"We don't know yet how this is going to work," says Jim Riley, secretary-treasurer of Local 328 of the food workers' union, whose national group defected last week.

01:00 AM EDT on Monday, August 1, 2005

BY SCOTT MacKAY
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- As if the decline in high-wage union jobs, the Republican ascendancy in Washington, D.C., and the difficulties in organizing new workers weren't enough to cope with, Rhode Island union leaders now must deal with a split in the national leadership of the union movement.

Last week's nasty divorce at the top ranks of the AFL-CIO left Rhode Island union leaders scrambling to keep the labor movement united and strong, in a state where union influence has waned over the past three decades but is still stronger than in most of the nation.

The first priority, says George Nee, secretary-treasurer of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, is to keep intact the local coalitions that focus on workers' rights, State House lobbying, and electing labor allies to political offices.

"Obviously, this isn't a good thing," said Nee, referring to the split. "But so far, everyone says they want to retain good, positive relations at the local level."

Nee says he plans to call a meeting of labor leaders soon, to gauge local reaction to the departure from the AFL-CIO of three big national unions with a strong Rhode Island presence -- the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Teamsters, and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).

The AFL-CIO -- a federation of individual unions representing workers in many different occupations -- is financed by dues payments from member unions. Those payments currently are 80 cents per worker per month.

If the national leadership of the three dissident unions orders their 17,000 local members to stop paying dues to the state AFL-CIO, it would cost the Rhode Island coalition about $170,000.

Ben Boyd, the service workers' national spokesman, and Stuart Mundy, the secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 251, said in interviews that they didn't want payments to local the labor coalitions stopped.

"Until we are told to do something different, there are not going to be any changes," said Mundy, adding that the Teamsters have about 6,500 members in the state. "Rhode Island is unique in the labor movement; we've always gotten along here."

Jim Riley, secretary-treasurer of Local 328 of the food workers' union, said he hoped to continue to contribute to the AFL-CIO's local lobbying and political efforts, but that he didn't know for sure what would happen.

"I have great respect for George Nee," Riley said. "But we don't know yet how this is going to work."

A major goal, said Nee, is keeping together WorkingRI, a labor-financed lobbying coalition that includes some unions not currently in the AFL-CIO. The coalition lobbies at the State House on issues that affect both union and nonunion workers.

Among the topics WorkingRI advances are organizing state daycare workers, increasing the state minimum wage, and pushing for better workplace safety.

Rhode Island unions helped build the state Democratic Party, and union leaders are still influential in the party; Frank Montanaro, AFL-CIO state president, is also Rhode Island's Democratic national committeeman.

Democratic party leaders are confident that the division on the national level will not spill over into a weakening of labor support for local Democrats running for office, said William Lynch, the state Democratic chairman.

About 17 percent of Rhode Island's work force of 494,000 was under union contracts in 2004, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The national average is 12.5 percent.

Rhode Island has the higest percentage of union workers in New England. Only eight other states have higher percentages of union workers: Alaska, California, Hawaii, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Washington.

As recently as 1970, almost 30 percent of Rhode Island workers were unionized -- a figure that dropped to 18 percent by 1990 and 17 percent in 2004.

STARTING WITH textiles and continuing with jewelry, electronics and assembly work, Rhode Island hemorrhaged unionized manufacturing jobs in the years since World War II. The jobs went first to the South, and later to Third World countries, as business owners sought cheaper labor.

For a time, the drop in unionized private-sector manufacturing jobs was offset by aggressive organizing in the public sector, as unions signed up teachers, firefighters, police officers, and state and municipal workers.

Now, Nee says, almost all public employees in the state are covered by union contracts; state and municipal employees now make up about half the state's unionzed members. There is little room for union growth among public employees.

Rhode Island workers once toiled in factories, manufacturing woolen and cotton textiles, or rubber products, and assembling electronic devices.

Now, they are more likely to work in a hospital, a nursing home, a restaurant, or in one of the many otherr service jobs the new economy has produced.

Thus, Nee says, the opportunities for unions lie in the industries that are driving new jobs in the state's economy, such as health care, tourism and financial services.

Unions have done well in organizing nurses and paraprofessional workers in health care and hospitals, Nee said, but have yet to make inroads into jobs in tourism and financial services.

In 2004, full-time wage and salary earners who were union members had median weekly earnings of $781, compared with a median of $612 for nonunion U.S. workers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Union workers are much more likely to have pension and health-care benefits than their nonunion counterparts, the AFL-CIO reports.

One of the ironies, for labor leaders, is that the better job they do securing good wages and benefits for their members, the more vulnerable those workers are to losing their jobs to low-wage workers overseas, says Scott Molloy, a professor of labor relations at the University of Rhode Island.

"The brutal fact is that the jobs where workers have pensions, good wages and health care are the ones being moved away," Molloy said.

SOME IN THE labor movement attribute last week's split of the Teamsters, service workers and food workers from the AFL-CIO to the ambitions of the leaders of those three unions. But others point to a philosophical divide on how to best expand the labor movement, nationally and in specific states.

The leaders of the dissident unions say that the AFL-CIO, under president John Sweeney, spent too much money on trying to elect Democrats to Congress and the presidency, and not enough on organizing campaigns to sign up more workers.

"If you organize more workers in unions, you will change their voting behavior," said John Trumpbour, research director at the Harvard Trade Union Project, at Harvard University.

Citing exit polling from the 2000 presidential election, Trumpbour notes that 69 percent of nonunion white males voted for Republican George W. Bush, but 59 percent of unionized white males cast ballots for Democrat Al Gore.

In an era of declining union membership in manufacturing, the unions that have been succesful in adding workers have concentrated on industries that cannot be moved or "outsourced" overseas, such as hospitals, janitorial services and hotels.

"We may not be perfect," Nee said, "but at the end of the day, the labor movement is all there is to provide a countervailing force to the power of big corporations and policies that are bad for workers and their families.

"We have our work cut out."