New Orleans   

Part of the story is in the numbers which continue to slip and fall.

Bureau of Labor Statistics announced another slight drop last year of union membership compared to the overall non-farm workforce from 11.9 to 11.8%.   Steven Greenhouse in the Times reports that union membership is now 14,760,000.  The public sector percentage was 37% and about 7,560,000 and the private sector percentage is now only 6.9% with about 7,200,000.  Private sector membership is clearly heading towards 5%, unless something serious and drastic happens.

The numbers could have been worse.  There is speculation that the AFL-CIO is claiming 3,000,000 members from its Working America unit as part of their membership totals, which would be wild, since these are “canvassed” members rather than “real” dues paying members in local unions around the country.  There are still scars on the ears of AFL-CIO staffers from 2008 who did phonebanking to the call list with that group and heard in no uncertain terms from many of these “members” that they had no idea they were part of a union?!?   The BLS numbers come from the Current Population Survey of 60,000 households taken on a monthly basis so those are much more reliable indicators than those reported by unions themselves.

But, I’m grabbing at straws in saying that it could have been worse.  This is plenty bad, and there’s no sign of anything being done in the labor movement to make it much better.  Counting on the economy to make the numbers look a bit better is not a strategy!

 New Orleans              

            And, judging by the billions being paid by ESPN and others to broadcast live sports as “product,” these games are passing for entertainment, and the players are either professionals or if they are not, they are being pimped out for pay by their educational institutions without hardly more than a thank you, and often not much of an education.    In recent weeks I have read several excellent articles making the case that college athletes, especially men’s football and basketball, should be paid, first in The Atlantic  by Taylor Branch, the noted prize winning biographer of Martin Luther King, and, more recently by Joe Nocera in the New York Times.   Two other articles also moved me on this question.  One was in the New Yorker and was looking at the growing “professionalism” of big time high school (yes, high school!!!) football, and the other was a brief piece in the Wall Street Journal making the case for more realistically pruning down the ranks of the top football NCAA division to get rid of huge number of schools that don’t have a chance and in fact are subsidizing the sport and losing millions in many institutions, that should know better.  Don’t they have business departments there either?

The NCAA itself walked into the mess finally by prosing to pay athletes $2000 per year.  They were forced to retreat by too many college athletic employers making the standard claim of all employers that they couldn’t afford to pay the workers who were bringing in the bucks.  Now, Nocera makes the excellent point that I had overlooked, that this coming season some players will be paid (if you call $2K a wage?), and others will not be, depending on when some athletes signed school “intent” letters.  This creates a totally ridiculous situation!

The numbers are all ridiculous.  The NCAA makes more than $770 M per year from TV rights to the “March Madness” playoffs to the basketball championship.  The combined revenue of men’s college football and basketball is estimate at $6 billion per year.  Big-time universities recognize that sports are huge moneymakers for them, which is why they pay the coaches sometimes millions per year.  In a stunning graphic the Times picture the highest paid 15 college coaches who were making a combined $53+ million per year.  All of this is built on the backs of “student athletes” who are paid nothing!

Oh yeah, the students get scholarships, though in many cases the value of the scholarships don’t pay all of the freight, as most parents of college age children know.  The fact that the scholarships exist within this revenue and exploitation model means that the athletes might be paid less.  It does not mean they should work – and get hurt – for free. 

Many of the proposals, particularly Nocera’s, are intriguing involving lifetime health insurance (everyone needs that!), bidding, salary caps per school, and so forth.  Before getting too deeply involved in any of the intricacies of various schemes, the starting point that is the huge power of the NCAA itself and the legal anti-trust implications of its operations with the institutions and of course the players, and, just like other big time professional sports programs, as we have discussed previously, the only way the NCAA can get around this problem is by negotiating directly and fairly with the students, which means U-N-I-O-N.

To some a union of college athletes might sound crazy, but they need to step back and think twice.  First, students in many, many cases are also workers, often to support the costs of college itself and certainly their lives while trying to study.  They work in every nook and cranny of the institutions, shuffling library books, making beds, serving on the line and busing the tables later, and on and on and on.  No one disputes the fact that these students work nor does anyone pretend that they are somehow not students because they are paid for their work.  Why then would the 40 to 50 hours per week athletes put into practice and preparation to play seem less like work or make them less students when they show up in class?  Secondly, in other countries the notion of unionized students is not so unique.  The associations have different levels of clout and bargaining ability but the one thing that is true is that they represent students in direct discussions with institutions. 

Looking just at men’s basketball and football at the top, Division I level, there are about 20,000 student-athlete-workers who would be part of the “unit.”  The organizing wouldn’t be a walk in the park.  Many coaches could teach regular bosses something about being autocratic and in fact sports is where some of them have no doubt learned these models, so they wouldn’t rollover easily.  The professional players’ associations could be real assets here and provide role models and advocates to offset the opposition. 

