David Unger is preparing for the family business -- labor organizing

By Linda Myers

ILR senior David Unger worries about how much tomato workers are paid.

"He represents in many ways the new kind of student labor activist," said Lee Adler, a senior extension associate at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations who teaches labor law. "He has a merged moral and political vision about where he wants to place himself."

But unlike rigidly dogmatic,1960s-style political activists, Unger and fellow students involved in such campus groups as COLA (Cornell Organization for Labor Action) reach out to other students and engage in dialogue, said Adler. "He's thoughtful but radical, in the best sense of the word; insistent but respectful."

Senior David Unger, outside the ILR School. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

ILR Assistant Professor Jefferson Cowie said of Unger: "He is one of those rare students who came to us having been born into the union tradition. You could say that his time at the ILR School was essentially finishing school for much of what he learned around the dinner table in a pro-labor household -- a family where getting involved in something you believed in was an important rite of passage, I suspect."

Unger describes his father, Nick, a campaign organizer, as "one of the foremost labor thinkers in the country." His mother, Laura, is a prominent woman union leader, and an older sister is active in social justice causes. In addition, a grandfather was a labor lawyer and a grandmother a radical socialist. "I went to my first rally when I was in a stroller, a pro-choice demonstration in Washington, D.C.," Unger recalled.

But he wasn't always headed in that direction. In high school he rebelled, becoming apolitical, and even went so far as to take a buttoned-down summer job with Citibank.

"I was able to talk the progressive line, but I didn't feel it on a personal level until I got to Cornell and joined COLA," he said.

Galvanized, Unger went on to become president of the Cornell branch of Students Against Sweatshops, a national movement to ensure that clothing with college insignias is made under decent working conditions. "It was on my watch that the university helped develop a process to prevent Cornell clothing from being made in sweatshops," he related.

A summer stint with Local 10 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) Union in Cleveland, organizing workers at a Radisson Hotel, was his first direct union organizing experience. Even though he found that organizing involved more listening than talking, he felt so strongly that he'd found what he loved to do that he almost dropped out of school to continue the campaign.

"Helping a worker gain power feels better than anything I've ever done," he said. "I believe unions are the only vehicle powerful enough for social change."

Once he discovered the direction he'd been seeking, he applied himself to learning as much as he could about labor history and labor law, but he also didn't shy away from criticizing the labor movement. In a course with Cowie, he wrote a paper about what a mediocre job unions were doing in publicizing their messages. And in a paper in a course with Adler, he took unions to task for being slow to eliminate racism and sexism among their ranks.

Unger also put himself out there on the front lines of social protest. "IlR gives you a good space for doing labor activism while going to school," he said. In the course of his labor activist "education," he got arrested twice, once while taking part in the protests against globalization at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington, D.C., and once while protesting a hotel and casino actively fighting unionization. But afterward he was greeted like a conquering hero by friends and family.

"My dad called up and congratulated me on my bar mitzvah," he recalled.

Anxious to do some activity not related to unions while in college, he spent the fall 2001 semester in Dublin working for the Irish Refugee Council, an NGO (nongovernmental organization), researching and writing a report on deficiencies in the health-care system that might effect the country's large asylum-seeking population. "Many live in horrible conditions -- bad housing, inadequate kitchens, entire large families in a single room. Its especially dangerous for the children," he said.

During his senior year, Unger sought a job as a union organizer with a large progressive union and accepted one with HERE, Local 11, in the Los Angeles area. "I'll probably be making about a third of what classmates are making in salary. But I'll be doing the work I know needs to be done and that I love to do," he said. "And I've made enough friends who'll be making big bucks who'll take me out to dinner at fancy restaurants whenever I'm in town."