New face on unions

TOLEDO, Ohio — The new faces of organized labor are immigrants working at construction sites, and as hospital nurses, parking lot attendants, mechanics and casino dealers — all groups who are unlikely to lose their jobs to overseas workers.

Union leaders, trying to stop the erosion of organized labor, are looking beyond their core auto and steel industries to recruit service workers making low wages and professionals worrying about losing their health care.

“What’s left anymore?” said Al Mixon, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 507 in Cleveland, which just finalized a contract with American Red Cross employees in northern Ohio. “We’re all forced to look into new areas.”

This may be just the beginning of the reshaping at a time when factory jobs are being sent overseas or lost to technological changes.

“As we lose manufacturing jobs, we’re going to move more into nontraditional occupations,” said UAW Ohio President Lloyd Mahaffey. “The issues aren’t different whether it’s a health care facility or a factory. It’s about having a voice.”

In the past year, the UAW signed up 2,500 new members in Ohio at auto parts plants, county jails and a juvenile courthouse. The national union last year voted to move $60 million from its strike fund into recruiting new members.

“We had a good year,” Mr. Mahaffey said. “But it wouldn’t be fair to say we’re replacing everyone we lose.”

Job losses at the Big Three automakers and at parts makers knocked UAW membership to fewer than 600,000 members in 2005, from a high of 1.5 million in 1979.

Union membership has declined steadily nationwide in the past 50 years. Only about one in 10 workers belongs to a union compared with a third of all workers in the 1950s.

“The question is, ‘Have unions fallen so far and so fast that they can’t get up?’ ” said Gary Chaison, a labor specialist at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. “I give them a 50-50 chance.”

The fall has been most pronounced in the industrial Midwest, where hundreds of thousands of union jobs have disappeared and unions in states such as Indiana and Ohio have recorded double-digit percentage drops in membership in the past two decades.

Jon Spears, 35, became one of the casualties in September when he accepted a separation package from Delphi Corp.’s auto-brake plant in Dayton, Ohio, where he had worked since 1999. He has no regrets about his union membership or the representation he received. But he felt beaten down by the unrelenting “gloom and doom” of the loss of security as the company filed for bankruptcy and the union weakened.

“I thought I was going to be there for my 30 [years]. When I started working there, I was very excited to have that job. I loved going to work,” said Mr. Spears, who now is looking for a job.

Unions likely need at least 500,000 new members each year just to make up for their annual losses, Mr. Chaison said.

“They don’t have to look overseas for fertile fields,” he said. “It’s all around them. They just have to use their imagination.”

Story Continues →