Houston Janitors

Read Brad Plumer’s excellent article on the Houston janitorial strike, and what it may portend for union organizing in the South. Plumer has this interesting paragraph, which got me thinking:

So why did the SEIU choose Houston for its latest foray into the South? Partly, the political atmosphere in the country’s fourth-largest city has been changing–because of immigration, Houston has become a nearly majority-minority city with a Democratic mayor. Structural factors also played a role. “What’s fascinating about Houston is that all the major building owners and all the major cleaning contractors were national and international corporations that were unionized everywhere but Houston,” explains Stephen Lerner, the director of the Justice for Janitors campaign. “So we felt we could use our strength in other cities to pressure these companies.”

The first is very interesting, since I’d always been of the belief that it was the combination of ethnic tension and ethnic diversity in the South that had helped scuttle unionization previously. Allowing that my picture may have been far to simple, I’d thought that the trick to resisting unions in the South was to mobilize tension between black and white workers. Was I wrong, or does the entire picture change when you add a third ethnic group or when non-whites outnumber whites?

I’m also kind of curious about the second. For those of you that’ve engaged in union activism, is there a notable difference between corporations headquartered in a union hostile area like the South and, say, a corporation headquartered in Germany, or do employers simply adapt to whatever local conditions they find? From what I know about organizational theory, I’d suspect the former, but I don’t really know.