LOOK FOR THE NONUNION LABEL...sweatshop unionism in the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, UNITE By Gregory A. Butler, local 608 carpenter According to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1934, all hours worked in excess of 40 in a week must be paid at the time and a half rate. For many many years, the owners of sweater knitting contractor Danmar Finishing overlooked that fact. The garment sweatshop, located at Johnson Av and Porter Av in a rough-and-tumble factory district near the Gowanus Canal in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, never paid OT to any of the 175 workers who made women's sweaters in the plant, no matter how many hours they worked. Fortunately, Maria Arriaga, a machine operator for over 10 years at Danmar, decided in 2000 that she was finally sick and tired of being robbed. Twelve of her co-workers were similarly angered, and they decided to step up and fight this abuse. They banded together, and tried to force Danmar to pay them the OT that they, and the other 162 garment workers, were owed.... This workplace activism got Sister Arriaga and her 12 co-workers fired.... The workers then presented the facts of the situation to one Nieves Padilla, an organizer for an anarchist-run and corporate and government grant financed not for profit community organization called Make The Road By Walking. Make The Road By Walking then proceded to have it's legal staff take Danmar Finishing to the Department of Labor. It took 18 months to even get a hearing...and that was mainly due to Make The Road By Walking's ties to Democratic Party politicians like Congresswoman Nydia Velasquez (D - Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens).. The group also occasionally engaged in street protests against Danmar as well. After 3 years, in December 2003, the NYSDoL finally decided that Danmar had in fact neglected to pay OT, and ordered the employer to pay back OT to 175 current and former garment workers at the plant. Danmar's payroll abuses are not an aberration..in fact, they represent a damned near universal pratice in New York City's approximately 4,000 garment factories.. Beyond that, most of the roughly 60,000 garment workers in the city aren't even paid by the hour...instead, they have piecework...that is, they get paid a certain amount of money depending on how many items of clothes they make. And, needless to say, they are not paid one and a half times the piecerate for the clothes sewn on OT... To make matters worse, Danmar Finishing, and many of the other non-OT-paying garment sweatshops here in NYC are actually UNION SHOPS!!!! The Danmar workers have the misfortune of being "represented" by local 155 of the New York/New Jersey Joint Board of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). It speaks volumes that, when Sister Arriaga and her co-workers needed help getting their OT, they did NOT approach the union..first, they acted on their own, then they approached a local community group. It also speaks volumes that UNITE local 155 didn't do a damned thing for them when they were fired for what was essentially a NLRA-protected concerted activity... Of course, UNITE actually allows it's members to be paid by piecework, instead of by the hour...a medieval practice that most factory workers unions in this country prohibited IN THE 1930'S!!! And, to make matters worse, most UNITE members in New York City actually MAKE LESS THAN MINIMUM WAGE!!! As I pointed out above, Danmar Finishing is a typical UNITE signatory sewing contractor..they don't pay OT or minimum wage, and they fire workers at will (in particular workplace militants like Maria Arriaga). Incredibly, the sisters at Danmar are not the most abused UNITE members.... That distinction would go to the 10,000 members of UNITE local 23-25 in the Chinatown section of Lower Manhattan.... 90% of Chinatown's 12,000 garment workers work for unionized sewing contractors...and, according to the NYSDoL, they have the worst labor conditions of any garment workers in the city, with 90% of them working in sweatshops that flagrantly violate minimum wage, OT and child labor laws....and where they make a meager $ 300/wk for a brutal 72 hour work week...that is, they make around $ 4.17/hr... In other words...union label sweatshops... Now, in local 23-25's defense...the 10,000 non union Chinese women in the unorganized garment sweatshops of Sunset Park, Brooklyn only make about $ 1/hr for a 72 hr workweek...so things could be worse... Yes, there is a $ 3.17.hr "union advantage" in working union in Chinatown as opposed to working scab in Sunset Park...but it's still subminimum...and the sisters in Chinatown actually have to pay $ 40 bucks a month in union dues, and $ 35 bucks a week in payments to the UNITE Welfare Fund, for the privilige of working for less than minimum wage!!! Ironically enough, UNITE spends a lot of time and money promoting "anti sweatshop" activism... Of course, the bosses of UNITE make damned sure the campaigns target sweatshops in other countries..and ignore the UNITE-represented union label sweatshops right here in New York City....even though New York garment wages are so low that many sweatshops here have lower labor costs than Hong Kong!!! This isn't a new thing for UNITE....in fact, back in the day it's predecessor union, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) was also guilty of similar abuses....and has been for many years In 1955, this writer's mother, like millions of other African Americans, migrated from the South to the Northeast in search of a better life. She came to Brooklyn, New York from Fayetteville, North Carolina, and promptly found a job in an underwear factory. Now, on paper, the job was a very good job..it was even unionized, represented by ILGWU local 62-32. But, my mom soon discovered that not every UNION job is a GOOD job. Wages were below minimum, production quotas were high..and, if anybody complained they would NOT be backed up by local 62-32. And that inaction by the union was insured by cash payoffs....every week a local 62-32 Business Agent would come to the shop, greet the owners, and sit down in the office and have lunch with them. As the BA was leaving, one of the owners would give him an overstuffed envelope...presumably filled with cash. To keep the details of their betrayal secret from the workers, the BA would only converse with the factory's owner in Yiddish, a language that the Black and Puerto Rican women who worked in the sewing shop didn't understand.. That kind of corruption in the ILGWU was far from an isolated incident....in fact, during the 1950's, that level of corruption and labor abuse was the norm, rather than the exception, in the New York Joint Board of the ILGWU.... Reportedly, that type of gangster unionism continued in the ILGWU until at least the 1980's... However, this is not simply a case of union corruption...far from it...not all of UNITE's sellouts of it's members are due to simple bribery and racketeering....a lot of it is ideological. UNITE's leaders consider themselves to be socialists, and many of them are members of a group called Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA)... However, the kind of "socialism" that UNITE and SDUSA belive in basically involves making the capitalistic system more "efficient", and helping the capitalists of the American garment industry compete with their competitors overseas..and helping UNITE represented companies compete with their non union competitors, by any means necessary.. That "labor management cooperation" is the overriding priority for the bosses of UNITE (and the ideologues of SDUSA who guide their thinking), and the urgent needs of the workers in the shops are far less important than preserving the competitive position of the owners of those factories.... Also, UNITE/SDUSA-style "socialism" is heavily racist and male chauvanist....which enables the bosses of the union to justify the grotequely low wages of the women of color who work in the industry.... UNITE and SDUSA's brand of pro corporate "socialism" also requires a union that is run like a dictatorship, with actual garment workers rigidly