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NBC15

Posted: Wednesday, June 12, 2013 --- 6:35 p.m.

Sun Prairie -- Everywhere you look new construction is popping up all over the place in Wisconsin.

While the boom in business is good for the economy, it's turning into a problem for contractors like Dan Duren.

"Right now, we have people to draw from but we are fighting over those people we have," said Duren.

He's the owner of Duren Custom Builders, and has homes to build but not enough skilled tradesmen to work on them.

"There's concrete work, foundation work, flat work, roofers, siders, insulators, electricians, plumbers, HVAC guys, there's a whole list," said Duren.

He's not the only one on the hunt. Wesnesday on Craiglist there were dozens of similar postings. Meantime, at Madison Area Technical College, remodeling instructer John Stephany's phone is ringing off the hook.

"I already had over a third of our students hired and was fielding calls daily," said Stephany.

He says the uptick is due to low interest rates, and people deciding to move forward with homes. However, many skilled workers turned in their tool belts during the recession, and now people like Duren are feeling the impact.

"It's the young guys coming in, the young blood coming into the workforce we're lacking on," said Duren.

According to MATC this trend is also happening in other parts of the country like Texas, and Florida, somthing they believe will only grow in the coming months.

SOURCE: FORBES

We tend to associate hefty paychecks with briefcases, neckties and lab coats – but it turns out there’s plenty of money to be earned by those who sport hard hats and coveralls.

This may be surprising considering the gradual decline of union memberships over the years and the fragile state of America’s workforce, but plenty of talented and skilled blue-collar workers earn six figures doing electrical work, repair jobs, and other labor-intensive trades.

Forbes combed through data gathered annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a division of the Labor Department, to find some of the highest-paying blue-collar jobs. The BLS culls its information from surveys it mails to businesses, and it releases its Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates data each spring. The figures are for 2012.

In Pictures: 10 High-Paying Blue-Collar Jobs

What defines a blue-collar job? The American Heritage Dictionary says, “Of or relating to wage earners, especially as a class, whose jobs are performed in work clothes and often involve manual labor.” We took that definition and excluded work that is largely managerial or supervisory to compile our list of 10 high-paying blue-collar jobs.

Some of the professions on our list require only a high school education, but many call for extensive training and apprenticeships that can last as long as four years. To become an elevator installer or repairer, for example, you must complete a four-year apprenticeship, says John Dalton, a field operations manager for the Stanley Elevator Company. “It can take up to four and a half years, including final exams, but once you get your license, you’re really qualified to do it all.”

Dalton says elevator installers and repairers are well-rounded trade workers who never stop learning. “There is always a new set of obstacles, a new set of opportunities, and the equipment is always changing. I’ve been in the business for 16 years, and I’m still learning.”

He says safety training and education is continuous, too, because elevator jobs are dangerous by nature and it’s crucial that workers be reminded of the hazards.

“The risks and rewards of elevation repair and installation go hand-in-hand. Elevators are dangerous. We’re working with live electricity, heavy equipment at extreme heights in some cases. But there are so many rewarding aspects, too,” he says.

So what makes this job better than a traditional desk job?

“It’s fast moving, it’s different every day, and people in the industry care about each other. We’re a tight-knit community, since it’s a generation type of job, and that makes it a great job to be in.”

Dalton explains that elevator repairers and installers are also “low-key, behind the scenes workers. It’s a job that people really don’t think about or realize exists until the elevator breaks and they have to walk up 20 flights of stairs.”

It may not be high-visibility, but it’s undoubtedly high-paying. Elevator repairers and installers tops the list as having the highest-paying blue-collar job. On average they earn $74,140 annually, or $35.64 an hour. The top 10% of them draw in $106,450, on average.

The best-paying state for these workers, who assemble, install, repair or maintain electric or hydraulic freight or passenger elevators, escalators or dumbwaiters: Massachusetts.

Dalton’s firm, Stanley Elevator Company, is headquartered in neighboring New Hampshire. “It’s such a high-paying profession in this area because it’s union-oriented and it’s very organized,” Dalton says. “The union has been especially strong in the New England area.”

