A
Union City
1993-2005
With the contraction and dispersal of the manufacturing base and a generally anti-union political climate reminiscent of the early twentieth century, organized labor in the United States has experienced declining numbers and concessionary bargaining in recent years.
While unions in the Madison area have not totally escaped these negatives, they have generally prospered relative to most other areas of the country, and over the last decade or so have ramped up both their political and legislative efforts and their outreach to the rest of the community and to workers who do not have the benefit of a union.
Although not at a satisfactory level, new union organizing did meet with some success, particularly in the government, construction, and service sectors of the economy. Early in 1993 AFT-Wisconsin organized the last large group of unorganized state employees – the “Fiscal and Staff” bargaining unit – and also doctors and attorneys (public defenders who work for the state). Many of the building trades unions took advantage of a construction boom and encouragement from their international unions to grow their numbers during the 1990s and early 2000s; even Klein-Dickert returned to the union fold. And in the service sector, Red Cross nurses, Head Start workers, nursing home workers at Orchard Hill and Oakwood Village, teachers at Madison Media Institute, warehouse workers at Holt Products, and employees of Whole Foods, Charlton Telemarketing, and Monona Terrace Catering all won collective bargaining rights.
Employer resistance, of course, had not disappeared. In addition to several aborted organizing drives, the bakery workers at Village Hearth in Sun Prairie lost two close union elections, and the employees at Whole Foods, Madison Media Institute, and Holt Products all failed to achieve a first union contract due to fierce employer opposition.
Also, in manufacturing the Madison area suffered the same plant closings that the rest of the country was experiencing at this time. Long time union employers Rayovac, Stainless Tank, and Rock-Tenn all closed their Madison facilities within a few years of each other around the turn of the century, as did Perry Printing in Waterloo.
Tyson
Strike
An intransigent employer also led to the area’s largest labor dispute since the Stoughton Trailers strike in the late 1980s. In early 2003, after nearly a year of negotiations, the workers at Tyson Foods in Jefferson, represented by UFCW Local 538, the same local that represents the workers at Madison’s Oscar Mayer plant, struck in response to the employer’s demands for drastic concessions in wages, health insurance, vacations, and pensions. The Jefferson plant, owned by a local family and successfully run for over 100 years without a strike, was sold to one national corporation after another beginning in the 1970s until it finally wound up in the hands of Tyson which controlled a quarter of the country’s meat supply.
Local 538 workers held strong with less than a half dozen of the 470 strikers crossing the picket line. The area labor movement responded with demonstrations, large rallies, picket line support, and sizable financial contributions. The Jefferson community and the surrounding area also rallied to the cause of their striking neighbors. Nevertheless, without a national strategy to combat this multibillion dollar company and facing a union decertification vote in which, by law, the strikers would not be allowed to vote but the scabs would, the strike was lost. The workers voted to accept most of the concessions and return to work rather than lose their union.
Despite the growing power of huge corporations and a labor law stacked against workers, not all strikes were lost during this time. Of particular note was a strike in late summer of 1999 by Laundry Workers Local 229 (now Workers United Local 229) against the Aramark laundry on Madison’s east side. The workers, many of them Hmong and Latino immigrants, struck only for a few days of sick leave each year to take care of sick kids without losing pay or being slapped with attendance demerits. The Madison labor community rallied to the cause of these workers with a big demonstration the second day of the strike and continual picket line support. After six days, the workers won their main demand, getting four additional personal holidays per year which could be used as sick leave. The strike’s success, contrasted to the Tyson strike, was due in part to simply catching the company off guard and partly to the nature of the business. Unable to recruit competent scabs to do this hot and dirty work and unable to supply their customers’ needs, Aramark, despite being a multi-billion dollar diversified company, made a necessary business decision and agreed to the workers’ demands.
Solidarity – the Staley Lockout
The Madison labor community also rallied to the cause of key labor struggles taking place in other states. In the 1980s, Madison unionists collected money, boycotted products, and caravanned to rallies for striking packinghouse workers at Hormel in Austin, Minnesota, and held big fundraising efforts for striking miners at Pittston in western Virginia. This solidarity with workers involved in key struggles elsewhere in the country soon made Madison a must stop on any “Road Warrior” circuit.
