ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 3, 1996 TAG: 9603010050
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: G-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON STAFF WRITER
The second Monday night of each month, Roanoke area union bosses gather in a former branch bank on Jamison Avenue in Southeast Roanoke. Representatives of 37 unions that belong to the Roanoke United Central Labor Council are welcome, but the turnout is sometimes less than that.
The discussion ranges over common concerns - wage levels, employers who don't honor their union contracts and the latest doings of John Sweeney, who last October was elected president of the AFL-CIO, the major federation of American labor unions.
As the union leaders hunker down at this month's meeting, hopes for the future will be running higher than perhaps at any time in the recent past.
Local labor leaders and their counterparts across the country are placing hope in Sweeney's leadership of the AFL-CIO, which is flush with cash to recruit new union members, endorse political candidates and policies and to advertise the union message.
At the Roanoke council's March 11 meeting, Daniel LeBlanc, the state AFL-CIO leader, plans to speak to the troops.
These are tough times for unions in the United States, which have witnessed membership decline as a percentage of the working population to about 15 percent.
The Virginia movement is weaker yet. According to Florida State University analysts, 7.3 percent of the hourly and salaried employees who work in the state belonged to unions in 1994, the latest year for which data are available.
Roanoke Valley construction trade unions are represented on less than 10 percent of area projects, said Bobby Myers, business agent of Laborers' Local Union 980 and president of the Southwestern Building and Construction Trades Council.
Union activity is so low that the Roanoke Valley Economic Development Partnership has for the last several years touted that fact as a selling point to prospective industries. The unions affiliated with the central labor council, which represent a high percentage of all union locals in the greater Roanoke area, have more than 8,000 members, the labor council said. Using a figure of 8,000, that's 5.6 percent of the hourly and salaried employees who work in the Roanoke metropolitan area, according to recent Virginia Employment Commission data.
Now, momentum is building, according to union leaders.
There will be evidence of change in a month of two, according to Walter Wise, president of the Roanoke United Central Labor Council, who said a planned campaign will raise the profile of unions locally.
"When spring breaks, we'll see more activity than we have seen in a long time in this area as far as educating the public about unions," Wise said.
The campaign will ensure everyone who wants to contact a union knows how to do so and explain how unions work. Wise said he wants the message to reach young people, in particular, who have recently joined the work force or are about to get their first jobs. He declined to say how the message will be spread.
In addition, Sweeney has pledged manpower to help union leaders organize workplaces.
Companies are ready to fight back as unions seek to grow, a Roanoke labor lawyer said.
"Management is tooling up to successfully oppose" new union organizing drives, said Clint Morse of Woods, Rogers & Hazlegrove in Roanoke, who provides legal advice to companies on dealings with unions. "We're going to meet them head on."
Morse said employers he has advised could make a case that unions promise more than they can deliver. The employers worked to spread that message to the work force before a union vote was taken, he said.
Unions in this area won 40 percent of such drives last year.
Elections were held at eight companies in the Roanoke and New River valleys, Alleghany Highlands and Martinsville area, according to the National Labor Relations Board's regional office in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Workers at three of those companies voted to unionize, while the others elected to remain nonunion, the NLRB said. At two other companies, results were released last year of votes taken in 1994; workers voted against unionization in one case and for unionization in the other, for a total of four union victories out of 10 tries.
"This area is very tough," said Gerald Meadows, a longtime area union leader and president of Local 161 of the International Union of Electronic Workers, whose roughly 1,000 members work at GE Drive Systems in Salem. "People are scared. They have been taught to be scared and they have a right to be scared. They are scared of the boss and there's always a fear of losing their jobs. In reality, the more support they give to the union, the better chance they have of prevailing and holding onto their jobs."
Some campaigns don't succeed until after multiple votes over several years, Wise said. For example, employees of Tultex Corp. who work in the company's home town of Martinsville voted five times in as many years before finally endorsing representation by the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees.
Wise's optimism is ever-present. With job security more of a worry than ever and Washington politicians talking of cutting the federal worker protection program, Wise said workers increasingly want to know, "Who is out there working in my best interests to protect me?'' The answer, he said, is unions.
"As we see individuals called on more and more to look out for themselves, then I think you're going to see them turn more and more to unions and to collective bargaining," he said.
The median weekly wage for U.S. union workers was $602 last year, 35 percent higher than the median wage for nonunion workers of $447, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Monthly union dues average about twice a worker's hourly wage. That means a worker earning the median union income in the United States would pay about $30 per month to support the union and its programs.
