A deal to organise

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=Business_News&subsection=market+news&month=April2009&file=Business_News2009042465811.xml

Web posted at: 4/24/2009 6:58:11
Source ::: FINANCIAL TIMES

Just when activists were awaiting payback for aiding a Democratic win, recession is turning the Washington mood away from law reform, write Jonathan Birchall and

Tom Braithwaite.

The Cintas commercial laundry in Islip, on New York’s Long Island, stands in a typical modern American landscape - a neat brick building in a nondescript business park adjacent to a shopping mall, with neighbours including a database analysis company and a manufacturer of bathroom fittings.

Only the small signs in the parking lot, warning against “trespass, solicitation, or distribution of literature”, indicate that Cintas, a business services company, is also the focus of a big national organising effort launched six years ago by the Unite Here union.

“I want to be in a union because a union would bring us many benefits and a sense of security, where my voice counts,” says Adela Viera, one of the laundry’s workers, speaking in Spanish during an interview at a nearby Starbucks. Ms Viera earns about $9.80 (£6.70, €7.50) an hour after working at the Islip laundry for almost 12 years.

She and her fellow workers - washing and folding uniforms in pursuit of the American Dream - could also be in the vanguard of a revival of the US labour movement, if new efforts in Congress to strengthen the ability of unions to organise become law. “Getting a reform of labour law, restoring workers’ rights to organise, is essential for the country, the economy and the labour movement,” says Bruce Raynor, general president of Unite Here.

Unionisation has been falling since the 1940s, in line with the decline in traditional manufacturing industries. Only one in eight of the workforce is these days a member; in the private sector it is one in 12. But trade unions spent hundreds of millions of dollars to support Democrats at last year’s elections and, with their party now controlling Congress and the White House, they see it as payback time. Raynor argues that reforms envisaged by a labour bill before Congress, relaxing constraints on a union’s ability to secure recognition in a workplace, would lead to an “explosive growth” in union membership among workers such as Ms Viera in the service sector, as well as in manufacturing, distribution and retailing. If it is passed, unions and big business agree, the change would be the most substantial since 1947, when the 1935 Depression-era labour relations act was amended for the postwar environment.

FULL story at link.