[fla-left] [analysis] Unions in FL: A Long Climb (fwd)

Michael Hoover hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us
Wed Sep 8 14:25:02 PDT 1999


Florida constitutional 'right to work' amendment dates to 1944. Its adoption, via statewide referendum, is an example of the 'pork chop' politics that has often dominated the state's legislature. Fifty one of sixty one rural members of the 1943 House of Representatives voted for the resolution that placed the issue on the 1944 ballot (Florida's legislature used to convene every other year, as did most state assemblies prior to mid-century). Large agricultural interests, timber industry (DuPont family was Florida's biggest landowner), railroad companies (Florida East Coast Railway locked 1200 striking workers out in 1946 when DuPont empire executor Ed Ball gained control of the company and replaced them with non-union labor during longest rail strike in US history), and business elites with Associated Industries (group comprised of executives of Florida's largest corporations, created in 1924) engineered the 'right to work' campaign during WW2 when a sizeable percentage of white working class males were away (of course, blacks were still disenfranchised at that time as well). Michael Hoover


> 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."



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list