For Lisa Ramos, her battle against “corporate greed” is the moral equivalent of her parents’ youthful struggle against the Vietnam War.
“My mom and dad fought the moral battle during Vietnam. Now it is different. Everything is so uncertain for young people today,” said the 22-year-old Ramos, who just returned to her native Los Angeles after attending the University of Alabama. “With all of this downsizing and corporate greed we have to fight against it, or we won’t have any future.”
Ramos is one of a growing number of young people concerned about the effects the global economy and corporate America will have on their lives. Economic uncertainty and the prospect of competing for low-wage jobs have led some to turn toward a source of support that has been on the wane in America for decades: union membership.
As part of its push to increase membership dramatically, the AFL-CIO is targeting young people with a series of programs designed to re-establish a relationship with youth that has been strained for decades.
“Young people are more prone toward candor and are more likely to consider joining labor unions,” said Ray Abernathy, a senior adviser to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. “It is a group we have not reached out to effectively in some time.”
Following the close of its four-day meeting in Los Angeles, the AFL-CIO organized a two-day “teach-in” on the campus of the University of California-Los Angeles designed to raise student consciousness about the labor movement.
Several hundred students, mixed with a scattering of workers and union organizers from around the country, spent most of the day Friday listening to lectures about the history of the labor movement and reports from AFL-CIO leaders, and attending workshops designed to encourage them to become union organizers.
Like Ramos, many of the students linked their current attraction to the union movement to what they see as corporate excesses.
“Growing up in the ’80s, it seemed like big business was all there was,” said Ramos. “But with what we are seeing now in job losses and poor pay, things look a lot different.”
“The job options are pretty bleak,” said Karla Zombro, a 21-year-old organizer for Local 399 of the Service Employees International Union. “You are looking at McJobs and these McJobs are not McUnion jobs.”
Last summer the AFL-CIO, under Sweeney’s more aggressive leadership, launched a program called “Union Summer” that provides a three-week paid internship during which young people are introduced to the fundamentals of labor organization.
Attached to local unions around the country, between 1,500 and 2,000 people under the age of 30 were sent out to help in recruitment and organization campaigns. The program will be repeated again this summer with indications, the AFL-CIO says, that the message is getting across.
A poll taken in late January and early February for the AFL-CIO found that 74 percent of those questioned said they had limited or not much trust in their employers’ fairness. That figure was up from 62 percent a year ago.
The same survey found that 70 percent felt corporations had too much power, while only 36 percent said unions were too powerful. It also showed that 48 percent of workers between the ages of 18 and 34 would favor joining unions at their workplace if they had the opportunity.
Among these student organizers, there was also a clear link between their union activities and a youthful quest for social justice.
“There have been attacks on minority rights, on the environment, on people of color and working people,” said Anibel Comelo, of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education. “The common thread that runs through all this is corporate power.”
Amy Kwan, 20, a pre-med student at UCLA, said she is anxious to participate in labor organization because immigrants are often those forced into low-paying jobs without benefits. “My mother and father work in these really difficult jobs for long hours and very low pay so that their daughter can become a doctor,” she noted.
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None of this is lost on AFL-CIO officials, who have targeted women as well as recent immigrants in their recruitment drives, with special interest during the teach-in placed on organizing young people.
“We have to encourage young people to get involved in the labor movement,” said Richard Trumka, the AFL-CIO’s newly elected secretary-treasurer. “They help us generate new energy and enthusiasm in the union movement.”