Other jobs on the list include transportation inspectors, who have an average annual salary of $66,470, and boilermakers, who earn $55,830, on average. Surveyors, who earn an average of $59,180, also make the tally.

In Pictures: 10 High-Paying Blue-Collar Jobs

This story is an update of a piece that ran previously.

Despite growing market share and profits in the U.S., General Motors wants to reduce the number of highly paid skilled-trades workers in many of its plants.

A new round of buyouts, similar to those offered after GM and the UAW reached a four-year labor agreement, are being offered at selected locations. GM offered up to $75,000 in late 2011 to about 4,000 skilled-trades workers who chose to retire. The company declined to say how many accepted the offer.

Ford offered a similar deal in fall 2011 with incentives of up to $100,000.

"We still have too many skilled-trades employees, compared to benchmarks," Chuck Stevens, GM's chief financial officer for North America, told analysts last month.

As U.S. automakers are on course to sell more than 15 million new vehicles this year for the first time since 2007, they are making those vehicles in plants with much more automation.

But management is betting that such machinery can be maintained with fewer of the welders, electricians and other specialized workers than they've employed in the past.

"There's more preventative maintenance now. There's a large amount of investment in upgrading plants and equipment," said Kristin Dziczek, a labor and industry analyst at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor. "They have newer stuff that doesn't break down as much."

GM's push at least partially explains why the automakers' surge in productivity and sales isn't creating as many jobs as one might expect.

Manufacturing employment nationally in March actually fell by 3,000 jobs from February.

In January, GM announced plans to close its Grand Blanc Weld Tool Center, displacing more than 343 employees, who are being offered transfers. The 1.7-million-square-foot plant's skilled-trades workers are being offered buyouts.

GM has added 18,000 hourly production workers since its Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009, but most of those jobs were entry-level workers starting at a wage of between $15 and $19 an hour.

Traditionally, skilled trades have been the UAW's elite, representing between 19% and 23% of the UAW's membership, Dziczek estimated. They make more money because they have special skills.

They make an average of $32 an hour, compared with an average of $28 for production-line workers, according to CAR.

An electrician or millwright might go several days without a major assignment, but once a machine goes down they become the valuable go-to people to get the line running again.

Japanese and Korean automakers in the U.S. need workers with similar skills, but they are not limited to one specialty and are expected to perform a variety of jobs, including working on the production line. That's the model the Detroit Three want to replicate.

CAR estimated in 2011 that GM saves $57,000 a year for every skilled-trades worker who takes the buyout offer and is replaced by an entry-level worker.

Dziczek said automakers are also working with groups like the Automotive Maintenance Technical Education Collaborative to give production workers more skills so they can handle more responsibilities.

The UAW did not make anyone available to comment for this report.

New investments don't necessarily mean new jobs.

For example, GM announced plans Thursday to invest $332 million to expand capacity and upgrade equipment at four manufacturing sites, including its Flint engine operations and Bay City power train facility, but won't add any jobs.

In January, GM revealed a $600-million expansion of its Fairfax assembly and stamping plant in Kansas, including a new, 450,000-square-foot paint shop -- again without adding workers.

Some economists and government agencies, such as the Michigan Economic Development Corp., have trumpeted skilled-trades training as a lucrative alternative to a college degree.

But many of the job opportunities are not new jobs -- they're job openings created when aging skilled-trades people retire.

A forecast by Economic Modeling, a unit of CareerBuilder, which is owned by Detroit Free Press parent Gannett, projects that the number of skilled-trades jobs in the U.S. will remain flat from 2.93 million jobs in 2012 to 2.91 million in 2015.

Josh Wright, Economic Modeling senior editor, said many of the new skilled-trades jobs have changed. For example, the number of computer-controlled machine tool operators has increased by 13% from 2010 to 2012. But the number of cutting, punching and press machine setters, operators and tenders is projected to be flat from 2010 to 2015.

