Labor's Return.

• Position: Unions see a flurry of organizing effort

In the last two decades, corporate power seemed unstoppable, and workers felt hopelessly outmatched. But now the labor movement is finally gathering strength. It is a thrilling moment for organizers. From the textile plants and slaughterhouses of the South to the posh offices of the American Medical Association (AMA), unions are taking hold.

When workers at the nation's largest textile plant, Fieldcrest Cannon in Kannapolis, North Carolina, voted to unionize in June, they broke a ninety-three-year anti-union streak.

IBP, one of the world's largest producers of beef and pork products, is hostile to organized labor. But at its manufacturing plant in Wallula, Washington, a 90 percent immigrant work force held a successful strike, and the workers won approval for their union in early June.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) just finished its biggest organizing drive in fifty years, signing up some 75,000 home health care workers in Los Angeles, most of them immigrants.

And the AMA announced recently that it is forming a union to help fight the growing power of managed care companies.

Across the nation, the number of union members rose for the first time in five years, from 16.1 million in 1997 to 16.2 million in 1998, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

It's just a beginning--even as union membership edges up, the percentage of the work force that is unionized fell slightly from 1997 to 1998. Part of the problem is the aggressiveness of management, and part of it is the change in the U.S. economy.

"We continue to lose manufacturing jobs at a rate of about 5,000 a year," says economist Dean Baker of the Preamble Center. "The centers of the economy that are most heavily unionized are where we're losing jobs most rapidly."

Still, union organizers should have an easy case to make. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union members made $659 per week on average last year, compared with $499 per week earned by nonunion workers.

"If you look at parts of the country where there are more unions versus parts where there are fewer, you'll notice a general wage rate that's increased because the good union jobs exist," says Martha Gruelle, an editor at Labor Notes. "And unions have the potential to, and often do, speak out about fairness for everyone."

Organizing drives by the AFL-CIO and the SEIU that target service-sector employees, immigrants, and others who have not traditionally been unionized are breathing new life into the...