Leaders discuss state of unions

Right to work, NAFTA prove to be hot issues

One of the first things Kenny Yuko does in the morning is put his union book in his pocket.

“It helps me to remember what I’m fighting for,” he said.

Yuko, D-Richmond Heights, is now the Ohio Senate Minority Leader. But before getting into politics he was a union organizer.

Unions, he said, help make for a more viable workforce, one that’s more willing to give effort.

“We’re not stupid,” he said. “We know we have to produce.” Gaining or losing? The percentage of Ohio workers with union membership increased slightly — 0.1 percent— from 2015 to 2016 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The 12.4 percent of Ohio workers with union membership is above the 10.7 percent national average, but a 0.4 percent decrease from 2015.

Ohio’s slight increase in 2016 is a blip on what has been mostly a downward trend over the past few decades. In 1996, 19.5 percent of Ohio’s workers were union members. In 2006, 14.2 percent had union membership.

“The national drop in union membership is the direct result of continued attacks on working people across this country,” Ohio AFL-CIO President Tim Burga said in a statement following the release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ data early this year. “The relative stability of our Ohio membership is attributable to the fact we have been successful in fending off the worst of these attacks — attacks that political extremists continue to push.”

Burga was referring to efforts like “right-to-work” laws, which now exist in 28 states. These laws bar unions and employers from requiring all workers in a bargaining union to pay dues.

Critics argue these laws weaken the power of organized labor.

In February, state Rep. John Becker, RUnion Township, introduced a right-to-work bill that would allow public sector workers to optout of union representation and dues.

In a March opinion column for the Cincinnati Enquirer, he said it’s about “freedom.”

“House Bill 53 is simply about eliminating the requirement for public-sector employees to join a union, pay union fees or be fired,” Becker wrote. “Furthermore, it eliminates the requirement for unions to represent employees who are not members or pay union fees. ‘Freeloaders’ are eliminated in the bill.”

Yuko called right-towork laws a losing proposition.

“We’ve said for years and year it’s really the right to work for less,” Yuko said.

The Ohio AFL-CIO argues right-to-work laws are deceptive and “increase profits for CEOs and hurt efforts to restore balance” to the economy.

Becker’s bill was referred to the House’s finance committee Feb. 14.

Yuko is confident that Ohioans see the value of labor unions, pointing to voters’ overwhelming repeal of Senate Bill 5 in 2011.

That bill — signed into law by then first-year Gov. John Kasich — would have significantly restricted collective bargaining rights for public union employees. Opponents circulated petitions to put a veto referendum on the November ballot. Nearly 62 percent of voters elected to repeal the bill. NAFTA The presidential election of 2016 set the stage for a huge change in the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, the 1994 trade agreement covering the United States, Mexico and Canada.

Union leaders and their supporters in Congress are awaiting the outcome of President Trump’s efforts to renegotiate NAFTA.

For years union leaders have argued the trade agreement has hurt organized labor and American workers as a whole, said Harry Williamson, president of the Lorain County AFL-CIO and the Lorain County Labor Agency.

“President Trump is not, for the most part, labor friendly or a big supporter of the unions,” Williamson said. “The one thing we will agree with him on is that NAFTA is no good.”

Rep. Marcy Kaptur and Sen. Sherrod Brown both are Democrats who agreed.

Kaptur, a Toledo Democrat whose 9th House district includes Lorain, in August outlined her priorities for the talks. Brown has authored a fourpoint plan to renegotiate NAFTA.

In northern Ohio, workers cite trade in general and NAFTA in particular “as a top reason they supported Trump’s candidacy,” Kaptur wrote in a guest column in the Guardian. She noted in the 2016 election, “Trump flipped two historically Democratic counties” and almost won Lorain County.

“It is no coincidence that his message of ripping up NAFTA resonated with workers hardest hit by the export of hundreds of thousands of American jobs,” Kaptur said.

Williamson agreed, as did Jim Slone, chairman of the United Auto Workers Community Action Program, known as the CAP Council.

“They called it a free trade agreement. We think it should have been a fair trade agreement,” Slone said. “If our new president wants to renegotiate NAFTA, he has to negotiate it to make it fair for everyone.”

American economy

Apart from trade agreements and legislation, union and nonunion workers should remember how the nation grew because of their predecessors, the local leaders said.

“It was American workers who laid down the railroad tracks that move people and products across the country,” Brown said in this year’s Labor Day statement. “They toiled in mines, digging the coal that would power our industrial revolution. They forged the steel that built our bridges and skyscrapers. They worked shop floors, building the cars, trucks and planes that would take our country to new heights.”

Companies moved jobs across America’s borders or overseas and it became easy to see how communities have suffered, said Slone, an Elyria resident.

He pointed to two local examples: East 28th Street in Lorain, where small businesses for years benefited from steelworkers at the mills across the street; and Taylor Street in Elyria, where years ago it was possible to visit and land a job almost immediately.

Now those companies are gone from Elyria and hurting in Lorain, he said,

and the cities and residents are hurting too.

“It goes hand in hand: When you get rid of labor, you get rid of the middle class,” Slone said.

Contemporary unions

Union members include steelworkers, autoworkers, miners, communications workers, nurses, service workers and others.

“These are all proud people who want a chance to make a good living for their family,” Slone said.

People have a misperception that unions press for too much pay, Slone and Williamson said.

But Japanese car companies have built factories in the United States and pay their workers almost as much as United Auto Workers make, in part to keep unions out, Slone said. When union wages go up, nonunion wages also tend to rise across various industries, the union leaders said.

“People think labor unions demand, demand, demand,” Williamson said. “We want to cooperate. We want to bring in business, we want our communities to succeed.”

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics