'I knew I could do this work'

Seven Strategies to Promote Women's Activism & Leadership

Berger-Marks-funded report by Amy Caiazza, Institute for Women’s Policy Research
Study Guide now available for this report - see below

“Unions are good for women workers, but they could be much better at promoting women into leadership positions,” said Amy Caiazza, IWPR's Director of Democracy and Society Programs, who authored a hard-hitting report released December 5, 2007.

Based on interviews with women union activists, “The strategies outlined in this report are designed to help women claim a voice of authority in an area that is traditionally dominated by men,” says Caiazza.

Benefit is mutual

As Caiazza notes, unionized women earn 30 percent more than non- union women, have more paid leave and are more likely to have health insurance.

For their part, women activists strengthen unions. For example, lead organizers who are women have higher success rates than men do. And women who become union leaders often gain influence in politics and public life. "Because unions shape policy and practice in both economic and political life, having women at the table has broad implications for their well -being, their autonomy and their rights as workers.”

Key obstacles that hold women back

Amy Caiazza

Yet women still encounter too many obstacles to union activism, researchers discovered. They don't find enough women in leadership (and therefore have few chances to find women mentors); many feel more vulnerable to being fired for union activities; are uncomfortable with conflict and non-traditional public roles; see the priorities of women workers neglected; are leery of the time demands of union work; suffer bias within unions; and work in jobs that offer little experience seeing what unions do. These issues can be directly addressed.

The seven key strategies for unions

1. 1. Address Women’s True Priorities, such as more flexible work schedules, which can inspire long-term, active involvement. Using words and images that resonate with women also matters.
2. 2. Create and Support Formal Mentoring Programs: While mentoring often occurs informally, it could be intentionally incorporated into union organizing as a source of ongoing support.
3. 3. Provide Opportunities for Women to Strategize Together, such as women-specific training programs and conferences, women’s committees, and networks at all levels that help women build skills and confidence. When unions are tempted to abolish such programs, the report warns, they “should also take seriously the sense of support and respect, or lack thereof, for women suggested by their actions” and the long-term impact on the resources available to women.
   
   It’s also important to encourage, and even financially support, women’s involvement in groups such as the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), 9to5, Chicago Women in the Trades and Oregon Tradeswomen. They not only promote women’s leadership and solidarity, but also provide resources and support through conferences, research and other activities.
4. 4. Put Women in Leadership: Placing women in visible local and national leadership roles provides role models and articulates respect for their authority.
5. 5. Highlight the Importance of Women’s Contributions: Unions can provide examples of women’s current and past union leadership as models for what union women can accomplish.
6. 6. Provide Flexible Options for Involvement: To accommodate the conflicting demands of women’s lives, unions should be attentive to what women say they need, and offer creative opportunities to get involved.
7. 7. Provide Training on Mobilizing Women for leaders and organizers so they know how to inspire women’s activism and promote their leadership.

The report won immediate notice on the AFL-CIO web site. Two years earlier, both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win federations passed resolutions calling for more diverse union leadership at all levels. This report can help illuminate the path toward those goals.

Free downloads of report & discussion guide based on it

You can now download -- free -- a facilitator's guide and handouts to help unions discuss how to support and promote women as leaders, based on the insights in this report. It's written and tested by labor educator Michelle Kaminski of Michigan State University.

Go to link to download the Discussion Guide and handouts

Click here to view & download a copy of the Report, which was funded in part by the Berger-Marks Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Foxwoods Casino workers get winning hand

Vote UAW at tribally-owned casino by 3-2 margin

Workers at Foxwoods Casino, the biggest private employer in Connecticut, voted Nov. 24 to have the UAW represent the 2,640 dealers.

Julie Kushner, assistant director of UAW Region 9A, played a key role in the victory.

The vote took place after the NLRB rejected the claim by the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, which operates the casino, that tribal rules trump federal labor law. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal strongly endorsed the workers' rights to vote UAW: “The courts have said that no one is above the law including federal labor law,” he said. “So the vote is overwhelming, not only in its margin of numbers but its impact in sending a message...

