Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for September 3, 2007 STATE OF THE UNION

State of the union remains strong in region

BY BECKY MALKOVICH, THE SOUTHERN

More than 100 years ago, union leaders pushed for the establishment of a Labor Day holiday to celebrate the U.S. labor force and its social and economic contributions to the country.

To celebrate the holiday, many communities sponsored street parades to demonstrate the "strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations," according to the U.S. Department of Labor's Web site.

And while many of those street parades have given way to end-of-summer getaways and blowouts instead of tributes to working men and women, the state of the union in Southern Illinois remains strong.

"I can't imagine working without a union," said Buddy Maupin, regional director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31.

In 1942, the first AFSCME local in Illinois started with just 20 members. Today, the union membership is more than 75,000 statewide with about 8,000 members in the Southern 13 counties.

"We're growing, but we're also fighting for traction," Maupin said.

"Budgets put forward by (Gov. Rod) Blagojevich cut a lot of union front-line workers, but we're fighting to stanch the bleeding the past budgets have created and we're also doing a lot of organizing."

Maupin said unions are valuable for many reasons, especially for the voice they provide in matters relating to their membership's employment. Otherwise, he said, "The employer makes all decisions for you instead of you getting to have any input."

And the necessity of that input remains as urgent today as it did 100 years ago, said Ed Smith, assistant to the general president, vice president and regional manager of Laborers' International Union of North America's Midwest Regional Office, which represents more than 50,000 of LIUNA's 800,000 nationwide membership.

The issues are the same, he said: Safety on job sites; a fair wage so that workers can provide for themselves and their families; good benefits and dignity and respect for workers.

"If you look at where we're going in this country, we're not going this way, we're going the other way. There's an atmosphere in Washington on down that says workers should have to provide everything themselves and the employer provides nothing. If the idea is to always find the cheapest work force and never let the workers have a voice, is that where you want to live, raise your kids?" Smith said.

"It's no coincidence that right-to-work states have the lowest wages, lowest education level, lowest benefits. And then what happens when the right-to-work states don't have bad enough conditions? They look to China, Mexico. We don't want that. We want a place where if you work hard and are productive, you can provide for your family," Smith said.

Laborers' Local 773 has a membership of more than 4,500 in the southern 13 counties of the state and is growing, Smith said, "We now represent virtually every occupation."

Paul Noble, president of the Southern Illinois Central Labor Council, said that while private and public sector representation is growing, manufacturing unions in Southern Illinois are being affected negatively by tough economic times.

"The manufacturing sector is losing jobs at a record pace - both union and nonunion jobs," Noble said. "External forces are making it hard for plants to succeed and when a plant closes down, it closes down. It doesn't matter whether it's a union plant or not."

Despite those losses, Noble said, only California and New York have more union members than Illinois.

Noble said a strong union presence helps nonunion workers as well.

"The higher the union density in an area, the higher the wages for nonunion workers and the better the working conditions are," he said.

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UNION ADVANTAGE

* Overall union workers' median weekly earnings are 30 percent higher than nonunion workers'

* Union women are paid 31 percent more; African American union workers make 36 percent more than nonunion counterparts; Latino union workers get 46 percent more

* Nonunion workers are five times more likely to lack health insurance than union workers

- SOURCE: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, provided by Paul Noble, president of Southern Illinois Central Labor Council