excluded from any position in union leadership...in fact, in many UNITE locals in New York City, actual garment workers are strictly prohibited from running for any union office, and only union staff lawyers, Business Agents and social workers are permitted to hold office... To this day, the big UNITE locals here are run by folks who never worked in the garment industry... Cutters local 10, Chinatown garment workers local 23-25, Garment District seamstresses local 89-22-1, porters and truckers local 132-98-102, knitwear workers local 155, underwear workers local 62-32, and office and retail workers local 99 are all run by folks who never spent a day of their natural lives behind a sewing machine.. Until very recently, all of those locals were run by men, even though, with the exception of the almost entirely male cutters local 10 and porters and truckers local 132-98-102, their members were almost all female.. Not for nothing was the ILGWU called the International LADIES Garment Workers Union..but it was a "ladies" union run by MEN... Today, there are some female union bosses in UNITE....and 23-25 is actually run by a Chinese woman, a former social worker named May Chen.... But, just like the fellas, UNITE's female union bosses tolerate all kinds of abuses in the plants..for the same ideological reasons... And, again, just like the guys, the lady union bosses of UNITE get paid far more than garment workers do..in some cases, actually making 6 figure salaries to represent workers who make, at most, $ 15,000/yr. However, despite the generations of grovelling towards the sweatshop bosses, the union is still on the decline...as is the industry as a whole in New York.... New York City had 100,000 garment workers working at 7,500 factories 15 years ago...today, it's down to 60,000 workers at 4,000 factories.... Local 23-25, UNITE's flagship local and the union's largest affiliate, has seen it's membership decline even faster than the shrinkage of the industry as a whole. In 1982, 23-25 had 20,000 members...today, it only has 10,000..and is losing members every day... The union's race to the bottom hasn't helped matters one bit...if anything, it's just made the race to the bottom that much faster.... To understand why UNITE tolerates massive labor abuses in it's plants, we have to go back, and take a look at the history of the union, and it's predecessor the ILGWU... I've written about the tragic story of UNITE on GANGBOX before, at: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/4949 and http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/10006 The International Ladies Garment Workers Union was originally chartered by the American Federation of Labor back in 1900, after a wave of strikes swept through the sweatshops of Manhattan's Garment District. The strikes were led on the ground by very young Jewish and Italian immigrant women sewing machine operators, (many of whom were actually teenagers) who worked long hours for very low piecerates in the sewing shops that subcontracted for the garment manufacturers. The women looked to the Socialist Party of America (SP) for political leadership, and SP lawyers helped set up the ILGWU, and channeled these workers into the newly founded labor organization. As it happened, the SP had some serious flaws in it's vision of "socialism"... Among other political errors, the organization was very racist and sexist, and had a very snobbish view of low paid workers, in particular low paid workers who were female, and were recent immigrants... So, when the ILGWU was founded the SP put male lawyers in charge of the organization, since, supposedly, most of the very young women who had actually led the strike would soon be married, and would leave the workforce for a life as housewives. Also, unlike the workers, who were either Jews from Poland or Russia or Italians from Sicily, the leaders the SP selected for the ILGWU were either American born Jews or Jewish immigrants from Germany. In the racist minds of the SP's leaders, those guys were more responsible than "uneducated" and "emotional" Sicilian or Russian Jewish women... Insteringly enough, most of the BOSSES of the garment shops happened to also be American-born or German-born Jewish males...so the leadership of the ILGWU looked a hell of a lot more like management than it did the workforce... Also, the garment shop owners and the ILGWU leaders shared the same sexist and racist prejudices towards the Sicilian and Russian Jewish women who actually made the clothes. And, the bosses of the ILGWU were also very disturbed by how disorganized and backwards the garment contractors were, and the garment union leaders had a vision of using the union to introduce "scientific management" to the garment business, to make the industry more "efficient".... The bosses of the ILGWU actually held this crypto-fascist social engineering scheme as a higher priority than achieving higher wages for their members.... Despite the sabotage of their leaders, the garment workers of New York were able to use the ILGWU as an instrument to fight the bosses through walkouts in individual garment shops over greivances, and the seamstresses were able to force the New York Joint Board of the ILGWU to call citywide general strikes of garment workers in 1908, 1909 and 1910... However, the bosses of the ILGWU were very concerned about all these strikes... They felt that the "gripes" of those young immigrant women in the factories got in the way of the ILGWU leadership's desire to have a harmonious relationship with "our good union employers" and created needless "conflict" with the bosses... So, the ILGWU became the first union in the world to strip it's members of the right to strike over greivances, and to force them to use binding arbitration... The New York Joint Board of the ILGWU, the New York County Committee of the Democratic Party and the Greater Blouse, Skirt and Undergarment Association sat down with their lawyers and came up with a scheme to make greivances go away, while appearing to settle them.... Every single greivance filed by the New York Joint Board's 20,000 members against the employers went to a 3 member panel, a lawyer from the ILGWU's New York Joint Board, a lawyer from the Greater Blouse, Skirt and Undergarment Association and one Belle Moskowitz, a powerful figure in the NY County Democratic organization who was the private secretary of Governor Alfred E. Smith. Of course, since Moskowitz lived and worked 150 miles away in Albany, the committee could only meet once a month, at most... Considering the huge number of members and employers covered by this small panel..and the many many greivances generated by the rampant labor abuses in the industry, this guaranteed that there would be a long waiting time for greivances to be heard by the panel... Which, considering the high labor turnover at each garment shop each season, and the fact that garment maunfacturers and sewing contractors fired workplace militants at will, pretty much guaranteed that, for many greivances, by the time the committee heard the greivance, the worker in question no longer was employed at that shop.... Beyond that, this greivance committee completely took struggle over contract violations and management abuses out of the hands of the women in the shop...and put them into the hands of two attorneys and a politician....none of whom would be inclined to sympathize with the problems of immigrant women factory workers, and who would be far more likely to see things the garment manufacturer's way.... Subsequently, just about every union in America and Canada copied this method of handling greivances.. with similar anti working class results... Naturally, many garment workers were deeply dissatisfied with this state of affairs...and workplace militancy continued despite the Joint Board's efforts. After World War I, this ferment on the shop floor led many garment workers to look to a left-wing splitoff of the SP for leadership - the Communist Party USA. To keep the peace in the industry, and supress the radical seamstresses on the shop floor, the New York Joint Board and the Greater Blouse, Skirt and Undergarment