Think booking a hotel room during summer is tough? It might get
tougher if the UNITE-HERE labor union keeps up pressure on several
major hotel chains this summer to gain new members.
It is using a tried-and-true tactic: a corporate campaign.
Corporate campaigns are elaborate political and public relations
campaigns that labor unions use to target a specific employer or
group of employers. Tactics include feeding allegations of company
wrongdoing to the news media, filing complaints with regulatory
agencies, contacting shareholders to challenge management’s
competence and question the company’s financial health, leveraging
the union’s investment power by introducing shareholder resolutions
that advance union goals — and, of course, picketing.
Corporate campaigns were pioneered by one of UNITE-HERE’s
predecessor unions, and they continue to be an important strategy
for UNITE-HERE and other unions. This year UNITE-HERE is launching
a nationwide campaign against several major hotel chains —
including Hilton, Hyatt, and Holiday Inn — and the union is
thinking big.
With contracts expiring this year at hotels in Boston, Chicago,
Honolulu, Los Angeles, and New York — and hotel workers in San
Francisco working without a contract since 2004 — UNITE-HERE’s
“Hotel
Workers Rising” campaign seeks to take advantage of this timing
by threatening a walkout by 60,000 workers at 400
hotels. The campaign has enlisted former North Carolina Senator and
2004 Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards and actor
and far-left activist Danny Glover as spokesmen.
For private sector unions, survival depends on increasing
membership, and to that end, UNITE-HERE and other aggressive unions
left the AFL-CIO a year ago to form a new labor federation, the
Change to Win Coalition. UNITE-HERE’s Change to Win confederates —
especially the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — are also
enthusiastic about corporate campaigns. While it is unlikely to
rejuvenate the labor movement in the way that its supporters wish,
the corporate campaigns of UNITE-HERE and Change to Win can still
inflict heavy damage on employers and the economy.
The Change to Win unions claim that the AFL-CIO, under the
direction of John Sweeney, has squandered organizing opportunities
to engage in electoral political activity, nearly all on behalf of
Democratic candidates. But the split seems to be more the result of
frustration with Sweeney’s inability to follow through on his
pledge to coordinate successful corporate campaigns. In his 1995
inaugural address, Sweeney proclaimed, “We will use old-fashioned
mass demonstrations, as well as sophisticated corporate campaigns,
to make worker rights the civil rights issue of the 1990s.”
UNITE-HERE KNOWS ABOUT successful corporate campaigns; one of its
predecessor unions helped pioneer the tactic. This union was formed
in July 2004 with the merger of the Union of Needletrades,
Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE) and the Hotel Employees
and Restaurant Employees (HERE). It boasts 450,000 active members
and 400,000 retirees. UNITE is itself the product of a 1995 merger
between the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the
Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU).
ACTWU’s four-year campaign against textile giant J.P. Stevens,
which ended in 1980 with the unionization of 4,000 Stevens
employees, is considered a watershed in corporate campaign history.
This campaign’s strategy was laid out by Ray Rogers, then an ACTWU
staffer, who in 1981 founded Corporate
Campaign, Inc., a strategy consulting firm for unions and
leftist activist groups. Rogers’s firm boasts on its website: “The
Stevens Corporate Campaign exposed, attacked and broke up the
network of power supporting the company and eventually forced the
big money interests behind J. P. Stevens, led by Metropolitan Life
Insurance Co., to give Stevens an ultimatum — settle or else.”
Several mergers later, UNITE campaigns have gone on to target
Disney, GAP, Guess?, K-Mart, Nike and Phillips Van Heusen, among
others.
A corporate campaign’s ultimate objective is to browbeat the
employer into allowing a union to organize its workers through a
procedure known as “card check neutrality” — which isn’t neutral
at all. Under “card-check,” which has been sanctioned by the
National Labor Relations Board, an employer agrees that it will not
campaign against union representation during a union organizing
drive. Union communication with employees enjoys an advantage
because the employer agrees to remain silent.
Moreover, “card check” circumvents a secret ballot election
because it requires only that a majority of employees sign cards
showing that they support union representation. Employees are often
urged to sign cards publicly and in the presence of union
organizers, which exposes them to high-pressure tactics that the
secret ballot is intended to avoid.
Now, as a key member of the Change to Win Coalition, UNITE-HERE
and its allies are pushing the envelope further. “Thinking big —
big unions, big campaigns, big ideas — seems to be the hallmark of
the Change to Win unions,” writes William Johnson in the
Nation. Its nationwide corporate campaign against hotel
chains shows UNITE-HERE’s commitment to these goals. It may be a
stressful summer for travelers.
Ivan Osorio is editorial director at the Competitive Enterprise
Institute. This article is adapted from the study, “UNITE-HERE on the Attack: Pioneer of Corporate
Campaigns Pushes Harder Than Ever,” published in the July issue of
Capital
Research Center’s Labor Watch.
