Union Organizing in California: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

C HAPTER 14 U NION O RGANIZING IN C ALIFORNIA : C HALLENGES AND O PPORTUNITIES C AROL Z ABIN W ITH K ATIE Q UAN AND L INDA D ELP Introduction At the beginning of the twenty-first century, unions in California are showing signs of revitalization. After many years of decline, union membership rose from 2,154,000 to 2,286,000 in 1999, and for the first time in several decades, the percentage of the California workforce that is unionized grew slightly, to 16.6 percent. The new growth is a consequence of aggressive efforts by a number of key unions and local, state, and national AFL-CIO bodies. This chapter explores labor’s efforts to meet the challenges for revitalizing its movement in the current era, focusing on new approaches and strategies for increasing union membership. The decline of the U.S. trade union movement over the last thirty years is a well-known story, and although there is little scholarship devoted specifically to California, the state’s experience parallels that of the nation. Union decline is a consequence of a multitude of forces, including a loss of employment in some highly unionized industries and a restructuring of other industries via subcontracting and outsourcing and organized labor’s own emphasis on servicing current members rather than organizing new ones (Goldfield 1987; Moody 1988). Above all, the loss of union membership is the result of a renewed offensive by anti-union employers who have fought unions on a variety of fronts, and have successfully shaped government labor policy to their advantage. Changes in the implementation of the National Labor Relations Act and limits of the law itself have undermined workers’ fundamental right to organize. Quoting a recent Human Rights Watch report (2000), In the United States, millions of workers are excluded from coverage by laws to protect rights of organizing, bargaining, and striking. For workers who are covered by such laws, recourse for labor rights violations is often delayed to a point where it ceases to provide redress. When they are applied, remedies are weak and often ineffective. In a system replete with all the appearance of legality and due process, workers' exercise of rights to organize, to bargain, and to strike in the United States has been frustrated by many employers who realize they have little to fear from labor law enforcement through a ponderous, delay-ridden legal system with meager remedial powers. While the experience of union decline in California is not unique, California may be the forerunner of change. California is certainly the bellwether for the new environment that labor must operate in. As the nation’s leading receiving state for new immigrants as well as the center of the economic transformations associated with the information technology revolution, California presents unions with the double challenge of a new workforce and a new economy. Recent events suggest that I thank the following people for providing information and reviewing earlier drafts of this paper: Kristen Spalding, Kent Wong, Warren Mar, George Strauss, Michael Reich and James Lincoln.

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