The future of labor: organizing the service industry

The future of labor: organizing the service industry

By Christian Roselund

Downtown San Francisco is quiet these days, no more are the hoarse cries of picketing hotel workers to be heard along Market street, in Nob Hill and the Financial District, where members of UNITE-HERE Local 2 were locked out for 38 days following a contract dispute. Yet whatever happens after the 60-day “cooling off” period brokered by Mayor Newsom, San Francisco has changed, and is changing. “San Francisco is a union town”, went one of the union’s chants during the lockout. The support that ordinary people lent to the striking workers suggests that this was no idle boast. But the strike and subsequent lockout of roughly 4,300 hotel workers here is not an isolated incident, nor is this particular to San Francisco. These issues are part of an ever-increasing trend in America today of labor struggles moving into retail and the so-called ‘service industry’.

It is hardly news in the U.S. today that our economy has moved from goods, that is, the production of tangible objects such as cars, televisions and lumber, to the service economy. This was hailed as a boon in the '90s, when the service jobs that were created were largely in high-tech, including internet jobs. After the dot-com bubble burst and the recession that followed in the wake of September 11, the jobs created have largely been ‘service industry’ jobs. Even conservative publications like the Economist admit that many of these are “McJobs”, a phrase coined by author Douglass Coupland in the 1991 novel ‘Generation X’ to describe “low-pay, low-benefit, low-prestige service industry jobs.”

Once seen as work for idle teenagers or at least as a second job in a family where the spouse, often the husband, worked in a more tangible line of work, today these jobs are often the sole source of support for workers and their families. And partially as a result, more service industry employees are demanding that their work and their working conditions be taken seriously.

This has led to a growth in union activity in the retail and service industries, as more and more employees see the way to a better life as improving conditions in their workplaces. The larger unions in this arena, such the AFL-CIO affiliated unions - UFCW (United Food and Commercial workers), who represent 1.4 million workers, and UNITE-HERE (Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees), who represent more than 400,000 nationally - draw much of their membership from places where employment is relatively stable and long-term, such as supermarkets and hotels, respectively.

HERE already represents 85 percent of the large hotels in San Francisco, according to Valerie Lappin, a spokesperson for HERE. Additionally, Lappin stated that HERE has organized an estimated 1,400 restaurant, bar, and nightclub employees not associated with hotels in San Francisco and San Mateo counties. But for the time being, its focus remains on organizing the big hotels.

The UFCW, meanwhile, has been attempting to expand into the smaller retail stores. “We continue to grow and expand. Most of our organizing is conducted on a local basis,” said Greg Deneir, the national communications director for UFCW. According to Deneir, the UFCW organizes both national chains and regional chains, and has recently taken on Whole Foods in an organizing drive.

In the larger stores there have been setbacks as well as victories, such as the UFCW grocery workers' strike in Los Angeles last year, which Mr. Deneir admitted was an “extremely difficult fight for the workers involved.” Officials at the union, including AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, have tried to emphasize successes, such as the parts of the contract covering health benefits. However, some observers have noted that the union, worn out from the long strike, sacrificed many of their most important demands in the final negotiations.
But the reality is that the vast majority of service and retail jobs are not organized, and there are many reasons that much of this industry has been difficult for organizers. Tenaya LaFore, a member of Young Workers United who organized service workers in Montepelier, Vermont, explained that “traditional organizing approaches lack the ability to respond to the unique situation of work in the service industry, specifically high turnover.”

In response to these difficulties, other approaches are being tried, both new and old. Last June LaFore was involved in the launch of the Montpelier Downtown Workers Union as a joint project of a local Workers Center and the United Electrical Workers, in an attempt to organize service workers in a city-wide union instead of shop by shop. In a Labor Notes article by LaFore on the union, she explained that, “The goal was to get retail and food service workers, mostly at small businesses, covered by a master contract that would create a ‘Montpelier Standard’.”

This model of organizing on a broader scale is hardly a new idea, but is getting more attention lately, and has had successes in areas where traditional unions have made little headway. This May, the organizing of a Starbucks in Midtown Manhattan, the first ever in the United States, showed that even mega-chains like Starbucks are not unassailable. Interestingly enough, employees at this Starbucks chose to organize with a radical union which, after being severely repressed in the 1920’s, was mostly dormant for much of the twentieth century--the IWW, or Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW differs from the larger unions in significant respects in that it places less importance on legal recognition by the government, eschews keeping a body of professional staff distinct from workers, and gives near total autonomy to its individual units.

Attempts to organize Starbucks have not been easy. The nascent Manhattan union, associated with the IWW’s general distribution branch, filed this summer for recognition from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which has a majority of Republican members and has been criticized as being pro-employer. The NLRB has delayed recognizing the Starbucks union while pending an appeal by Starbucks, a process which could take years. In the interim, Starbucks employees are opting for a more radical approach, and have pulled their NLRB petition. Additionally, the chief organizer of the Manhattan store, Daniel Gross, is going to trial in January for charges related to his participation at a protest at the Republican National Convention this summer, which he says are official harassment for his workplace activism.

Overall, the IWW, or 'Wobblies' as members are called, are starting to have some small victories. As well as Manhattan Starbucks, the 'General Distribution' branch of the IWW has organized a coffee shop in western Massachusetts, who also failed to get NLRB approval, a fabric store in Berkeley, and a health food store in Cincinnati, part of the Wild Oats chain, all within the last two years. This would be small pickings for a larger union, but such successes have boosted the IWW significantly. Also, on November 24 the NLRB filed a complaint against Real Foods, which shut down its store in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco when workers announced plans to unionize with the IWW. It is not known if the company will have to rehire its workers or make some sort of other concession, but it is seen as a victory for retail workers.

Gross, the lead organizer of the Manhattan Starbucks, feels that the work they are doing is spreading. He said, “I'm inspired every day by the increasing number of Starbucks workers around the country who are reaching out to the union looking to get involved.” He claims that his store’s action has lead to wage increases at Starbucks stores across the country. IWW members have even created a separate website, retailworker.org, for news and organizing issues in retail, which is one of many websites such as bordersunion.org and kinkosworkersunite.info for retail workers and organizers.

Locally, Young Workers United, a self-described “workers center” has adopted a somewhat similar approach of being an advocate and support center for the huge numbers of non-unionized service industry workers in San Francisco. Young Workers United focuses on the problems of young workers, students, and other groups that are typically not the focus of mainstream unions. Formed in 2002, Young Workers United operates out of the HERE Local 2’s building, with which it has strong ties. Among its current projects, Young Workers United is currently taking on the Cheesecake Factory, a chain restaurant with five branches in the Bay Area. They recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Cheesecake Factory workers for alleged back pay and other complaints. Last year Young Workers United, along with the national group, ACORN, and a host of local groups, had a significant victory in the passing of Proposition L, San Francisco’s minimum wage increase, which raised the city’s minimum wage to $8.50 an hour and is set to increase again in January.

Yet despite these small successes, the test in America of labor in these industries remains the 800lb. gorilla of the retail world, Wal-Mart. It is hardly a coincidence that Wal-Mart, the world’s largest company and infamous for its near-minimum wage pay and monstrous working conditions, is also America’s largest private employer. Wal-Mart has so far aggressively fought off unionization at any of its stores in the United States.

But Daniel Gross and others are hopeful. “We believe strongly that if the labor movement in the United States is to survive, the retail sector must go union”, he stated in a recent interview with Fault Lines. And in San Francisco, the quiet downtown may be temporary, as the staff at HERE Local 2 are quietly at work preparing for the next round of battle with the big Hotel chains.