toledoblade.com --

The seven labor organizations that severed ties with the AFL-CIO last year have made strides toward adding tens of thousands of union members, including 200 drivers in northwest Ohio and 5,000 janitors in Houston.

But Change to Win's executive director says the group has not determined whether those additions will be enough to offset the nationwide membership losses incurred in the last year by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Service Employees International Union, United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, and other unions that formed the federation.

That predicament is center stage this Labor Day as layoffs, factory shutdowns, bankruptcies, and other corporate cutbacks continue affecting the long-shrinking ranks of union members nationwide.

Unions that make up Change to Win and other labor organizations, including the United Auto Workers, are trying to reverse the trend.

"We believe we need to ratchet up the organizing effort," said Greg Tarpinian, Change to Win's executive director.

That battle cry is spurring that group and the AFL-CIO, which now are competing for workers in what is the biggest organizing impetus in several decades, said Charles Craver, professor of labor and employment law at George Washington University Law School.

"I think finally that organized labor is trying to do something," he said. "The question is, is it too late?"

Nationwide, union membership has fallen from 20 percent of those employed in 1983, the first year comparable information was collected, to 12.5 percent last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Ohio's union membership rate went up between 2004 and 2005 for the first time in a few years, while Michigan's declined and the nation's remained stable.

The percentage of working Ohioans in labor unions last year was 16 percent, up from 15 percent in 2004, and Michigan's rate fell a percentage point to 20.5 percent last year, according to the bureau.

Unions are suffering from prior successes with securing raise and benefit increases, which have priced their workers way ahead of nonunion competitors globally, Mr. Craver said.

Companies with U.S. operations answered by investing in more automated equipment or moving work overseas, he said.

"When their labor costs got too high, they looked for ways to improve them with technology and outsourcing," Mr. Craver said.

Nonunion workers are afraid becoming organized will anger employers and spur more layoffs, said Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

The SEIU and UFCW are among unions that have done a good job of adding members, he said. The Steelworkers and UAW, however, mostly are trying to preserve conditions for existing members, as their ranks are shrinking, giving them less money to use on organizing, he said.

Nearly 1,200 Toledo Powertrain workers will be dropped from the UAW's active ranks this year after taking retirement offers and buyouts from General Motors Corp.

The UAW's Ohio office in Maumee continues to try organizing work forces outside of the automakers' traditional assembly and parts plants.

So far this year, the UAW has signed up more than 2,200 workers in northwest Ohio alone, including more than 1,000 at factories supplying parts to the Toledo Jeep Assembly complex and 400 at the Lucas County Sheriff's Office, organizer Sarah Laws said.

The UAW also is working to organize 150 clerks, detention workers, and other employees at the Lucas County Juvenile Justice Center, Ms. Laws said.

Locally, the union represents health-care workers at St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center in Toledo and librarians and school employees through the Toledo Association of Administrative Personnel, she said.

Other unions are expanding beyond their traditional sectors.

Teamsters Local 20 has lost members as food processors and other manufacturers have cut back, but about 200 were added this year at cement companies and terminals for delivery service firm DHL, said Bill Lichtenwald, president.

"We've been fairly successful, but it's really been in the construction and service industries," he said.

Bankers, academics, insurance brokers, and other professionals are ripe fields for unions to organize, but they need to call themselves "associations" to avoid blue-collar stigmas with the name union, said Mr. Craver, the law professor.

Organizing Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other retailers is necessary for the union movement's survival, Mr. Craver said. Wal-Mart employs nearly 1 percent of the U.S. workforce, he noted.

UFCW Local 789 in South St. Paul, Minn., is going after Target Corp., but turnover is the biggest hurdle in organizing a retailer, said Jenny Shegos, organizer.

"A lot of people just get fed up and they leave," she said.

A Change to Win survey released last week shows that 68 percent of American workers believe conditions would improve if workers joined unions.

The only major union still headquartered in northwest Ohio, Toledo's Farm Labor Organizing Committee, reached an accord two years ago with Mt. Olive Pickle Co. and the North Carolina Growers Association that initially increased membership by 8,000 people.

The migrant workers' union could expand the agreement to growers to Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, adding 10,000 members for starters, said Baldemar Velasquez, FLOC's founder and president.

"There's a lot of possibility for expanding the agreement down here," Mr. Velasquez said.

Contact Julie M. McKinnon at: jmckinnon@theblade.com or 419-724-6087.

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