First win at tribally-owned casino

''This union is the first to be established by a tribal casino by contested vote,'' Blumenthal added. ''Its impact could be seismic in changing the landscape of labor relations at tribal casinos, not only in Connecticut, but across the nation.''

The tribe had hastily assembled its own set of labor laws only after employees started organizing. Under their system, Foxwoods employees, paid by the tribe, would decide on workers’ rights, without outside review.

The week after the vote, the tribe announced it’s filing a challenge to the victory. The tribal gaming industry accounts for 670,000 jobs nationally and had gaming revenues last year of an estimated $25.7 billion, according to the National Indian Gaming Association.

February D.C. court ruling paved the way

"We respect tribal sovereignty," said UAW Region 9A Director Bob Madore. "But we also believe these workers have the right to be protected by federal law. This has been decided by the courts." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled last February that an Indian sovereign nation is still subject to federal labor laws.

Another federally supervised union election is scheduled in Michigan for 300 housekeeping employees of Soaring Eagle Casino & Resort, which is owned by the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, this time for the Teamsters union.

Postal Workers’ Woman-to-Woman Campaign fires up, signs up, members

Taken from AFL-CIO blog by James Parks & APWU

When women leaders of the Postal Workers union took a good look at the one in five workers who hadn’t joined the union, they discovered that most were women. Many of the clerical, maintenance, motor vehicle and support service workers at the nation’s 37,000 postal facilities that postal union represents had taken advantage of their legal right to refuse to join the union.

Over 7,000 workers sign up

Near Fort Worth Texas, local steward talks with members

Inspired by discussions of woman-to-woman organizing during the 2005 Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) convention, the 17 women who were elected national officers approached APWU President William Burrus with a plan to focus on recruiting women.

The result: In just over six months, the Women’s Organizing Campaign helped convince some 7,184 workers – including men -- to join APWU.

The campaign is planned and promoted by women, for women, and addresses issues that matter to working women, explained Judy Beard, who was recently elected the union’s director of retirees.

Working with the union’s Organizing Department, they began by sending letters to every female non-member and sending packets of buttons, stickers, balloons, fliers and other materials – including sign-up forms-- to 100 local and state unions. Local leaders and workers set up tables in post offices and talked with women workers, explaining the benefits of joining the union.

Relief for home-work pressures is union-made

Women leaders stressed that the tools to help working women and men juggle the responsibilities of work and home are all union-made: family and medical leave, the right to bid on jobs that best suit women’s hectic schedules, the opportunity to use sick leave for dependent care, job security, and family-supporting wages. Union officers, including APWU President William Burrus, traveled across the country to explain the program and join organizing events.

Women officers made the difference

“Having the national women officers to come down and talk to the workers really turned them around,” said Thomasine Derricks, president of APWU Local 181 in Baltimore, Md. “This campaign made us a lot stronger.”

And the campaign itself is getting stronger, Beard says. “People are calling saying 'We’re ready to do an organizing drive' without us being present. It’s really exciting.”

For Burrus that makes a lot of sense: “The actions we take affect their lives and their livelihood in a fundamental way. How can they sit on the sidelines and not get involved?”

Protests rise up against NLRB:
‘Close it for renovation!’

Taken from AFL-CIO blogs & PAI

On Nov. 15, workers in 25 cities spilled into the streets, chanting, singing and waving signs, to show they’re fed up with the ongoing assault on their rights by the Bush-appointed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In Washington D.C. & other cities, they marched and rallied at NLRB offices, calling on the current agency to be “closed for renovations.” “What’s disgusting? Union-busting!” was a popular cry.

'September massacre': 61 cruel decisions

Nashville workers protest fox overseeing the coop

For many, the last straw came in “the September massacre,” when a sweeping series of 61 decisions cut to the core of workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain collectively -- rights the NLRB was set up 80 years ago to protect.

