How Unions Can Still Win Big.

• Author: McAlevey, Jane
• Position: BOOK EXCERPT

It's October 20, 2018, and it's louder than an orchestra or rock concert on the 2200 block of Broadway in downtown Oakland, California. Irma Perez is working her bullhorn like a trumpet virtuoso. She's standing in the middle of hundreds of people who've made plastic buckets into drums, their hands holding perfect rhythm as they harmonize their chant: "Hey hey, ho ho--Mar-ri-ott has got to go!"

Perez has the kind of energy that can motivate everyone on the picket line for days on end, dancing as she's chanting to remind the workers and their supporters that they are fighting for a better life, for the freedom from having to work two full-time jobs. Every picket sign has the strike slogan and the workers' demand: "ONE JOB SHOULD BE ENOUGH!"

Born and raised in Guanajuato, Mexico, Perez is a mother of three. Her daughter, Carolina, is thirty years old. Her second child, Abraham, is twenty-eight. David is the youngest; he's twenty-six. But Perez was so youthful that you'd never guess that she's fifty-two.

I sat down with her in a cafe a block away from the picket line at the Oakland Marriott. With a deep smile, she reached for her phone to show me pictures of her children and started talking about her four grandchildren. Two live in Mexico, and two live near her in the East Bay, in California.

"Near her" changed recently, because Perez--like so many other workers--lost the first house she owned during the housing crisis brought on by the unregulated financial industry in 2008. She was forced out of a nice neighborhood in Berkeley and now lives with her brother, sister-in-law, and their two kids near the towering Oakland Coliseum, where schools, access to public transit, and all available services drop precipitously in quality.

Perez's day job is at the Marriott-owned Courtyard hotel in Oakland. She's been working there for seventeen years. Because she's such a natural leader among her peers, her union, UNITE HERE, the primary hotel and hospitality workers' union in the United States, leveraged a contract provision known as union leave. This provision allows people like Perez to work with the union for a specified period, generally with the union reimbursing the employer. Workers can then stay on the company payroll--accruing seniority and hours toward their benefits (especially retirement)--while having a chance to develop their leadership capacity by doing hands-on full-time union activities.

Perez has been serving as the lead union...