The merger of the 180,000-member UNITE with the 260,000-member HERE, announced in February, was adopted unanimously by the more than 2,500 delegates of both unions. The membership of the new union also includes some 400,000 retirees.

At the UNITE HERE convention, and at the separate gatherings that preceded it, union officers emphasized their organizing efforts over the past year.

Delegates included four workers from Point Blank Body Armor in South Florida, who recently won a union contract. Sadius Isma, standing on stage with three other UNITE members from Point Blank, described their two-year battle to organize the union. In the course of the struggle workers went on strike, fought firings of union supporters, and won favorable National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rulings that forced the company to bring back the fired workers with back pay and aided the union-organizing drive.

Workers who had won a strike for union recognition at Sterling Laundry in Washington, D.C. were introduced to the convention, as were unionists who had been involved in organizing drives at Angelica Laundry; Al Phillips dry cleaning service in Las Vegas, Nevada; and H&M warehouses in New York and New Jersey.

A delegate from Ontario, Canada, recounted how he and others recently succeeded in winning a union drive at the last unorganized Hollander Home Fashions plant.

Bruce Raynor, president of UNITE, was elected the new general president of UNITE HERE. He pledged to commit some 50 percent of the union’s budget to organizing, and to renew efforts to organize the CINTAS laundry and uniform giant, H&M retail stores, and California Indian gaming facilities. Raynor said that the 6,000 members of HERE Local 6 in New York recently voted to begin an assessment for their 2006 strike fund.

Officials and delegates reported on the contract negotiations at nine Los Angeles hotels, which have been at an impasse over the union’s demand for a 2006 contract expiration date that would line up the California workers’ contract deadline with those in 10 other cities.

Raynor and John Wilhelm, HERE president who now serves as president of the hospitality industries division, are both leaders of the “New Unity Partnership” (NUP) within the AFL-CIO. The NUP, whose leaders call for merging many of the 60 existing unions into larger organizations, is critical of AFL-CIO president John Sweeney for not delivering on promises to organize more workers. Other NUP leaders—Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which organizes cleaners, janitors, hospital workers, and others; Doug McCarron, president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters; and Terry O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers International Union—addressed the convention. McCarran led the carpenters union out of the AFL-CIO in March 2001.

The merger of UNITE and HERE was promoted by Raynor, Wilhelm, and other union officials as a measure that would strengthen the organization by increasing its numbers, and would codify the recent collaboration over union matters between laundry workers and those at hotels and restaurants. The 2003 UNITE convention had taken steps to drop the union’s focus on garment and textile workers, and voted to rename the union into the word UNITE, which previously had stood for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees.

Such mergers, which dilute the industry-specific character of the unions—a gain of the battles to build the industrial unions in the 1930s—have been an accelerating trend in the labor movement for some time. With a shrinking membership, union officials seek mergers as a way to increase the dues base and combine staffs. At the same time, struggles like those at Point Blank pull in the other direction.

Well-known Democratic Party figures were featured speakers, including Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy and Illinois candidate for U.S. Senate Barack Obama. They urged delegates to turn out the vote for the Democrats in November. North Carolina senator John Edwards, who has been tapped by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry as his running mate, addressed the convention by closed-circuit television.  
 
 
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