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Bad Connections: How Labor Fails to Communicate
New strategies to build public support and worker involvement

New Labor Forum, Spring, 2005

Published by City University of New York

By Matt Witt

As union membership drops below 13 percent of the work force and as employers and their anti-worker political allies become stronger and more sophisticated, public support has become even more important to the success of most union bargaining, organizing, and political strategies. Yet, it is often difficult to win that support because most members of the voting public see the labor movement as a top-down, special interest.

• In a national poll, voters were asked whether various institutions or individuals have "too little influence" in America today.  More than 80 percent said that "working people" have too little influence, but only 20 percent said "labor unions" do.[1]
• By 2 1/2 to 1, voters said that unions care only about their own members, not about the interests of working people generally.[2]
• Asked who makes decisions in unions, more people said that "the union" does than said that "the members" do.[3]
• In a separate poll, 80 percent of voters said they would trust "public employees in your community" on policy issues related to public services, but that number dropped to 53 percent who would trust "labor unions that represent public employees" --  12 percentage points lower than the Chamber of Commerce.[4]
• While between 43% and 50% of Americans who by law could be represented by a union say they would vote to have one if they could make that choice without employer interference -- which is good news as far as it goes -- 79% (or nearly twice as many) said they would vote for an "employee association."  In focus groups, nonunion working people explained the distinction: many see a "union" as an outside institution that has its own agenda and thrives on conflict, while an "employee association" would be controlled by workers themselves and would be focused on resolving problems rather than creating them.[5]

The easy, comfortable explanation for these perceptions is to blame them on "media bias" that has given the public bad impressions of unions -- and there certainly is some truth to that.  The media regularly tag unions -- worker organizations that fight for Medicare, Social Security or good, secure jobs -- with the same "special interest" label applied to corporate CEOs lobbying for tax loopholes or fewer health and safety regulations.  In contract negotiations, unions are said to "demand," while corporations "offer."  Disagreements are described as "labor disputes," even if it is management that is refusing to invest in the good jobs the community needs.[6]

These patterns are no surprise given the interests of the huge conglomerates that now own most media outlets, the "positive environment" sought by corporate advertisers, and the class background of most editors, producers, and other media decision-makers.[7]

But while the corporate media make an easy and often deserving target for complaints, many of labor's image problems result from unions shooting themselves in the foot by failing to apply proven best practices for communication.  Most union communication with the media and the public -- and even some well intentioned media support work by academics and other allies -- aggravates labor's top-down, special interest image, instead of combating it.  Meanwhile, most unions' efforts to communicate with their own members also fail to apply the labor movement's own research about what members want and respond to.

In every communication with the public, unions make choices -- consciously or not -- about how an issue is framed, who are the spokespeople, what visual images are presented, and what tone is used:

• Is the issue framed to highlight the connection to the broad public interest -- or to emphasize only the particular needs of the union or its members?
• Are workers, family members, and community allies featured as spokespeople, or is all the talking done by union officials who the public perceives as representing narrow, institutional interests?
• Are event locations, signs, slogans, and chants chosen to emphasize the public interest connection, or just union militance?
• Is the tone chosen to show workers taking a stand for the community interest but open to reasonable solutions, or is the union demanding what it wants, or else?

Too often, unions make the wrong choices.

• Union presidents often hold news conferences or issue news releases -- without worker or community spokespeople -- to announce the organization's contract "demands" based on what the members "deserve," with little or no reference to the public interest.

• Leaders brag about how much money they are spending in political races and stand with their arms in the air together with politicians to announce endorsements made because those officeholders have "always been there when labor needed them" -- instead of showing workers and their families supporting elected officials because of their track record in serving all working people.

• Unions announce organizing drives targeting a particular work site, company, or industry -- instead of highlighting workers explaining why they are choosing to form a union for the benefit of the whole community.

• Union picket lines typically feature chants provided by the union that have been around since the 1930s and that provide no public interest message to passersby, television viewers, or radio listeners:  "We are the union, the mighty might union; everywhere we go, people want to know, who we are, so we tell them…" or "The boss says cutback, we say fight back."

• Issues like the freedom of working people to choose to have a union too often are presented in jargon that suggests the public is a bystander with no stake in the outcome: "labor law reform," "leveling the playing field," "card check recognition," or "majority verification."

For years, unions have made choices that helped create the common visual image of collective bargaining in the United States: a table where a union leader in a suit reaches across to shake hands to open bargaining or to complete a settlement with corporate executives, also in suits.  The public can be forgiven for concluding after seeing these images that the bargaining is about the institutional interests of the union and the company -- not about issues that affect working people and their communities.