"Whether or not there is now, there is almost certain to be a shortage later on given the large percentage of older workers in skilled trade occupations," Wright said.

SOURCE: BLOOMBERG

Paul Thomas could hardly believe it when a Canadian recruiter called about a position as a mechanic in British Columbia. His annual income had dropped to $40,000 a year from $100,000 as business slowed at the Atlanta car dealership where he worked. He’d filed for bankruptcy, and his house was in foreclosure when the headhunter saw his résumé online. “My wife and I were excited,” says the 45-year-old. “Auto mechanics don’t get approached by recruiters, so it was sort of nice being catered to.”

The headhunter sent Thomas online videos about the heavy-truck dealership that wanted to hire him, and his prospective employer flew him in for four days for a fuller picture of life in Prince George. Last March the company hired him under an immigration program for skilled workers. Scoring the job, which pays about $90,000 a year and comes with government-provided health care, seemed like “I scratched a lottery ticket,” says Thomas. Within a month he had a work permit.

Canada has a high rate of unemployment—12.3 percent in some regions. It also has tens of thousands of open jobs nationwide for plumbers, electricians, and other skilled workers. Employers have a hard time getting potential hires to go where the work is. “Canadians just aren’t willing to leave their provinces,” says Kathleen Kischer, who recruited Thomas. So companies, particularly in Western Canada, are tapping headhunters to scour Monster.com (MWW), LinkedIn (LNKD), and even Craigslist in search of Americans and other foreigners with the right résumés—a task made easier by the national government.

This past winter it launched a fast-track immigration program for 43 trades, promising to process work papers within 12 months for applicants who speak English or French and have two years’ experience in their field. Among the most wanted: ironworkers, welders, oil and gas well drillers, and heavy-duty equipment mechanics. “We always point out to Canadians that even though there are too many unemployed Canadians, there are also too many unfilled jobs,” Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said during a speech in April.

Canada is opening the door to Americans at the same time the U.S. Congress is battling over whether to let in more skilled workers. In Canada last year, 160,617 immigrants were granted permanent residency because of the economic value they brought, while 64,901 became residents via family ties, according to the government. In the U.S., with a population about nine times as big as Canada’s, 680,799 immigrants became residents through family sponsorships in fiscal 2012, and only 143,998 obtained residency based on their employment, federal data show.

It can take a decade for an employed immigrant to get a U.S. green card; in Canada a skilled worker can obtain permanent residency within 18 months, says Richard Kurland, an immigration lawyer in Vancouver. Foreigners can also apply for residency on their own, without an employer’s help—another big difference from the U.S. Word of the perks has spread all over the world. In 2011 the U.S. was only the fourth-largest source of immigrants to Canada, behind the Philippines, China, and India.

Kael Campbell, a headhunter in Victoria, says Canadians are benefiting from the influx of foreigners. “The hiring of one American John Deere (DE) or Caterpillar (CAT)mechanic with 10 years of experience can result in the direct employment of eight to nine Canadians” that are less skilled, Campbell says. His firm landed jobs in the mining and equipment industries for 30 immigrants last year, up from 18 in 2011.

Going north solved Thomas’s financial problems. His wife is now a cashier at a Costco (COST). They’ve made friends. “Home will always be the States,” says Thomas. That won’t stop the couple from applying for permanent residency in their new country. “Canada was my saving grace,” he says. “I believe I will stay here for a while.”

The bottom line: Canada gives preference for visas to immigrants who’ll add to its economy—a contrast with the U.S., where family ties trump employment.

SOURCE: WASHINGTON POST - ROBERT SAMUELSON

Are we missing a couple million jobs? These would be jobs that exist but lack workers to fill them. The notion that the recovery is being hobbled by too few skilled workers is seductive. It might explain today’s stubbornly high unemployment and why aggressive government policies to promote recovery have been so ineffective. Low interest rates and big budget deficits can’t cure bottlenecks in the job market. They can’t make construction workers into computer scientists.

There’s only one problem with this story: It’s mostly fiction.

