When leaders of organized labor issued a major report last year on labor`s future, the AFL-CIO had 13.7 million members. Twelve months later, there are 600,000 fewer members.
If the numbers underscore a continuing dilemma, the annual winter meeting of the AFL-CIO Executive Council in Bal Harbour, Fla., marks an important juncture in assessing whether the ballyhooed report has become more than scratch paper on desks.
The meeting formally opens Monday. Significantly, the first real order of business will be a breakfast meeting Monday to discuss the status of last year`s study by the AFL-CIO`s Committee on the Evolution of Work.
One year later, officials are generally content with the report`s progress. As one maintained, it has generated far more debate, even opposition, than indifference.
The key sections of the report deal with offering nonunionists some union benefits and services for a portion of normal union dues, industry-wide and company-wide organizing efforts and elimination of ”wasteful competition”
among unions in organizing campaigns.
The AFL-CIO is negotiating with the Bank of New York to issue unionists a Master Card with interest rates as low as 14 1/2 percent. That`s at least 4 percentage points below the rate faced by most of the nation`s 70 million bankcard holders.
The card will be test-marketed in June with members of several of the larger unions. At the same time, the AFL-CIO will unveil either an individual retirement account (IRA), a group legal services program or group health insurance.
The hope is that such devices will increase the lure of union membership. But the hope prompts serious, even vexing, consideration of a related proposal –setting up a new category of associate membership for workers whose firms are not unionized.
Some unions, especially in the conservative building trades, don`t like the idea. For others, response appears to range from calculated neutrality to extreme enthusiasm. But much work remains on important elements such as fees for associate membership and whether it would confer rights to vote for union officers.
”More unions are looking at the associate membership idea seriously and some are clearly committed to it,” said an author of the report. ”That`s quite different than a year ago. Now, we`re trying to develop a loose model of an associate membership and tackle touchy questions, like voting rights.”
When it comes to industry-wide organizing, officials cite as an example the recently announced plan for several unions, including the United Auto Workers, to combine in seeking to unionize Blue Cross-Blue Shield white-collar workers nationwide.
The AFL-CIO also will unveil its choice of a person to head a new office to run what have become known as ”corporate campaigns,” or comprehensive efforts to frustrate and embarass a company, partly through use of various forms of economic pressure.
Officials also confirmed they will urge passage of a mechanism to lessen, if not end, the frequent battles among unions trying to organize the same group of workers. The proposal probably will include binding arbitration.
Some officials acknowledge that in the past, the AFL-CIO has suffered from being deeply tradition-bound. But one person involved with writing last year`s report claims astonishment at how serious an effort is underway to consider implementation.
”People seem to actually be committed to develop programs to make the concepts we introduced palatable and desirable.”
On Sunday, the pre-meeting calm was broken by a dispute that focused on Chicago`s Hyatt Corp. and resulted in the oddity of competing brunches at poolside of the host Sheraton hotel.
Traditionally, Hyatt, which has a generally strong pro-union track record, holds a Sunday brunch here for the labor leaders. This time, however, leaders of the 850,000-member Service Employees International Union, embroiled in a contract dispute with the Hyatt in New Orleans, set up a picket line and diverted unionists to a brunch only 100 feet away.
Illinois State AFL-CIO President Robert Gibson and SEIU Chicago leader Eugene Moats were among the pickets. Despite the urgings of a Hyatt vice president that people not boycott his brunch, saying a ”great deal of misunderstanding” marks the New Orleans dispute, he had few takers, with only one prominent unionist, Chicago native Edward Hanley, head of the hotel and restaurant employees union, crossing SEIU`s line.