In Washington, D.C., Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts told more than 1,000 protesters that in all honesty they should take the word “labor” out of the board’s name because it answers instead to business & right-wing interests. Change will come in Nov.’08 elections, he added. Referring to the Bush team as “a bunch of squatters” in the White House, he looks forward to delivering “an ejection notice.”

Organized by the AFL-CIO, the protests won support from the Change to Win federation and Coalition of Labor Union Women, along with sympathetic honks from drivers, cabbies and truckers all along the D.C. parade route. Community and religious activists and local lawmakers joined rallies in some cities.

Rulings hit workers again & again

Rain was no deterrent

Judy Galat, a member of the Office and Professional Employees, said the decision inviting workers to decertify unions after a majority signed union cards that employers voluntary recognized was the last straw. More about that ruling.

Thanks to that ruling, an AT&T sales consultant told protesters, no sooner had he and co-workers in Winston-Salem joined the CWA, than they found "notices from the labor board posted around our worksite instructing us how to get rid of our union… The labor board never posted a sign telling us we had a right to join a union!”

The three Republicans that Pres. Bush appointed to the Board had their way, while the two Democrats dissented time and again. The rulings made it easier to harass workers, further weakened the right to strike, and let employers evade the law’s mandate that they must bargain with the union once it's certified.

• The NLRB now accepts signed slips of paper as a decertification petition, and if a majority of workers sign up for a decertification election, the company can immediately dump the union, without a vote.
• The Board reversed more than 40 years of prior rulings and cut the amount of back pay workers can get for being illegally fired. Illegally fired workers now must prove they were looking for work the whole time they are out. Those who initially joined picket lines after being fired were denied back pay because the Board said that would “reward idleness.”
• Again overturning all precedents, the Bush majority ordered that all a Wisconsin employer had to do to remedy its continuous and outrageous labor law-breaking was hold a second election. “This is conduct of a type that the board and the courts have previously found is likely to have a long-lasting impact on the workplace, creating an atmosphere of fear in which there is little or no possibility of a fair election,” the AFL-CIO protested.
• More than half the decisions had been pending four years. One case from Brooklyn, where 202 workers were illegally fired, stretched back to 1989. Those workers have yet to receive any back pay.

Labor Board chairman Robert Battista – who himself has been cited for illegal actions against NLRB workers -- complained that the protests were “shrill.”

AFL-CIO calls global summit on right to organize

From AFL-CIO & PAI

Workers in Arizona press Verizon Wireless to honor employees’ desire for a union

The AFL-CIO invited unions from 63 nations around the world to come to D.C. Dec. 10-11 to testify and strategize on the endangered right to organize amid rampant law-breaking by U.S. and other firms. “With this historic gathering, the world’s labor movement is coming together with a unified voice to say we will stand together to build a global movement that’s capable of restoring the rights of workers worldwide,” declared AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.

The conference, “Going Global: Organizing, Recognition and Union Rights,” was timed to open on International Human Rights Day. Sponsored by the Council of Global Unions (CGU), the 200 union leaders met at the National Labor College in Maryland. The meeting culminated Dec. 11 with a press briefing and forum on capitol hill chaired and moderated by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other congressional leaders.

Global leaders would testify before Congress about how “what’s happening in the United States is a global disgrace,” says Communications Workers of America (CWA) President Larry Cohen.

Unions ask international watchdog to step in

AFL-CIO files ILO complaint for U.S. suppression of workers

In October, the AFL-CIO filed a complaint with the International Labor Organization (ILO), charging the Bush administration’s NLRB with violating international labor standards.

“Under Bush, America’s labor board has so failed our nation’s workers that we must now turn to the world’s international watchdogs to monitor and intervene,” explained AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. “The Bush labor board is kryptonite for America’s workers. There is no historic precedent for such aggressive efforts by the Board to curtail workers’ rights of freedom of association and collective bargaining.”

The ILO complaint cites a “rise in unlawful employer conduct” and charges the NLRB with steadfastly refusing to apply the few meaningful remedies available under the law. This is the third complaint the AFL-CIO has put before the ILO, an agency of the United Nations. The others challenge the NLRB’s stripping university teaching and research assistants of collective bargaining rights, and declaring that workers like nurses no longer get protection because they're "supervisors."

