UF Researcher: Florida Could Become Next Frontier For Labor Organizing

August 27, 1997

GAINESVILLE — Florida and other states with large service economies and many part-time employees could become the next great frontier for organizing workers, suggests a University of Florida labor historian.

“Florida, with all its nursing homes, apartment complexes and entertainment centers, is fertile ground for labor organizing,” said Robert Zieger, a UF history professor and author of several books on labor history. “After all, you can’t take a big nursing home and truck it down to Mexico as you can with an auto plant or an electronics factory.”

Zieger’s latest book, a collection of essays he has edited titled “Southern Labor in Transition 1940-1995,” is due out in November and features the role of labor activism in the Sunshine State.

“It’s too easy to write off Florida as conservative and a “right-to-work” state, when Florida is, in many ways, on the cutting edge of the conditions under which Americans work and how they deal with their workplace problems,” he said.

With 80 percent of the American work force in nonmanufacturing jobs, the labor movement may be able to capitalize on the public’s image of the recently striking United Parcel Service workers and project it to waitresses, nurses and vast numbers of other workers in the growing service economy, Zieger said.

“One reason the UPS strike was so successful is that people know their UPS driver works hard,” he said. “We see him or her hustling packages, not even having time to stop for a Coke or a chat. But also working hard are waitresses and other workers who meet the public — of which Florida has so many — giving labor unions public relations opportunities they may not have recognized in the past.”

Another likely target for unions as a result of the UPS strike is the growing number of people who work part time, particularly those at community colleges and universities, who are highly skilled and articulate, Zieger said. UPS’s large share of part-time employees and the vulnerable status of such workers, who typically receive no health insurance, pension or other benefits, was an issue that strongly resonated with the public, he said.

Especially as the economy strengthens and moves closer to full employment, part-timers may see themselves as increasingly deserving of seniority and other job rights, Zieger said.

“This right of workers to their jobs was one of the great struggles of the 1930s that built unions like United Auto Workers,” he said. “The auto companies would just lay everybody off at the end of every production season and six weeks later hire people back without regard to length of service.”

Although Florida traditionally has been inhospitable to unions, the state nonetheless has a rich and lively tradition of labor activism, Zieger said. Workers in the paper mills, steel mills and support industries for the space program were organized, not to mention machinists at Miami-based Eastern airlines, he said. The nation’s first statewide teachers strike happened in Florida in 1968, and the state is a pioneer in firefighters organizing.

Sometimes, Zieger said, it is surprising which workers ultimately do organize.

“In the 1950s, the notion that school teachers would someday organize into one of the most heavily represented groups in the country would have been absurd,” he said. “Yet within 10 years they emerged as one of the nation’s most militant, well-organized and active groups.”

After years of free-fall, unions have begun to recapture public sympathy, Zieger said. Many Americans now feel corporations have made too many gains at the expense of workers, he said.

With new and younger leadership, unions, representing about 20 percent of public employees and 11 percent of private employees, are trying to broaden their support by reaching out to women and minorities, he said.

“Perhaps as this Labor Day approaches, we shouldn’t look to the past and the great struggles of John L. Lewis, but look at ways the labor movement has been trying to reinvent itself and how that is likely to change the future,” he said.