Superficially, it seems compelling. Consider the evidence. The Labor Department’s latest estimate (February) of job vacancies was 3.9 million, up 80 percent from the latest low in July 2009. Just recently, the Wall Street Journal reported a “shortage of help hits nursing homes.” Employer complaints of scarcities abound, notes Darrell West of the Brookings Institution. Even in 2010, manufacturers said they couldn’t fill 227,000 jobs. More than half (55 percent) of state governments report difficulty hiring for IT openings. Microsoft says it struggles to fill thousands of computer science slots.

Then there’s the “Beveridge curve,” after English economist William Beveridge (1879-1963). He noted a relationship between unemployment and job vacancies. When unemployment is high, vacancies are few, because workers quickly fill them. But when unemployment falls, vacancies actually rise, as employers scramble to meet their needs. What’s puzzled economists is that there are more vacancies now than were expected at today’s high unemployment rate. This suggests job mismatches: workers lacking needed skills or living where the jobs aren’t.

On closer inspection, the logic unravels.

For starters, most vacancies are routine. They’re just-posted job openings or those reflecting workers retiring or switching employers. Some skill shortages always exist in a sophisticated economy, says Brookings economist Gary Burtless. “Are they serious enough to explain today’s high unemployment rate?” he asks. “The answer is an emphatic no.” In April, the unemployed totaled 11.7 million; another 6.3 million people wanted a job but weren’t looking. These figures dwarf the number of vacancies.

If shortages were widespread, Burtless and other economists argue, wages would be rising rapidly as employers competed for scarce skilled workers. There’s scant evidence of this. From April 2012 to April 2013, average hourly manufacturing wages rose 1 percent, reports the Labor Department. Over the same period, the gain for all private nonfarm workers was 1.9 percent. Among computer programmers, inflation-adjusted wages have remained flat for a decade, says a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.

Similarly, economist Paul Osterman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology surveyed 925 manufacturing establishments in 2012 about worker shortages. Three-quarters reported no shortages, defined as vacancies lasting three months or more. Of the rest, most shortages were less than 10 percent of their workforces. “Very few firms responded by reducing production,” says Osterman. “The most common reaction was to outsource” domestically — to send business to other American firms. Labor bottlenecks haven’t crimped recovery, he concludes. A study by economists Edward Lazear of Stanford University and James Spletzer of the Census Bureau agrees.

So, what explains more vacancies at given unemployment levels (a.k.a the shifting Beveridge curve)?

The answer almost certainly involves employers, not workers. Businesses have become more risk-averse. They’re more reluctant to hire. They’ve raised standards. For many reasons, they’ve become more demanding and discriminating. These reasons could include (a) doubts about the recovery; (b) government policies raising labor costs (example: the Affordable Care Act’s insurance mandates); (c) unwillingness to pay for training; and (d) fear of squeezed profits. In practice, motives mix.

The chief victims of this shift in business behavior seem to be the long-term unemployed (more than six months), as some fascinating research by economists William Dickens and Rand Ghayad of Northeastern University suggests. By their estimates, virtually all the reduction in hiring falls on this group, regardless of their other characteristics (age, education, industry experience). Many firms seem to have concluded that the long-term jobless are damaged goods.

To test this, Ghayad e-mailed fake resumes to hundreds of firms in response to job postings. All the fictional candidates were 2005 college graduates with identical skills; they differed only in their length of unemployment (0-12 months) and experience in the hiring industry. The long-term unemployed received few responses. In many cases, software filters apparently eliminated their applications automatically. Similarly, six months of joblessness erased the value of industry experience. Employers preferred candidates with less joblessness over those who had worked in their industry.

No doubt the economy’s future would be brighter if workers had more skills. But we shouldn’t mistake a long-term goal for a short-term problem. The idea of widespread labor shortages in an era of high unemployment seems absurd — and is. Today’s crucial scarcity is not skills. It’s confidence.

Read more from Robert Samuelson’s archive.

Apprenticeships a Little-Traveled Path to Jobs

Apprenticeships can mean high-paying jobs without degrees, but boosting the system may not work in the U.S.

