Why Organize?

IMAGINE . . .

If we didn’t have to fight the boss for every penny or fight against cuts in health insurance or resist unmanageable or dangerous workloads.

IMAGINE . . .

If we could raise wage, benefit and work environment standards throughout entire industries instead of one work place at a time.

IMAGINE . . .

If one full-time job was enough and you didn’t have to hold down two or three jobs to keep your family going.

Those are all reasonable and fair expectations. So, why aren’t they true today?

POWER . . .

Who has the power to set standards . . . the boss or us?
It depends on who there are more of.

If you’re selling a shirt for $10 and the guy down the street is selling the same shirt for $5 you’re going to have a tough time raising your price. You can tell your customers that your shirt is better quality. You can tell them the shirt down the street was made in a sweatshop that exploits workers. You can even bring a lawyer in to explain the ins and outs of shirt buying. But time after time people are going down the street to save 5 bucks. And that’s what we face every time we bargain. Union labor is high quality. Non-union shops exploit workers. Our lawyers can talk as well as anybody’s. But our employers are looking down the street for the cheap way out.

Every time union members sit down to negotiate our contracts we’re faced with the same management argument – the non-union hotel, factory, or shop doesn’t have to provide raises, benefits, or days off. The only guaranteed wage non-union workers earn is minimum wage. Non-union workers are not guaranteed health insurance or pensions. And we all know, in non-union places the rules can change at any time, for any reason or for no reason at all. That’s what we compete against.

We have two choices: We can lower the price of our shirt to $5 and lose money on every sale or we can get the guy down the street to raise his price. We can wait until the non-union places drag us all down to where they are or we can bring the non-union places into the union to raise all our standards.

If we don’t organize people who do the same work, in the same industry, in the same area we’re going to have to lower our standards. If we don’t organize, we’ll spend our time fighting to keep what we’ve got right now rather than keeping up with the times. Either non-union standards go up or union standards go down.

That’s why our union has an aggressive organizing plan in our key industries. In order to win the union contracts we need, and fight for all working people, we’re organizing every day.

We talk to non-union workers who have no benefits, no way of holding management accountable and no input into their future. And because of the way the law works, they face a massive uphill battle to form a union. There is an entire industry of lawyers that trains companies how to threaten, bribe and trick workers out of the union. They convince workers to stay in a situation where they’ve got no guarantees, no voice and no way of changing things. People get scared and begin to doubt that change is possible. It happens all too often. The only way to beat those tactics is to show workers that there’s a better way and that improvements are winnable. The people those lawyers can’t beat are union members who already have rights on the job and who already have the power to influence their work lives.

If we are going to raise standards for ourselves and other workers, we’ve got to organize. To organize successfully we need union members involved. To find out more about our organizing program, please contact Julie Kelly at Jkelly@unitehere.org or phone us at 212-243-0300.

By working together, imagine the changes we can make.