Union Targets Downtown Workers
Submitted on Sun, 04/23/2006 - 11:09am
By Dana Hooker - Wisconsin State Journal, April 21, 2006
Bartenders, servers, baristas and others who work Downtown could soon be carrying more than your food or drinks. They may also be carrying union cards.
Local organizers for the Industrial Workers of the World union hope to sign up some of the over 4,000 Downtown Madison employees, many of them students who work part time in small businesses - a notoriously difficult group to unionize.
"(Downtown has) a very good concentration of similar kinds of workplaces and ones that are generally ignored by other unions because of the small size and the transient nature of the workers," said Amy Mondloch, an IWW member and lead organizer of the campaign.
But this wouldn't be a typical union, where labor leaders try to get a majority of the employees in a workplace to sign up and form a union.
Instead, IWW wants to establish the Madison Downtown Workers Union, a "non- majority union" where workers from all types of businesses, from stores to restaurants, form an association of workers, rather than a bargaining group.
Continued . . .