There are around 398,000 registered apprentices in the United States, according to the Labor Department.

Ray Lambert is almost done with his four years of school, and he already has a steady income at a good job.

"I absolutely love it. It's something different every day. There's always a problem to be solved," he says.

Lambert is a building engineer for an apartment management company in McLean, Va. He does the tasks that many city-dwellers take for granted: making sure the boilers and air conditioning are working, for example. Tonight, he has come early to the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 99's office, a modest building in an upscale section of Washington, D.C. The 27-year-old from Herndon, Va., sips a bottle of soda and relaxes as he waits for classes to start for the night. He has good reason to relax: secure job prospects for years to come.

[LATEST: Jobless Rate Holds at 7.8 Percent]

"This is a very specific trade; you have to know electricity, HVAC, you have to know everything. And it becomes very widely sought-after," he says.

Lambert is not about to graduate from college; he's about to finish an apprenticeship with the IUOE. And unlike the undergraduates down the street at Georgetown University, many of whom are doubtless toiling away at unpaid internships and furiously emailing resumes, he currently earns a comfortable living. And he won't have to sweat student loans; his program is free, aside from books and union dues, which according a training coordinator with the program tend to run students $49 to $59, depending on their pay.

Though apprenticeship programs vary, many are variations on a theme: students spend a few years learning a trade both in the classroom and at an assigned job site. Throughout that training, students' pay slowly increases along with their experience. In Lambert's program, for example, a student starts out earning 50 percent of what the engineer at his site earns. By the second semester of the fourth year, that share is up to 85 percent. The site engineers who work with the D.C. IUOE program tend to make $30 to $38 per hour—that equals around $62,000 to $79,000 a year for a 40-hour workweek. That means that pay for a starting apprentice can be well over $30,000—a pay level you can't earn handing out towels at the college rec center.

Why isn't this kind of education more popular? In the U.S., more high school students likely hear about the Donald Trump kind of apprentice than the IUOE kind. There are around 398,000 registered apprentices in the United States, according to the Labor Department (that count includes apprenticeship programs like many led by labor unions and run by individual companies, but not apprentice-like positions, like hospital interns). That's not a tiny number, but it's down significantly from a decade ago; in 2003, there were nearly 490,000 apprentices in the nation. U.S. apprenticeship numbers are also dwarfed by figures from even much smaller countries. Germany's apprenticeship system trains around 1.5 million people per year, with apprentices accounting for around two-thirds of the total working population. Many credit that system for the country's low youth unemployment rate in comparison to fellow troubled Euro zone countries. Germany's centuries-old system is often cited as a model for other countries. The U.K., seeing Germany's success, is trying to ramp up its own program, in which more than half a million people began apprenticeships last year. 

A Question of Culture ... and Unionization

Could the U.S. emulate Europe's apprenticeship systems?

[OPINION: U.S. Needs New Educational Model for Economic Growth]

The answer depends on whom you ask. "In the United States, it's just not in our DNA," says Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. "It's a process that's almost unimaginable in the U.S.: it's a collaborative, joint governing system that represents the workers and the employer and the government." It's not just a collaboration between the workers and the firms; it requires a certain amount of government oversight. The Department of Labor, for example, is involved in the certification process by which registered apprentices get nationally recognized credentials. But some businesses may see that as government meddling in business' training processes.

SOURCE: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100403900

IMAGES FROM: GETTY IMAGES

The percentage of U.S. workers belonging to unions tumbled to 11.3 percent in 2012, the lowest percentage in 76 years, led by dramatic declines in states where lawmakers have put organized labor in the political crosshairs, government figures showed on Wednesday.

The total number of union members fell by nearly 400,000, from 11.8 percent of the workforce in 2011, the Labor Department report on union membership said. The rate of 11.3 percent of the workforce was the lowest since 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt was president.

Almost half the losses in the last year were in the industrial Midwest -- Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan -- where states with Republican-led governments have led an assault on unions.