Organizing players at this level is also good for unions.  Seeing the Hornets’ Chris Paul as a player’s union representative at the NBA bargaining table or the Saints’Drew Brees in a similar position sent exactly the right messages to unionized workers in New Orleans for example.  Multiple this throughout all of the nooks and crannies of big time college athletics and let that trickle down, and the benefits to organized labor and the overall perception of unions would multiple the good will many times over of the countless union sponsored service projects which go unrecognized.

The Players’ Associations and other student advocates, like the PIRGs, should help resource such an organizing drive along with Change to Win and the AFL-CIO as the key labor federations.   Unions need to be in this conversation and let the NCAA and colleges know that it’s “game on!”

I’m down!  Sign ‘em up!  Unionize college athletes now!

            New Orleans              

The new rule modifications primarily affect elections that go to a hearing before the NLRB and involve appeals.  The NLRB in their release of the rule indicated that only about 10% of elections are currently going to hearing, since mostly the parties are agreeing to stipulated elections.  The number of elections in the last available year (2009) only totaled 1304, so we are talking about 130 elections involving perhaps 7000 workers.  Some of these hearings are quick and simple matters for unsophisticated employers and attorneys hoping for the best, so only a subset of these 130 elections actually involve appeals.   Previously I’ve argued that this is not insignificant because the larger the unit being organized, the more likely the hearing and the appeals, and if a union is stuck in that rut it is absolutely a world of pain with a recent Berkeley Labor Center report, based on a FOIA filing with the NLRB, indicating that the delays will of elections will run from more than 4 months to close to 6 months.  In these cases the new rule will be helpful in allowing the election to proceed and forcing the lawyers to argue later and limiting and consolidating the appeals, but….

Comparing the 2009 NLRB stats back to 1997 figures is sobering on several scores.  Unions were winning more than 50% of elections filed in that period and won an astounding 66% of elections filed in 2009.  Unfortunately despite winning two-thirds of our elections, we certified only a little more than 44,000 workers, and that likely means only at best half of those or about 22,000 ended up from this process under a collective bargaining agreement.  The number of workers involved in elections filed is down to less than one-third of what it was in 1997:  224,262 then and 69,832 now!   Elections are off correspondingly from 3261 filed in 97 and only 1304 in 09.

Gamely, labor spokespeople and other commentators argue that many more are being won in non-board organizing, and undoubtedly that’s true, but no one would argue that the winning significantly or at scale sufficiently to offset our steadily shrinking numbers.  Even SEIU reported membership losses in recent years for the first time in decades.  There are huge concerns that the AFL-CIO reported membership strength is wildly inflated.

Past all of the sound and fury about the modest nature of these rule changes and the continuing hope, no matter perhaps how unrealistic, that there may be more substantial changes in election rules shortening the time and giving unions more easy access to the workforce through telephone and emails, it seems impossible to deny that the biggest problem for unions besides the fierceness of employer opposition is our failure to continue to emphasize organizing.  The numbers seem to indicate that we are on some kind of long, terrible organizing holiday.

We need to get back to organizing before it’s too late.

 New Orleans              

One of the dangers of organizing work is that sometimes the tactic can swallow the strategy, and this seems to have happened in DC.  The news was all about 60 to 70 arrests for this and that and a lot of attention was paid to the street blocking and traffic delays as folks tried to gum up the works.

The press may have thought that this was all Occupy all the way, which speaks to the power and impact of a legitimate movement and the savvy of SEIU and others to attach themselves to something with traction, but seeing the following quote from one of the arrestees was labor all the way:

“K Street is the place to be if you’re going to stop the moneybags who are corrupting our government,” said Jim Sessions, 75, a Methodist minister from Tennessee who was arrested Wednesday. He and eight others from Texas, Massachusetts and Washington state had linked arms across K and 16th streets and refused to move.

I couldn’t help smiling seeing my old friend and comrade (and Labor Neighbor Training and Research Center board member!), Rev. Jim Sessions, whose history and credentials within the labor movement and many other progressive causes is blue ribbon all the way from his time supporting the Pittston Strike to his directorship of the Highlander Center and then his efforts to build the Union Community Fund for the AFL-CIO until returning to Knoxville, taking one for the team and staying on message.  Nonetheless this was all run as Occupy.

Another article looked extensively at whether or not the street blockings and arrests advanced the 99% cause or not, which is always the argument when message gets consumed in the tactics.  Given that this was really the hard paws of labor sending a message to the Capitol, I hope the message was not lost on the White House, even if it is likely to end up as hours of debate before the Occupy DC general assembly in coming days.

No question we took a shot.  Just unclear if it came within a mile of the real targets.

More depressing to me was reading an Ezra Klein interview with former SEIU President Andy Stern in yesterday’s Washington Post. I wish it were a case of misunderstanding or mistaken identity, but Andy seems happy enough with how his views were presented that he linked to the interview on his twitter account, so I guess this is what he really thinks.  Long and short he seems to say, his well ran dry:

“What I would say is I felt that the next strategy of change would be different. I had tried everything I knew. I was too much of a victim of the model I created. I tried Change to Win and helping Obama, and then I just ran out of Andy Stern ideas.”

