By BERNARD STAMLER
It is a season of discontent, at least among
those who make their living on the city's streets. And many have taken to those very
streets to protest: taxi drivers, disgruntled sidewalk artists and, most recently, food
cart vendors, all complaining of new municipal regulations that they say will hamper their
business.
But these are battles between individual workers and their city.
Where are the labor unions, whose collective organizing traditionally took place on the
streets and sidewalks of New York?
"Don't worry, we're out there," said
Mike Hellstrom, an organizer for Local 79 of the Construction and
Building Laborers Union. "And these days we're taking a relentless approach that
works."
Indeed, after many years of decline, grass-roots organizing is
back in New York, as local labor leaders make it a priority again. And there is probably
no better example than Mr. Hellstrom's union.
"Until a few years ago, there was a very complacent
attitude," said Mr. Hellstrom, who has taken organizing courses at
the A.F.L.-C.I.O. George Meany Center outside Washington, and at Cornell University.
"Now you're seeing a much more aggressive attitude," one that he says has
succeeded in winning union recognition at many construction sites across
the city.
For about two years, his union has been sending its members to
nonunion projects to demonstrate in the street. They whistle, chant and yell and, usually,
they take along a 20-foot inflated rat to make their point. "He represents nonunion
contractors," Mr. Hellstrom said of his whiskered companion.
Local 79's most recent protest took place on
Thursday morning at a Metropolitan Transportation Authority project on Ninth Avenue and
54th Street. (Many government employers use contractors who pay the prevailing wage, but
who are not required to hire union members.) Beginning about 6 A.M.,
hundreds of whistle-blowing union members blocked the street and tied up traffic. They
also brought four of the towering rodents with them, for emphasis.
This return to "in your face" demonstrations, as Mr.
Hellstrom calls them, is part of a national trend, said Joshua Freeman, a labor historian
at Queens College. A few years ago, he explained, big labor realized "that standing
still just wouldn't work" in the midst of politicians' consistent
attacks on unions and growing antilabor sentiment. Still, it has taken New Yorkers longer
to join the fray than it has others, precisely because New York is historically a union
town.
Despite some erosion in its union membership, "New York was
less hard hit by the general decline of labor than the rest of the country,"
Professor Freeman said. Organizing never petered out totally, but a bad local economy in
the early 1990's, coupled with "less of a sense of emergency," made New York
"slower to re-embrace it," he said. "But it's happening now."
Local labor officials agree. "Unions were acting like their
only job was to take care of their existing members," said Bill Henning, vice
president of Local 1180 of the Communications Workers of America, who added that labor
used to "wait for the phone to ring" before organizing new
members. That attitude has disappeared, he said; he and other union executives took a
labor organizing course in March, and about 70 members of the local went on a retreat a
few weeks ago to learn about organizing.
Similarly, Sylvia Grant, executive vice president of Local 1199 of
the National Health and Human Services Employees Union, said that 20
rank-and-file members had recently taken leaves of absence from their jobs and were being
trained to organize clinic workers. Already the largest union of health care workers in
the city, the 120,000-member local merged early this year with the 1.2 million-member
Service Employees International Union, based in Washington. The merged union has pledged
to increase its organizing.
Of course union organizing never disappeared entirely from New
York. But much of it was "waged silently," with the unions negotiating behind
the scenes with employers, according to Brooks Bitterman, research director for Local 100
of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union. But he said that
his union had always believed in "taking street action."
"We've done lots of civil disobedience," Mr. Bitterman
said. "Lots of leafleting, sit-down strikes and rallies."
Local 100 is the union that targeted the Box
Tree, the elegant restaurant on East 49th Street that serves $86 prix-fixe dinners. The
organizing effort dragged on for more than four years, until the workers were unionized in
February.
The Box Tree campaign was "a real community battle," Mr.
Bitterman said. The union enlisted local politicians in the cause and also publicized
possible code violations by the restaurant, which the union claimed was running a hotel
illegally.
Box Tree denied the claims, but merely raising
them helped the organizers. "One of the things we have found is that there is a lot
of potential support among elected officials and neighborhood groups if you know how to
mobilize it," Mr. Bitterman said.
Of course there was constant picketing, too, and a coordinated
effort by Local 100 to get prospective diners to choose other restaurants for their luxury
meals. "If a restaurant worker engages customers in conversation, and explains what's
going on, we find that they are generally supportive," Mr. Bitterman said. "It's
so easy for them to avoid the aggravation of crossing a picket line and to go somewhere
else, especially with so many restaurants in New York."
But are the tactics of confrontation effective generally? Mr.
Hellstrom thinks so, and plans to continue them, he said. Among other successes, he cited
25 weeks worth of demonstrations that resulted in a union contract for
workers renovating a 24-story office building on John Street. He said there had been an
increase of 5,000 members in his local in the two years since the on-the-street,
rat-accompanied protests began.
Mr. Bitterman will also persist in such tactics, like the
picketing since early spring at Angelo and Maxie's Steakhouse on Park Avenue South and
19th Street, a spot frequented by professional athletes.
He also pointed to the recent unionization of cafeteria workers at
the headquarters of Salomon Smith Barney on Greenwich Street in lower
Manhattan. The strategy there, he said, included sit-ins (complete with arrests last
November), picketing and even an alliance with women's groups to publicize reported acts
of sexual harassment and discrimination by various firm employees.
Salomon Smith Barney tried to emphasize that the cafeteria was technically run by Aramark, an outside contractor. But although Salomon denies it, Mr. Bitterman believes it was the confrontational pressure on the firm that got the matter resolved last month, after nearly a year of demonstrations.
"These are high-profile tactics," he
said, "and they work."