Association looked to the world of organized crime, and sought out protection from Jewish gangsters like Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro... Of course, that protection came at a high financial price..and, from that day to this, organized crime has had a major presence in the New York garment industry... But that price was well worth it for the bosses, because the gangsters helped them maintain sweatshop conditions..and the "socialist" leaders of the ILGWU were content to go along for the ride, in hopes that the gangsters and the sweatshop bosses would let them live out their dream of using the union to "regulate" the chaotic garment industry.... However, that gangster-enforced "labor peace" didn't last long... By 1925, many communist-influenced garment workers had fled the ILGWU, and other "socialist" led but gangster-affiliated Garment District unions like the International Fur Workers Union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the United Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers, and had joined the communist-led Needle Trades Workers Industrial Union, which proceded to lead a citywide strike of garment workers and furriers... The communist NTWIU didn't suceed in forcing the garment manufacturers to deal with them, but they did put major pressure on the ILGWU and the other "socialist" gangster unions to demand wage and working condition improvements from the garment manufacturers and their contractors.... Some garment manufacturers responded to this new labor upsurge by getting the hell out of New York City, shifting work to sewing contractors in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Upstate New York and rural Southern New England, all places that were about a day's truck ride away from the city...close enough to do business with, but with conservative American-born White Protestant workers who weren't as communistically-inclined as the Jewish and Italian immigrant garment workers... Men's clothing manufacturers, who's styles didn't change as frequently as the ladies clothing makers, and therefore didn't have to have their manufacturing facilites as close to their offices, could move their plants even further away, to textile towns in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia...communities that already had a plentiful supply of apparel industry workers (conservative US-born White Protestant apparel industry workers, to be specific), good railroad connections to New York City, and, more importantly, where the KKK and the local sheriffs would keep the union radicals out.... This was the begining of an epidemic of runaway shops that continues to this day in the NYC garment industry... However, the labor unrest in the Garment District continued...and, once the Great Depression began, the level of worker militancy and discontent actually stepped up... In 1933, the Communist Party had dissolved the Needle Trades Workers Industrial Union, and had sent that union's members back into the ILGWU, the International Fur Workers Union and the other right wing "socialist" and gangster-led garment unions, to transform those unions from within.... By 1936 communists suceeded in taking over the Fur Workers Union, and proceeded to lead a very militant strike in the Garment District. The communist-led furriers union suceeded, in the middle of the depression, in achieving a 7 hour day, a 5 day workweek, the abolition of subcontracting, and a major pay increase..and, after a merger with the Leather Workers Union, they'd also started organizing the runaway shops Upstate, in New England and in Northeastern Pennsylvania.. Unfortunately for the folks who ran the ILGWU, these improvements, and the massive strike it took to achieve them, were very visible to their membership...since the Fur Market along 7th Avenue from W 25th St to W 30th St, was just south of the Garment District, 7th Avenue from W 35th St to W 40th St One group of Fur Workers were physically even closer to ILGWU members than that...the members of International Fur and Leather Workers Union local 150, industrial electricians who installed sewing machines both in the IFLWU-reprsented shops in the Fur Market below 34th St and the ILGWU-reprsented shops in the Garment District above it.... In other words, their shorter work day, greatly improved working conditions and higher wages were immediately visible in the ILGWU shops... That, and the presence of a hard core of communist activists in the ILGWU-represented shops, force the New York Joint Board to actually take serious steps to improve conditions in the ladies garment shops..and also to make a serious effort to organize the runaway shops...or at least the ones in Upstate New York, New England and Northeastern Pennsylvania... The bosses of the ILGWU tried to contain communist influence in the shops..even going so far as to disband locals with pro communist leaders and forcibly merging them with locals controlled by gangsters and right wing "socialists" (that's why the garment union in NYC to this day has so many locals with weird hypenated local numbers...23-25, 62-32, 132-98-102 ect....that's a legacy of those forced local union mergers in the 1930's...) But, the ILGWU's New York Joint Board and the employers represented by the Greater Blouse, Skirt and Undergarment Association could no longer rely on "Lepke" Buchalter and "Gurrah" Shapiro to repress communist workers in the shops.... The IFLWU's New York Joint Board had set up what amounted to a militia of burly young male furriers (euphamistically called the "Education Committee") that used bats and pipes to drive the gangsters out of the Fur Market..and the union had assisted the New York County District Attorney in getting Buchalter and Shapiro, and many of their associates, prosecuted, convicted and incarcerated (Buchalter actually got the electric chair).. The government had their own agenda in driving out the gangsters, of course...the payoffs they extorted had grown too costly for the business community..especially in light of the fact that they could no longer effectively repress radical workers and stop strikes and labor agitation in the industry....so, the bosses had the government step in and lock up the racketeers... In retrospect, it wasn't such a good idea for the IFLWU to work so closely with the cops..even though they had what appeared to be a common goal of driving the gangsters out of the Fur Market... The communist leaders of the furriers union, along with communist activists in other garment industry labor organizations, would themselves be targeted by the government just a few years later... By collaborating with the government's racketeering investigations, the IFLWU's leaders had set a bad precedent that it was OK for the government to intervene in the internal affairs of workers organizations, and that it was perfectly alright for labor leaders to actively assist those government intrusions in union internal affairs.... In any event, that two front attack on Lepke and Gurrah, combined with the efforts of communist activists in Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees locals 6, 16 and 302 to drive Arthur "Dutch Schultz" Flegenheimer out of those unions, had critically weakened the Jewish racketeers, and almost completely driven them out of the Garment District.. World War II kept the pressure on the bosses of the ILGWU to force improvements in Garment District labor conditions..... Thanks to massive war production, and federal requirements that defense contractors use female labor, women factory workers had much wider employment options, and many of them left the garment industry for the higher wages at defense plants like Brewster Aircraft and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Those labor market pressures made the ILGWU fight for higher piecerates in the shops..and, by 1944, ILGWU members in the Garment District had the highest straight time earnings of any factory workers in the United States...and, they also had the shortest hours...the 7 hour day and the 35 hour 5 day workweek.. (defense plant workers had higher earnings overall, due to massive amounts of OT).. The ILGWU also was forced to follow in the footsteps of the IFLWU and abolish subcontracting... That is, the manufacturers had to make their clothes themselves, rather than using sewing contractors.. Sewing contractors typically had the worst labor conditions and wages in the business, because their profit margins were much narrower than the manufacturers were. This was due to the fact that the sewing contractors were yet another set of bosses extracting surplus value from the seamstresses and the cutters..and, the more bosses that were involved in the making of the garment, the more rich guys there were to feed off the workers.... Consequently, the sewing contractors, being the bottom men on the garment business totem pole, had to 'sweat' as much profit out of their workers as they could..