices. The union would
> not permit them to speak with hospital managers without first going through
> a union steward, he said.
>
> "Our nurses are very smart people," Siegel said. "And they didn't take what
> the union said at face value. After they looked behind the rosy picture,
> they realized the union could not deliver on any promises."