Indiana passed a so-called "right-to-work" law in February, 2012 making payment of union dues voluntary for workers. Wisconsin passed severe restrictions on public sector unions in 2011, but they were blocked by the courts for part of 2012.

Ohio also passed curbs on public sector unions in 2011, but they were overturned by referendum the same year. Michigan last month passed a right-to-work law that has not yet taken effect.

Robert Bruno, professor of labor relations at the University of Illinois, said a growing number of laws that make organizing workers more difficult were part of the reason for "an incremental erosion" of the labor movement.

"It goes back a couple of decades, that there has been a growing number of anti-labor policies," Bruno said. "We have the weakest labor law and enforcement of labor law in the entire Western industrialized world," he said.

Some of the most brutal fights over collective bargaining have taken place at the state level. A federal appeals court last Friday upheld a controversial Wisconsin law restricting the power of public-sector unions.

Last year, organized labor also suffered big membership losses in states considered union strongholds and controlled by Democrats, including Illinois and New York. Lawmakers grappling with public employee pension crises and sharp drops in tax revenue have sought concessions from public workers.

"It reflects a number of things beyond labor's control, such as the state of the economy," said Harley Shaiken, labor relations professor at the University of California at Berkeley. (Read More: The 10 Least Stressful Jobs)

"It used to be big labor and big business. Now we have small labor and big business," he said.

On the other hand, unions made strong gains in traditionally weak states for organized labor, including Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma and even Texas, due to booming local economies.

Some analysts blame unions for the drop. Membership has been falling since 2008, when it was 16.1 million, or 12.4 percent of the workforce, federal data shows. It peaked in 1954, when 28.3 percent of workers were represented by organized labor.

"They must now admit that they are not investing enough staff and funds in organizing and not embarking on an imaginative journey to rediscover the relevancy of unions," said Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University. "Essentially, workers are feeling tremendous job insecurity ... Yet as today's figures suggest, workers are not turning to unions to act as their voice."

The report also showed full-time unionized workers had median weekly earnings of $943, 27 percent more than the $742 of those whose pay was not collectively bargained.

The activist group Center for Union Facts, which is critical of the labor movement, said unions have made salary and benefit demands that have hurt the budgets of corporations and the public sector.

Slow Recovery

Slow recovery from the 2007-09 recession has hurt revenues of state and local governments, forcing them to eliminate jobs and to cover the swelling costs of healthcare and pensions by cutting spending in other areas.

"It's not a secret that some politicians chose to cut public education funding, balance the budgets on the backs of students and slash the education workforce," Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, a 3 million member union, said in a statement on the report. (Read More: For Americans, 'Cope' Has Replaced 'Hope': NBC Poll)

In 2012, public sector unions lost 234,000 members. Nearly 80 percent of that decline was in organizations representing local government workers, primarily teachers. More than a third, 35.9 percent, of public-sector workers belonged to unions, compared with just 6.6 percent of those in the private sector.

From December 2007, near the start of the recession, to December 2012, state and local governments shed 489,000 jobs.

"That's a highly unionized sector and we know the public sector has been doing poorly in this recovery," said William Briggs, chief economist for the largest U.S. union, the AFL-CIO, and former undersecretary at the U.S. Labor Department. "The weakness isn't just a union story. It's a story about the economy not functioning the way we hope it would."

He noted the age group with the lowest membership rate - only 4.2 percent for workers aged 16 to 24, compared with 14.9 percent for those aged 55 to 64 - was also the one struggling most to find full-time jobs.

Black workers had the highest union membership rate, at 13.4 percent, followed by whites at 11.1 percent, Hispanics at 9.8 percent and Asians at 9.6 percent. Black men alone had a rate of 14.8 percent, as African-American women mostly hold public jobs, Briggs said.

Women made up 57 percent of the public sector workforce in 2012 and accounted for 72 percent of the union membership decline, the National Women's Law Center said.