In 2003, when seven Los Angeles locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) got into a bitter contract fight with major national grocery chains over a number of issues, including proposed cuts in health benefits, the union chose to provide workers with picket signs that read -- not "Affordable Health Care for All" or "Our Community Needs Health Care" -- but "UFCW - Locked Out - Please Respect Our Picket Line."  As a result, every time picketers were seen by the public or shown in newspaper photographs or TV news footage, what amounted to free advertising space that could have helped frame the battle in broader terms was squandered.   The unions' campaign web site was called -- not StandUpForHealthCare -- but SaveOurHealthCare, with "Our" clearly defined on the site as no broader than the particular workers who had been locked out.

After the four-month grocery battle ended with severe concessions, a Los Angeles Times reporter contrasted the unions' communications failures with the successful Justice for Janitors strike in the same city a few years earlier, in which organized involvement by community allies helped make the janitors a symbol of working people standing up to corporate greed.  "The union locals also failed to communicate the issues clearly to supermarket customers, especially in the early stage of the dispute," the Times analysis concluded. "No one's denying that the arcane details of health benefits are difficult to communicate. But the idea that this contract is symptomatic of attempts by employers around the country to push health-care costs onto their employees is easy to grasp. It should have been at the core of the union's campaign to win public sympathy from the start."[8]

As the Times reporter pointed out, effective techniques for featuring worker and community voices and highlighting the public's stake in a union campaign's success are well established and proven.  Perhaps the best known and largest- scale example is the Teamsters national contract campaign and strike at United Parcel Service (UPS) in 1997.  The campaign could have been presented as a standard attempt by union leaders to win increased pay, benefits, and job opportunities for members.  Instead, the union organized months of media events in which workers and their families did the talking, with an emphasis on an issue of particular public appeal: reversing the company's shift of good full-time jobs to lower-paid part-time jobs.[9] "Part-Time America Won't Work" was the campaign's broad public interest theme.  "To the corporations that are creating a throwaway job economy, we say 'enough is enough,'" union leaders told reporters.

By the time UPS realized that it wasn't dealing with labor's traditional and often self-defeating campaign strategy, it was already on the defensive -- and the workers won an agreement to provide 10,000 new full-time jobs, the largest wage hikes in company history, and pension increases of up to 50 percent. After the strike, UPS Vice Chair John Alden told Business Week, "If I had known that it was going to go from negotiating for UPS to negotiating for part-time America, we would've approached it differently."[10]

The Teamsters campaign showed that the public interest framing that connects with voters also inspires most union members, who feel pride that they are fighting for good jobs, quality services, and basic fairness for their communities and future generations and not only for themselves.  At midnight when the strike began, a national wire service reporter went to a picket line close to UPS headquarters in Atlanta and asked a picketer what the work stoppage was about.  After months of activities with a disciplined public interest message, it wasn't surprising that the striker gave the reporter a quote that would help build the broadest public support:  "We're striking for every worker in America. We can't have only low service-industry wages in this country."[11]

The Teamsters involved members in the public-interest campaign by organizing actions at job sites -- something most unions today don't do very often despite polling and focus group research by the AFL-CIO and SEIU showing that worksite communication and other direct, person-to-person contact is the most effective way to communicate with most union members.  A statistic typical of that research showed that union members who were contacted at work about the 2000 election voted by a 43 percent margin for the union-backed candidate for U.S. president, while the margin dropped to 27 percent among those not contacted.[12]

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) delved deeper into these findings by conducting focus groups around the country to ask members what forms of communication work.  The focus group format, with two hours of anonymous discussion led by an outside facilitator, made it possible to get past many members' natural reluctance to admit to union officers, staff, or pollsters that they don't read publications the union takes the trouble to send them.  It also provided an opportunity to test whether members were familiar with specific union publications they had recently been mailed or given at work, and whether they actually knew about events and facts that were prominently featured in those newsletters or magazines.

Although local unions were chosen for this research in part because they had well written and designed publications, virtually none of the randomly selected members were reading what they were mailed, and many did not even remember receiving those materials (even though the union did have their correct addresses).  Major themes that had been repeated in mailed publications for months registered no recognition at all from most members.  In contrast, most members who were being given one- or two-page leaflets by stewards at work were familiar both with those worksite bulletins and some of the content they contained.

It's not hard to see why worksite communication is more effective than mailed material.  It's two-way, allowing both for members' input and questions and for making it clear to them that getting results on the issues they care about depends on their involvement.  It builds ongoing relationships, trust, and unity.  It is done when the timing of campaigns requires it -- not on a rigid and less frequent publications schedule.  And it doesn't require people to read a lot of words -- which fewer and fewer Americans will do.

For all those reasons, few unions would try to organize nonunion workers merely by mailing them a magazine or newsletter every now and then.  Yet, at a time that unions urgently need to organize their own members to get involved in contract campaigns, reach out to nonunion workers, and participate in political action, many let mailed publications carry most of the load.

