Where Are the Workers?

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Harold Meyerson is the editor-at-large at The American Prospect and a columnist for The Washington Post.

One sparkling day about 10 years ago, I drove from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara to deliver a talk at a nationwide staff retreat of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE). I can't recall exactly what I talked about, but I remember distinctly whom I was talking to. The HERE staffers -- there were about 70 of them -- were all corporate researchers, most of them from HERE's locals.
This was something new. For some time, locals in America's more vibrant unions had employed organizers, but no union I knew of -- until that day -- had embedded corporate researchers in their locals as well. The researchers I met that afternoon were preponderantly young and uniformly bright. But HERE's decision to create a cadre of corporate campaigners was based on the grimmest of facts: Traditional private-sector union organizing -- signing up workers who want to join a union, winning a certification election conducted by the government, and securing a collective-bargaining agreement in negotiations with the employer -- had become a dead-end.

I discovered that day in Santa Barbara that HERE had concluded there was not a single hotel that could be organized absent a campaign to bring so much financial, political, and community pressure on the employer that it would agree not to oppose unionization. The mere desire of workers to form a union no longer sufficed.
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