Unions fight for comeback after split

"What they showed is, if you can do it in Houston, you can do it anywhere," says Professor Milkman.

It's a model the SEIU is holding up as an example of the direction labor should be - and is - heading, and the ways in which realities of globalization can be harnessed rather than fought.

"The world is shrinking so quickly that US cities look more and more alike and major capitals look more and more alike, and there are similar solutions," says Stephen Lerner, who runs the SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaign.

Another innovative tactic: public information campaigns against nonunion Wal-Mart, which have attacked the company's worker policies and forced it to defend its image.

Such successes, though, provide the labor movement only occasional respite from an economy that's increasingly hostile to unionization. Current laws provide little protection to workers, and companies are rarely stopped from intimidating or harassing workers who try to organize.

Despite the studies routinely cited by labor leaders showing that some 50 percent of American workers would join a union if given a chance, the reality is that very few - fewer than 12 percent, including government workers, are unionized. Many Americans doubt labor's relevance. The recent job losses at places like General Motors underscore the threats to jobs more easily moved overseas than janitors or service workers.

At rallies, marches, serenades, and hearings around the US - and in a few far-flung locales like Bosnia and Bahrain - labor leaders this week are making the case that such an environment is an abuse of basic human rights.

In a survey of Chicago-area organizing campaigns, nearly a third of employers fired pro-union workers and just under half threatened to close a work site where workers tried to form unions, according to a pro-labor group, American Rights at Work.

"The average person doesn't know the horror stories that are out there when a worker wants to join a union, doesn't know what employers spend in high-priced legal firms whose job is to build an anti-union environment in the workplace or to bust unions," says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. "The ability to form unions is the key to this nation's middle class, yet the right to come together in a union is a fundamental freedom that has been eroded beyond recognition."

That can be a tough argument to make in the US, where people tend to see work as an economic exchange rather than a human rights issue, says Robert Bruno, a labor expert with the Chicago Labor Education Program of the University of Illinois, but he believes it's an important piece of unions' quest to show relevancy in a 21st century economy. "It's another effort to broaden the question."

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