Wise bristles at comments of those who would sound the death knell for unions. The movement, he said, is like an aircraft carrier that has taken its main sight off the target of manufacturing, a shrinking industry, and "is turning around and going in another direction."
"Unions are starting to look in other areas of the economy for the workers to become unionized," he said.
Sweeney instills confidence, because before his election as president of the AFL-CIO, he ran the powerful Service Employees International Union, whose membership has grown by nearly 500,000 in 10 years. That union has grown to more than 1.1 million under a strategy focused on organizing low-paid workers such as janitors and nursing home aides, spokeswoman Deborah Dion said. She called it the nation's fastest-growing union.
Trying to do with the 13-million member federation what he did with the service employees union, Sweeney plans a massive infusion of money to the AFL-CIO's Organizing Institute in Washington, D.C., a school that trains union organizers to scour the country for converts.
The organizing push is likely to be felt in Virginia, sources said.
"The manufacturing base has dropped, but the service industry is there for the taking," said Mary Gardner, vice president of the Virginia Coalition of Labor Union Women and the organization's statewide leader.
Targets of specific organizing drives are not available, but LeBlanc has said drives are being planned.
The service employees union, though strong elsewhere, has a limited presence in Virginia. Vinton is home to a regional office of the International Brotherhood of Firemen and Oilers, which became affiliated with the service employees union last February. Its president, Dan Anderson, said he did not know of the service employees union targeting any employers in the Roanoke Valley.
Myers of the Southwestern Building and Construction Trades Council has said the Covington area will be the focus of at least one campaign by a building trades union.
"If you don't grow, you're going to die," he said.
The temporary help industry is one new source of service jobs that would seem to offer unions a source of new blood. But the job won't be easy, said Richard Bensinger, executive director of the school for union organizers.
Because employees of temporary employment companies do not work at their employer's office - instead working at a variety of companies that are their clients - unions are uncertain whom to deal with on matters such as bargaining, handling grievances and conducting other business. Does the union negotiate with the temporary help firm itself or the firm's clients, asked Bensinger, who added that the problem was being studied.
Unions have been polishing and reviewing organizing techniques. They say there are few good substitutes for pitching the benefits of union membership to prospective members in a parking lot after work, in a coffee shop or at their home, and hoping they will vote for the union. That is how most organizing will occur.
But Frank Stoner has orders to take steps that could make it easier for work forces to get a union started.
Stoner is an organizer for the United Auto Workers assigned to Virginia and other states. To ask the National Labor Relations Board to hold an election, a union needs the signatures of at least 30 percent of the workers at a company or a plant who would be eligible to be covered by the contract.
Unions most often direct prospects to sign a card if they want the union formed and mail it to the union organizer who is leading the drive. This year, Stoner must begin to offer workers the option to circulate a petition instead.
While the card protects the privacy of union supporters, the petition allows workers to see who supports the union - a feature that Stoner said could make it easier for a work force to reach a consensus.
``If I'm working in a plant and a lot of people look up to me, they might say, `Well, Frank signed. Why can't I sign?''' Stoner said.
A technique called "salting" also could pep up organizing efforts. Union organizers seek jobs at nonunion companies in order to organize their work forces. In November, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled employers can't discriminate against organizers engaged in such activity, a ruling union leaders took as a green light for future campaigns of that type.
As for other nontraditional organizing techniques, the school for union organizers said it teaches the use of so-called geographical campaigns, in which a union tries to organize all similar employers in a community. Bensinger of the institute suggested one possible target: all nursing homes in a city. Unions would share the work of educating and signing up prospective members and divide the new members if a union forms, he said.
This has been tried on a limited scale here. Southwest Virginia construction trade unions last summer won the authority to bargain as a unit for the first time, in connection with a one-time construction project at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, Wise said.
These are the issues that likely will be hot topics on upcoming Monday nights behind the closed doors of the Southeast Roanoke union hall shared by the labor council and the Carpenters & Millwrights Local Union 319.
One opportunity for unions to gain the greater visibility they seek sits right out back - in the form of an enormous sign shaped like a handsaw. It once decorated a former carpenters' union hall on Wells Avenue in Roanoke. Jim Wright, who heads the carpenters local, said the sign has sat on the ground at the new carpenters' hall location for two or three years but that he plans to get around to putting it up on the building where it will be seen by traffic on Jamison Avenue.
LENGTH: Long : 198 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Walter Wise (above), president of Roanoke Untedby CNBCentral Labor Council, see the uncertain labor market as an
opportunity for unions to increase membership. 2. A steel
fabrication plant (in a December photo at left) is being built in
Natural Bridge Industrial Park by The International Association of
Bridge, Structureal and Ornamental Iron Workers. color.