Various items on organized labor and politics

Chicago Tribune [reg. req’d] (Reuters) reports impact of SoCal grocery strike on stores’ bottom lines: “Labor fight takes toll at Kroger, Albertson’s”

Kroger Co. and Albertson’s Inc., the nation’s two largest grocery store chain owners, said Tuesday that quarterly results were hit hard by labor turmoil in Southern California and forecast a difficult year ahead. . . .

Albertson’s estimated that the Southern California labor troubles cut its quarterly profit by about $90 million. Kroger said the dispute, combined with a West Virginia work stoppage, cut its profit by $156.4 million. . . .

Edouard Aubin, an analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., said the 2004 outlook was disappointing. He said the latest results also highlight the growing influence of stores like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in the U.S. grocery business. . . .

Albertson’s CEO Larry Johnston said on CNBC that grocers had been aggressive in introducing a lower cost structure in Southern California, possibly creating a benchmark for driving down labor costs in the rest of the country over time.

Agreeing that the SoCal strike outcome may have this longterm result, and viewing that prospect from a pessimistic, prounion perspective, Harold Meyerson writes in the Washington Post: “What Wal-Mart Has Wrought”

Meyerson starts by recalling what he views as “the role that unions played in making Los Angeles the epicenter of America’s epochal post-World War II prosperity,” crediting “the greatest new housing boom in world history” on “huge aerospace factories, whose unionized workers could afford to buy new homes.”

Chicken-and-egg question: which came first, prosperous aerospace factories fueled by cold war government spending, and the consequent high demand for labor, pushing up wages and benefits, or union activism? Is it really historically accurate to credit unions with generating middle class prosperity under those circumstances?

Meyerson fast forwards to today:

Since the Cold War’s end, the aerospace industry and other unionized manufacturing here have drastically downsized. The service sector waxed as manufacturing waned, but most nonprofessional service-sector jobs are nonunion and low-wage.

The great exception was supermarket work. . . .

And why should this be an exception? Ultimately unions can’t defeat market forces. Labor is worth what it’s worth, and unwarranted exceptions won’t last forever. Indeed . . .

[L]ate last week, the union threw in the towel. The contract that the unhappy but increasingly desperate workers ratified created a lower pay scale for all new hires. It virtually ended the markets’ responsibility for new workers’ health coverage: Employers agreed to contribute $4.60 hourly for current workers’ health plans but just $1.35 hourly for those of future employees. .

You get that one? $1.35 an hour is virtually nothing! Tell that to folks with no employer-provided healthcare whatsoever!

The union’s contracts will expire in other parts of the country later this year, but now its strike fund is depleted and the companies can point to the new contract as setting the pattern for the industry. Close to 1 million unionized supermarket jobs may now be downward-bound. And while Americans have focused, understandably, on the ongoing evisceration of manufacturing jobs, the downscaling of service-sector jobs in the age of Wal-Mart poses no less a threat to the existence and idea of a working-class career.

Fortunately, the defeat of the supermarket strikers wasn’t the only union news in the past week. Last Thursday two of the nation’s most proficient organizing unions . . . announced that they were merging. UNITE, the clothing and textile union, and HERE, the hotel and restaurant union, agreed to join forces in what will be a remarkable organization of largely immigrant workers in routinely low-wage industries.

UNITE and HERE may well be the two most tenacious unions out there. . . . UNITE is situated in an industry that will soon move almost entirely offshore, while HERE, a union in an industry that is anchored in every American city, has more opportunities than it has resources. Their merger creates a powerful force for organizing and upgrading the kind of service-sector jobs that otherwise are being ratcheted downward.

So UNITE, having failed to salvage any textile jobs for its members, is the model service workers should turn to?

Anyone who doubts the ability of these unions to transform dead-end jobs into productive careers should check out the improbable union city of service-sector America: Las Vegas. By organizing almost every Strip hotel, HERE has created an employer-funded training academy where maids and dishwashers can become cooks and servers and wine stewards, and a hotel workforce that makes enough to purchase new homes. The biggest housing boom in the nation today spreads across the Vegas desert and, as in Los Angeles a half-century ago, it is largely the consequence of unionization.

