By Neal Pollack
Bynum told everyone to go home, but the workers said they wanted to vote. “You don’t have to vote,” he replied. “You shouldn’t be troubled with this duty.”
“He knew we were going to go against the contract,” said Robert Lee Wilson Jr., who’s worked for the last two decades at a laundry seven blocks south of the union’s office. “He knew we didn’t want a 25-cent raise. We’re paying those guys $23 a month for nothing. We’re getting screwed, and we might as well try to get something better. We’re gonna stand up on our feet.”
“UNITE makes us try to look like the bad guy,” says Local 46’s Marshall Bynum. “In 20 years, we’ve never attacked another union regardless of their affiliation. We feel like it’s a hands-off system. We’re all in the same boat, so to speak. Why would you attack another guy, with no provocation?
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When UNITE held its first convention almost four years ago, its leaders pledged to pursue the social agenda of its predecessors. Since then, the union, affiliated with the AFL-CIO, has asked its members to actively support prolabor politicians and to push for political initiatives that would improve the lot of working people as a whole, such as a higher minimum wage and national health insurance. True to their democratic ideals, union members elect their national president, as well as the officers of local chapters. UNITE provides ESL classes for Spanish-speaking members and seminars on how to become a union organizer. The goal, it says, is to become ever more inclusive. “We are going to keep organizing workers,” says research director Joe Costigan. “That’s what we’re all about.”
Local 46, on the other hand, is a small independent trade union, one of dozens nationwide that operate independently of the AFL-CIO. These unions are typically run like family businesses, with a large percentage of their membership dues going to pay for the salaries and perks of union officers. Most were formed during the 1940s and ’50s, the heyday of labor’s political might. Tom Geoghegan believes many employers welcomed the independents because they feared the alternative. “Local 46 comes out of a tradition of employer-manipulated sweetheart labor,” he says. “It was put up as a kind of Potemkin village to keep unions from coming into certain kinds of industries. There were lots of these ‘independent’ unions that popped up. They were attractive to employers. I’m not saying that the employers set this one up, but they didn’t mind having it around and they would prefer it to a stronger AFL-CIO union.”
Since then, the union appears to have cleaned up its act. There haven’t been any documented cases of embezzlement for almost seven years, and Local 46, in particular, has made an effort to clear the decks, promoting Marshall Bynum to president and hiring a raft of new trustees unassociated with the previous incidents of corruption. But when UNITE organizers began talking to laundry workers, they found some fundamental problems remained. They heard horror stories about retired members who were receiving pensions of just $150 a month after 30 years on the job. One woman was collecting $107 a month after 25 years. Another was getting $65 a month after 18 years.