Change to Win launches ad blitz

The anti-worker bias of the NLRB “is not just an assault on American workers, it's an assault on the American Dream," says the Change to Win federation's chair Anna Burger. "Americans are tired of the Bush labor board…serving greedy corporations at the expense of working families."

On December 6, Change to Win launched a print and web advertising blitz against 61 anti-worker rulings by the Labor Board, with full-page ads in three cities. The ads were timed to remind Congress of the board’s actions just before the 2-day global conference called by the AFL-CIO.

How health issues can help organize women

-- And why it's important

Perspectives from a Berger-Marks Trustee

As director of Cervical Cancer Prevention Works, CLUW, Berger-Marks Trustee Carolyn Jacobson is passionate about the important role unions can play in educating women workers about health and preventing problems. CLUW (Coalition of Labor Union Women) delegates endorsed this vision when they passed a resolution at their fall convention committing the group to continue its involvement in health care issues.

Christine Baze sang for a CLUW event vs. cervical cancer

But what does this have to do with organizing? Its one of the many ways to show that a union improves the lot of workers. As Jacobson argues, "Union women... unlike most other American women, have access to regular communications from a trusted source, that is, their union. [And] research shows that women will unionize around quality of life issues more readily than around wages."

Saving lives

For some women and their families, getting the right preventive information in time will be a matter of life or death. (As Jacobson points out, women are usually the health gatekeepers of the family.) How can a union be more relevant than that?

Jacobson explains how unions can get involved, with the fight against cervical cancer as a key example.

Read the full article.

Women in foreign sweatshops challenge stereotypes,

Defy dangers to organize new unions

You don't need to be told that U.S. unions have been hit hard by the outsourcing of clothing and other jobs to poor countries with anti-labor regimes, where companies get away with paying starvation wages to “cheap labor,” which usually means young women. All too often, this undermines organizing.

But what you may not know is that courageous young women are fighting to unionize sweatshops, even when existing unions are dominated by men.

Big victory for women at jeans plant In Mexico

Young women working at garment factories in Mexico's maquiladora zones (which get tax breaks for sending their products to the U.S.) have to fight not only repressive employers, but also male-dominated unions enjoying a cozy relationship with a government that has little use for workers' rights -- corrupt unions are often okayed to represent workers without any say from the workers themselves.

Mexmode workers wearing union buttons in the factory

Photo: Huberto Juárez Núñez

A few years back, workers at the Kukdong factory near Puebla, Mexico, which supplies Nike and Reebok, made a breakthrough in organizing the first independent, woman-led union in the maquila garment industry, with strong support from the anti-sweatshop movement in the U.S. (The company was later renamed Mexmode to escape the black eye it gained worldwide for its anti-union campaign.)

This November 23, Mexican women made another big breakthrough at the Vaqueros Navarra plant in Tehuacán, where they make jeans for popular brands like American Eagle Outfitters, Gap, Warnaco, Tommy Hilfiger, Guess and Dickies. Despite hundreds of discharges, harassment and threats, they voted to join the September 19 Union affiliated with the independent Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT).

Union supporters kept up their courage even when they had to vote for the union out loud in front of factory management. Just three opted for the union that had controlled the factory up until then. They were bolstered by an international solidarity effort coordinated by the Toronto-based Mexico Solidarity Network (MSN).

Read more in Mexican Labor News & Analysis.

Meanwhile, in Indonesia, women union leaders get respect

Ngadinah

In Indonesia, where nine out of ten garment workers are young women, the rise of inspirational woman union leaders was recently noted by an article in Inside Indonesia. Indonesians are both haunted and inspired by the memory of Marsinah, a 25-year old factory worker who was brutally raped, tortured and murdered in 1993 after she protested the firing of fellow workers at a watch factory, in a struggle to enforce the legal minimum wage. Each year memorials are still held in Marsinah's honor.

