For the past 14 years, on the eve of Saturday home football games, the UC Berkeley Golden Bears have checked into the Claremont Resort & Spa for a pregame ritual that typically costs Cal about $60,000 a season.

This year, that money is going to the Berkeley Doubletree Hotel, as Cal Athletics is honoring a boycott of the Claremont orchestrated by a union of hotel workers locked in a seemingly intractable dispute with the resort’s owners for two years.

One of the issues at the Claremont is an attempt by spa workers to organize and join the union. For its part, the resort management says it does not necessarily oppose the organizing push and made what it considers a generous offer to workers, even in an anemic economy. Union organizers disagree, to say the least.

Whichever way the Claremont’s standoff is resolved, organizing workers is the primary issue for the labor movement—especially at a time of declining union strength. To underscore that point, organizing is the theme the AFL-CIO has adopted for Labor Day 2003, vowing to overcome barriers erected by resistant employers.

“What employers do is shameful and wrong, and our communities suffer,” AFL- CIO President John Sweeney said in remarks prepared for Labor Day.

As it has in most recent years, labor’s strength continued to decline. The unionized percentage of the wage and salary workforce in the United States in 2002 was 13.3 percent, lower than any time since the early 1930s, UCLA labor specialist Ruth Milkman notes in a report by the UC Institute for Labor and Employment released today.

Still, organized labor has other reasons for celebration this Labor Day, emboldened by a survey it paid for in which more than 40 percent of nonunion American workers said they would join a union if they could.

In Berkeley, people with the-glass-is-half-full philosophies believe the Claremont workers will prevail.

“Patience is everything in the union movement,” said Dion Aroner, a former Democratic member of the state Assembly who represented Berkeley and sides with the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Union Local 2850.

“As long as the community is with them, they will be on the streets,” holding their own in the dispute, said Aroner, a former president of a Service Employees International Union local and now a consultant at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

The Claremont wants the dispute resolved, said Anne Appel, its marketing and communications manager.

“The goal is to have a great work environment and provide excellent services,” she said.

BRIGHT SPOT FOR LABOR

Despite the example of the standoff at the Claremont and the downturn in labor’s numbers nationally, union membership increased in California, from 16. 1 percent of all wage and salary workers in 1998 to 17.8 percent in 2002, the UC researchers noted.

Labor specialist Milkman, a professor of sociology at UCLA and director of the UC Institute for Labor and Employment, and co-author Daisy Rooks, a graduate student at UCLA, also found:

-- Union growth in the public sector and in health care has been much more rapid in California than in the nation over the past few decades.

-- Union organizing has been more effective in the state, particularly at SEIU on behalf of health care workers.

-- The state has a disproportionate share of a growing population of immigrant workers, and labor has more political influence in California than in most other states.

“Assuming that SEIU continues to expand and that labor remains politically influential in the state, we can conclude that the outlook for continued union growth is far more favorable in California than in the United States as a whole, where prospects of reversing the long-term density decline appear relatively bleak,” Milkman and Rooks wrote.

Labor in California has a major presence in the gubernatorial recall campaign, supporting Gov. Gray Davis but also endorsing Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante should Davis be ousted.

Labor’s support of Davis is “a matter of loyalty,” said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the independent California Nurses Association, representing 55,000 nurses at 150 facilities in California. The CNA, which opposes the recall, has been silent on the second half of the Oct. 7 ballot, where voters will choose from among competing would-be successors to Davis.

UNION SUCCESS STORY

The CNA, in fact, is a major union success story this Labor Day. The nation’s largest organization of registered nurses sponsored the nation’s first state law setting minimum nurse-to-patient hospital staffing ratios—the envy of nurses across the nation, said DeMoro.

The union, which developed the first collective bargaining contracts for registered nurses in the country, will celebrate its birthday with a series of events Sept. 14-16 in Oakland, where it is based.

“It’s significant that it has taken almost a century for the recognition of registered nurses to occur, and that is mainly because we have encountered some pretty bad forces out there,” DeMoro said.

No such celebration is planned by the Claremont workers. However, the hotel, owned by KSL Recreation Corp. of La Quinta (Riverside County), says that its offer is generous, particularly in light of the economic doldrums.

“We feel very comfortable that we are offering a fair package to the associates,” said Appel. “It has been a horrible economy for tourism (and business), and we have consistently offered increases in their wages, increases in their health care, across the board,” she said.

Appel acknowledged that the boycott “has definitely affected our group business, and they (the union) have gone after some of those clients,” UC departments among them.

The Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley has taken no action, however. “I think it is the best policy . . . not to choose sides in the matter,” said Haas Dean Tom Campbell. “Accordingly, we will not be altering our business with the Claremont Hotel one way or the other on this account.”

The contract for 220 food and beverage workers expired two years ago. “There is a very large hole between the two sides,” said Claire Darby, an organizer at Local 2850, “and the major issue is health care.”

SECOND CONTRACT EXPIRES SOON

A second contract for 60 front desk and reservation associates, bellmen and housekeepers expires in September. Negotiations with that group are continuing.

A core group of 15 spa workers—massage therapists, aestheticians, hair stylists and nail technicians—held clandestine meetings for a year preparing to mount the campaign for union membership, said Leslie Fitzgerald, a massage therapist at the Claremont for nine years before she was fired last October. Fitzgerald, now a Local 2850 organizer working with the spa workers, said she was dismissed for “sticking up for another worker.”

Fitzgerald said their planning meetings steeled spa workers for the hotel’s resistance to their organizing effort. “It has been frightening and pretty brutal,” she said.

“There were mandatory meetings, one-on-ones where people were told they will lose benefits, that the union will not be able to negotiate better pay, not get them anything, will come between them and managers, that they will not be able to talk to managers any more,” Fitzgerald said.

Appel said the owners support the 130 spa workers’ right to join a union, but only through a secret ballot rather than the card-check method the union wants.

Unions oppose elections because employers can appeal results, resulting in long delays. Employers oppose the alternative—a majority of members signing cards in favor of union representation.

Appel said the owners want to see the issue resolved and focus on reviving the hotel’s core business. Corporate travel is down, tourism has been one of the hardest-hit segments of the economy, weddings are smaller, and holiday parties that businesses once had are no more.

“The owners absolutely would like to see it settled soon,” said Appel. “Two years is a long time.”