Organizing

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 3, 1999 by Arthur Jones

From hotel workers to doctors, unions emerge again as answer to wage discrepancies and working conditions

Slot machines are the Wall Street of the working class. Workers and retirees, that is. These days though, here in Slots Capital, USA, it's the other workers on The Strip -- those who keep the casinos and hotels going -- who are catching attention.

In the past few years, labor protest and unionizing has become such a feature of the Southern Nevada landscape that labor leaders now refer to Las Vegas as "the new Flint, Michigan." Flint -- from the 1930s until the 1950s -- was probably the most unionized city in the nation. Now Las Vegas probably is.

NCR has taken Las Vegas as a case study to briefly examine some of what's underway in a major counter-cyclical push, the return of organized labor (see NCR, June 4). In 1998 alone, nationwide almost 400,000 Americans joined unions, predominantly in the service sector. (The offset was that as U.S. manufacturing changed or shifted to south of the border, some 250,000 unionized manufacturing jobs were lost.)

In the 1990s, union representation here has outstripped Las Vegas/Clark County's more than 20 percent population growth. For once corporate America moved in on casinos and hotels (and the mob apparently moved out) and began a casino-building frenzy, Las Vegas burnished its image as a family place. (Still, the new mayor is a lawyer best known for his Mafia clients.)

Forget the gamblers for a moment. For the working class family, another price here is still right: housing. A thrifty hotel housekeeper on union scale can buy a single-family home in a region where the median housing sale price is only $119,000. Not surprisingly then, more than 40 percent of the newcomers have flocked in from next door -- California where it's 30 percent more expensive to live. But it isn't just in this booming gambling mecca that the unionizing push is on. Evidence of low wages and new labor pressures is everywhere. Where workers are concerned, something's in the air nationally. In a move that would have had America's colonial governors call out the redcoats, a 1998 protest march in Colonial Williamsburg, Va., slammed the low pay that supports that region's tourism.

Nationally, a family of four needs $32,000 annually to live. Colonial Williamsburg wages range from $12,660 to $17,180. At UCLA in the West and at Ivy League schools in the East, graduate students -- teaching assistants who shoulder the work professors no longer undertake -- want to unionize. The once-aloof medical profession in June watched the American Medical Association form an all-doctors union.

Other victories

Organized labor has scored some other odd victories recently. Stockholders at Oregon Steel Mills this year sided with a labor-backed resolution to make it easier to oust the board of directors and end the secrecy surrounding how the company conducts it business. In recent years, strikes are more common -- including at airports, where it's no longer unusual to see uniformed airline pilots protesting long hours or low pay as they carry neatly printed signs urging public support.

Few homemade signs could match 17-year-old Josh Whitman's hand-lettered 1998 placard: "Boycott McDonald's. On strike for better staffing, wages and vacations." The Fairfax, Va., high school junior led eight night-shift colleagues off the job to force the company to address issues of long hours and low pay. McDonald's responded with a meeting at which officials promised to fully staff busy shifts, conduct regular wage reviews and post work schedules well in advance. The National Labor Relations Board was not involved on Josh's behalf.

On the West Coast, immigrant restaurant workers in Los Angeles' Koreatown know the feeling. Last year they were marching to protest the $600 a month they earn for 940-12 hour days, six days a week -- less than half the minimum wage. High on the complaint list were working conditions -- from slippery floors to employer verbal abuse. But not all abused employees find they can bring in the union. Hundreds of Guatemalan workers in North Carolina's chicken-processing plants have been trying for years.

Overworked? In a Darien, Conn., hearing earlier this year $9-an-hour nursing home workers said they had to wear roller skates on the job to get to all the patients.

So, for all the high employment figures, there is unease. Nationally there is the growing realization that working in America isn't what it used to be or ought to be. The blue-collar class feels it worst, but there is simmering white-collar resentment against exploitation in fields as different as medical care, law and the airline industry.

Entrepreneurs may make computer billions, but all the computer workers see is corporations in Washington opposing rules proposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to protect workers from repetitive-action syndrome.

Other auguries: Despite the booming economy, the United States still has the highest poverty rates and most unequal income distribution among industrialized countries; projections suggest that 60 percent of today's white 20-year-olds and 90 percent of all black 20-year-olds will fall below the poverty line sometime during their lives. The real crunch, as Notre Dame economics professor Teresa Ghilarducci notes, is that "real wages have fallen for 15 years and corporate profits have increased for the past eight."