Monday, 7/14/97 Program prepares students for work ACTIVISTS:
Participants taught about workers’ right to organize, form
unions
By Angela Paymard Daily Bruin Contributor The AFL-CIO’s Union
Summer program is helping its participants do what most people only
wish they could do: get involved in an extremely
personally-fulfilling career. "A lot of people have anger about the
present existence of their families and communities, but they don’t
know how to make change," said Will Yamada, a fifth-year political
science student. "Union Summer gives these students the opportunity
to demystify the problems for the first time." Offered annually,
Union Summer is a paid internship that reaches 17 cities nationwide
and includes about 1,500 participants. This year’s theme is "The
Right to Organize." "This means activists will be fighting employer
resistance and other obstacles workers face as they try to achieve
dignity and fairness in their workplace," said Anibel Camelo, site
director for the Los Angeles Union Summer group. The group, lodged
in Downtown Los Angeles, goes through a series of training sessions
that include learning how to organize labor, to collectively
bargain, to protest effectively and to make connections for labor
purposes. They participated in their first protest on Saturday.
"Guess? workers are fighting for a better future," said Carla
Naranjo, director for the Guess? campaign. "(The company) has tried
to rob their employees of their due salary, intimidated them with
various tactics so they remain silent and then put an injunction
against our protesting. But we have to fight for those people and
let Guess? know we are not going to stop until they make change."
Every Guess? store in California, from Sacramento to San Diego, was
picketed at 1:30 p.m. Saturday. At 3 p.m., when the protest ended,
all the participants in L.A. County went to Third Street Promenade,
where a Guess? store is planned. "The new labor movement is all
about getting more membership," Yamada said. "Unions in the 1960s
had about 35 percent (of the labor force) membership, and now it’s
down to about 14.5 percent. People shifted away from organizing and
focused on maintaining the membership they had." "Under the new
leadership (of John J. Sweeney at the AFL-CIO), the new labor
movement was initiated to gain strength in unions once again,"
Yamada said. Originally, the present group of twentysomethings was
supposed to have shied away from the labor movement. But with the
present status of the workplace, a shift back to organized labor
may be in the future. "There’s a group of people with a lot of
money and an even larger group of people with very little money,"
Yamada said. "A union organizing helps change that." Union Summer’s
objectives are to show students that there are ways to combat the
problem of socio-economic differences. Even if people don’t get
involved in labor organizing, Camelo hopes that they at least
become aware of worker’s rights. "The AFL-CIO’s goal for Union
Summer is to give students a taste of unions in hopes that they
will come back and have careers in labor organization or at least
keep ties to the union cause," Camelo said. GENEVIEVE LIANG/Daily
Bruin Kurt Edelman speaks to a group of participants in the Union
Summer program, as they learn about bargaining rights and effective
protesting. Previous Daily Bruin Story: Laboratory layoffs under
review