The idea that a judge would join a labor union once struck Stephen Bosch as absurd.
"There are many of us who thought that, to say the least, being in a union was demeaning," said Bosch, who decides Social Security cases as an administrative law judge.
But caseloads kept increasing, support staff proved less than adequate, and, in Philadelphia, Bosch said, Social Security judges don't even have decent offices. Bosch is now the equivalent of a shop steward in an AFL-CIO union.
The judges needed a union, Bosch came to realize, "to gain enough strength to negotiate."
If you think that unions are only factory workers toting lunch boxes, think again. Half of the AFL-CIO's 12.9 million members are white collar, including teachers, engineers - even rocket scientists and doctors.
As union participation declines along with the nation's manufacturing sector, organized labor wants to build its ranks with professional workers. The sell isn't all, or even mostly, about money. It's about professional standards and working conditions.
And, please, no talk of strikes. That's a turnoff, AFL-CIO studies show.
"The No. 1 issue is about having a voice on the job as professionals," said Paul E. Almeida, president of the AFL-CIO's Department for Professional Employees. "More and more, their ability to do their job in the way they were trained to do them has been impacted."
Nurses have higher patient ratios, he said. Doctors have less time for diagnosis. College faculty members find they have too many students to educate them properly and still do research.
"Typically, wages are down about five on the list when we do our normal polling," said Almeida, who presided over a recent conference of 250 union leaders and scholars in Arlington, Va., titled "Organizing Professionals in the 21st Century."
Stefan Gleason isn't surprised that the AFL-CIO wants more professionals to join, given its declining membership. Gleason is vice president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a Virginia-based group that represents workers who don't want unions.
"Union organizers searching for additional dues revenues are creating the rationale for expanding union monopoly privileges into new sectors," he said.
Educators and health professionals, he said, don't like the idea of abandoning students and patients during a strike.
