The Next Labor Movement

'The Power of Their Numbers'

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, May 3, 2006; A23

This morning, for the first time in two months, it will be a day with immigrants at the University of Miami. On Monday the university's janitors -- almost all of them immigrants, and the vast majority refugees from Fidel Castro's Cuba -- won a nine-week battle with the university and its janitorial contractor over their right to be represented by a union. Today they report back to work. When the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) set out to organize the janitors, it didn't anticipate its campaign would turn into the struggle it eventually became. "Given who the president of the university is," said Eliseo Medina, SEIU's executive vice president, "we actually expected this to go rather smoothly."

It seemed a reasonable expectation. The president of the University of Miami is Donna Shalala, secretary of health and human services in the Clinton administration and a longtime proponent of greater equity for the poor. Nonetheless, when the strike began, it was hard to find Miamians much poorer than the university's janitors. Maritza Paz, who was admitted to the United States 13 years ago as a political refugee from Cuba, hired on at the university 11 years ago at $4.35 an hour. When the strike began, she had worked her way up to a sumptuous $6.70 hourly wage with no benefits, for which she cleaned 17 bathrooms and 20 offices every day.

But as weeks dragged into months, both the university and its contractor refused to deal with the union. Workers and students embarked on a hunger strike, and SEIU enlisted the help of its numerous Democratic allies. Behind the scenes, a number of Shalala's former Clinton administration colleagues worked to mediate a solution. A few weeks ago a Shalala-appointed commission recommended raising wages and establishing health benefits (recommendations that Shalala promptly enacted), but it did so without ever having met with any of the striking workers. Convinced that they still had no channel to talk to management, the workers stayed out. Medina embarked on a hunger strike that ended only Monday, when the university agreed to a procedure that enables the workers to get their union.
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Even a sea change among immigrant workers doesn't necessarily mean that the dark days of American labor could be coming to an end. In the growing high-end, high-tech workforce, said union strategist Jim Grossfeld, who with pollster Celinda Lake has undertaken a study for the Center for American Progress of professional and technical employees, "many workers have a problem with the word 'union' and with the old economic rules." Nonetheless, he points out, in a time of rampant economic insecurity, such unions as the Communications Workers of America have even managed to organize techies.

But it's chiefly immigrant workers who are emerging from the shadows to lead the next generation's battles for economic equity. "Our victory," said Maritza Paz, speaking of her struggle in Miami but also about this transformative moment in American immigrant life, "shows workers they can overcome their fears. It has opened the doors."

Meyerson mostly gets it right, but he mis-characterizes the "high-end, high-tech" work force. These days that sector is battered and wages are stagnant or falling. That's ripe territory for union organizing. His larger point, that as the Latino immigrant workforce loses its fear of collective action they well might revitalize the labor movement, is spot on. UNITE-HERE is making a concerted effort to organize service sector employees in labor-intensive sectors like hospitality and textiles.

This will be the next time that the movement was invigorated by immigrants.