By DUNSTAN PRIAL, Standard-Times staff writer

Donald Rei, vice president of United Steelworkers Local 1357 in New Bedford, spent three months in Brazil last year, building relationships with unionized metalworkers in South America.
A few months later at the United Steelworkers annual convention in Las Vegas, a cooperative agreement was signed between the American union and its Brazilian counterpart, one that strengthened ties between similar labor organizations on two continents.
"Globalization," explained Mr. Rei, a sheetmetal worker at Allegheny Rodney's plant in the city's South End.
"This is how it has to be. If the companies can go overseas, so can the labor movement. We're trying to cover every front and send the message to corporate America that they can't hide anywhere. Wherever they go, we're going to be there. And the unions are going to be together," he said.
Conventional wisdom holds that the labor movement in the United States is struggling merely to survive. And there's evidence to support that argument.
The number of unionized American workers has declined dramatically in the last half century, to 12.5 percent of the workforce in 2004 from 31.8 percent in 1948, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics.
Furthermore, a rift over nothing less than the future direction of the movement has fractured the nation's largest labor organization, the AFL-CIO.
Nevertheless, local union leaders say they aren't ready to raise the white flag.
To the contrary, they argue, now more than ever action and cooperation are needed to overcome the formidable challenges facing organized labor.
Peter Knowlton, president of the New England Region of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, has seen membership fall to 1,000 from around 3,000 in 1990.
Deindustrialization, or the shift in America from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based one, is the primary cause, he said.
Mill towns across New England have been especially hard hit by the transition, he added, noting that New Bedford and Fall River are textbook examples.

'solidarity'

Experts who study local labor issues cite the loss of the region's good-paying factory jobs for many of the social problems that plague New Bedford and Fall River, problems that include high instances of drug abuse, gang violence and single-parent households.
"Many of the social problems here in New Bedford are related to deindustrialization and job flight," said Kim Wilson, coordinator of UMass Dartmouth's Labor Extension Program.
Factory jobs -- most of them union jobs -- that paid reasonably high wages and provided benefits and security to the workers have been replaced by lower-paying service jobs in retail or food services that offer poor benefits and little security, Ms. Wilson observed.
Compounding the problem is that the national labor movement has been slow to adapt to the seismic shifts in the American economy, she said.
"What we need to deal with as a labor movement is how do we change with the times," she said.
A good start, according to Ms. Wilson, is the example set by the United Steelworkers. "One of our goals has to be to work toward solidarity and not competition with unions in other countries," she said.
In fact, the United Steelworkers have established a local track record of success.
In 1998, as other area manufacturing unions were losing workers by the thousands, local labor leaders successfully organized the Allegheny Rodney plant on East Rodney French Boulevard.
Local 1357 President Bob Giusti said his reasons for fighting for a union at Allegheny Rodney were simple: job security.
"Instead of preaching so much about more benefits and higher wages, what we need to concentrate on is more job security and worker safety," he said.
As consolidation sweeps through American industry, leading to a wave of mergers and acquisitions, companies will seek to cut costs by laying off the most senior, and highest paid employees.
Union membership prevents that from happening, he said.

looking to health

If domestic manufacturing represents a shrinking pool of potential union members, the health care industry represents a growing reservoir, according to Jerry Fishbein, regional vice president for the Service Employees International Union Local 2020.
Health care is one of the fastest growing industries in America and one of the largest employers in Southeastern Massachusetts, he said.
The Services Employees Union currently represents 11,000 health care workers in Massachusetts and 4,000 in the southeastern part of the state, according to Mr. Fishbein.
Yet the union represents employees at just one nursing home in New Bedford and at just one of the three large SouthCoast hospitals.
With considerable room for growth in this region, Mr. Fishbein said, Local 2020 plans to aggressively recruit those potential members.
For his part, Mr. Fishbein likes to view the challenges facing the labor movement from the bottom up, rather than from the top down.
That is, he sees it in human terms -- as a struggle to organize workers who need the strength in numbers afforded by unions that creates the leverage used to obtain decent wages and benefits.
"It's not about the labor movement," he said. "It's about working people who need help."

subhead

Mr. Knowlton was critical of national labor leaders for what he described as their shortsighted approach that only seemed to take into account the needs of dues-paying union workers.
Labor, he said, needs to significantly broaden its perspective by introducing a more "environmentally and economically sustainable approach."
That could be accomplished by labor leaders working with community leaders to develop a long-term strategy that is mutually beneficial to all segments of society in a given region.
In New Bedford, for example, Mr. Knowlton suggested organized labor should be vocal in its support for light and medium manufacturing jobs rather than, say, a casino, the long-term economic benefits of which are questionable, he said.
Labor should also be out in front in the call for renewable sources of energy as a long-term engine for economic development.
He cited the proposed Cape Cod wind farm as an example of an economic development project that would create good-paying jobs and which, arguably at least, benefit the region.
"These are issues the labor movement should be and is slowly getting involved with," said Mr. Knowlton.

Dunstan Prial can be reached at dprial@s-t.com

This story appeared on Page A1 of The Standard-Times on September 4, 2005.