Chicken-and-egg question again: which came first, gambling-and-tourism-driven prosperity or unionization? Were the unions the fertilizer of this growth or the parasites feeding off of it? And since when is Vegas comparable to anywhere else? I mean people basically go there to throw money away. If restaurants and hotels there are pricier due to labor costs, a Vegas trip costs more. So what, that just makes it a better vacation, doesn’t it? I mean if the point is splurging and throwing a lot of money around . . . .

Myerson concludes:

John Kerry walked a supermarket picket line in Santa Monica last week in the waning hours of the strike, pledging to provide the kind of health insurance that the new supermarket workers will sorely need and to change labor law to protect workers’ right to organize. The Wal-Mart political action committee, meanwhile, has abruptly become the largest corporate PAC in the nation, funneling 85 percent of its congressional contributions to Republicans. The battle over the Wal-Martization of America has entered the electoral arena — one more reason why Kerry has a strong hand in November’s presidential election.

Kerry’s hand will be stronger, IMHO, if he shows he’s not just a typical Democratic suckup to organized labor’s political machine. He’s got the substantial hardcore anti-Bush vote no matter what. The true-blue labor Democrats will stick by him even if he shows labor some backbone. But if he wants to get “Reagan Democrats” and right-to-work southerners and midwestern swing voters like me, he’d gain by distancing himself a bit from the AFL-CIO machine. Look what happened to Labor’s buddy Gephardt in Iowa, when Labor pulled out all the stops for him!

And Labor just may be setting the stage for an opportunity for Kerry to tell them where to go (or not):

Boston Globe (Rick Klein) reports: “Union raises stakes for July; Police group eyes convention boycott”

Boston’s largest police union is asking Democrats nationwide, including presumptive presidential nominee John F. Kerry, to boycott the Democratic National Convention in July, a dramatic escalation of tactics in the union’s quest for a contract.

Yeah, right, so what are they supposed to go, move the convention to another city, or just blow it off altogether?

Police union allies across the country have already begun phoning local delegates and party officials, telling them that entering the FleetCenter will be seen as crossing a picket line if Boston police do not have their contract settled by then. Thousands of police from at least nine states and 18 unions are ready to stand beside Boston officers to show their solidarity.
“There will be an expectation that the line not be crossed,” Thomas J. Nee, president of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, said at a news conference yesterday at the union’s Roxbury headquarters. “I know Democrats do not do that. That’s the protocol.”

That’s BS, is what that is. Democrats should do like everyone else does: decide whether to cross a picket line based on the merits of the dispute, not some kneejerk “protocol” that a good person never crosses a picket line.

Asking delegates to stay away from the biggest Democratic political event of the year would embarrass hundreds of Democratic elected officials, particularly if officers from their hometowns are on the picket line.

A picket line outside the convention could also embarrass Kerry, who will formally receive his party’s nomination at the convention. A public display of disharmony among Democrats, who have traditionally had close ties to organized labor, could send a negative message as the party tries to present a unified front against President Bush. . . .

Don Fowler, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said that local labor disputes are common in the months before a convention, but that they have been smoothed over in time to prevent disruptions. While many delegates would be sympathetic to a picket line, he said, a local dispute is unlikely to keep droves of delegates away.

“Every convention in my memory has had this kind of matter pending prior to the convention,” Fowler said.

Hmmm . . .what does that tell us. That the Dems have bad luck and timing picking cities for conventions? Or that Labor sees them as gutless pushovers and always uses conventions for unmitigated and disgusting power plays?

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a strong labor ally, declined to comment on how he would handle a picket line at the convention, saying only that he is sure it will never come to that. “I’m confident that both sides will be able to find a satisfactory resolution of the issues,” said a prepared statement Kennedy issued.

