LABOR LEADER
An area president says unions help everyone benefit from a stronger economy.
Along with being president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, Zeph Capo serves as president of the Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation. In that role, he represents a coalition of unions in industries from hotels to trucking when they have similar interests, such as labor standards in public contracts. Contrary to popular belief, unions can have animpact in a right-to-work-state —and they’ re looking to grow.
Q: Unions don’t seem to be a huge presence in Houston. What has membership been like lately?
A: There’s been this idea that Texas doesn’t have unions, and that’s just simply not the case. We are a ‘right-to-work for less’ state, but that doesn’t mean that workers at UPS and the airport and some of our hotels don’t have unions — they have a voice at work. And it’s important for us to support them. Membership has grown over the past few years, despite the fact that labor in general has had a hard time in the United States based primarily on the active intent to keep workers from having a voice. Some of the sectors that we’ve grown in are in the teacher and public employee areas, but also in the building trades. We’ve experienced a tremendous boom in downtown building as the economy has rebounded, and that’s helped organized labor in those skilled workforce areas. I think the big question for us is, “How are all other workers going to benefit from a strengthening economy?” Because too many people who don’t have a method to work together to increase their wages are taken advantage of by those that are sharing in the profits of a rebounding economy. And that’s why we see such negativity out there. It’s anger.
Q: What would you point to as a big victory recently?
A: You can see it in some of the contract fights that have gone on. If you look at the number of apprenticeships that we’ve been able to open up, these are jobs that have a real future to them, have access to health care and retirement while they’re training. Our sheet metal workers, if you go into their training halls, they’re filled up. There’s not any more space, we need to open up more, because there’s work. And every one of those guys who came from a minimum wage job can now afford to pay the rent, pay for their family’s health care.
Q: How is the oil slowdown impacting some of those building trades unions? A: The slowing of the economy around oil, that’s cyclical, and it does take time. We are seeing some of the impacts of the downturn, but there’s a focus in Houston on trying to stay diversified. We learned our lesson from the ’80s that we cannot be dependent solely on oil, so we have to build other sectors like health care. I don’t want to underplay the concern, but we’ve got a vision to look at the long game to ensure that we provide as many opportunities as possible for people to build skills. Because that’s really the issue: Even today, with the slower economy, there still are skilled jobs that are being filled by people from outside Houston because we’re not able to find people with the right skills in our area. So it’s really important that we work with the labor council in our area, working with educational institutions, to ensure that those individuals get those skills necessary to fill those jobs. Q: You worked to help elect Mayor Sylvester Turner. Are you happy with his performance so far? A: The mayor is doing a good job to turn things around, to make headway, and we appreciate his focus on working families and ensuring that all neighborhoods in Houston share in the growth and prosperity of the city. I think that we have some work to do in economic development policies. We have a set of proposals that we are putting forward to the mayor that we would hope that he would embrace and take an active role in implementing, because they really are policies that get to the heart of making a difference for the people he says he wants to make a difference for, and that’s working families, and neighborhoods that haven’t always had the best oppor- tunity to be included in the prosperity of our city.
Q: And that’s wage requirements for tax incentives?
A: Yeah, absolutely, and community benefits, and ensuring that if our tax dollars are going into investments within the city, that we are engaging in fair contracting processes.
Q: I sometimes hear people talk about unions like they’re just obstructionist whiners who want to slow down work. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions of unions out there, and how are you addressing them?
A: I think people should make up their own minds, and if they have questions, reach out to a union leader, reach out to the rank and file members, ask the questions that they have, and dispel some of those myths. Because quite frankly, power concedes nothing without a demand. And a lot of the time, language about combativeness, grievances, what have you, is language with intent to hold power by those who already have it. If you are the 1 percent, if you are the leaders on top of the pile, you have no interest in giving up your power. And the only way for workers to better themselves is to build power that’s focused on their needs and their interests. Too often, we get lost in the Hollywood version of what somebody thinks unions are without really taking a look at what’s happening at the company level. I think that ultimately people in unions want to ensure that their employers are healthy and strong, because the only way they can make an argument for improving things for their members is to improve the bottom line for the company they work for. So I think there’s an interest in making sure we’re collaborative and productive, without taking advantage of people, and without rewards simply going toward shareholders or the CEO, they should be shared with the people who are creating those additional profits. And that is where we see the differences of opinion. Too often, companies today are judged by how big a profit shareholders are getting — shareholders that are completely disassociated from the day-to-day workers of the company. I think that we’ve got to bridge that gap sometimes. It’s important that all sectors of our economy understand one another. Having them out of balance is frankly dangerous. And the overwhelming majority of them, they don’t have an outlet to channel that. And we see that manifest in some of the vitriol in our political process right now. I do believe that if people took a look at what they could get by working together with the workers they see every day, to focus on their own interests, they might have an opportunity to better their lives, and our society would be better off.