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Cornell professor urges unions to improve organizing
Tuesday, August 25, 1998 By Jim McKay, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Cornell University professor Kate Bronfenbrenner spent a decade studying union organizing campaigns and has concluded that the winners mix grass-roots campaigns with old-fashioned hard work.
"We're remembering what we have to do to organize a union and to stay union," Bronfenbrenner said yesterday in an address to the 63rd annual convention of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America. "What it takes is a grass-roots, rank-and-file-intensive, bottom-up strategic campaign."
Bronfenbrenner told the 200 delegates attending the UE's convention at the Westin William Penn Hotel, Downtown, that they were living in both a wonderful and terrifying time for labor unions.
There is great public antipathy to unions and never before, she said, have unions faced such powerful global opposition.
At the same time, she said, there is now "promise and possibility" that unions can rebuild and revitalize a static movement hurt in the 1980s by plant closings, increasing use of permanent striker replacements and international competition.
"We are trying to turn things around. We are winning more than we are losing. We are fighting more campaigns. We are winning them in larger units," she said.
Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell, said workers who want to organize their workplaces must jump through successive "rings of fire" to succeed.
They face being fired by employers who threaten to close facilities or contract out work if union drives succeed and they are subjected to extensive employer campaigns of "lies, threats, twisted information" and electronic surveillance.
The former union organizer said employers "create a climate so fraught with fear and conflict that even those workers who supported the union long for the time before the union campaign."
In the middle of her speech, Bronfenbrenner poked Beverly Enterprises, the nursing home giant that this year filed a defamation suit against her for calling it a notorious labor law violator.
She said companies like Beverly not only violate labor law over and over again, but also "go after" the National Labor Relations Board and others who speak out, "intimidating workers, intimidating scholars, intimidating legislators."
Beverly withdrew its defamation suit earlier this month.
Most union campaigns face the same obstacles of virulent employer opposition and weak and poorly enforced labor laws, she said.
Traditional campaigns that rely on leafleting at plant gates, mass mailings and a few large meetings fare worse than those that rely on personal contact, community involvement, escalating pressure tactics, and an emphasis on issues such as dignity and fairness over bread-and-butter economic items.
But most unions, she said, don't do it right and fail to hire enough organizers who are women and minorities despite the fact that women and minorities are the groups most likely to be attracted to unions.
"We aren't doing very well. But that's good news in some ways," she said. "We're doing everything wrong and we're winning, which means we have a great opportunity."
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