When people in power behave badly, you don’t tend to change their behavior by asking nicely, points out Jeff Fiedler, a departmental president at the AFL-CIO.

That’s why unions exist and why they have to fight, Fiedler said at AFT Healthcare’s organizing conference in September.

However, there’s a myth that professional workers are more reluctant than their blue-collar peers to stand up to employers. Do they shrink from conflict? Are they too polite?

No, said Fiedler. At core, every worker has the same fears. It’s the union’s duty to promote a culture of victory.

To build confidence, unionists need to arm themselves with facts about their employers, he said. Become shareholders; research public filings on the Internet; ask for a list of major vendors and look for conflicts of interest.

“Love the facts,” Fiedler said. “Don’t exaggerate even an iota. You don’t have to. The facts are bad enough.”

And don’t investigate your institution’s trustees only when you’re about to strike, he added. Do it all the time. And pick a big fight over a small one—for the same amount of work, you’ll get more attention and greater success.

Carrying the fight to Washington
U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) brought AFT organizers to their feet at the conference by urging them to take the cause of workers to the polls this fall. He called it a critical moment in history when CEOs put $40 million in the bank while airline workers have to eat 40 percent pay cuts.

“Companies are taking the productivity [increases] for the shareholders and the officers of the corporations,” he said, and they don’t see the need to share those gains with the people who produced them. As a result, family finances are strapped.

“The economy is about more than just interest rates. It’s about the security of your family,” Miller said. “The American Dream isn’t that much: a good job, decent wages and working conditions, an education for their kids. They’d like to have a home. But it isn’t working for most Americans.”

He urged AFT members to continue pushing in Congress for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would guarantee workers the right to join unions.

Taking a page from the flight attendants
Even in industries that are faring terribly these days, unions don’t have to sit still for an assault on their wages, noted David Borer, general counsel for the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. He told conference-goers about successes using his union’s CHAOS (Create Havoc Around Our System) strategy of sudden strikes by small groups of flight attendants. In 1993, 24 flight attendants struck seven Alaska Airlines flights without warning, winning a new contract that provided top industry pay. Later, the mere threat of CHAOS brought other airlines to settlement.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, nearly a third of the nation’s passenger air fleet has been grounded, Borer said. Airlines have made drastic cuts, and, left to their own devices, they would have cut wages even more. Unions helped their members survive to fight another day.

In contrast, the healthcare industry is growing, pointed out AFT Healthcare director Mary MacDonald. In fact, she cited Business Week, which hails healthcare as the engine driving our nation’s economy. Organizing workers in such a vibrant industry is exciting, added Helen Lee, organizing director for the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals.

Labor scholar Ellen Dannin advocated replacing a value system of greed and selfish individualism with the values of social justice.

For starters, she said, unions should push for the values embodied in the National Labor Relations Act. If you live in an “at-will” state—where employees can be fired for a good reason, a bad reason or no reason at all—put a proposition on your state ballot to require that employees be fired only for just cause. Or, negotiate “just cause” into your contract. “If you get nothing else in your contract,” she said, “that’s huge.” Most employees already believe, often wrongly, that they have “just cause” rights.

“Exploit these things,” she said. “Make them as big as you can.”