When “Road Warriors” from the union representing 760 workers who had been locked out by the A.E. Staley Company in Decatur, Illinois, came to Madison in July 1993, they met a hearty reception from SCFL and Madison labor activists. Owned by the British multi-national Tate & Lyle, the Staley Company, which produces mainly sweetener made from corn, was demanding twelve hour, rotating shifts and unlimited subcontracting amongst other concessions. The union refused to take this strike bait and instead launched a vigorous in-plant strategy. The success of the in-plant strategy led the company to lock out the workers in late June.
The company’s heavy handed tactics and the union’s valiant fight back inspired Madison unionists to take a special interest in this struggle. For the two and a half years of the lock out, individual union activists and local unions contributed through SCFL over $1000 per month in order to “adopt” two locked out families. UFCW Local 538 on its own adopted a third family. SCFL coordinated boycotts of products using Staley sweetener, and at least a half dozen times Madison activists caravanned to mass rallies in Decatur, taking food, toys, and money with them for Christmastime rallies. Because of the repressive tactics of the Decatur police force, these activists at least once returned home with watering eyes and the smell of pepper gas in their hair.
Students at the University, in response to the Staley struggle, formed the Student Labor Action Coalition (SLAC), which was soon emulated at campuses throughout the country. Long after the Staley struggle had ended, SLAC-type chapters continued to take up the cause of worker struggles, be they living wage campaigns for workers right on campus or sweatshop workers making University apparel in foreign countries.
In the end, after two and a half years of intense struggle, the company’s intransigence was too much for the Staley workers and they returned to work under a contract that allowed most of the concessions the company had originally demanded. But, they returned to work knowing that at least in Madison, Wisconsin, solidarity was alive and well.
Political
Action
Meanwhile, in the early 1990s a growing number of politicians not supportive of worker concerns were being elected to public office in the greater Madison area. In response, SCFL in 1994 led the formation of the Labor Political Coalition, a grouping of many of SCFL’s larger affiliates and of some unaffiliated unions. The Coalition pooled the human and financial resources of the participating organizations and targeted strategic races. As a result, by the end of the decade, the Dane County Board, the Madison Common Council, and the Madison School Board all had elected solid pro-worker majorities, and the area’s representative in Congress and all but one of Dane County’s representatives in the state legislature had been elected with labor’s support.
Changing the political orientation of the local legislative bodies resulted in Madison and Dane County passing strong living wage ordinances (applied mainly to organizations holding service contracts with the city and the county) in 1999, Madison passing one of the few municipal minimum wage ordinances in the country in 2004, and an end to the contentiousness that had characterized the relationship of Madison Teachers Inc. and the Madison Metropolitan School District throughout most of the 1990s.
A Union City’s Community Outreach
In addition to legislative efforts that reached out to non-union, low wage workers and to the community in general, labor unions also engaged in a wide variety of other efforts designed to extend labor’s reach into the community.
Madison Labor Radio was initiated in the mid-1990s with the UW School for Workers as a 15 minute, biweekly news program about workers and their unions. By early 1998 the program was a half hour and weekly, and continues as such to this day.
Further,
largely through the assistance of the South Central Federation of Labor, a chapter
of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists was started, the South Central Wisconsin
Committee on Occupational Safety and Health was launched, and the Interfaith
Coalition for Worker Justice of South Central Wisconsin (ICWJ) was formed. The
ICWJ created a bilingual Workers Rights Center on Madison’s south side
which has provided invaluable wage claim and other assistance and empowerment
for mainly non-union workers, many of them immigrants from Latin America. Madison
labor activists also partnered with students to place the University of Wisconsin
at the forefront of a nationwide anti-sweatshop movement.
These efforts by the South Central Federation of Labor partly predated and partly coincided with the AFL-CIO’s “Union Cities” initiative to reinvigorate central labor councils. The Union Cities initiative called for greater engagement with the community, more support for organizing, greater involvement in the political and legislative arenas, and more concerted efforts to mobilize union members to assist each others’ collective bargaining efforts as well as labor’s political and legislative agendas. The latter mobilization emphasis has led over a thousand Madison area union activists to sign up for SCFL’s Street Heat and E-Activist mobilization lists.
Madison’s long history of union activism led SCFL to be one of the first labor councils in the country to commit to the AFL-CIO’s Union Cities program. Implementation of that program resulted in SCFL being one of the first 14 labor councils in the country designated a “Union City” by the AFL-CIO at its 2001 Convention.
Proud of their traditions, Madison labor activists head into the 21st century poised to make more history.