After years of eclipse, America’s much maligned labor movement is finally enjoying some sun. No, workers aren’t joining up by the millions. And no, the halcyon days of the 1960s, when the esteemed heads of Big Business and Big Labor resolved the nation’s problems over drinks at the White House, aren’t coming back. But anger over corporate cutbacks and meager pay [raises] is giving the movement its biggest boost in decades. Guided by careful market research and creative public relations–including hundreds of photogenic young organizers– labor is again a political force to be reckoned with. A new NEWSWEEK Poll finds that 62 percent of Americans approve of unions, after a drop to 55 percent in 1981 from 66 percent in 1967. Which goes farin explaining why an ultraconservative Congress may soon vote to raise the minimum wage. Says pollster Kevin Phillips, a populist Republican, “A very significant midsection of the population is open to labor’s arguments again.”
Talk about an unanticipated development. Unions have been on the skids around the world, and Generation X was supposed to be the most anti-union bunch yet. These, after all, were kids who never learned that it took the bloody Battle of the Overpass to win those high wages at General Motors, kids who grew up in a world where unions were insignificant, even reviled. But while today’s twentysomethings may not know what unions did for their grandparents, they do know about the insecurity of life in the ’90s. “I hear this all the time, that the labor movement had its place but now it’s not needed,” says Jason Erlich, 23, who’s organizing research workers in the vast University of California system. “It’s needed more than ever.” Some professionals and employees unlikely on past picket lines-like HMO doctors and university clerical workers-may become promising candidates for unionization. The young are especially sympathetic to the cause. Among people 18 to 29, 68 percent view unions favorably, according to NEWSWEEK’S Poll. Labor has moved to capitalize on the trend by recruiting students to join its “Union Summer” organizing campaign. “Baby boomers represented the worst case for unions, politically,” says Geoffrey Garin, who polls for the AFL-CIO. But “people in their 20s and early 30s turn out to be much more open.”
If there was a single turning point for the union movement, it came with the flight attendants’ strike at American Airlines in November 1993. The Association of Professional Flight Attendants is no tower of strength, and American was expected to break the strike quickly. But the largely female union had spent months telling members and passengers how little newly hired flight attendants could earn. “We worked very hard to help the public understand what the strike was about,” recalls president Denise Hedges. Travelers and politicians rallied to the APFA’s side. After five days, American struck a deal.
The lessons of the APFA strike resonated through the labor movement. Communicate. Sound a clear, simple message. Talk about issues that matter to average people, such as the wages awaiting their kids. AFL-CIO surveys found that members felt unions to be too partisan. That’s why, instead of taking potshots at Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, the union federation’s TV and radio ads aim at individual members of Congress who oppose a higherminimum wage or favor curbs on Medicare. Slogans such as “America Deserves a Raise” were consumer-tested with a rigor that would do Procter & Gamble proud. If it happens that more of the targets are Republicans than Democrats, well, that’s a conclusion for you to draw. “When we ran our last series of minimumwage ads, two days later a group of Republicans introduced a bill to increase the minimum wage,” says AFL-CIO vice president Richard Trumka. “We think we did our job.”
Labor’s new popularity is being felt in local politics, too. This month’s Olympics in Atlanta may be the most heavily unionized ever, with everything from stadium construction to the setup of the closing ceremonies being handled by union workers. The reason: the long-somnolent Atlanta Labor Council joined with neighborhood groups to back the 1993 election of Mayor Bill Campbell, and Campbell repaid the favor by naming Labor Council president Stewart Acuff to the board of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games. In Los Angeles, where union organizers are targeting immigrant janitors and dry-wall installers, Mexican-American Miguel Contreras just became the first non-Anglo to head the local labor federation. Those grass-roots successes, in turn, make the movement more appealing to people like 26-year-old Carla Naranjo. The daughter of Ecuadoran immigrants, Naranjo returned from a Fulbright fellowship to attend, the AFL-CIO’s organizing school. Now she’s organizing garment plants in Texas. “I wanted to help the Latin community in some way, and the best way to do that was the labor movement,” she says.
Recruits like Naranjo are good news for labor. But reversing trade unionism’s decline, the announced goal of new AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, may be beyond the reach of even the most ambitious youth movement. Only one private-sector worker in nine now belongs to a union. Last year saw the smallest number of govemment-supervised workplace elections in half a century, and unions won barely half the elections they petitioned for. Gregory Tarpinian of the Labor Research Association, a union consultant, estimates that adding a million new members to today’s 16 million would take a mind-boggling $350 million worth of organizing. Labor can’t enhance its political clout without adding to its rolls. Union chic has made labor popular. But can it make labor grow?
