Victories in the New Labor Movement

By Colin Asher, San Francisco Chronicle. Posted October 24, 2007.

Alicia Hershey is 24 years old and she has had 18 jobs. She has waited tables, served coffee, mixed drinks. She even boxed candy bars. On average, she keeps a job for six months to a year because, "There's just no benefit to staying for a long time in any one position," she says.

Hershey's life is hectic. She juggles marriage, work, volunteering and classes. She attends San Francisco State University full time in the hopes of breaking the cycle of lateral transitions from service position to service position she has been in since entering the work force. But while she works toward graduation and new opportunities, she always has at least one job.

In 2006 she waited tables at a North Beach brewery where she, like her co-workers, worked 16-hour shifts and didn't receive breaks or overtime pay. Her manager grabbed her on the restaurant floor several times and he yelled when she went outside to take smoke breaks. "We all feared him," she says.

She knew that her situation was bad and potentially illegal, but as a veteran of the service industry, she expected little more. She never thought of challenging her employer. Then a co-worker found a labor group, Young Workers United, which was willing to help them. A group of employees, including Hershey, met outside work and formed a committee. Then the committee met with YWU organizers who informed them of California's wage and hour laws. Duly informed, Hershey confronted the man she had feared for the last year. "When people know their rights, it really changes the person," she reflects.

Hershey is part of a growing trend among workers, particularly young blue-collar workers and workers in the service sector, to see employers as interchangeable and job stability as an afterthought. People like Hershey create serious obstacles for labor unions because unions traditionally rely on a static work force during the lengthy process of union recognition and contract negotiation; young, transient workers are part of the reason that unions represent fewer than 6 percent of low-wage workers nationally.

In economic terms, the service sector of the economy produces intangible goods. It includes jobs such as waiting tables, food preparation, retail sales and hospitality. During the 1990s, the service sector increased by 19 million jobs, radically changing the U.S. economy. In cities such as San Francisco, where 73,152 of 427,823 working adults are employed in sales and food service alone, it is a huge part of the economy.

Devising new tactics to organize low-wage and service workers has been a point of contention within labor circles. It added to the crisis that split the AFL-CIO in 2005, when the Service Employees International Union and the Teamsters boycotted the AFL-CIO's 50th anniversary convention and announced the creation of a rival labor federation, Change to Win. Now, two years after the split, Change to Win represents seven international unions and is a viable rival for the AFL-CIO.

Changes in the economy, decline of union representation and turmoil within organized labor have allowed new groups with radical organizing strategies to develop and take the place of traditional labor organizing in some areas.

"Unions are designed for a different economy," Sara Flocks says. Flocks is the co-founder of Young Workers United, the group that assisted Hershey. YWU is a workers center, a group designed to organize people like Hershey who work in the service sector, in positions typified by low-wages and high turnover. Workers centers, which include the Restaurant Opportunity Center in New York City and the Garment Workers Center in Los Angeles, are a growing phenomenon.

There were as few as 25 workers centers nationwide in the 1990s and there are more than 140 now, their growing numbers mirroring the growth of the service sector.

Flocks first conceived of a group like YWU in 2000 while working for the United Farm Workers Union. In her off-time, she organized with youth groups against California's Prop. 21, a state proposition that increased criminal penalties for juvenile offenders and lowered the age at which children could be tried as adults for some crimes. The movement against the proposition included dozens of youth and community groups that promoted concerts, held sit-ins at local businesses, organized street protests, phone-banked and canvassed door-to-door.

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Colin Asher is a San Francisco-based writer.