In focus group discussions, members made clear what kind of communication most are looking for:

• Leaflet length.
• Handed out at work where it's possible to discuss it.
• Conveyed by phone if the nature of the work site makes it impossible to do so in person.
• Based on issues that are clearly relevant to workers.
• Focused on what the member can do to help achieve goals, and not just reporting on what "the union" is doing.

Members had an easy time explaining the difference between relatively lengthy publications mailed to their homes and short leaflets handed to them at work.

• "If it comes in [the mail] and you've got a pile of stuff on your table -- it's in the ads from Kmart…"
• "Not only that, you have union members at work.  Nobody at my home is in the same union as I am, and the kids don't care.  So if there's issues, then I can talk with my coworkers at that time."
• "[When you get a leaflet] you're right there among your coworkers if there's anything standing out for budget or pay increase or layoffs or whatever the matter is.  You have other people to discuss it with."
• "If there is anything in [the magazine], you have to look for it.  It takes time.   Whereas something like [a leaflet], it's quick.  It's easy.  It's there."
• "It just seems like there's an awful lot of expense…that would go into making this [magazine].  And mailing it to send it to people who aren't even going to read it, who don't even look at it…this is almost painful."

Shown a "President's Column" from their union magazine and then an action leaflet that made the same points in much briefer, bulleted format, members almost unanimously chose the leaflet as a more effective way to reach them.  This doesn't mean that most members want their union officials to be invisible.  To the contrary, they like to see their leaders on the front lines, taking part in actions, listening to workers, or educating the public about working family issues.  But they said they want brief information on strategies and results in fighting for affordable health care, secure jobs, or adequate staffing -- not what they see as self promotion or reporting on union process (meetings held, resolutions passed, "accolades" for leaders and staff).

Asked whether web sites or email were effective ways to communicate with them, virtually all of the members -- including white-collar local government workers -- said no, either because they aren't "online" at all or because they only use those tools for personal communication or shopping.

The focus group results obviously don't apply to every single worker in every American work site:  there may be some individual members who particularly like to read or who turn to the Internet for information.  But when a report was presented at a national meeting of SEIU local union leaders, some took the findings to heart and launched reexaminations of their member communications programs.  "For years, I've noticed that our polls show that more than half our members read our magazine, but whenever I go to the buildings where they work and ask them about it, they don't even know what I'm talking about," said the head of a major local union that had a well written, professional looking publication.  "I've always suspected that they weren't reading it, but this really tells me we have to make some changes."

One local that is trying to learn from the members' feedback is SEIU 1199P, which covers health care workers in Pennsylvania.  The local stopped publishing its newsletter of up to 24 pages that had been mailed to homes.  Instead, it is putting the money and staff time into targeted worksite action fliers, leaflet tools and training for internal organizing staff and active members, and a short action bulletin for stewards and other key activists.  "These are challenging changes," 1199P President Tom DeBruin told the leaders of other SEIU locals.  "It requires a steward system strong enough to make sure the information really is distributed and discussed.  It requires staff making a shift from thinking about putting out 'news' and instead thinking of what we put out as campaign leaflets to help people get more involved.  It's harder, but it's what we have to do to build a stronger union."

Tools to help leaders, staff, activists, and allies apply more effective approaches to communication with union members and the public are now shared at an independent web site, TheWorkSite.org, that also has other resources for grassroots organizing of all kinds.  But unions that are attempting to rebuild worksite communication rather than relying on mailed publications, and to change the way they do media work, are a small minority.

Every union is affected by other unions' communications practices.  After all, focus groups consistently show that most members of the public don't distinguish between one union and another, and when one union can't build public support or get its members involved, the ability of the whole labor movement to win is diminished.   But even though some approaches are proven to work better than others, the labor movement has few ways to share that research or conduct training -- and no mechanism for agreeing on standards that everyone commits to live up to.  Whether at the national, state, or local levels, it is rare for unions -- even locals of the same national union -- to systematically plan and coordinate communications strategy in common media markets or in dealing with the same industry or employer.  To the contrary, it is far more common for unions to see each other as communications rivals, with each one competing for media attention for its president or its particular campaigns.

These problems highlight the fact that improving union communications approaches cannot be separated from increasing the overall effectiveness, unity, and strength of the labor movement.  Building stronger worksite organization and member involvement is not just a communications challenge but requires a different approach than many unions take to internal and external organizing, collective bargaining, and political action.  Being tied more closely to community groups and community issues represents not just a communications shift but a different strategy for winning social and economic justice and putting public pressure on big corporations.  The repeated finding in AFL-CIO polls and focus groups that most working Americans don't ever think about unions as a solution to the problems they face cannot be addressed just by better communications but requires strategies to organize on an entirely different scale.  As a participant said at a recent Jobs With Justice communications workshop, "It's great to put workers out front and show that what unions are fighting for is community based, but for it to mean anything it's got to be real."