Labor's New Recruits

At Harvard University this week, a group of economists will hold a conference to explore a phenomenon that has gone largely unremarked in the wider world -- an organizing campaign that has added 2 million workers to the ranks of organized labor in the past four years.

Since the campaign started as a two-state pilot project of the AFL-CIO in 2003, Working America, as it is called, has expanded to a dozen states.

In a briefing for reporters last week, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and Karen Ackerman, the federation's political director, highlighted the contribution of Working America members to the gains that labor-endorsed Democrats made in off-year races in Kentucky and Virginia. Democrats captured the governorship in the former and took over control of the state Senate in the latter.

To another Karen -- Karen Nussbaum, the head of Working America -- the message is clear: Keep expanding the program as the 2008 election draws nearer.

The idea of Working America is fairly simple. Surveys show that large numbers of employees in nonunion plants and offices say they would like to have a union, if one were available. But the workplace organizing task has been much more arduous since President Ronald Reagan broke the strike of air traffic controllers in 1981.

Employers have become more aggressive in resisting unions, and they often have found help in their effort from the Republican-controlled National Labor Relations Board.

As jobs have shifted from the manufacturing sector, where unions were strong, to nonunionized service and high-tech industries, organized labor has struggled -- and lost steadily as a percentage of the workforce.

So instead of organizing at the workplace, Working America reaches out to people in their neighborhoods. On a typical evening, Nussbaum said, she has about 150 paid organizers going door to door in working-class communities, often in the suburbs and exurbs.

Using lists of union members, they skip the households that are already unionized and knock on the doors of their neighbors. The message: We know you're not part of a union, but you probably have the same concerns we do about jobs and schools and health care. We work on all those issues. Would you like to become an individual member of the AFL-CIO?

"Astonishingly," Nussbaum said, "two out of three people we talk to join." And they are immediately recruited to write a letter to a member of Congress or some other official on an issue about which the labor federation is lobbying. "One out of five writes to their congressman that night," she said.

A profile of the Working America members shows that two-thirds of them do not have a college degree, two in five attend church at least weekly and one-third own guns. Half are neither strong Democrats nor strong Republicans.

Dues are voluntary but have totaled more than $1 million, Nussbaum said, with most of the funding for Working America coming from the AFL-CIO treasury.