SOURCE: http://www.thenation.com/blog/173875/afl-cios-non-union-worker-group-headed-workplaces-fifty-states#

Demonstrators from MoveOn.org and Working America picket against federal budget cuts outside John Boehner's office in West Chester, Ohio. (AP Photo/Al Behrman)

The country’s largest non-union workers’ group will soon announce plans to establish chapters in every state, achieve financial self-sufficiency and extend its organizing—so far focused on politics and policy—directly into the workplace.

“This organization has done really what nobody else thought could be done,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told The Nation, “and that’s recruit more than three million people without a union to be part of the labor movement.”

That organization is Working America, the AFL-CIO affiliate for workers without a union on the job. Created ten years ago, it now claims 3.2 million members—more than any of the individual unions in the AFL-CIO, or any of the other “alt-labor” groups organizing and mobilizing non-union workers in the United States. “We’re taking the momentum that we’ve built organizing workers in communities,” said Working America Executive Director Karen Nussbaum, “and beginning to organize a community in the workplace.”

As I reported in The Nation’s October 29, 2012, issue, Working America’s past efforts have taken place outside of work. Paid canvassers go door-to-door in what the group calls “working class moderate” neighborhoods, starting conversations about economic issues and asking people to join the organization (according to Trumka, two out of three people sign up by the end of the conversation). During election season, organizers come back to persuade and mobilize these members to vote for endorsed candidates, touting their stances on issues like outsourcing (they explicitly avoid discussing so-called “social issues”). Year-round, Working America supports union-backed campaigns on issues like supporting paid sick leave or opposing liquor store privatization; members write letters, lobby politicians and join rallies.

Nussbaum told The Nation that, following the group’s success in mobilizing workers who haven’t been reached by unions or other progressive organizations, “it was the local labor leaders who came to us last August and said, ‘We need you in every state.’” The organization plans to double its number of state chapters over the next three years, to twenty-four, and to create chapters in the rest of the fifty states by 2018. Working America’s most recent new chapters are in Texas and North Carolina, both Southern states with even lower unionization rates than the country as a whole.

Nussbaum, Working America’s architect since its founding, said she expects the expansion to require at least one staffer in each state. Given the expense of maintaining full-time, year-round canvassing teams, she said the group is “building on the base that we have and turning that into a more flexible, vibrant organization” that can “build out in a lot of different ways, meeting the immediate needs of whoever our partners are.” Nussbaum noted that Working America staff now include online organizers, who push members to take actions ranging from calling legislators to sharing “I support the minimum wage” on Facebook. But “at the end of the day,” she said, “we still think that face-to-face, one-on-one communication, that makes the difference in bringing new people into our movement.”

The AFL-CIO’s investment in Working America is born out of a crisis for organized labor. Union leaders and supporters argue that the limits of labor law, the rise of union-busting and the prevalence of retaliation have made it a near-impossible task for many private sector workers to win collective bargaining rights and a union contract. Given the ongoing decline in US unionization, and the repeated failure of union-backed labor law reform efforts, the AFL-CIO and major US unions have increasingly been studying, supporting and partnering with non-union labor groups, whose numbers have exploded over the past two decades—from handfuls to hundreds, according to a tally by Rutgers labor expert Janice Fine.

“We want to figure out a way to make membership more open, to make membership in a union not depend on workers being willing to endure trial by fire in an election or extended pitched battle with the employer for voluntary recognition,” AFL-CIO General Counsel Craig Becker told The Nation earlier this month. “Now that might not immediately lead to collective bargaining, but in some broader sense it should.” Becker, who served as a member of the National Labor Relations Board during President Obama’s first term, has been tasked by Trumka with overseeing a comprehensive overview of labor’s current predicament in the run-up to the AFL-CIO’s September convention.

While expanding to new states, Working America plans to enter the workplace. Following a series of local pilot programs and a membership survey, early next month the group will launch a new website, "Fix My Job," where workers can share complaints about their workplaces and get ideas for collective action. “We’re building the capacity to give workers the tools they need to just get in motion,” said Nussbaum, “whether it’s five people who want Twizzlers in the candy machine, [or] people who want higher pay.” Nussbaum declined to specify what forms of workplace activism the site will support.

