Gladiola Campos, an effervescent sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, found herself outside a Los Angeles hotel the other day handing leaflets to a busload of Japanese tourists. "Konnichi-wa," she greeted each one with a little bow. "Good day." The flyers urged the visitors to boycott the New Otani Hotel, which has been fighting a three-year union-organizing effort by its mostly Latino employees. And to reinforce the message, as soon as the tour bus closed its door, Campos and four other college students hopped inside a van and tailed it along the freeway. As the bewildered tourists emerged at Universal City, their agitated guide scowling and gesticulating, Campos and her friends swarmed around them, shouting, "Boycott! Boycott!"
It was impolite--and that was the point. "I'm pumped up," said Campos as she returned to the hotel to join a noisy picket line. "I feel ready to take on the world. I'm finally doing something instead of just talking." What Campos and more than 1,000 participants have done is sign on to the AFL-CIO's "Union Summer," a program designed to attract campus and community activists and channel their thirst for social justice into the long-moribund labor movement. Modeling itself on "Freedom Summer," the 1964 effort by 1,000 college students to register blacks in Mississippi, Union Summer hopes to galvanize a generation uneasy about its economic prospects into fighting for "workplace rights."
"In the '60s it was an effort to achieve racial justice," says the program's director, Andrew Levin. "In the '90s the great issue is economic inequality--the growing disparity of wealth, wage stagnation, layoffs and an economy that creates jobs but not well-paying ones." Elizabeth Panetta, a 31-year-old former bartender who is training the Los Angeles students, puts it more bluntly. "Union Summer is a shot in the arm--and a kick in the butt," she says. "The labor movement has been tired and worn out in many places and unprepared for the issues of the day."
With only 10.4% of private-sector employees now unionized--down from 16.8% in 1983--the motto of John Sweeney, the federation's new president, is Organize or Die. Some $20 million is earmarked for membership drives, and the tactics are increasingly bareknuckled--as in the effort to drive away New Otani's tour business. The number of organizers deployed by the federation has increased more than tenfold since 1990. And defying labor's stereotype as a bastion of old white males, the new organizers are mostly in their 20s and 30s, mostly female and, like Campos, increasingly from minority groups.