By Zenitha Prince
Washington Bureau Chief
PHILADELPHIA— The struggle for social, economic and political equality has almost always worked in tandem with the fight for organized labor. There is no better illustration of this than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last and fatal trip to Memphis, where he had gone to help organize garbage workers."We know that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters,” he said in 1968, explaining his reason for going to Memphis. “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?"
That is why plummeting African-American union membership rates are alarming so many. According to a report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a Washington-D.C.-based non-profit geared towards public education on key issues, the percentage of African-Americans who are either members of or represented by unions fell by half, from 31.7 percent of all Black workers in 1983 to 16 percent in 2006. “For Black America, organized labor is absolutely essential,” said Henry Nicholas, longtime labor activist and president of the National Union of Hospital and Healthcare Employees, Local 1199 C in Philadelphia.
“We don’t own anything in America but our labor. We don’t own none of the institutions. None of them. So if the only thing you own is your labor you should let that work for you.” It’s not that Blacks don’t want to join unions. In its 2007 union report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that Black workers were more likely to be union members (14.3 percent) than Whites (11.8 percent), Asians (10.9 percent), or Hispanics (9.8 percent). And within these major groups, Black men had the highest union membership rate of 15.8 percent. So why the decline in membership numbers? “The economy,” Nicholas answered. “If you are the last hired and first to go, when the economy changes, you are at the bottom of the seniority list.” And the numbers support Nicholas’ observation. "Fifty-five percent of the union jobs lost in 2004 were held by African-American workers and Black women accounted for 70 percent of the union jobs lost by women in 2004, according to a recent study."
Not surprisingly, most of the losses were in the manufacturing sector, an industry that helped to create the middle class after World War II but has suffered because of exploding technology that accompanied the shift to a knowledge-based economy as well as weakened or unenforced trade laws that caused many jobs to be shipped overseas. Between 1979 and 2006, the share of all African-American workers who worked in manufacturing declined from 23.9 percent to 10.1 percent, the CEPR report stated. Blacks weren’t always welcomed into the unions or the trades they represented until the fierce advocacy of the civil rights movement. For example it took the Philadelphia Plan, adopted by the Nixon administration at the urging of Assistant Labor Secretary Arthur Fletcher, to assure inclusion of Blacks in the skilled building trades.
As recently as this year, the $700-million expansion of the Philadelphia Convention Center was stymied until the Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council promised to increase its minority membership. While the construction unions pose a challenge and the industrial unions are losing Black members because of shrinking jobs, the service sector unions like the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and Service Employees International Union are surging with Black and other non-White members. The unions’ membership is about 16 percent Black. “It used to be the industrial unions that had the most power but with the decline of coal and steel, the service sector unions have become bigger players,” said Paul Clark, professor of labor studies and employment relations at the Pennsylvania State University.
“AFSCME and SEIU tend to organize in more urban centers like Philadelphia.” For Black workers, union membership provides considerable economic benefits as Carlotta Bishop, a home health aide now with SEIU, can attest. “It was very hard because I wasn’t getting enough jobs,” she said. “And I had to work more than 40 hours to get healthcare for me and my children.” Now she’s enjoying a great benefits package. African-American workers like Bishop earn wages that are 12 percent higher – about $2 per hour – than their non-union counterparts, according to research by CEPR’s Jon Schmitt.
Additionally, union members were 16 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and 19 percentage points more likely to have a pension plan than non-union workers. Unions also empower their members politically.
“Political action is an integral part of what unions do,” Professor Clark. “A union that’s strong politically can help to create an environment that allows them to be more effective in bargaining for their members.” It may be why unions are playing such a central role in Pennsylvania politics. The labor movement delivered the state to presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry in 2004. On Tuesday, union support could tip the scales in favor of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the Democratic primary.
AFSCME has thrown about $329,000 behind Clinton, according to Federal Election Commission filings. She also has support from the machinists union, American Federation of Teachers and the National Association of Letter Carriers. Obama has the backing of the SEIU, which has injected about $1.2 million into his campaign efforts in the state. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Unite Here, the United Food and Commercial Workers and the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers are also backing the Illinois senator.
“The greatest resource unions have is their membership,” Clark said. “The labor movement has been much more effective at getting membership to participate—manning phone banks, get-out-the-vote drives, disseminating record of candidates and doing door-to-door campaigns.” To do that, AFSCME has 95,000 active members in Pennsylvania and 1.4 million nationwide and the SEIU represents 1.9 workers nationally, with 68,000 active members in the state. Some question whether Blacks are adequately represented among the leadership ranks of organized labor. Organizations such as the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) and the A. Philip Randolph Institute were created to address the paucity of African-American labor union leaders.
“The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists came about because we had no voice in the unions,” said Nicholas, vice president for the CBTU. “There were no Black labor leaders – none – even in the unions where the majority of members was Black. It was still run by Whites.” Nicholas broke ranks with AFSCME, his umbrella union, and is supporting Obama, a decision that could have political repercussions in the labor movement. . AFL-CIO spokesman Steve Smith said the labor federation has recognized the need for diverse representation.
“There’s been a concerted effort to diversify the labor movement from top to bottom so that it reflects the nation’s labor population as a whole,” he said. “We’ve been organizing where there traditionally hasn’t been organizing before.
It’s not targeted toward a particular demographic but towards a broader recruitment of workers.” The federation recently appointed its first African American, Arlene Holt Baker, as executive vice president, one of its top three positions. And there are other modest advances in Black representation in the labor movement’s top tiers, especially within the service unions and especially in places like Philadelphia, where Blacks head many of the unions. For some, progress is still coming too slowly.
“When [Africa Americans] first came [to America] by force, we did all the construction work, did all the hard work; we had all the skills but we didn’t have the unions,” said Nicholas, the Philadelphia labor leader. “As soon as Whites moved into those skills, they organized the unions and put us out of those skills and then we had to fight to get back in.” It is a fight that is far from being over.