Labor: what is its future here?

By: EDMOND JACOBY - Staff Writer | Sunday, September 4, 2005 7:37 PM PDT ∞

Today is Labor Day, celebrated since 1882 as a day to honor the American worker.

Originally, it also celebrated the labor movement, which lobbied for its creation. Both purposes seem to have been lost over the last 123 years, and local labor organizations are not celebrating the day with parades and picnics, which are still common in some parts of the country.

But it remains a good time to ask pointed questions about the state of labor, and the state of working people in our midst.

Unemployment is almost as low as it can be ---- 4.4 percent.

That ought to be comforting news to labor, if by that word one means working men and women. When unemployment is low, jobs are supposed to go begging, and those mysterious market forces that economists point to all the time are supposed to operate to drive up the price of work.

But in North County, and in fact almost all over the country, that's not happening: At the low end of the wage scale, where small pay raises make the most difference, pay rates are stuck.

Indeed, according to a new report by the California Budget Project, the growth of the low wage work force and stagnation in low wage rates of compensation has meant that median family income in California is not keeping pace with inflation ---- it dropped $299 from 2003 to 2004 ---- $50,266 to $49,927.

Worse than that, the state's poverty rate is rising. According to the budget project, some 1.4 million Californians work in jobs that pay the minimum wage of $6.75 per hour or very little more.

Marney Cox, chief economist for the San Diego Association of Governments, said that he thinks everybody has more or less the same goal throughout the region: improving the standard of living.

"We generated more than 20,000 jobs from July to July," he said. "The big picture is this, we have very low unemployment."

On the other hand, Cox said, "not everything is rosy here. There is another side of the coin: we're not producing a heck of a lot of middle income jobs. We're producing some at the low end, and some at the high end. It validates the concept of the barbell society."

According to Cox, the region has to invest in middle income jobs if it is to increase them.

"For example, a regional airport is one of the most important contributors to high-paying jobs," he said. "And the Port now is talking about expanding operations and creating a working port. That also would produce high-paying jobs if that works out."

To remain relevant and to encourage middle income growth, Jack Kyser, chief economist of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., said he thinks local cities will have to abandon what he called "the curse of the RCC ---- the retail crazed city."

Kyser said local governments see the expansion of the retail sector as the best way to bring cash into city coffers through local sales taxes.

"But retail jobs are low-wage jobs," Kyser said.

"Local governments need to figure out whether they want to race to the bottom or rebuild the middle class," he said.

How much do you make?

The average hourly wage in the U.S. is about $16.13 per hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics ---- one-third below where the minimum wage would be if it had risen at the same pace as the compensation of corporate chief executives over the last 25 years, according to Boston-based United for a Fair Economy.

Those chief executives earn an average of $11.8 million a year, 431 times the average wage, the Boston group said.

In a sense, San Diego County is a shining star by comparison. Here, the average wage is $20.80, the statistics agency reports ---- its growth over the last quarter century exactly comparable to the growth of CEO compensation.

Likewise, while the U.S. average wage rose from 2003 to 2004 at a rate of about 0.7 percent annually, one fifth of the rate at which the cost of living is going up, in San Diego County wage growth in the same period was about 6.5 percent. That has to be balanced, of course, against energy and housing costs that are among the highest and fastest-growing in the nation.

One might think that this flagging of earning power ---- the government reported last week that Americans' rate of saving is 0.6 percent ---- would mean that the labor movement is growing, as workers look to unions to beef up and protect their incomes. But it hasn't played out that way.

In 2005, the number of jobs held by union members in the private sector is below 9 percent of the total work force, which led to a schism in late July between the AFL-CIO, the labor movement's most visible umbrella organization, and its three largest member unions, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Service Employees International Union and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Union membership is even weaker in San Diego County, where unions claim 100,000 ---- or 7.7 percent ---- members among the county's 1.3 million workers.

After a period of relative quiescence in the late 1990s and early part of this decade, labor strife became sporadically important in San Diego County in 2003 with the onset of a long struggle between grocery chains Albertson's, Ralphs and Vons and the union that represented many of their employees, the food workers' union

Since the end of that strike in February 2004, pickets and work stoppages in San Diego County have involved janitors organized by the service workers' union, hotel employees who were members of the Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees union, and the California Nurses Association won a representation vote at Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas in a contest that has dragged on for two years.

Union opponents recently lost a decertification vote at the same hospital. At Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside, nurses are seeking authorization for a union representation vote now. Researchers at UCSD who were members of the United Professionals and Technical Employees union struck, and members of the Teamsters struck a Coca-Cola bottling plant.

"Even though our international union has split with the AFL-CIO, we still, as a local, affiliate with the central labor council," said Mickey Kasparian, president of San Diego's Local 135 of the food workers' union.

"We are not going to change our working relationship that we have had in San Diego" among the unions that make up the local labor movement, he said. That cooperation provided the 10,000 members of his local support during the long grocery store strike.

"It had been years since we really had to fight for something, and they thought we wouldn't do it," Kasparian said. "Well, we showed that our members would do that. But we are under siege, we are threatened ---- you bet we are."

Kasparian said he believes that the labor movement's existence could be at risk if unions don't continue to band together.

"We knew in the strike that what happened to us would affect everyone," he said. "Now there's a machinists strike at Northwest Airlines, and the airline unions should recognize whatever happens to the machinists will happen to all of them."

Members of other unions are not honoring picket lines set up by the machinists, and the airline is continuing to operate with little disruption in spite of the strike over demands by the airline that the maintenance personnel accept rollbacks of earlier pay hikes, benefits increases and job protections. There are no picket lines in San Diego, but the issue is seen as potentially divisive of the labor movement here as well as elsewhere, weakening other unions in future negotiations with management.

"The strike at Northwest is becoming a nonevent," said Kyser, of the Los Angeles development group.

"That the other unions are not honoring the strike is a huge blow," he said. "But that's not labor's only problem. Look at all the public employee unions. They see a light at the end of the tunnel, and I'm afraid it might just be a train coming their way."

According to Kyser, public disgust over runaway benefits for public employees, such as the pension funding problems in San Diego and San Diego County, may lead voters to try to limit the strength of their public employee unions.

One such opportunity will come up Nov. 8, when one of the measures on which they will vote is Proposition 75, the biggest potential crisis for labor in California, according to Jerry Butkiewicz, secretary-treasurer of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council.

Prop. 75 requires a union to get written consent annually from each of its members to spend any money withheld from their paychecks for political purposes, and is strongly supported by business interests.

"The whole notion is to let the corporations control the political process," Butkiewicz said.

"All politics is local, and everybody understands that," he said. "If we're going to continue to be successful, we're going to have to keep helping each other."

Contact staff writer Edmond Jacoby at (760) 739-6675 or ejacoby@nctimes.com.

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