(which is actually the origin of the word "sweatshop") Abolishing contracting meant that there were that many less parasitic businessmen feeding off the labor of the garment workers..and that much more of the surplus value created by the garment workers could go into their purses as piecerate wages, rather than into the bosses bank accounts as profits... Unfortunately for the garment workers, that was the high water mark of apparel industry unionism. It was all downhill from there.... First of all, the gangsters were back....the Jewish racketeers had been all but driven out of the business in the 1930's..but, the Italian-American racketeers of < cosa nostra >, who had been in the garment business since the 1920's but had previously played second fiddle to Lepke and Gurrah, stepped up to take their place...and, the Mafiosos were far more efficient, disciplined and ruthless then the gangsters they replaced... The Gambino family of < cosa nostra > rapidly became the dominant racketeer group in the Garment District, and they managed to seize control of the Greater Blouse, Skirt and Undergarment Association...and they also took control of the trucking companies that hauled fabric and pieces between cutting shops, sewing shops and warehouses... A good example of that < cosa nostra > domination of the garment trades in the city is a firm called Gambino Trucking, which is one of the main companies that hauls and warehouses fabric, pieces and finished garments in the city.. And, yes, Gambino Trucking's owner is related to THOSE Gambinos...Thomas Gambino, to be specific, son of the late Carlo Gambino. Carlo, of course, was the boss of the crime family that bore his name from 1957 to his death in 1975... Just to clarify, Thomas was never a "made" member of the Gambino crime family, or even an associate...but, no doubt that last name opened a lot of doors..and made a lot of customers make damned sure their freight bills were paid in full and on time..... < Cosa nostra > loansharks also had a financial hold on much of the industry...many financially marginal garment manufacturers and subcontractors, unable to borrow money from "factors" (garment industry financiers who issue loans to garment companies using the clothes themselves as the collateral), would frequently find themselves forced to borrow money from the wiseguys at very high rates of interest...and with the threat of injury, death or the robbing or burning down of their businesses if they didn't pay back in a timely fashion... The < cosa nostra > gangsters also began to have an influence on the union as well....although they were never as directly involved in ILGWU internal affairs as Lepke and Gurrah were.... Also, in the 1950's, the ILGWU relegalized subcontracting...as long as the subcontractor was signatory to an ILGWU agreement.... The reemergent sweatshop bosses even set up their own trade association to bargain with the union, the New York Skirt and Sportswear Association, alongside the group that represented the manufacturers, the Greater Blouse, Skirt and Undergarment Association... Needless to say, the new employers group was just as racketeer influenced and corrupted as the older one... And, soon, both the ILGWU/Greater Blouse agreement for the manufacturers and the ILGWU/Skirt and Sportswear agreement for the sweatshop bosses were basically dead letters...in particular the wage scales set forth in those agreements were more honored in the breach than the observance... Also, the trend toward runaway shops that had started in the 1930's began to step up in the 50's...with the ladies garment manufacturers following the men's clothing companies to Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, and with the ILGWU reluctant to follow the work... In fact, the union began a pratice which continues to this day...something called "liquidated damages".. That is, when an ILGWU reprsented shop would move down south or to Puerto Rico (or, in later years, to Hong Kong, Mexico, Central America or the Carribbean), the ILGWU Welfare Fund would file a lawsuit against that company....and would seek financial damages to compensate the fund for losses due to that company no longer making payments on behalf of it's laid off workers.... That made the ILGWU welfare fund a hell of a lot of money...and didn't do jack shit to save the jobs of the garment workers..nor did it unionize the workers in PR or in the South.... Also, the piecerates being paid in the shops started to go down.... Remember, even at the high point of 1944, when unionized garment worker wages were at their peak, the seamstresses and cutters were still being paid by the piece, rather than the hour... Now, theoretically, those piecerates added up to a union scale hourly rate...if the workers actually made a certain number of pieces in an hour, and if they only worked a 7 hour day.... But, if the women worked OT, and still got the same piecerate, or if the piecerate was set so low that nobody could actually sew enough clothes in an hour to make union scale....then the real wages actually being paid in the shops were far lower than they were supposed to be on paper... The ILGWU, rather than fighting for hourly wages, had a team of union time study people, who went around to shops, checked piecerates and timed how many items of clothing the women actually sewed in an hour to see if that piecerate actually equaled union scale...but, with the many shops, and the different rates for each type of clothing, and the fact that the rates changed constantly, there was no real way to make sure that the shops were actually paying union scale... And, in fact, the bosses of the New York Joint Board of the ILGWU had no real interest in fighting for higher wages...after all, they wanted to "cooperate" with the bosses, and help them "compete" with the shops in Pennsylvania and the South...and it wouldn't be very "cooperative" if they made the New York shops pay higher wages.... Also, the bosses of the ILGWU now no longer had the pressure from communist garment workers that forced them to keep wages up... The Communist Party had become very conservative during WW II... The CPUSA's leaders main priority was to unconditionally support the war effort, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party at all costs..and to keep workplace militancy to an absolute minimum.... At one point, in 1944, the CPUSA even disbanded itself, and actually became a caucus within the Democratic Party....and as early as 1939 the CP had stopped active recruiting of factory workers into the party, to focus on recruiting college students and white collar professionals But, even after the Communist Party was reorganized in 1946, it was a shadow of what it had been in the Garment District of the 1930's... Despite the CPUSA's attempts to be respectable, the very same Democratic Party they'd tried to subordinate themselves to began to attack them. The Truman administration banned communists from being union officials, and actually prosecuted 150 CPUSA members for trying to overthrow the government The International Fur and Leather Workers Union's president, Ben Gold, and the head of the IFLWU's New York Joint Board, Irving Potash, were among those prosecuted....