WSJ: Unions in Some Southern States Post Gains From New Strategies

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

Unions in Some Southern States Post Gains From New Strategies
By KRIS MAHER
June 22, 2006; Page A4

Unions are making inroads in some parts of the historically nonunion South -- organizing call-center workers, janitors, sanitation workers and school-bus drivers -- by tapping frustrations over low wages and benefits and developing new organizing strategies to battle employer opposition.

While the percentage of workers represented by unions was flat last year nationwide and fell across many Southern states, several individual Southern states saw increases in union membership, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Mississippi, the percentage of workers who belonged to a union increased to 7.1% last year from 4.7% a year earlier, while membership grew to 5.3% from 5.1% in Texas and to 10.2% from 9.7% in Alabama.

About 49,000 workers in Texas joined unions last year, as did 14,000 in Alabama, boosting the percentage of union members in each state. More than 11,000 Cingular Wireless employees in Southern states, including Mississippi and Florida, have joined the Communications Workers of America in the past year. In Florida and Texas, about 5,700 janitors have joined the Service Employees International Union. This week, nearly 1,200 city employees in Jackson, Miss., joined the CWA. The Teamsters have organized more than 1,000 school-district workers, including bus drivers, in North Carolina, in the past 2½ years.

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Still, recent gains in the South are noteworthy because organized labor has never been strong there. One reason is that right-to-work laws in many Southern states have diminished the benefits of joining a union and paying dues, since workers can opt out of joining but still be covered by contracts negotiated by unions. Experts say the biggest opportunity for labor in the South could be among the growing number of immigrant workers in the booming service sector. To bolster their position, unions have begun working with Southern-based religious and civil-rights leaders and reaching out to immigrant groups.

In some cases, unions have successfully approached employers in asking them to remain neutral in union organizing drives. That was the case with Cingular, a venture of AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. Larry Cohen, president of the communications workers, says the union would never have been able to sign up the 11,000 Cingular Wireless workers across the south without getting the company to agree to be neutral in an election, rather than fight it.

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URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115094638370787244.html (subscription)

[Union Thug]

1. it's about time. I guess people are at the breaking point...

But I remain cautiously optimistic.