THE president wants you to join a union!"

That was the message labor organizers passed on to garment workers, coal miners and lumbermen during the depths of the Great Depression almost 65 years ago. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal opened the door to a wave of organizing that built the big industrial unions, doubled living standards and transformed U.S. politics for two generations.

Could it happen again? The recent election giving a Los Angeles union the right to represent 74,000 home health-care workers might well have been the dress rehearsal for such a new social drama. It was labor's largest organizing win in more than half a century, a huge shot in the arm to the fast-growing Service Employees International Union, with 1.3 million members nationwide. SEIU President Andrew Stern says this is but the first of many organizing "waves," each one building on the momentum generated by the last.

The union win was impressive in its own right. These home-care workers toil at tens of thousands of work sites across the county. An organizer can't just pass out a factory-gate leaflet and sign up the masses. Instead, SEIU Local 434-B, which organized the workers, conducted a community campaign that won the confidence of the workers, their elderly clients, disabled advocates and local Democratic Party establishments. A heavily immigrant, middle-aged, largely African-American and Latina work force gave the union more than 80 percent of its votes.

In Reuther's mold

It was a remarkable, decade-long effort, led since 1995 by David Rolf, 30, deputy general manager for Local 434-B, who recalls such savvy, hard-driving unionists as Harry Bridges and Walter Reuther; they were just about his age when they built the CIO or Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Right-wing Republicans hate this kind of union politics. They call it a racket, a conspiracy between liberal politicians and militant unions designed to fleece the taxpayer. Last year, they tried and failed to snuff it out with Proposition 226, which would have limited the ability of unions to use membership dues for political education and mobilization.

But this is the kind of virtuous conspiracy that made the New Deal sing. The SEIU victory will raise wages, stabilize the work force and improve the quality of home-health care, thus saving the taxpayers money that would have gone to pay for patient care in expensive nursing homes.

In the 1930s and '40s, industrial workers made cities like Flint and Detroit, Mich., and Akron, Ohio, synonymous with labor's new potency. The unions and their New Deal allies transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of tire builders and auto workers. With millions of other unionized industrial workers, they became the backbone of the nation's middle class. For nearly a generation, every Democratic Party candidate for president launched his campaign with a Labor Day speech in Detroit's Cadillac Square.

Struggling workers

That world of mass-production industry has been replaced by a vast service economy, where tens of millions of low-wage workers struggle. Unlike manufacturing, most of these jobs cannot be shifted to Mexico or Thailand. This is the social battlefield on which the unions fight to construct the nation's new middle class. Already, the SEIU has organized almost 200,000 of these workers.

But union organizing victories do more than raise wages. They help to build a democratic America. The booming U.S. economy does not work for a huge portion of the population. Poverty and income inequality eat at the heart of our democracy because poor, powerless people neither vote nor care. Government is an alien institution, unresponsive to their needs. And joining a union in too many contemporary work places requires something close to a "heroic commitment," complains Mr. Roth.

But it does not have to be that way. During the 1930s, voting-participation rates soared to their 20th-century apogee because working people finally had a voice that made them feel the state was responsive to their needs and aspirations. Roosevelt gave stirring speeches, but union power at the workplace and in the polling booth was key to turning millions of immigrant, alienated workers into active, alert citizens. The nation did it then. We can do it again.

Nelson Lichtenstein, a University of Virginia history professor, is author of "The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor." He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.

Pub Date: 3/11/99