Turf wars.

With falling union membership, different unions are sometimes trying to sign up the same new members. In some cases, the view is that they're treading on each others territory. It's enough to make once friendly rivals turn against each other, as the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) and the United Steelworkers of America did in 1993. It all started when the CAW planned to merge with an independent union representing 1,700 nickel miners in Sudbury. The Steelworkers thought the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers would join it. Although most Mine, Mill locals were part of the Steelworkers' union, it was the result of a Steelworkers' raid a generation earlier. Sudbury local 598 hadn't forgotten and preferred the CAW as its representative. A year earlier, in 1992, the CAW gained three mines when it merged with the Canadian Association of Industrial, Mechanical and Allied Workers, a former affiliate of the Canadian nationalist Confederation of Canadian Unions. So, mining interests weren't entirely new to them.

By 1993, manufacturing employees still made up about 77% of the CAW's 170,000 members, but massive manufacturing job losses and the move into the service sector changed the membership mix. It took on workers from the shop floor to the airlines reservations desk to the fried-chicken counter.

The new "outreach strategy" of unions has brought the United Steelworkers of America and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) together too. The RWDSU wasn't too pleased when 25,000 of its Canadian members voted to merge with the Canadian division of the Steelworkers, rejecting a plan to join the United Food and Commercial Workers. Again, the Steelworkers were accused of raiding. While the merger gave the Steelworker's a major boost in its drive to diversify, it denied the accusation.

As big unions swallow smaller ones and branch out to include new types of workers, the campaign to increase membership continues. The Steelworkers union plans to commit one-quarter of its overall budget to organizing by 2000. In 1997, it earmarked about 18%, or $5 million, of its overall budget to bringing in new members, up from a little more than 3% in 1996.

The Canadian Auto Workers increased its organizing finances by one-third in 1997, to $7 million from $4 million in 1996. The Canadian Union of Public Employees also increased its budget by about a third, to $1 million from $750,000.

The efforts are paying off. By August 1997, the Steelworkers union, for example, had organized 8,000 new workers over a 12-month period. In addition, it gained 17,000 new members through mergers with other unions.

The Steelworkers' Canadian director, Lawrence McBrearty, expects people will continue to turn to unions "in the current legal environment and with corporations being so much more aggressive in trying to lower the standards for working men and women...We have our work cut out for us. But we're ready."