(neither one did jail time, but Gold was forced out of union activism, and Potash got deported to Romania, the country his parents had immigrated from when he was a small child).. Needless to say, the righward drift of the CPUSA in the early 1940's, and the repression in the late 40's, had put a damper on the furriers union's struggles in the Garment District, and the furriers labor conditions were begining to deteriorate almost as rapidly as the members of the ILGWU.... In 1955, the IFLWU ceased to exist as an independent union.... Almost all of it's members outside New York had been forced by their employers to join the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, a union that, like the ILGWU, was run by right wing "socialists". The union's remaining members in New York (the furriers and the Garment District electricians) became members of two newly chartered local of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen...the awkwardly named Local 1-5 Fur, Leather and Machine Workers/Furriers Joint Council for the fur workers, and local 150 for the electricians who installed the sewing machines in the Garment District.... FLM/FJC and local 150 were still run by CPUSA members, and would be until the locals both folded in the 1980's..but, the "communists" who ran those unions were far mor timid than the communists who'd driven out Lepke and Gurrah and broken sweatshop conditions in the 1930's... The tamed and housebroken "communist" leaders of FLM/FJC and local 150 didn't dare take on the contractors, or the gangsters who stood behind them, and presided over the gradual destruction of their members standard of living.... The only thing you can say for those guys is...the pay and conditions of furriers and Garment District electricians didn't fall as far, or as fast, as those of the ladies garment workers.... By the 1950's, sweatshop conditions had returned to the Garment District... And the Garment District's workforce began to flee the industry in droves... Now, historically, teenaged Italian and Jewish women had come into the business, and they usually worked until their mid 20's or early 30's, when family and childcare responsibilities usually caused them to leave the industry... (incidentally, this high labor turnover had long been used by the ILGWU bosses as an excuse both for low wages and the union's near total bar on letting women participate in union leadership..it simply never occured to the bosses of the ILGWU to demand paid maternity leaves and employer subsidized childcare so garment workers could keep their jobs after they married and had kids..).. But, when those women left the business, usually, their younger sisters and daughters, along with young immigrants from the USSR, Poland and Italy, replaced them... That wasn't happening anymore.... Women garment workers were leaving the business...and, since conditions had deteriorated so sharply, their relatives weren't replacing them. Also, the many Jewish and Sicilian refugees from Europe who were coming into the city were also not going into garment work.... There were still women from those ethnic backgrounds in the labor force, of course...and, actually, the heavy entry of women into the workforce during WW II had led to a permanently increase in female labor force participation by women of all ethnicities, including Jews and Italians... But now, women from those backgrounds were going into clerical work, or retail work, or getting jobs with the city...anything but the sweatshops of the Garment District.... Male Jewish and Italian garment workers were leaving the business too....leaving their jobs as truck drivers, porters and cutters for other industries.... These workers were being replaced by Blacks who had recently migrated to the city from the South and Puerto Ricans who had just come here from the island.... Now, as I mentioned above, the leadership of the ILGWU had always been just as racist as the garment factory owners, looking down with contempt at their Sicilian and Russian Jewish members.... The union bosses had an even deeper hatred for the African Americans and Puerto Ricans who were now coming into the industry..and had even less of an incentive to fight for them than they had for the White immigrant workers they replaced.... Black men became a permanent fixture in the Garment District workforce, taking jobs as porters and truck drivers hauling fabric and clothes around the city, crafts that are still largely African American to this day.. But Black and Puerto Rican women didn't stay as seamstresses for very long.... Those women soon found far superior jobs in hospitals, stores, offices or with the City of New York, and left behind the low pay and abuse of the Garment District...and they made sure their daughters and younger sisters did NOT take their places behind the sewing machines.... By the mid 1960's, the sewing contractors found two new groups of women to exploit....Dominicans and Chinese... After the US Army crushed the revolution in the Dominican Republic in 1965, tens of thousands of Dominican immigrants moved to NYC. Many Dominican women took jobs as sewing machine operators in the Garment District, replacing the Black and Puerto Rican women who were fleeing the industry.. Also, around that same time, many garment manufacturers in the Garment District began to subcontract the making of their clothes to a newly emerging group of sewing contractors in the Lower Manhattan neighborhood called Chinatown... The city's Chinese population had rapidly expanded in the mid 1960's, thanks to the fact that pressure from the Civil Rights movement forced the government to end it's racist immigration quota system, which had all but barred Chinese immigration to America for the previous 80 years... Thousands of Chinese people came here, mostly from from Hong Kong, but also from Taiwan and China's Guangdong (Canton) Province... Many of the Chinese businessmen coming to the city set up sewing shops...and they hired young Chinese women immigrants as seamstresses, and Chinese men to work as porters, drivers and cutters... And, their pay scale was far below the Garment District... Which led to a rapid shift of work from Midtown to Downtown.... In 1969, there were 40,000 garment workers in the Garment District, and only 8,000 in Chinatown.. By 1980, there were only 25,000 garment jobs left in the Garment District, but there were now 16,000 jobs in sewing shops in Chinatown.... By 1982, that number had balooned to 20,000, working in over 400 factories in the small, densely populated Lower Manhattan neighborhood.... Now, just about all of those Chinatown garment workers were, nominally, unionized...members of local 23-25. But, you'd never know it, based on the subminum wage piecerates and abusive conditions prevailing in the Chinatown garment shops...which were far worse than the Garment District (which is saying quite a lot, considering just how horrible conditions were for the Dominican women working in Midtown!!!).. Local 23-25 had become the main ILGWU local in Chinatown..even though it was based in the ILGWU's palatial hirise headquarters at 275 7th Av between W 25th and W 26th Sts in the Fur Market. The local, like all ILGWU locals in the city, had a male president despite being majority female, but he was a man of color...a Black man named Edgar Romney who also doubled as an ILGWU International Vice President.. So, unlike the White-led ILGWU locals that covered the garment shops in the Garment District, Williamsburg and Bushwick, Brooklyn and Long Island City, Queens, this local at least had a minority principal officer...even though, unlike almost all of his members, Romney wasn't Chinese.... In the summer of 1982, local 23-25 led the first major garment workers strike in New York City since the 1930's... The ILGWU New York Joint Board had, as usual, signed an agreement with the < cosa nostra > controlled Greater Blouse, Skirt and Undergarment Association, representing the garment manufacturers in the Garment District... And, as usual, the 1982-85 ILGWU/Greater Blouse agreement would be honored more in the breach than the observance...especially in terms of the piecerates that would actualy be paid in the shops... Normally, the New York Skirt and Sportswear Association agreement, covering the sweatshop sewing contractors, would have been a mirror of the Greater Blouse agreement But, the Chinatown sewing contractors, who were becoming a major presence in the New York Skirt and Sportswear Association even though the group was dominated by Jewish and Italian sweatshop contractors from the Garment District, wanted an agreement that legalized the blatant contract violations and substandard piecerates that actually went on in the shops...and that weakened the authority of the union to "enforce" the contract against non < cosa nostra > protected employers....