IT DOESN'T MATTER WHETHER you're an organizer running a National Labor Relations Board election drive, a staff representative coordinating a first contract campaign, a steward representing a member in a grievance, or a local union leader negotiating a renewal contract for a unit that's been around for 50 years, knowledge is power and forewarned is forearmed!
Researching an employer will provide you with the knowledge to enhance the collective power of your union. Both contract negotiations and organizing campaigns are power struggles -- fights pitting workers and their unions against a company. You must protect yourself against the company's strengths and exploit its weaknesses. You need information to do this and researching the employer will supply you with facts you need to put up a fair fight.
When should you begin to research your employer? Start early in a bargaining situation, at least six months prior to entering negotiations. Although the Research and Education Department will assist you in compiling data on your company, the local should also be involved in this process.
Although union activists working at home or at their local hall may sometimes need to get help from professional research resources -- like the OCAW Research and Education Department or the AFL-CIO's Corporate Affairs Department -- vast amounts of employer information are available to anyone with a library card and a credit card.
When preparing for bargaining or an organizing campaign, the union committee should first look at the information it already has in its possession and thoroughly analyze it.
In a contract bargaining situation, the negotiations committee should review the current contract, paragraph by paragraph, to identify areas in need of improvement. Old grievance and arbitration records are a great source of information which will help you locate shortcomings in your existing collective bargaining agreement. It is also very important to talk to stewards and grievance committee members who deal with the problems arising under the contract on a day-to-day basis.
The local should also assemble demographic information on its units from its own records or by way of information requests to the company: the number of employees; dates of birth; dates of hire; minimum, maximum, and average rates of pay by job class; average earnings; cost of living payments; total and average hours worked overtime hours worked; descriptions of jobs performed; and vacation eligibility.
After obtaining the internal information from union and company sources, the committee's search for external data is simply a matter of knowing where to look or who to call.
This external information on the employer, the economy, and contract settlements achieved by other unions can be accessed via public and institutional libraries, governmental agencies like the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Department of Labor (DOL), as well as the OCAW Research and Education Department.
The following are some basic resources for researching your employer and where you can find them:
Other reports available from the AFL-CIO include the NLRB Election History and Union Buster Reports.
More and more union organizers and negotiators are turning to the Internet to uncover corporate facts and figures for organizing campaigns, negotiations, and rank-and-file communications. Free corporate information is available by researching multiple sites. But saving research time sometimes requires paying user fees to access a site that offers all or most of the key information.
A reliable Internet provider can maximize efficiency. Other key tools are a fast modem (with a minimum speed of 28.8) and a credit card to access fee-paid sites or establish accounts. For organizers without computers or Internet service, local libraries often offer free computer use - just make sure to bring a box of 3.5-inch computer disks to download information.
Many computer-savvy unionists already use Internet search engines programs that "search" Web sites for information based on a keyword or series of keywords -- to unearth corporate data, but search engines are limited -- they reportedly cover less than 30 percent of Internet sites. A more direct approach is to access individual business and government-related Web sites and look for information based on the names of the business or corporate officers.
An Internet search can locate public information that includes company profiles, articles of incorporation, officers and their ties to outside companies, financial reports, violations of state and federal regulations, court cases, and news items from general media and trade publications.
Begin with www.hoovers.com to get quick information on public companies. The site has free information on 13,000 U.S. firms -- data on sales, employees, offices, addresses, phone numbers and a brief description of each company. Additional data is available for a fee. For the full details on a company, read the annual 10-K and quarterly 10-Q filings at the Securities and Exchange Commission's sites at either www.sec.gov; edgar.stern.nyu.edu; www.whowhere.com/EDGAR or www.freeedgar.com. To learn about the company's officers, go to people.edgaronline.com/people.
At www.corporateinformation.com hundreds of Internet links describe information available and indicate whether user fees are charged. Included are links for researching public and private companies, and links by industry and region.
The AFL-CIO Paywatch site provides the salaries of top chief executive officers of major companies and maps their ties to each others' boardrooms: www.paywatch.org.
Another helpful site is www.knowx.com, which can be searched for a fee during business hours or for free after 6 p.m. (There is a separate fee for downloading information.)
Other useful fee-based sites include: www.dnb.com (Dun & Bradstreet), which provides credit and financial information, and www.wsj.com (Wall Street Journal), which includes access to the Dow Jones News Retrieval's 3,600 publications.
Before starting an Internet search, it's critical to remember the warnings of organizers who say they have spent an hour or more searching the Internet for information they could have located with one or two phone calls. Think about the quickest way to get the information you want.
OCAW Reporter, November-December 1998