Constitutional Crisis Sparks All-Out War for Control of Powerful Union

By Lindsay Beyerstein, AlterNet. Posted March 2, 2009.

UNITE came into the merger as an established, well-staffed union, while HERE was more of a bare bones operation. Years after the merger, HERE continues to outsource core union business to outside contractors close to Wilhelm, to UNITE's immense frustration.

Even within a union that was founded to organize, there are profound disagreements about how best to grow. UNITE is almost exclusively focused on growth and has clashed with HERE about the tradeoffs between getting the best possible wages and benefits for a smaller number of workers vs. accepting a contract that might be slightly less attractive at the outset, but which would establish a toehold in a shop that wouldn't otherwise be unionized at all.

Paul Durrenberger, a professor of anthropology at Penn State University, who studies the labor movement, said that UNITE embraces an organizing model that doesn't sit well with HERE. The idea is for the union to approach the management directly and convince the company not to oppose unionization.

The two approaches don't mesh any better in practice than the do in theory.

One thing is clear, the massive organizing gains envisioned at the beginning have failed to materialize, despite a annual organizing budget of approximately $50 million. UNITE HERE organized an average of roughly 16,000 workers a year between 2005 and 2007, which is far fewer than predicted at the time of the merger and not significantly more than the total number of workers that UNITE and HERE organized each year before the merger. One of the main reasons that UNITE HERE hasn't been more successful is that the organizing climate in the United States has become extremely hostile over the past several years. If the Employee Free Choice Act becomes law, organizing is expected to get a lot easier.

Unions merge all the time. UNITE itself is the product of a 1995 merger between two other garment unions. It's never easy because every union has its own culture and traditions. UNITE HERE made a difficult job impossible by failing to give a single leader control over the whole union. Perhaps the philosophical and organizational hurdles could have been overcome if the union's constitution hadn't made integration between the two groups virtually impossible.

In effect, the two-president system was designed to impede true integration between UNITE and HERE. The architects of the UNITE HERE merger were determined to create a marriage of equals--even though UNITE had significantly fewer members. They didn't want the minority union, UNITE, to be subsumed by the majority, HERE. So, they created a power structure that encouraged each president to tend to "his" side of the union, instead of making decisions that would move former UNITE and HERE locals in the same direction.

Wilhelm now regrets the structure and is proposing a series of democraitzing reforms to share power more widely within the union.  Since the relationship between himself and Raynor has soured, Wilhelm has issued public statements warning about the dangers of dictatorship in unions.

One version of the history of the merger between UNITE and HERE is spelled out in a lawsuit that Raynor filed against Wilhelm in early 2009--the one asking the courts to strike down Wilhelm's resolutions.Wilhelm agrees that the power sharing arrangement was unusual. Years after the merger, at the height of the current strife, Wilhelm characterized the deal as "an unusual governing structure" which "vested immense power" in himself and Raynor.

The deal was ratified by each union individually and approved at a joint convention in the summer of 2004, but those votes were more or less a formality once Raynor and Wilhelm had struck their bargain.

There's widespread agreement that the joint presidency was never intended to be a permanent arrangement.  It was supposed to be a stopgap measure until Wilhelm was eased out. The two presidents wanted to have their cake and eat it, too: One way or the other, the president of UNITE HERE was going to be very powerful.

The suit alleges that Wilhelm assured Raynor that he would retire after 2 or 3 years.

              

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Lindsay Beyerstein is a New York writer blogging at majikthise.typepad.com

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