Trumka expressed hope that the political activism and sense of community shared by Working America members would prepare them to take up action where they work, which in turn would lay the groundwork for ongoing organizing—including unionization efforts. The AFL-CIO president predicted that non-union workers’ efforts would secure improvements in areas like workplace safety, and that “in some cases it won’t get completely done, and they’ll reach out for different forms of organization that they think can help them.” “We hope,” he added, “that we will have the seed planted for people to understand the importance of collective action.”

“I believe that it’s the experience of winning that helps workers conceive of having a permanent relationship that equalizes power with the boss,” said Nussbaum. “And it’s the leadership skills that people gain in the doing that make them the kind of capable leaders that can organize to be represented and win contracts.”

And what if companies respond to Working America activism by illegally punishing the workers involved? “If that happens,” said Trumka, “I think workers, if they stick together, they’ll be able to defeat that.” He added that Working America offices would stand ready, with support from AFL-CIO affiliates and allies, to “bring down justice” if companies cracked down on activists. “In some cases,” Trumka told The Nation, “who knows, there could be consumer boycotts organized.” He added that any retaliation would offer “another reason” for workers “to come together even more.”

Working America’s expansion will be funded in part through a new Tenth Anniversary Fund, to which the AFL-CIO and major unions have pledged donations; Trumka said the AFL-CIO is “substantially” supporting the organization. But Nussbaum told The Nation that Working America is also grappling with how to eventually achieve an elusive goal for alt-labor groups: financial self-sufficiency. Lacking union contracts with automatic dues payments from members, such groups generally draw the majority of their funding from donations from unions or non-profits. “In the long run, that’s the litmus test,” said Nussbaum, “because worker organizations that aren’t self-sustaining can’t be democratic.” Groups that are “dependent on outside funding,” she added, can “meet objectives, but they don’t sustain and build the labor movement in the long run. And I think that’s the challenge for us at this point.”

Ai-jen Poo, who sits on Working America’s board and directs the National Domestic Workers Alliance, toldThe Nation last month that, as additional revenue sources, NDWA is exploring offering citizenship services to workers or matching employers with employees. Nussbaum said that deepening members’ relationship with Working America could put the group “on the path to self-sufficiency,” potentially through more consistent dues from members or fees for providing them with services.

Organizers said last year that 15 percent of Working America’s members pay dues (suggested payment: $5 per year); they acknowledged that its membership ranks include people who no longer remember signing up in the first place. At the other end of the spectrum are the “community action teams”: members who meet weekly with organizers to make plans to pressure politicians and involve new members. Nussbaum said that Working America currently has such teams in “a few dozen” places, “and we’re going to be expanding those all around the country.” Overall, said Nussbaum, “when you operate at the scale that we do, when a majority of our members identify with us to one extent or another, that’s a lot of people.”

University of Texas Law Professor Julius Getman called news of Working America’s expansion “a sign of new life” at the AFL-CIO. “Because they’re in trouble, and because of some shifts in personnel, I think they’re more open to new things,” said Getman, the author of Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes a Movement. He suggested that Working America could be valuable in part because “it puts the AFL-CIO in direct contact with workers, which is something that doesn’t always happen”; given the AFL-CIO’s structure as a federation composed of affiliated unions, he said, “there are lots of layers of bureaucracy and authority between the AFL-CIO and workers on lots occasions.” Getman said Working America could “develop a greater sense of working class solidarity” among non-union workers, and offer “a sense of being important, and being involved in something worthwhile.”

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“I think collective bargaining is one of the tools necessary—to actually bring down inequality, that’s one of the best ways to do it,” said Trumka. “But there are other tools that we will experiment with.” Trumka noted that Working America, which faced “significant opposition” among union leaders when Nussbaum first proposed it a decade ago, is now one of an array of alternative groups the federation supports. “I think we’re going to have a whole bunch of different models,” said Trumka. “And some of them will work.”

Across the country, students are wrangling with their universities to cut ties with Adidas over its labor practices. For more, read this week's Dispatches from the US Student Movement.