Union ranks drop again

Teaming up with employers, Connecticut metalworkers earlier this month sued their union counterparts in carpentry on claims the latter group was improperly siphoning off work.

But in the coming year, don”™t expect unions and employers to sit on the same side of the negotiating table or courtroom aisle.

Organized labor in Connecticut won its biggest victory in years, after a judge agreed with workers at Pratt & Whitney who said their contracts prevented the company from moving their jobs in East Hartford and Cheshire to another location, without a good-faith effort to keep them at their respective sites. The judge ordered United Technologies Corp. to keep the plants operating this year until the current labor contract expires. UTC had rejected $100 million in incentives from the state to keep the plants open, saying they were still a money-losing proposition on those terms.

Attorneys speculated that more labor unions will press for similar terms in any upcoming negotiations, creating a conundrum for corporations and possibly reducing their enthusiasm for maintaining jobs in Connecticut.

The lawsuit was the most prominent union action in Connecticut since 2006, the year when workers at Stratford-based Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. went on strike for six weeks. The strike subsequently landed the UTC division a rebuke from Department of Defense auditors who said quality suffered as Sikorsky worked to bring its factory floors back on line. In the wake of the strike, Sikorsky added 2,000 jobs at its booming Stratford plant, even while diversifying its production and maintenance capabilities by opening or acquiring facilities in other locales.

 

Earlier this month, unions representing metalworkers teamed with several companies, including Bethel Steel, to sue the New England Regional Council of Carpenters, charging them with muscling in on contracts that would otherwise go to metalworkers.
The U.S. Department of Labor estimates 265,000 Connecticut workers were members of unions in recession racked 2009, a drop of 10,000 from 2008 or 3.6 percent.

 

Measured as a percentage of the total work force, however, union membership rose to 17.3 percent of the work force compared with 16.9 percent in 2008, a possible sign that unions were better able to protect their members”™ jobs as employers spent much of the year executing layoffs.

Still, Connecticut”™s Northeast manufacturing doppelganger Massachusetts saw its own union ranks swell by 16,000 members in 2009; New York”™s numbers similarly dropped by 10,000 members, but of a union base seven times the size that of Connecticut.?Nationally, unions lost 771,000 members, which the Labor Department attributed largely to the effect of the recession on overall jobs.

New York remains the country”™s stronghold of organized labor, with one of every four workers a union member, with New Jersey fifth and Connecticut ninth nationally. At the opposite end of the spectrum, North Carolina had just 3 percent of their workers belonging to unions.

Labor issues will likely take center stage in the mid-term elections. Last week, Senate Republicans blocked President Obama”™s nomination of a labor lawyer to serve on the National Labor Relations Board, with GOP senators reportedly voicing concerns Craig Becker could attempt to implement a form of “card check” without authorizing legislation from Congress.

Card check has been among the biggest hot-button issues in labor policy the past few years, with the goal of allowing employees to vote on whether to unionize on a ballot card that would be public. Supporters say it would make it easier for workers to join unions than the current secret ballot process endorsed by NLRB; opponents such as the Connecticut Business & Industry Association argue the public nature of the process would result in union organizers pressuring workers who might otherwise cast a nay vote.