(on paper, the ILGWU could enforce the rules against the mobbed up contractors too...but that rarely happened in real life)... This forced the bosses of the ILGWU to actually call a strike...a thought which terrified them, since the last thing they wanted was a mass movement of garment workers....garment worker activism on the shop floor is something which these guys had been trying to SURPRESS since 1910.... The New York Joint Board, and the Business Agents of local 23-25 spent the better part of 2 months bending over backwards to make a settlement with the 400 Chinese sewing contractors in the New York Skirt and Sportswear Association.... The union bosses were obsessed with being "non-confrontational" and protecting the "dignity" of the sweatshop bosses of Chinatown, and trying to make a backroom deal with as little worker involvement as possible... On June 24, 1982, local 23-25 found itself in the uncomfortable position of having to call a mass rally of 15,000 garment workers in Chinatown.... That kind of worker mobilization is very scary for the bosses of a deeply racist, sexist and totalitarian union like the ILGWU, where members are supposed to be seen and not heard, and where the outsiders who run the union are absolutely terrified that ACTUAL GARMENT WORKERS might one day rise up and evict the interlopers from their dictatorial domination of the union.... Worse yet, if they got the members mobilized and riled up, the union might ACTUALLY HAVE TO ENFORCE IT'S CONTRACTS...and that would make the New York garment bosses "uncompetitive"... That rally scared the hell out of a lot of Chinatown garment bosses too....the New York Skirt and Sportswear Association made a tentative agreement with the New York Joint Board that day... But, the bosses had a couple days to think about it..and the Chinatown sweatshops represented by the Association voted it down on July 1...although the union signed many shops to tentative agreements on an individual basis On July 9, some of the bosses who hadn't signed locked out their workers... and, a week later, the union formally called those workers out on strike, along with all the other workers who's bosses hadn't signed, with a total of 10,000 workers on the picket lines... Of course, the union kept the remaining 10,000 members of local 23-25 at work. Typically, the ILGWU bosses kept the strike racially segregated too...by not calling out the Latinas in locals 89-22-1 and 62-32 in the Garment District and local 155 out in Bushwick and Williamsburg, and the Black men in local 132-98-102.. Despite that frantic effort to limit and segregate the struggle, the union bosses found themselves in the horrible position of leading a mass rally of 10,000 garment workers in the streets of Chinatown... That mobilizaiton scared the bosses too..especially since it came on the heels of the 15,000 worker rally les than 3 weeks before..so, they hastily signed up to the proposed agreement that the ILGWU had inked with the leaders of the New York Skirt and Sportswear Association the month before..and, with unseemly haste, the union rushed the seamstresses back to work.... Unfortunately, in the day-to-day reality of the shops, the ILGWU/Skirt and Sportswear Agreement in Chinatown was as much of a dead letter as the ILGWU/Greater Blouse agreement in the Garment District.. The contractors paid whatever the hell they wanted to pay, treated their workers however the hell they wanted to treat them..and, as long as the bosses paid their protection money to the gangsters, and made damned sure that the ILGWU Welfare Fund got it's money on time, they were virtually immune to union sanction.... The strike taught the Chinatown sweatshop bosses another lesson..that any union, no matter how servile, craven, racist, sexist and corrupt it's leaders may be, will always have the potential to lead a struggle..and, the union bosses, no matter how disgustingly class collaborationist they may be, are always at risk of being forced to fight the bosses...and there's always the even bigger potential risk that militant leaders emerging from the ranks of the workers themselves might take over the union... So, Chinatown sewing contractors began moving their factories to the heavily Chinese Sunset Park section of Brooklyn, and reopening them nonunion...and, to date, the union has made no serious effort to follow them... The ILGWU continued on it's class collaborationist path..in 1991, they even went so far as to TURN DOWN A RAISE IN PIECERATES...because, supposedly, the workers "didn't want more money".. The money that would have gone into the worker's pockets went to finance a childcare center operated by the ILGWU Welfare Fund... Now, of course, there were a lot of working moms in the garment factories...and they desperately needed free or low cost childcare..but I'm quite sure they would have wanted BOTH the raise and the daycare center.. And, needless to say, in the real world, the piecerates under the old agreements were not being paid anyway... On paper, in 1991, Chinatown garment workers made a piecerate that costed out to $ 9 an hour.. In the real world, the piecerates were a lot closer to $ 2 an hour.... But, the bosses of the ILGWU had a problem...despite their grovelling and begging, and the fact that they spent a hell of a lot of their member's dues money doing marketing for the employers (that nauseating "look for the union label" campaign)....the employers were agressively deunionizing...and not just in New York.. And the ILGWU bosses had no clue as to how to deal with that. Nor did the ideologial masterminds of Social Democrats USA (SDUSA), one of the splinter groups which had emerged from the disintegration of the SP during the Vietnam War.. The SDUSA's leaders, while nominally "socialist", were actually the first of the neoconservatives, pioneering the ideology that led Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush to the presidency. Other leftists sometimes called the SDUSA "state department socialists", due to the fact that the Social Democrats actively assisted the US government in repressing (and even murdering) communists and socialists who were fighting US imperialism in countries like Chile and El Salvador... SDUSA's reactionary "state department socialist" political thinking guided the sellout ILGWU bosses....but SDUSA didn't have an answer to the ILGWU's dilemma either... Nationally, the main center of the ladies garment industry had shifted to Los Angeles, where close to 200,000 of the 2 million workers in America's apparal industry toiled..and almost none of those workers were ILGWU members.... The same held true for the bulk of the apparal industry workers in the Carolinas, Arkansas, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi and Puerto Rico...almost none of them were union..and the few who were organized were in the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union Oddly enough, the ACTWU (a product of the 1982 merger of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Textile Workers Union of America and the Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers Union) was actually a somewhat more militant union than the ILGWU...and, of course, they were a hell of a lot more agressive about organizing than the ILGWU was.... That's not to say that ACTWU was particularly radical, or was leading any kind of mass movement... It's just that they wern't as reactionary or sellout-oriented as the ILGWU was, and they actually made some attempt to organize the runaway shops..or at least those in the USA... ACTWU's "socialist" leaders, unlike the ILGWU's, were guided by a somewhat more liberal splinter