Back to basics, unions go door-to-door

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited/feeds/afx/2008/02/04/afx4612258.html

02.04.08, 4:05 PM ET

NEW YORK (AP) - Laura Tapia is the union movement's equivalent of a beat cop.

A tiny, fast-talking woman from Puebla, Mexico, she's spent two years walking the 99-cent stores, fruit stands and sneaker shops of Brooklyn's immigrant Knickerbocker Ave. She made her rounds recently, hugging the woman selling tamales from a cart, pointing to the car wash, which she says is usually staffed by underage kids, and clucking that the combination laundromat-Post Office was robbed in the middle of the day.

'When you are on the street all day, you know everything that happens,' she said, shivering in her down parka. 'Everything.'

Tapia is an organizer for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Only two of the roughly 170 stores on Knickerbocker are unionized, but organizing workers is her secondary goal. Her immediate task is investigating working conditions, injuries and wage and hour violations involving the stores' shelf stockers, cashiers and salespeople.

She's one of seven organizers working a neighborhood for the union. Their efforts, part of a small but growing push by organized labor to battle for workers who may never join a union, are as much social engineering as organizing.

Union membership has declined for 25 years in part because unions have 'lost connections to communities,' said Jonathan Tasini, executive director of the labor-funded Labor Research Association. Union halls, once the community centers of the urban working class, the place to find a job, a card game or a date, have all but disappeared.

FULL story at link.