Small Shop Unions, Part 1
I’ve long pondered the potential for organizing workers in the retail and restaurant industry, especially in the smaller chains and independent shops. Like Andrew Friedman’s post today on the Drum Major Institute blog points out, most organizing in the growing service sector is focused on the big chains like Walmart. He continues describing the recent victory organizing 95 workers at the ten stores of the local shoe store chain Footco. The campaign, organized with help from Make the Road by Walking (Friedman is a co-founder) and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), part of the UFCW, sought support from the entire community, threatened to organize a boycott, and filed wage and labor violation complaints with the New York attorney general. The workers are almost all immigrants and they won increase in wages, backpay for past wage violations, health coverage for all workers who work more than 20 hours a week, sick leave and paid vacations. The organizers say they are hoping to take their model to other employers in the area, and I hope they do. They seem to have hit upon a working recipe. The RWDSU has reposted this Sunday’s NYT article on the campaign.
In the long run, I think the big challenge to organizing in this sector is building long term labor organizations that are relevant and effective for their constituents. I think the reason the UFCW and other unions have had such difficulty organizing retail and similar service industry jobs is due in part to not understanding the workforce and difficulty in shaking off older, less relevant models.
February 20th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
This comment was emailed in by someone who wanted to otherwise remain anonymous:
yeah, totally. The more I deal with old guard unions, the more I wonder how they even exist. There’s a good audio interview of the guy who wrote “Solidarity for Sale” on www.leftbusinessobserver.com under the radio part. It’s pretty good, locals are personal feifdoms with no accountability to the membership and, as NYC saw during the transit strike, minimal communication much less solidarity between the multiple feifdoms. In his interview he talks about how we should move to a more European model of national unions that you can join in your worksite and switch to different ones if you don’t like the one you’ve got. Of course, how to get from here to there? I have no idea, but it’ll obviously only be worked out in practice.
I highly recommend the interview and just ordered the book. I knew I’d like the guy when Doug Henwood asked him if SEIU was the model for the future of U.S. labor and right before he said it I said outloud at work “hell no!”
he’s in your neck of the woods monday:
http://www.coliseumbooks.com/events/022006event.htm
the picture on the cover was taken by a TDU guy. i’m curious what he thinks of TDU…
April 12th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
[…] In my previous blog I’d written a bit about my thoughts on organizing retail and restaurant workers in towns like Ann Arbor, which I perceived as ripe for a certain kind of organization (I think those writing are lost). I’ve been meaning to follow up on this post about small shop unions, and specifically talk about models I think are worth considering. This looks pretty promising. So far the students seem to be doing a lot more listening than prescribing, which is a positive first step. […]