New Haven Independent

The gathering was the biennial convention of the Connecticut AFL-CIO. It runs through Friday.

“Welcome to a union hotel,” New Haven labor activist Andrea van den Heever told delegates as they filled the Omni’s second-floor ballroom Wednesday morning for the opening session. “We welcome you to a union town.”

The convention comes at a time when the labor movement, like other groups, has wrestled with job losses in a recession.

The recession has underscored organized labor’s relevance, argued state AFL-CIO President John Olsen (pictured above as the convention got underway).

The percentage of Connecticut workers belonging to unions rose from 15.6 to 16.9 from 2007 to 2008, Olsen said. The biggest new chunk came from the unionization of 2,500 Foxwoods casino dealers.

Meanwhile, unionized workers have found greater protections than others when their employers consider moving jobs out of state, Olsen said. Case in point: the recent announcement that Pratt & Whitney might shut down its Cheshire and East Hartford plants. One thousand unionized jobs are at stake.

If not for the machinists union, those workers would have already lost their jobs, Olsen said. The union contract requires the company to negotiate with the union before shutting down, Olsen said.

Also, the union has influence with government. So the governor is proposing a $100 million five-year aid package to Pratt & Whitney to keep the jobs here. Union influence often leads to job-protection guarantees in such aid packages, Olsen said.

“If it weren’t for the union, you wouldn’t have these discussions,” Olsen said. “It would have been like the Colts leaving Baltimore. They would have the trucks packed and they’d be moving in the middle of the night.”

Organizing new union shops in Connecticut is one of the convention’s two central themes. The other is health care reform; the convention is hosting on the Green at 12:30 p.m. Thursday a rally for a “public option”/ expanded government insurance plan.

In opening remarks to the convention Wednesday morning, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano invoked the recession as he said he wanted to “challenge” the delegates.

DeStefano (pictured conferring with a convention “sergeant-at-arms” prior to his speech) predicted that even as the economy recovers, difficult changes will continue to leave Connecticut with local and state budget deficits and other threats to employment. He said that “people are underestimating the depths of the problems” in the state. He also spoke of how “human nature” leads “some people” to “play defense” and “resist change.”

Once the federal stimulus program stops sending money to the states in two years, for instance, the magnitude of Connecticut’s long-term budget problems will become more apparent. And they will hit cities the hardest.

“We’re going to have to change and do some things differently,” said the mayor, who has been strongly allied with unions throughout his career.

“Risk some change … Be willing to work with some people we haven’t been able to work with in the past … Let’s not let our old ways of thinking hold us back.”

In his speech, DeStefano didn’t elaborate on the new approaches and new partners he was urging on the assembly. Nor did he elaborate when asked afterwards.

He noted in his speech that like other cities, New Haven has laid off government workers this past year.

He’s also engaged in intensive negotiations with the local and national American Federation of Teachers on a school-reform plan that seeks concessions on longstanding work rules.

Nationally, as union ranks have thinned over past decades and the internet has transformed the global economy, a debate has grown among labor leaders about how to become more relevant. Does the answer lie in traditional person-to-person organizing drives? In multinational or global “corporate campaigns” targeting distant owners? In strikes? In political organizing? Do unions, like private companies and governments, need new global business models, the way the growth of railroads once led union organizers to think nationally within industries? Should unions become more flexible on work and hiring rules and pay scales, or should they fight to beat back threats to job security and standards of living?

At one level, especially in Connecticut, the debate includes how to grow new jobs rather than just protect old ones. In New Haven, the labor-affiliated Connecticut Center for A New Economy has launched a multi-year communal discussion on how to forge a progressive economic policy for the 21st century.

A convention like this week’s state parley in New Haven can’t promise to answer those big questions. Nor, in 2009, can it ignore them.