Sounds just like him. What would happen if someone like TK just said “the union [expletive] well better get it settled because if they don’t I’m crossing their line and will never vote for a labor-sponsored bill again”?

Meanwhile, at the AFL-CIO convention in Florida: “Labor OKs Funds to Mobilize Against Bush”, reports the Miami Herald (AP; Leigh Strope)

Labor leaders voted Wednesday to spend $44 million to mobilize union household voters in November against President Bush, a record sum in an election they say is do-or-die for the labor movement. . . .

“People are fed up with this administration’s inability to create good jobs and get our country back on track,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said. “They are demanding a change and we plan to give it to them.”

Union leaders meeting this week at a luxury seaside resort approved a hike in the assessments they pay to the AFL-CIO to help fund the $44 million effort, which does not include money the affiliates will spend individually on their own programs. The 64 unions agreed to pay 48 cents per member.

This is what you get when you work in a union shop (unless you specifically object) – the union spends your money backing political candidates, assuming that you and your union brothers and sisters are going to vote as they tell you.

Labor’s strength in the workplace has been plummeting, but union members have remained reliable voters for Democrats. One in four voters in the 2000 election was from a union household. That year, the AFL-CIO spent about $41 million to mobilize its 13 million members and their families.

Think how much job training for unemployed union members that money would have bought.

Previous election efforts focused on registering and turning out new union voters. This time, the AFL-CIO is targeting undecided and swing union household voters.

“Our program is more sophisticated,” Sweeney said. “We can more accurately identify the undecided voters among our ranks, and plan to make a special new effort to make sure they get educated about where the candidates stand on issues like overtime, jobs and education.”

As if union members can’t educate themselves from more objective sources. Maybe they’re undecided because they think for themselves, and don’t plan on blindly obeying the union bosses.

Finally, CNN reports on the AFL-CIO meeting: “Labor pains, continued”(by John Mercurio)

[T]he story we’re watching most closely today is the awkward reunion of organized labor, which gathers in south Florida to make sense out of a particularly clumsy primary roadshow that left them divided, dispirited and, in some cases, doubting their ability to defeat President Bush.

If one head should roll at the Sheraton Bal Harbour Beach Resort, sources say it could be that of Gerald McEntee, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, who may face a challenge as chair of the AFL-CIO’s political education committee after the way he handled his union’s endorsement — and abandonment — of Howard Dean.

Criticism of McEntee, who as chairman of the committee controls labor’s multimillion-dollar voter-turnout operation, comes strongest from unions that had backed Dick Gephardt. . . .

For the record, an AFSCME spokesman dismissed speculation about McEntee’s woes as “idle chatter.” He noted that McEntee is scheduled to preside over his committee’s meeting tomorrow morning and will hold a news conference in Florida with Sweeney and Gephardt following the meeting. . . .

Now, to John Kerry, who by all accounts is showering his newfound labor friends with constant phone calls and made sure to schedule campaign stops earlier this month (in Atlanta and Oakland) designed to give local unions a national platform. . . .

“We’re pretty unified [behind Kerry], which is incredible if you think about how screwed up the primary was,” said Mike Mathis, political director of the Teamsters, which backed Gephardt. “Kerry has been really good about touching base with people. He’s good at making phone calls, he checks in with a lot of labor people.”

But in the end, of course, labor’s unity has resulted more from who Kerry’s not, than who he is. “He’s not Dick Gephardt, sure. But he’s also not George W. Bush,” one labor wag said.

And ultimately, eight months before Election Day, labor leaders say that’s the most important factor.

So what was screwed up about the primary? Big Labor didn’t throw its weight around as a solid bloc, holding off on an endorsement, but what’s wrong with that? Why shouldn’t they just encourage their members to participate in the process, instead of trying to dictate their votes with their “endorsements”? And why should candidates suck up to the unions? Now Democratic candidates know they can win a nomination without a unanimous union endorsement. Maybe the cat’s out of the bag . . . .

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