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Since June 1, Union Summer activists have fanned out to 20 cities. Paid a stipend of $210 a week, they are given free housing: an East Boston, Massachusetts, convent; a Chicago youth hostel; a Beaufort, South Carolina, trailer park. They are joining protesting sewage-plant workers in Denver; demonstrating against unfair labor practices on riverboat casinos in St. Louis, Missouri; pressuring a Washington department store to stop buying suits made in sweatshops; offering legal advice to strawberry pickers in Watsonville, California. They are picketing beach hotels in Hilton Head, South Carolina; knocking on doors in Boston to organize hospital workers. At least 30 of them will be winding through the Deep South on a bus tour to reach low-wage health-care workers, stopping along the way at civil rights touchstones such as the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
If this onslaught is causing them any tremors, employers are not letting on. Jeffrey McGuiness, president of the Labor Policy Association, a corporate lobby group in Washington, says, "College students breezing in and telling people they are better off joining a union--and then breezing back to school again--that's not likely to be very effective." The handpicked Union Summer activists, however, are far from ivory-tower stereotypes. Among the 30 Los Angeles recruits, for instance, only one is an Ivy Leaguer: Brown University's Marisela Ramos, the brainy daughter of an illiterate East Los Angeles seamstress. Three of the students have worked part time in supermarkets since high school, and some, like Marcio Castro, manager of a Domino's Pizza who attends California State University/Northridge, spend as much time at work as in class.
Campos, the University of Texas sophomore, was drawn to Union Summer by a desire to help those less privileged. The daughter of an El Paso, Texas, janitor, Campos had felt the power of a union up close: before the hospital where her mother cleans was unionized in 1989, "she had to work two jobs, and we couldn't afford health insurance," Campos says. She moved to the U.S. when she was seven and talks of class struggle as if the phrase had never gone out of style. "Around campus, I see so many Mexicans cleaning dorms," she says. "We are all immigrants, but I got lucky. Since I got to go to college, it's my duty to fight for them."
Most of the New Otani employees are immigrants. And the tactics used against the hotel are typical of the unorthodox new weapons of labor's "corporate campaigns." Local 11 of the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees sends delegations to Japan and Hong Kong to rally Asian unions against the hotel and urge travel agents to avoid it. It has secured endorsements from scores of the city's Asian and Latino civic and business groups, as well as 11 out of 15 city councillors, and it blocked rush-hour traffic with a sit-down protest last spring that resulted in 57 arrests.