When the labor movement came to life after the fall of the brutal Suharto dictatorship in 1998, women played a key role. Ngadinah, who at age 29 headed up a footwear workers' union, overcame being jailed for leading a strike at an Adidas factory. After supporters brought her case to an International Labour Conference in 2001, Ngadinah was acquitted of all charges.

Women also look up to Dita Sari, a long-time unionist and labor rights activist who was sentenced to five years in prison in 1997 at age 23 for leading 20,000 striking workers in a nonviolent protest march. International outrage (including pressure from the AFL-CIO) forced her early release, and she became president of the union federation, National Front for Indonesian Workers’ Struggle.

Sari refused to accept the Reebok Human Rights Award on the grounds that it was ‘hypocritical,’ since conditions in Indonesian Reebok factories are still so bad.

Indonesian women continue to organize, even as arrests, torture, and threats of rape and sexual abuse at the hands of authorities are on the rise. The article describes one group of women at a small, all-female factory in West Java who broke away from a bigger union to create their own, led by women. They won the right to be paid for overtime, along with time off and maternity leaves, and are running union education campaigns in their neighborhoods.

Older workers feel less stress on the job

From WINS Economic Report by Jesse Russell

The older you are, the less stress you may feel at work. That’s according to a new study from the University of Michigan. One reason cited in the study is that only one out of five older workers surveyed said they had poor job security. Another is that only 15 percent said work interfered with their personal lives, with only two percent saying their personal lives interfered with work. The main reason is that older workers tend to be "empty-nesters" and no longer need to juggle family needs.

Colorado workers get some bargaining rights

Unions unite to organize

Taken from PAI and a pro-worker wire

Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter (D) signed an executive order Nov. 2 that gives 30,000 state workers some bargaining rights. Ritter’s order gives workers the right to choose a union to represent them over workplace issues and delivery of government services, but it doesn’t give workers full bargaining rights over wages and benefits. It creates “partnership agreements” for the workers, but bans binding arbitration.

Photo by Jack Brigham

Unions immediately signed their own Colorado Partnership Agreement, vowing to together organize many of the state's 31,500 civil service employees. The new Colorado Workers for Innovations and New Solutions (WINS) unites AFSCME, the American Federation of Teachers, and SEIU (which includes the old Colorado Association of Public Employees).

Early this year Ritter had angered labor supporters by casting a veto -- his first in office -- against a bill that would have ended Colorado’s bizarre law that requires a second vote to get a union or agency shop, after workers organize. To succeed, a yes vote from the majority of everyone in the workplace unit, or 75 percent of those who vote - whichever is higher – is needed.

Yale Hospital to pay $4.5 million for violating conduct agreement

But not ordered to bargain

Taken from WINS labor radio service

Local 1199/SEIU and Yale New Haven Hospital have been locked in a ten-year battle over the unionization of the hospital’s 1,800 service workers. A neutral arbitrator was chosen by both sides to settle any disputes arising from the parties’ historic election conduct agreement signed in April, 2006. The arbitrator ruled in October that the hospital must pay a $4.5 million fine for flagrant violations of the agreement. However, the arbitrator didn't order the hospital to bargain with the union.

The union and the hospital had agreed 18 months earlier to a “fair process” for deciding on union representation that went beyond the rules of the National Labor Relations Act. For example, it banned captive audience meetings for workers in which supervisors could bash the union. But as the NLRB-supervised election scheduled for December 2006 drew near, the arbitrator determined that the hospital had violated the ban on captive audience meetings 98 times, and the union withdrew its request for an election.

Half the money –$1,300 per eligible worker (equal to what the hospital paid to its outside consultants) -- goes directly to the workers, and the union is being reimbursed for organizing expenses.

Campaign to win sick days is for all workers

Support the Healthy Families Act

Everyone gets sick. Not everyone has time to get better. And that can be dangerous for the whole workforce.

While the right to take sick days is something non-union workers often want, they may not know that they can work with the union movement right now to win the right to time off when they’re sick.

