WORKERS UNION TRIES NEW SALES PITCH
TEAMS UP WITH COMMUNITY GROUPS TO HELP BREAK ICE WITH LOW-WAGE WORKERS
BY WENDY DAVIS
August 20-26, 2007
Crain’s New York Business

EVERY DAY, union organizer Laura Tapia pounds the pavement on Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She's on the payroll of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, but when she goes out to interview employees about their wages and working conditions, she touts her affiliation with another association, the community group Make the Road by Walking.

The retail union began working with Make the Road more than two years ago in a campaign to improve working conditions in the 170 stores along Knickerbocker Avenue. The partnership's biggest success came last year, when about 100 employees of the Footco/New York Sneakers chain joined the union.

"Before, we didn't have anything," says Christina Roche, who has sold sneakers at Footco for four years.  She used to work sixday, 52-hour weeks for $5.25 an hour.  Now there’s a union contract, she earns the minimum wage, $7.15 an hour, and hast two days off each week, two weeks’ paid vacation and a heath insurance plan.

Make the Road is one of several community groups that the retail workers union is partnership with in a new effort to organize employees.  The union also has joined forces with at least two other community groups in the city, the Good Old Lower East Side in Manhattan and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition.

For the retail workers union, partnering with community groups is born out of  a recognition that the old strategy of focusing just on reducing employees is no longer working. As of last year, just 12% full-time employees nationwide belonged to a union, down from 16.4% in 1989, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In New York state, 24.4% of employees were in unions 2006, down from 27.9% in 1989.

Part of the problem is the makeup of the workforce. Many of the people the union is trying to organ¬ize are low-wage immigrant workers who come from cultures that do not have an affinity for unions.

"People are afraid to talk to unions," says Ms. Tapia, the labor organizer working in Bushwick. On e other hand, workers welcome her when she mentions Make the Road, formed 10 years ago as an immigrants' rights group. "Make the Road is an institution that most of the people know and trust," she says.

Unions have little choice but to work with community groups if they want to rebuild their ranks, says Thomas Kochan, a professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a mem¬ber of the U.S. Commission on the Future of Worker Management Relations.

Cultural considerations
“It’s absolutely essential to work with community groups, immigrant groups, the religious groups that these workers come from and relate to,” he says. Such groups give the union legitimacy with workers.

Building on their success at Footco, the retail workers union Make the Road are working together to rally support for workers at the Associated Supermarket on Knickerbocker Avenue, where Make the Road is leading a boycott over al¬leged labor law violations.

The union is working with Good Old Lower East Side as it fights the owner of a retail store, Yellow Rat Bastard, over wages and working conditions. The state attorney gen¬eral has sued the owner for $2 mil-lion for alleged labor law violations.

Hidden benefits
Unions stand to benefit even if their partnerships with community groups don't immediately result in an increase in union membership, says Lawrence White, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. In some cases, unions have joined with communi¬ty groups to keep anti-union retailers such as Wal-Mart from opening stores in New York City.

In fact, the prospect of an anti-union store moving into their community is exactly what the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition and the retail workers union hope to avoid. The community group sought help from the union last year when the city was getting ready to solicit proposals to develop the Kingsbridge Armory. As a result, the city's request for pro¬posals includes a preference for de¬velopers who commit to hiring re¬tailers that offer jobs with "living wages"-defined as $10 an hour with benefits or $11.50 an hour without.

"In order for us to be able to of¬fer living-wage jobs, we knew we had to work with the union,” says Teresa Andersen, President of the Bronx group.
 

© 2007 Crain Communications, Inc.