Labor's Return.

In the last two decades, corporate power seemed unstoppable, and workers felt hopelessly outmatched. But now the labor movement is finally gathering strength. It is a thrilling moment for organizers. From the textile plants and slaughterhouses of the South to the posh offices of the American Medical Association (AMA), unions are taking hold.

When workers at the nation's largest textile plant, Fieldcrest Cannon in Kannapolis, North Carolina, voted to unionize in June, they broke a ninety-three-year anti-union streak.

IBP, one of the world's largest producers of beef and pork products, is hostile to organized labor. But at its manufacturing plant in Wallula, Washington, a 90 percent immigrant work force held a successful strike, and the workers won approval for their union in early June.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) just finished its biggest organizing drive in fifty years, signing up some 75,000 home health care workers in Los Angeles, most of them immigrants.

And the AMA announced recently that it is forming a union to help fight the growing power of managed care companies.

Across the nation, the number of union members rose for the first time in five years, from 16.1 million in 1997 to 16.2 million in 1998, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

It's just a beginning--even as union membership edges up, the percentage of the work force that is unionized fell slightly from 1997 to 1998. Part of the problem is the aggressiveness of management, and part of it is the change in the U.S. economy.

"We continue to lose manufacturing jobs at a rate of about 5,000 a year," says economist Dean Baker of the Preamble Center. "The centers of the economy that are most heavily unionized are where we're losing jobs most rapidly."

Still, union organizers should have an easy case to make. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union members made $659 per week on average last year, compared with $499 per week earned by nonunion workers.

"If you look at parts of the country where there are more unions versus parts where there are fewer, you'll notice a general wage rate that's increased because the good union jobs exist," says Martha Gruelle, an editor at Labor Notes. "And unions have the potential to, and often do, speak out about fairness for everyone."

Organizing drives by the AFL-CIO and the SEIU that target service-sector employees, immigrants, and others who have not traditionally been unionized are breathing new life into the labor movement.

There are several reasons for labor's comeback: 1) concerted organizing drives by the big unions, brought on, in part, by the change in leadership at the AFL-CIO back in October 1995 when John Sweeney was elected president; 2) an influx of immigrant workers who are less reflexively hostile to union organizing than many of their North American counterparts; 3) the realization that corporations are grabbing more and more power; and 4) the recognition that unions are the best vehicle for workers to defend their rights.

"There's a growing awareness on many people's part that the corporation is not going to look out for them," Gruelle says. "This is from years and years of downsizing, wage loss. People are working harder for less compensation, and realizing how much power the corporations have over their lives and their communities."

The labor movement helped win the eight-hour day, the forty-hour week, the child labor laws, occupational safety laws, Social Security, and the Civil Rights Act. In the early part of its history, immigrant members brought the energy and radical vision to the movement. They are doing so again today.

"At the turn of the century, immigrant workers speaking Slavic, Russian, and Polish were at the core of organizing efforts," Harley Shaiken, a labor specialist at the University of California at Berkeley, told The New York Times. "And at the end of the century, it's immigrant workers speaking Spanish, Laotian, Vietnamese."

Especially in the South, where "right-to-work" laws make it illegal to compel workers to pay union dues, entrenched anti-union sentiment has made organizing hard. But new immigrants are more open to unions.

Andy Stern, president of the SEIU, which has organized large numbers of immigrant health care workers and janitors throughout the country, calls new immigrants "the leaders of the labor movement."

"They have really been inspiring," he says. "People come to this country wanting to live the American Dream. If we can make sure that their work pays a living wage and provides benefits, then new people in the work force can send their kids to college."

The SEIU is now organizing immigrants who come from Central America and as far away as Armenia and Russia. They are making a difference.

"The last huge organizing drive in America was in 1937, and it started the UAW and the CIO," says Stern, who compares that drive to the recent organizing victory in Los Angeles. The sheer number of newly unionized health care workers is just the half of it, "The size is obviously symbolic," he says. "But I think it also represents the union movement of the twenty-first century's economy. Home care workers are the fastest-growing population of workers in America. I think this is the beginning of turning [those jobs] into well-paid jobs with training and benefits."

Even the stodgy old AMA, traditionally an elitist group of professionals who shunned the blue-collar association of a union, is now organizing a doctors' union. Doctors are ripe for organizing because of discontent with multibillion-dollar managed care companies, which restrict services for patients and force doctors to work with both eyes on the bottom line.

If doctors fight not just for pay raises, but for better working conditions and better quality care, it will benefit not only the physicians but the patients, as well.

"The kinds of things that nurses and doctors negotiate over are guaranteed nurse-to-patient ratios," says Matt Witt, acting campaign communications director of the SEIU. "They say, `We want to know that we're not going to be asked to take care of more people than we can handle properly.' You and I are not health care workers in a union, but when we go to a hospital and are lying sick in bed, we'll know that the people taking care of us know what they're doing."

Labor still has a long way to go. Unions need to redouble their organizing efforts. They need to bring an end to the practice of competing against one another for the same members. And they need to rededicate themselves to internal democracy. "Simply stopping the bleeding of members is a good first step," says Gruelle.

Republicans, who blame union lobbying for the latest increase in the minimum wage, have a raft of antiunion bills on their agenda.

Democrats, meanwhile, aren't presenting a scintillating alternative. The two most visible Democratic Presidential contenders, Al Gore and Bill Bradley, while cozying up to labor, both supported NAFTA, and both are heavily dependent on corporate money to fuel their campaigns.

But just as unions swayed public opinion to pass vital social justice legislation over the last century, the time may be ripe for organized labor to take the lead again.

"There's a strong polarization in this country, a polarization of wealth," says the SEIU's Witt. "There's an idea that every decision made by management, by corporations, should be made on profits. More and more people are turning to unions to try to have human values rather than just profits."

This is one of the best signs in a long, long time.