group that emerged from the disbanding of the SP..the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)...a group far less racist and sexist and pro capitalist than the ILGWU bosses mentor, the neoconservative "state department socialist" SDUSA.. DSA-style "labor management partnership" wasn't as sellout oriented, or as company unionist, as SDUSA style "class partnership".... Because of that liberal ideological influence from DSA, ACTWU at least kept it's members piecerates above the starvation level. Unlike the ILGWU's subminimum wage garment workers, struggling to eake out a living in the highest cost city in the Continental United States on $ 4 bucks an hour, ACTWU's largely rural, predominantly Southern membership earned much higher piecerates, typically costing out in the $ 7 to $ 9/hr range... And, the typical ACTWU local union was very small, often representing only one factory, and thus much more accountable to the women and men behind the sewing machines..and many ACTWU local union officers actually worked in the factories at one point in their lives... Even in big cities like New York, ACTWU was a lot more democratic than the ILGWU...and a lot less racist and male chauvanist... For instance, members of the ILGWU's New York Joint Board were herded into 7 huge locals, which back in 1982 were all run by men, all but one of whom was a White man, all of whom were attorneys...and none of whom had ever sewed a dress or pushed a cart of garments in their natural lives By contrast, the members of ACTWU's New York Joint Board were in 40 much smaller locals....9 of which were actually run by women.. And many of the male principal officers of those locals were, like the members, actually Black or Latino... Some of these folks had actually worked in the crafts they represented Meanwhile, American garment bosses had gone international, by having their clothes made by sewing contractors in low wage Third World countries like Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.... Neither ACTWU nor the ILGWU had any clue as to how to deal with this... That would be bad enough..but the bosses of the ILGWU actively assisted the US Government in union busting in those countries... As I pointed out above, a number of the ILGWU's right wing "socialist" officials, under the leadership of the SDUSA, worked with the State Department and the CIA to subvert communist-led unions in those countries..including orchestrating strikebreaking, police attacks on strikers and even state sanctioned murder of union activists..... That disgusting and horrible betrayal not only hurt the workers in Central America, East Asia and the Carribbean...but it also caused major job loss for American garment and textile workers.... Thanks in large part to those craven betrayals of the workers, both here and abroad, the ILGWU began it's slow-motion implosion as a garment workers union..a process of gangrenous dry rot and decay that continues to this day.... In 1955, the ILGWU had 383,000 members... Including workers represented by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Textile Workers Union of America and the other apparal industry unions, 932,000 of the nation's 2.5 million clothing and textile workers were union, or around 40% of the industry. By 1982, the year of the ACTWU merger, only 475,000 of the 2 million apparal workers in the country, about 25% of the workforce, were union...and only 210,000 of them were ILGWU members.... In 1995, the ACTWU and ILGWU merged, forming the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE...they deliberately picked those words in the union's official name so as to spell out the cutesy and catchy acronym...that's why they write the made up word "Needletrades" instead of the more gramatically correct "Needle Trades")...with a total of 235,000 members. Within 5 years, there were only 205,000 members left in UNITE. The industry had shrunk too...dramatically....to only 1,162,000 workers, with the balance of the jobs going overseas... Today, the industry is down to about 1 million workers..and UNITE only has 150,000 members.. Locally, here in New York, UNITE's membership decline has been so drastic that the locals in the city no longer have their own Joint Board. The New York Joint Board absorbed locals from 11 former ACTWU Joint Boards across New York State, as well as former ACTWU Joint Boards in New Jersey, and also annexed locals from 5 other former ILGWU Joint Boards in New York State, as well as the former ILGWU Joint Boards covering New Jersey. The locals from these dozens of disbanded local delegate bodies were cobbled together to form a "New York/New Jersey Joint Board" that covers locals scattered across both of those states, from all the way up to Rochester and Buffalo, to all the way down to Camden and Atlantic City. Beyond the membership decline, theres the fact that a hell of a lot of the members remaining in the union have very little to do with garment manufacturing... UNITE artificially inflated it's membership by absorbing the 11,000 member Laundry and Dry Cleaning Internaitonal Union, and proceding to launch an organizing drive in commercial laundry services. Also, UNITE started organizing nursing home attendants in Miami, Florida, and warehouse workers at the Las Vegas and Chicago distribution centers of the TJ Maxx stores. So, it's probable that only, at most, 15% or so of the nation's garment workers are unionized... And UNITE has made no serious effort to unionize those remaining 850,000 non union garment and textile workers... They have launched a sort of social service effort among those workers, setting up not for profit entities called "garment workers justice centers".. There are two of them in Brooklyn, the borough that has become the center of much of the city's remaining garment factory workforce, and two more in Manhattan.... Since this is UNITE we're talking about, the "justice centers" are racially segregated. In the Garment District and Bushwick, the "justice centers" serve the industry's Latino workforce (these days composed of recent Mexican and Ecuadorian immigrants....since the Dominicans have begun to flee the industry, following in the footsteps of the Jews, Italians, Blacks and Puerto Ricans who escaped from the industry before them). And, the "justice centers" in Chinatown and Sunset Park serve the Chinese workers (mostly recent illegal immigrants from Fujian Province, China...since the Chinese workers from Hong Kong and Guangdong Province have, like the Dominicans, also started to flee the business)... Incidentally, an index of just how far garment industry labor conditions have fallen is the fact that many of the Fujianese immigrants are actually held in a form of indentured servitude!!!! You see, it costs around $ 40,000 bucks for a Fujianese worker to get herself smuggled here...(reportedly, many Hongkongese and Guangdongese folks in Chinatown refer to the immigrants from Fujian as "$40,000 dollar men" because of that) Once the "$40,000 dollar men" (or, in this case, I guess it would be more accurate to say "$40,000 dollar women") arrive in America, they have to pay off the "Snakeheads" (Chinese gangsters who specialize in illegal alien smuggling)..or they will be beaten, raped and possibly even killed.... To enable these workers to pay off their debts, the snakeheads sell them to sewing contractors, where they can work off the debt, and the substantial, loansharkishly high, interest rate that the snakeheads charge on that debt... That, of course, is how the sewing contractors in Sunset Park can find folks to work for a piecerate so low it costs out to around $ 1 dollar an hour!!!! Those workers literally have a gun to their heads to make them work that cheap!!!! Now, one might think that, considering how grotesque that labor conditions have become in the garment business in this town, that these union-financed "justice centers" would be out there organizing strikes and walkouts, slowdowns and sitdown strikes, plant occupations and mass picketing,..or perhaps even mass escapes and/or slave revolts of the indentured Fujianese workers... But, if you thought that, then you thought wrong.... Remember, this is UNITE we're talking about... So, instead of struggle, the "justice centers" engage in what amounts to social work... Not to knock social work, of course....and I'm sure that the immigration counseling, legal services and other services these agencies provide is very helpful to the workers. As are the efforts of the legal staffs of the "justice centers" to take the FLSA minimum wage and OT violation cases of individuals and small groups of garment workers to the New York State Department of Labor.... Problem is, that's casework, not class struggle...indivudalized begging, rather than collective bargaining... The struggles for workplace justice get completely removed from the jobsite, and taken to a legal tribunal, and, as we've seen, whenever garment workers rights get placed in the hands of lawyers...then you know the workers are going to get screwed over royally.... At best, a few garment workers will get a couple of dollars...