By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer

Washington, D.C.—The nation’s unions must change their organizing methods and tactics to take advantage of their higher success rates among women workers, two prominent labor scholars say.

Speaking at a Feb. 6 forum at the AFL-CIO, Princeton historian Doro-thy Cobble and Cornell labor studies professor Kate Bronfenbrenner pointed out that strategies that worked to organize female workers in the 1930s and 1940s still work today. Organizing drives are more successful among women workers than among their male counterparts, they added, but unions fail to take advantage of this.

“No union in America makes its priority the targeting of private-sector female clerical workers,” Bronfen-brenner said.

Unions don’t target female workers even though “women are one of the few bright spots in the labor movement,” said Bronfenbrenner, a professor at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “We have a constant increase in proportions of union members who are women and soon women will be a majority of union members.”

Women already hold a majority in unions such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Yet most union organizing campaigns, reflecting the long male dominance of union hierarchies, are geared towards organizing men in male-dominated professions, and a higher proportion of them fail, Bronfenbrenner added.

To change that imbalance in organizing, Bronfenbrenner said unions must use different tactics and emphasize different issues. Winning unions—and those who are organizing female workers—share several approaches, she said. These unions:

• Hire and train organizers who are a match for the unit being targeted.
• Use community pressure to leverage the employer inside and outside the workplace and emphasize personal one-on-contact in both the workplace and the community.
• Build and empower rank-and-file leadership committees with an ownership role in organizing drives.
• Focus on issues that resonate with the workers, not necessarily pay, but respect on the job, job security and issues such as work rules and flexible hours. Many successful unions start planning for bargaining and setting bargaining goals even before winning the organizing drive.
• Become tough on themselves, using benchmarks to determine whether they should continue a campaign or cut their losses.

“We have to make organizing campaigns more aggressive and global, and we have to have organizing committees that are more representative by race and gender,” Bronfenbrenner said. “Unions will fail if they only see women workers as a pressure group to be accommodated.”

Public opinion also contributed to the organizing wins of the 1930s and 1940s, Cobble said.

“The powerful message then was that if the labor movement was strong, so the entire country would be strong,” Cobble said. People viewed labor as “representing the social good.” That message has since been buried under anti-labor laws and business lobbying.

Female union membership rose from 800,000 at the beginning of the 1930s to 3 million by the end of the 1940s, and there were successful, large, female-led strikes, she noted.

These included a nationwide strike in 1947 by 230,000 female telephone operators—members of what became the Communications Workers of America (CWA)—and strikes by the United Electrical Workers (UE) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). UE shut down 78 General Electric and West-inghouse plants in 1946 by demanding equal pay for equal work, Cobble noted.