Building union support in any workplace is a tough road, certainly given the intense anti-union activity on the part of employers. Given the state of the labor movement–small and almost invisible, how do you get the numbers you need to build the labor movement into a large presence?

     One approach is to build the power of the union by, first establishing presence in the community at large. Which is what this article from the Associated Press explores:

Laura Tapia is the union movement’s equivalent of a beat cop.

A tiny, fast-talking woman from Puebla, Mexico, she’s spent two years walking the 99-cent stores, fruit stands and sneaker shops of Brooklyn’s immigrant Knickerbocker Ave. She made her rounds recently, hugging the woman selling tamales from a cart, pointing to the car wash, which she says is usually staffed by underage kids, and clucking that the combination laundromat-Post Office was robbed in the middle of the day.

"When you are on the street all day, you know everything that happens," she said, shivering in her down parka. "Everything."

Tapia is an organizer for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Only two of the roughly 170 stores on Knickerbocker are unionized, but organizing workers is her secondary goal. Her immediate task is investigating working conditions, injuries and wage and hour violations involving the stores’ shelf stockers, cashiers and salespeople.

She’s one of seven organizers working a neighborhood for the union. Their efforts, part of a small but growing push by organized labor to battle for workers who may never join a union, are as much social engineering as organizing.

You can here more about this campaign from a video from a forum we did a bit ago on the unregulated economy.

The reporter, then, quotes a so-called labor expert:

Union membership has declined for 25 years in part because unions have "lost connections to communities," said Jonathan Tasini, executive director of the labor-funded Labor Research Association. Union halls, once the community centers of the urban working class, the place to find a job, a card game or a date, have all but disappeared.

"One way of thinking about how we connect to communities is thinking about doing so at the street, block and neighborhood level, as opposed to just in the workplace," said Tasini.

  But, there are other legitimate views on this:

But some union advocates say small-scale community efforts aren’t worth the effort; after all, unions would have to organize hundreds of thousands of workers to return to the membership numbers of the 1980s.

"In the current climate, the labor movement cannot afford to be extending resources for one or two workers at a time," said Kate Bronfenbrenner, a labor studies professor at Cornell University.

 Your thoughts?