Nearly half of all workers in the private sector don't get a single paid sick day. To this day, there are no state or federal laws that require workplaces to provide paid sick days. In a nation that prides itself on family values, we can do better. San Francisco took the lead by passing the nation’s first law guaranteeing paid sick leave, which took effect this June. Read more about it.

The labor movement has joined with the National Partnership for Women & Families to press Congress and the states to allow every worker seven paid sick days a year by passing the Healthy Families Act. Click here to sign the petition.
List of unions & other groups calling for paid sick days as a national right.

More about the bill & facts on sick days

St. Joseph Sisters support unions --except in their own hospitals

They refuse to sign pre-election agreement with SEIU

What happens when a church group that has long supported union organizing finds itself running a chain of 14 hospitals whose workers try to unionize?

At the St. Joseph Health System in California, it’s not a pretty picture. The resistance of Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange to a union drive recently earned them an expose cover story in the Orange County California OC Weekly.

The Sisters had backed farm workers in the 1956 Delano Grape Strike, , and supported the Justice for Janitors campaign launched by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in the 1980s.

No worker justice here

Workers at St. Joseph's don’t feel they can talk openly about forming a union

Photo by Jennie Warren

But when SEIU and unionism knocked at their own door, it was a different story. Sister Katherine Gray, chairwoman of the St. Joseph Health System, hired known union-avoidance consulting firms.

The NLRB concluded that employees were being “threatened with adverse consequences, questioned about union sympathy or that of others; and people were promised that if they didn’t support the union, they would receive benefits” at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. Eventually it got so bad that the union pulled out of the election, on grounds that employees had been unfairly intimidated. More than 16 former members of the order are protesting.

Church had issued guidelines for union drives

Yet this was after the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had issued the paper, “A Fair and Just Workplace: Principles and Practices for Catholic Healthcare,” following an earlier four-year struggle by SEIU to organize Catholic Healthcare West (CHW)—the state’s largest nonprofit religious hospital system – where management also behaved badly. The goal was to present guidelines for Catholic health systems and organizers. Eventually, that system agreed to a fair election process, and a majority of its hospitals voted for a union.

But not at St. Joseph hospitals. Once the NLRB had ruled that management did violate labor law, the hospital agreed to remedies such as posting signs promising not to bar off-duty employees from peaceful handbilling or “interfere with, restrain, or coerce” workers.

Reich baffled by Sister Katherine's logic

Even so, the Sisters balked at signing a pre-election pact with the union that would let an arbitrator, chosen by both sides, quickly resolve conflicts leading up to the election. Such agreements, says former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, are often used to shortcut the long delays that have become the m.o. of the NLRB. But Sister Katherine complained that would “give away the rights of employees to be informed by both sides and to exercise their right to choose in a secret election ballot as outlined by the NLRB.”

“I honestly don’t know what she’s talking about,” responded Reich, who is now a professor at UC Berkeley. “Rather than taking away employees’ rights, it enhances them.” If illegal acts are committed, workers can still go to the NLRB, explains an SEIU organizing official, “It’s largely saying that the employer won’t use the power that they have to have an intimidating conversation with people.” That apparently is a power the Sisters don’t want to yield.

Photo by Richard D. Vogel

1,000 Aramark workers & supporters march on company headquarters

Kick off national drive to respect workers, customers

Information from unions and MRZine article

Aramark workers, who provide food and cleaning services at facilities across the country, were joined by unionists and public school parents, clergy and elected officials to call on Philadelphia-based Aramark to improve its treatment of both workers and customers.

The rally in Philadelphia on November 14 kicked off a national week of action aimed at Aramark and coordinated jointly by SEIU and UNITE HERE, which between them represent more than 25,000 Aramark workers who prepare and serve food, clean buildings and provide laundry services in cities and towns across the country.

Protesters believe Aramark’s business practices not only harm workers but shortchange customers by cutting corners on quality and promising savings that the company can’t deliver. Aramark earned $11.6 billion in revenue last year and paid its CEO $16.2 million, and its business practices are costing taxpayers millions. At the same time, Aramark workers across the nation struggle to make ends meet at dead-end, low-wage jobs with no path toward health insurance.