LABOR'S YOUTH BRIGADE

By Margot Hornblower

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.

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.

Meanwhile, in Lynwood, a largely ethnic neighborhood of Los Angeles, another Union Summer group gathered at 8 o'clock on a recent morning across the street from the Superior Super Warehouse and readied for a "blitz." "You'll be scared," warned veteran organizer Lois Elbornetti. "But don't worry, just have fun." The students had to "roach" the nonunion store--they entered en masse, headed for the back, then spread like cockroaches. They quickly handed out leaflets with the phone number of the United Food & Commercial Workers to all employees. And got out fast. The plan went like clockwork, with angry managers shouting, "Get them out of here!" and grabbing one student's shirt. "I have a headache," said Third Andresen, a Filipino-studies major from the University of Washington, afterward. "It felt like jumping out of an airplane."

In a less confrontational campaign, 25 of the Los Angeles students spent days working phone banks and trudging door to door for the local Service Employees International Union, which is trying to unionize 73,000 minimum-wage workers who care for the elderly and disabled in their homes. "We have this down to a science," claims S.E.I.U. official Steve Wilensky, explaining that students would follow computerized lists of homeworkers laid out on block-by-block grids. But the database crashed, and lists turned out to be outdated, with students searching for buildings that had tumbled down during the 1994 earthquake.

While the students had been prepared with reading lists (Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals) and video lists (John Sayles' film Matewan, about a coal miners' strike), some found themselves reluctant to embrace the gamut of militant tactics. There were nervous titters during training when Quynh Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American organizer, mentioned "Dumpster diving"--searching through company trash for information. And when hotel workers laid out plans for street theater during a wedding reception at the New Otani, many had misgivings. "I don't want to protest at someone's wedding," said Ramos, the Brown University student. "That's their very important day." But after much discussion, she and other dissenters agreed to participate. "I had to stop and think, 'What would Cesar Chavez do?'" she said.

In the end the wedding party sat glumly ignoring the ruckus, as the street theater proceeded outside. "We felt bad about disrupting the wedding," said Kamaria Finch, a Sarah Lawrence activist. "But when we saw the waiters giving us thumbs up, it was worth it." Union Summer was learning to kick butt.