RI labor faces a turning point (continued)

AT ITS HEIGHT in the 1950s, the labor movement commanded a significant chunk of the national and Rhode Island workforce: one of every three workers belonged to a union.

Paul M. Buhle, a lecturer in history and American civilization at Brown University, says that coming out of the 19th-century, unions organized most of the major textile and other manufacturing plants in Rhode Island. Dramatic and sometimes violent strikes here and throughout the country gave unions their foothold, ending the raw working conditions of six-day workweeks and 10-hour days, and helping to reform horrific safety conditions in some factories.

Labor gained enormous influence in the political process, Buhle says, and Rhode Island enacted an array of benefits for the poor and unemployed designed to mirror national reforms of the New Deal. "The idea that the society had to be pulled up, and people should not be left on their own, was a sentiment that was very strong," he says, "and it owed more to labor than it did to any other force at the time."

Buhle and another labor historian, D. Scott Molloy, Jr., a former bus drivers’ union president and now a University of Rhode Island professor, say automation and cheap overseas labor drastically decreased manufacturing in Rhode Island and the nation. "The labor movement never had much presence in the service sector," says Molloy. And for a long time, labor ignored new immigrants from Latin America and other non-European areas.

One national landmark of labor’s declining strength was Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers in the early 1980s. In Rhode Island, another symbolic blow came in 1981, when the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Co., suffering (fatally, as it turned out) from Japanese competition, successfully broke a strike of 1600 machinists by using replacement workers willing to cross union picket lines.

Attitudes were also changing, in Molloy’s view. Labor had done so well in improving wages and conditions that workers forgot the earlier struggles. "They put their union cards in their wallets and headed for the suburbs of Providence," he says. "Labor did its job and sowed the seeds of its own weakness, as people started going up the ladder of success and began to forget where they came from."

Buhle says that Rhode Island labor leaders were an important factor in the strength of the Democratic Party for many years, "[but] then it became smoke and mirrors — because they couldn’t turn out the numbers."

One experienced political operative, who asked not to be named, says of labor’s current impact: "I don’t know that labor has been weakened as much as its strength has been overrated."

This critic points to labor’s lack of impact on gubernatorial races, in which Republicans have frequently trumped Democrats over the last two decades. In 2002, labor lost twice: its primary candidate, former state Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse, was defeated by fellow Democrat Myrth York, who then lost to Republican Carcieri, a former banker and business executive.

Further, according to the Institute on Money in State Politics, the AFL-CIO contributed to 43 legislative candidates, 10 of whom lost primary or final races. Still, most experts believe that labor — with its money, communications network, and sheer number of bodies — has played a key role in keeping the General Assembly 85 percent Democratic.

But even at the General Assembly, the labor critic says, unions often don’t get all they want. There’s likely to be no change in the minimum wage law this year, for example. Similarly, health-care unions, among the most potent organizations, have failed in previous years to get bills passed that would limit mandatory overtime shifts for nurses and require minimum staffing by nurses.

A KEY DISAPPOINTMENT for labor this year is the General Assembly’s mostly level funding of local school districts, a move that puts enormous pressure on school committees to cut sharper deals with teachers. There were wins for the teachers, of course, in bargaining that took place against a backdrop of a painfully cash-strapped city. Although a tentative deal calls for the 2200 members of the Providence Teachers Union to pay 10 percent of their health premiums for the first time, the package would give teachers fewer workdays and steady pay increases, preserving their rank as the second highest paid educators in the state.

The tentative Providence pact seems to give Carcieri a boost. In his original budget proposal, the governor proposed cutting millions of dollars from local school districts, lecturing school boards that they need to get better control over spending, in part by negotiating tighter deals with unions.

However, many teachers unions already co-share their health care premiums, so the Providence deal is not a precedent. More importantly, when budget analysts forecast more revenue than expected, Carcieri restored education cuts, and the House then added more local aid to cities and towns, further easing local money worries. Reback and her counterpart, Robert A. Walsh Jr., executive director of the other big teachers’ union, National Education Association Rhode Island (NEARI), argue that things turned out better than proposed in the governor’s original budget.

Similarly, the General Assembly sided with state worker unions after Carcieri proposed that non-union workers start "co-sharing" 7 percent of their premiums, while getting raises, and the same deal was written into the budget for unionized workers. But when the House Finance Committee made its budget, it ignored the governor’s concept, leaving the matter to union negotiations. Labor leaders suggest that the big unions will likely suggest a plan that provides other types of health-care savings for the state, such as changes in the design of the insurance plans. "Our fundamental belief has not changed," says George H. Nee, secretary-treasurer of the state AFL-CIO. "We always felt that health-care should be provided by the employer, ideally at no cost to the employee." The negotiations remain likely to be as much of a test of political will between the unions and Carcieri as they are exercises in the mathematics of health-care.

This is just one issue on which unions have clashed with the governor during the less than two years that he has been in office.

Carcieri opposes the proposed West Warwick casino favored by construction service unions, which expect thousands of jobs. The governor blocked a "project labor agreement," a process which favors union contractors, for the new $61 million Kent County Courthouse in Warwick, although labor officials say union contractors successfully bid the job anyway.

Carcieri struck back when one of the top health-care unions, District 1199, New England Health Care Employees Union, part of the big Service Employees International Union, won a close vote from the State Labor Relations Board, allowing 1300 home day-care workers to be declared state workers, with a right to vote on joining the union. Fearing a huge increase in the state work force, Carcieri won a restraining order from a Superior Court judge skeptical that the union and labor board were on firm legal ground. Further, Carcieri demanded that the four labor board members voting in the affirmative — including AFL-CIO president Frank J. Montanaro — resign (they didn’t).

Labor leaders have been both infuriated — and delighted — by the governor’s attacks.

They are angry at what they call the demonization of public workers. But they are buoyed by the solidarity the governor’s approach has sparked within the union movement. "I don’t see Carcieri just as an employer" of state workers, says Rick Brooks, director of United Nurses and Allied Professionals (UNAP). "I see him as a political cheerleader for Republican, pro-business interests — which are not the interests of union members."

UNAP created a storm within the labor movement when it split away from Reback’s teachers’ union six years ago, instantly creating a major health-care union with 3500 current members. Brooks thus welcomes the creation of Working Rhode Island, which brings together such independents as UNAP, NEARI, the Rhode Island Brotherhood of Correctional Officers, and the Carpenters’ union, with AFL-CIO locals. "It’s a work in progress," Brooks says. "I think it [the coalition] has enormous potential and is really a positive development, working in unprecedented ways, from our perspective as an independent union — a terrific opportunity for us to work so closely with the AFL."