(as happend in that case I described at the top of the story, which was handled by a group called Make The Road By Walking, an outfit very similar to the "garment workers justice centers")....but the abuse of the rest of the workforce continues unabated... If this type of "social work unionism" continues, sooner rather than later, garment worker unionism will fade into nonexistance... And, as it happens, within a few weeks, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees itself will cease to exist as an independent labor organization... Earlier this year, UNITE General President Bruce Raynor met behind closed doors with the president of the Hotel Employee and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), one John "Kaiser" Wilhelm, and the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a dude named Andy Stern... HERE is the rapidly shrinking 228,000 member union that represents hotel and casino employees in big cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago and major resort areas like Atlantic City, Miami and Las Vegas... Unlike UNITE, their industry is actually expanding....(and their jobs can't be exported to Mexico or Haiti) but, despite HERE's company union-like behavior towards the hospitality companies, the union's membership continues to shrink... I've written about HERE's rancid style of unionism here on GANGBOX before, at: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/5271 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/5327 and http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11795 The SEIU is the 1.6 million member mega-union the core of who's members are building service workers, hospital workers and government employees... The SEIU is actually expanding by leaps and bounds, which is unique among American unions these days. The SEIU has been growing for years, while the rest of the union movement shrank; 205,000 members in 1955, 305,000 in 1965, 480,000 in 1985, 688,000 in 1985, 1,027,000 in 1995, 1,104,000 in 1999, 1,400,000 in 2002 and 1,600,000 today... However, that expansion is NOT because the SEIU has launched some kind of mass movement among the nation's 12 million non union service workers and 1.4 million non union security guards... Far from it.... The SEIU's "culture of organizing" is more like the corporate raiding of the 1980's...basically, Andy Stern is a sort of labor Carl Ichann or Frank Lorenzo.... Despite all the hoopla and ballyhoo about being an "organizing union", the SEIU's typical "organizing" methods involve either protest campaigns (often with student activists or other non worker stranger pickets doing the protesting) to persuade employers to sign sweetheart contracts, backroom deals with politicians and/or bosses to force workers into the union under sweatshop conditions or raiding already existing unions and bribing and/or forcing their union's leaders to accept absorbtion into the SEIU... A typical case is the backroom deal with California's former Governor, Grey Davis, and the California Democratic Party State Committee that herded 110,000 self employed home attendants into the SEIU, as a favor after the SEIU helped Davis get elected. Of course, this was done with no vote or mass campaign among these self employed medical professionals to join the union..and with the SEIU having absolutely no intention of barganing higher wages, benefits, a pension, a greivance procedure, traning or a job referral system for the women.. Since the women weren't actual state employees, the State of California actually had to cobble together bogus entities to pretend to be the "employers" of these self employed professional women, so that the SEIU would have somebody to "bargain" with... Another case involves the SEIU's attempts to force the officers of the Security, Police and Fire Officers Association, an independent union that represents Wackenhut's nuclear power plant security guards, to let their union be absorbed by the SEIU, or face a massive raid by the larger union... Incidentally, much of the propaganda used by the SEIU during the so called "Eye on Wackenhut" campaign to raid the SPFOA actually focused on insulting the job skills of the workers the SEIU was trying to organize!!! The SEIU claimed these workers were incompetent, had shady backgrounds, and were not profesional enough to guard the power plants against terrorists...the union even claimed that many of these guards were criminals... But yet and still, the union still wanted these workers they publicly insulted to join the SEIU!!!! Another, even more disgusting, SEIU "organizing" campaign involved Portland, Oregon SEIU local 49 signing a $ 9.50/hr contract for Portland Habilitation Center's mentally retarded "sheltered workshop" janitors, and then letting PHC use those disabled workers to replace $ 17/hr Portland School Board school custodians...who were represented by Portland SEIU local 140!!!! I've documented the totalitarian corporate unionism, poverty level union scale and institutional racism and sexism of the SEIU on both the GANGBOX website, at: http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/pocodinero1.html and http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/pocodinero2.html and on the GANGBOX listserv, at: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/4949 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8770 and http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11507 All three of these unions have one thing in common...they're all formerly mob connected unions that are now run by pseudo "socialists" with close ties to the Democratic Party heirarchy who belive the way to rebuild America's unions is through signing sweetheart near-minimum wage contracts for superexploited Latina immigrant workers... UNITE, SEIU and HERE also are all run like totalitarian dictatorships, with huge numbers of members herded into vast mega-local unions (the SEIU's largest local, 1199, has 250,000 members in 4 states, with 117,000 in New York City alone). In all of those unions, members are largely excluded from any influence over the day to day life of the organization..down to and including a de facto near total bar on actual members effectively being allowed to run for office... Stern, Wilhelm and Raynor also are all extremely wealthy White Jewish male attorneys running unions largely composed of deeply poor blue collar Latinas Andy, John and Bruce's staffs are just like them, disproportionately White, Jewish and male, mostly graduates of expensive private colleges, from affluent backgrounds, never been poor and never actually permanently employed in a factory or a service job.... These three guys, and the legion of $ 50,000+ a year professional union staffers around them, also have a master plan to reorganize the whole AFL-CIO in their image...totalitarian unions rebuilding the house of labor by signing grotesquely low paying sweetheart contracts... Along with presidents Terry O'Sullivan of the Laborers International Union of North America and Douglas J. "Cash" McCarron of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joi http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/ http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/16498