Chicago, IL
In 1986, the AFL-CIO adopted the Organizing Responsibility Procedures, a mediation and arbitration process to resolve competing organizing claims by AFL-CIO national unions and end wasteful competition in an era when a substantial majority of workers remain unorganized. The Executive Council also established criteria for Impartial Umpires to apply in deciding these disputes in its February 1988 statement, Implementing Article XXI of the AFL-CIO Constitution. The labor movement's renewed commitment to organizing, and the AFL-CIO's initiatives to promote strategic and coordinated organizing campaigns by affiliates, now warrant modification of those criteria to accommodate new approaches and circumstances.
In recent years, unions have turned increasingly to strategic organizing campaigns, well-researched and ambitious efforts to organize industries or occupations in particular geographic areas. Experience demonstrates that such campaigns can achieve substantial organizing gains much more effectively and quickly than ad hoc and reactive organizing activity.
The Executive Council will revise its Article XXI implementation statement to instruct Impartial Umpires to accord due consideration to strategic organizing campaigns that satisfy certain specified criteria.
In situations where a national union is actively pursuing a strategic organizing campaign in a particular industry, occupation or geographic area, the Umpire will be able to take that campaign into account in evaluating competing organizing efforts among an employee group that is encompassed by the campaign, even if the union waging that campaign has not yet undertaken direct organizing among that employee group.
For example, assume one union has set out to organize each of an employer's five retail stores in a particular city. This union has won an NLRB election at two stores; is actively organizing two other stores; and has a strategy to organize the fifth but has not yet actually begun its campaign there. A second union then targets the fifth store alone, sending in organizers who solicit authorization cards. The first union invokes Article XXI and seeks an exclusivity award for the fifth store. Under current Article XXI standards, only the second union may be found to have begun a full-fledged drive there significantly before the first union; under a revised standard, the first union could raise its own "significantly before" claim at that store in reliance upon its overall five-store campaign, and the Impartial Umpire would then weigh those competing arguments.
Under this proposal, the Impartial Umpire's award would still govern only the unions' organizing rights regarding the particular "employee group in question." This change would not accord recognition to pure jurisdictional claims or to efforts to assert unreasonable organizing dominion, nor would it inherently favor either single-target or broader organizing campaigns. Rather, it would simply expand the Impartial Umpire's field of consideration in cases in which both kinds of campaigns are underway.