immigrant labor came on May 1, 2006, when five million immigrants demonstrated across the United States for immigrant rights, many taking the day off of work. The Los Angeles waterfront was paralyzed, half the nation’s meatpacking operations closed, and construction was hit hard in areas of high immigrant population such as Southern California.66 Immigrant workers would also play an important role in the growth of the SEIU, which became the largest union in the AFL-CIO as the new century unfolded. Membership gains in the private sector came mostly in growing service-sector industries such as food services, hospitality, and health care.67
The scale of new organizing, however, was not sufficient to prevent overall shrinkage from 2000 to 2006. The number of NLRB representation elections involving new organizing dropped from 3,162 in 1999 to 1,503 in fiscal year 2008.68 NLRB elections had been declining for many years as that route to representation was undermined by employer resistance. A number of unions had turned to pressuring employers for “neutrality” agreements and “card check” schemes with some success. These are procedures in which an employer agrees to a simple majority show of authorization cards for recognition. Although organizing targets tend to be larger in these campaigns and the number recruited larger, the incidence of these new types of “voluntary” organizing tactics deployed remains small, rising from 227 to a high of 420 in 2001 and then falling to 258 in 2004, never amounting to more than 15 percent of all organizing efforts. What was clear was that the general level of new union organizing had been down for some time.69
In terms of growth, the great success story of the period was the SEIU, which had grown from 981,331 in 1995 to 1.8 million in 2009.70 Its most famous campaign was Justice for Janitors, drawing on the new immigrant workforce, which won a high-profile victory in 1990. By 2008 SEIU had gained representation for 225,000 building service and security employees. Some of this growth came from mergers, such as the 1998 absorption of New York’s huge health care workers’ Local 1199, which brought in 125,000 members. Another major source of growth was the 365,000 home and child-care workers organized between 1996 and 2007. This was largely the result of political deals struck with governors in several states, due to SEIU’s generous donations to the campaigns of these governors. In 2004, it had even given half a million dollars to the Republican Governors Association. SEIU was the biggest political donor in the AFL-CIO. In the 2007–08 election cycle, SEIU raised more than sixty million dollars in political contributions.71
In the name of more effective organizing and political clout, however, SEIU president Andy Stern transformed this union into a highly centralized, top-down organization. Beginning with the “New Strength Unity” program in 2000, more and more authority was given to the president while local unions were merged, so that by 2009 57 percent of the union’s members were in fifteen “mega-locals.” Trusteeships, where local unions are placed under the direct rule of the national union, were a frequent tool in this transformation, with twenty-six locals facing control imposed by the president between 2000 and 2007.72 Stern also adopted what many viewed as an extreme version of labor-management cooperation schemes which he called “value-added employer relationships.” The theory being, he wrote, that “improved quality, increased corporate revenues, and increased workers’ skills and opportunities should lead all to more equitably distributed financial rewards.”73 Linked to that is an effort to move away from workplace organization, the battleground of the last three decades, and substitute call centers for shop stewards as a means of dealing with growing on-the-job pressures, a direction that seems to be the exact opposite of what is needed. All of this was presented as the strategy for growth and renewed union power. This model would become increasingly controversial.74
Frustrated by the unwillingness of the AFL-CIO to prioritize organizing above all else, SEIU’s Stern and the leaders of the Teamsters and Carpenters formed the New Unity Partnership in 2003 to pressure the federation to adopt a more aggressive organizing policy and a basic reorganization of the AFL-CIO and its unions. Unable to move the AFL-CIO, in 2005 six unions, again led by SEIU, left the AFL-CIO to form their own Change to Win (CTW) Federation.75 At first it might have seemed as though the new federation was organizing where others had failed. In the two years prior to the recession, US unions were actually growing. In 2007, unions had a net gain of 311,000 members, 133,000 in the private sector, while in 2008 they gained 428,000, 151,000 in the private sector. The largest increase from 2006 through 2008 was in healthcare services, the major base of the SEIU, where union membership increased by 214,000.76 Despite SEIU’s gains, CTW as a whole, after slight growth from 2006 to 2007, actually lost nearly half a million members from 2007 to 2008.77
The aggressiveness of the SEIU leadership toward other unions went beyond the formation of CTW to spark a virtual civil war in organized labor. Much of this centered on the highly controversial efforts of the SEIU to raid a number of unions. One was the California Nurses’ Association (CNA), which was successfully competing with SEIU in recruiting nurses not only in California but around the country. Another major target of SEIU aggression was UNITE-HERE, the recently merged union of garment and hotel workers. This ended in a split in UNITE-HERE, with perhaps a third of its members leaving to join SEIU.78 The CNA, for its part, went on to lead the merger of three nurses’ unions to form the National Nurses United in 2009 with 150,000 members.79
As Stern aggressively merged dozens of SEIU into giant “mega-locals,” he ran into resistance. The strongest opposition to forced mergers and to Stern’s increasing willingness to cut deals with healthcare systems in order to gain members came from the leadership of SEIU’s militant 150,000-member United Healthcare West (UHW). When Stern moved to put this rebel local into trusteeship in 2009, the leaders and thousands of UHW members left SEIU to form the independent National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). As UHW’s membership was technically under agreements signed by the SEIU International, however, the members were not able to simply transfer their loyalty. NUHW suffered a serious setback in 2010 when it lost a representation election for forty-five thousand workers at Kaiser Permanente, the huge California-based healthcare system. Nevertheless, it went on to win representation for some ten thousand healthcare workers by mid-2011.80
Eventually, after alienating much of the leadership of both federations, the SEIU reached truces with UNITE-HERE and CNA and Stern resigned as SEIU president. The war against NUHW, however, continued.81 If the worst of labor’s “civil war” was over by 2010, it had arguably been a factor in the unions’ loss of the one piece of legislation they most sought from the Obama administration, the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made union organizing somewhat easier. Despite growth in some areas, the US labor movement as a whole had entered the recession in disarray.
Crisis and Decline, Once Again
The rate of profit began its fall in 2006. By the fourth quarter of that year the mass of profits in the nonfinancial sector fell. This was before the subprime collapse was evident and well before the big financial meltdown of 2008.82 As employers responded to this decrease in profits, unemployment began to edge upward in the first quarter of 2007, when the unemployment rate was 4.5 percent. By March 2008 it was 5.1 percent, with 7.8 million out of work. By October 2009 official unemployment hit 10 percent with 15.6 million out of work, a third of them for twenty-seven weeks or more. If we include the 5.6 million considered “not in the labor force” but who wanted work, the total is more than twenty-one million.83 Some six million private-sector production-worker jobs were lost between May 2007 and October 2009.84
The fate of the unions in this situation was predictable. In 2009 unions saw a net loss of 771,000 members, 834,000 in the private sector, more than wiping out the gains of the previous two years.85 The outcomes of collective bargaining followed the pattern of union loss. First-year wage increases in new collective bargaining agreements rose to an average of 3.6 percent in 2007 for all new agreements and 3.2 percent for those in manufacturing, but by 2009 new wage settlements had dropped to 2.3 percent and 2.0 percent respectively, and by September 2010 they had fallen to 1.7 percent and 1.1 percent. Whereas 14 percent of workers covered by these agreements had received no first-year increase in 2007, by 2010 it was 35 percent.86 The number of strikes, while already very low by the 2000s, fell to an all-time low in 2009 of 119 strikes.87 Management
