Local unions still working together

Yawu Miller

While Boston labor activists hobnobbed with politicians and civic leaders during the annual Labor Day Breakfast, a contingent from Service Employees International Union Local 615 headed to Providence to join a massive demonstration aimed at organizing janitors.

SEIU President Rocio Saenz fired up a crowd of about 300 labor activists before leading them on a march through downtown Providence and blocking a busy intersection.

Saenz was led away by police officers, but not before she fired up downtown Providence with union slogans and fiery oratory.

“It’s so important that we have an organizing agenda,” Saenz said, explaining SEIU’s drive to unionize janitors. “The unions need to have a stronger voice.”

It was SEUI’s insistence on organizing and expanding membership that ultimately pulled the union away from the AFL-CIO this summer. Along with SEIU, the Teamsters and United Food and Commercial Workers also broke from the nation’s largest federation of unions.

While the breakaway unions — representing 4.6 million workers — are channeling resources into organizing and expanding membership, the AFL-CIO has been focusing its resources on electoral politics, channeling resources into pro-union candidates.

At first glance, those differences seemed evident during the Greater Boston Labor Council’s annual breakfast with much of SEIU’s leadership missing.

But local AFL-CIO leaders say they are continuing to work with SEIU, honoring the union’s picket lines and supporting their actions.

“I really don‘t give a damn what’s going on in the rest of the country with the AFL-CIO,” said George Nee, secretary/treasurer of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, addressing labor activists in Providence Monday.

“We’re going to have one labor movement. In Rhode Island, everybody is one family, one labor union and we’re going to make progress together.”

Saenz and other SEIU officials agree that the main differences with the AFL-CIO are at the national level.

“I don’t think we feel like it’s a split for the local labor movement,” said Peter Rider, the secretary/treasurer for SEIU Local 615 who for 10 years served on the national board of the AFL-CIO. “It’s a split over leadership at the national level.”

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney has come under fire in recent years for his failure to persuade member unions to expand their membership. While the United States workforce has been growing, the percentage of the workforce that is unionized has been declining — from 16.7 percent to 12.5 percent since 1995.

In much of the country, labor’s traditional base of manufacturing jobs has given way to a service-based economy. As European groups who immigrated decades ago have moved up the social ladder, more recent immigrants from Central and South America and the Caribbean are now working the lowest-paying jobs.

In Providence, that often means cleaning offices for the state’s minimum wage of $6.75 an hour, too little to survive on, workers say.

“Our situation is very difficult as immigrants,” said Luis Lopez, who works 16 hours a day cleaning a non-unionized building in the city’s downtown. “They often take advantage of the fact that you are an immigrant. They give you the hardest work with the lowest pay.”

Lopez is exactly the type of worker SEIU has been targeting with its national organizing campaigns aimed at janitors and, more recently, security guards. And the largely immigrant labor force that makes up those unions seems badly in need of help.

“You can’t support your family working these jobs, even if you work 60 hours a week,” Saenz said. “It’s always difficult for workers in these jobs to make ends meet.”

SEIU Local 615, which covers Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine, plugged into the One Providence network, a coalition of labor groups and community organizations pushing for higher wages and better conditions for Providence workers.

At Monday’s action, city councilors and neighborhood organizations linked up with religious leaders and labor activists in the type of broad-based coalition that has become SEIU’s modus operandi.

And among the diverse crowd were Nee and other representatives of AFL-CIO affiliates.

“With the fights we need to engage in as a labor coalition we can’t fight alone,” Saenz said. “When employers are violating workers’ rights, it affects all of us.”