I actually don’t believe that is either true or what Andy really thinks.  The rest of the interview in fact belies that quote as does his interest in broadcasting the interview.  Andy has never been short of ideas, what he seems to have realized is two more fundamental things in leaving SEIU.  First, that he could not convince people to follow his ideas, and, secondly,  after having led people to follow him  through past ventures like Change to Win, sometimes they don’t work.  It may have been the right idea, but it was the wrong strategy or set of tactics.  The rest of the ideas in the interview are feints in different directions.  I can remember how he scoffed at the German workers’ councils a dozen years ago, so it’s a little hard to see him touting them now.  I’ll think about all of that and get back to you….

But worse in all of these comments whether high or low, Twitter or Times, is that even when expressing hope they still reflect the old post-Katrina refrigerator slogan:  Hope is Not a Plan.  There still seems to be no coherent strategy or plan that pulls labor together in a more fundamental direction to rebuild and reassert.  In some ways it is too easy to see Wisconsin as a last gasp of the old school.  I heard recently that the Madison AFL-CIO was debating calling a general strike.  If called, who would come?  If we came, what would we really stop?  I want to see this and count the feet on those streets!

In the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago a breathless story about a possible $100,000,000 organizing campaign being launched by SEIU in more than a dozen cities around the country was attributed to an anonymous SEIU board member and other sources.  Whatever the merits and truth of those reports, SEIU and every other union need to pull all of their last dollars together and figure out how to survive and turn the tide and do it now, make it real, and make it very, very different, because the bell has rung on the old school and the old ideas, as Stern acknowledges, and we are running out of time and money with the tide coming in hard against us.

Time for speeches is over.  It’s only sweat that counts now.

New Orleans

And, that was a shock.  Oliver was a friend and supporter.  Mayor Morial’s blessing and Oliver’s work on the inside when I ran the multi-union project, HOTROC, for SEIU, the AFL-CIO, HERE, and the Operating Engineers, ended up being the big success of our inside “leverage” campaign with the Piazza de’ Italia public corporation that built the Lowe’s Hotel, the only major post 9-11 property, and now the only union hotel in the city.  Earlier Oliver had been the key we needed when he cast the deciding vote preventing the privatization of the Sewerage and Water Board.  He has been one of our most vocal champions when we fought to raise the minimum wage.  Believe me, if he had been for sale, developers, hoteliers, and the privateers all would have paid way more than $20,000 chump change to take him out of those fights.  So of all the trees to be toppled and fall, the looming, large Councilman Thomas was the surprise never expected and the disappointment most deeply felt and impossible to replace.

When caught with the cookies, Oliver manned up, pled guilty, didn’t rat, and did his time.  We got some letters from him from the fed penitentiary in Atlanta that were moving and well thought out.  Big believers in redemption, when the bizarre news came out that he and his old friend, Anthony Bean, director of a community theater uptown had written a play about all of this, called “Reflections:  A Man and His Time,” I immediately went on line and bought six tickets so we would be well represented from the top (Local 100 ULU’s President Mildred Edmond) to the bottom (the rest of us organizers).

The play was sold out and my guess is that the theater should have cleared $6000 conservatively the night we attended, and that’s a very good contribution and says something about rehab right there.  What do I know about the theater?  Not much, but the play was sprightly up to the intermission.  Some of it was even funny.  The crowd got a tremendous kick out of the satire around the preachers advising and arguing with Oliver before his public announcement.  The second half focusing on his prison time was preachy and boring with one good song, which might mean it was realistic, but it didn’t offer much to most of us already off parole.

A politician slipping and falling and then doing something as public as a play to try and “explain” himself is a rare thing, so it’s hard to judge.  Having read Oliver’s prison letters, I don’t doubt his sincerity, yet watching all of this on a stage inevitably and by definition takes some of the reality out of both insight and contrition.  The sense of “I did wrong” was never diluted, but the play allowed there to be curious mitigations around the inadequate pay in politics, the puny level of the bribe, the generosity shown to needy constituents, the lack of benefit to his family, and the couple of times that problems with racetrack gambling floated out in snippets of dialogue without explanation or amplification, as if the very mention was a trial balloon for an alternate reality.

Some things can’t be explained and Oliver and Bean were sharp enough to not try to defend something that was just plain stupid.  The play also left the future cloudy and confused for our friend and now banned politician.  The very drag of the second act made it hard to believe that there as a clear path for Oliver working with young people, which was part of the hint drifting there.

New Orleans is not like other cities.  Thank goodness!  Former governor Edwin Edwards just came out of jail after a decade as the play was hitting the boards.  Here he maintains a reputation after four terms in office as delightful rouge regardless of the evidence.  In our city Oliver can still be an advocate what needs to be done.  A son of the lower 9^th ward and a long time representative of uptown housing projects and neighborhoods, Oliver can still find a voice speaking truth to power.   He did wrong, and he paid his debt to society.  Now he needs to find a new stage and talk about what he really knows and what really matters.  Maybe that will be with young people, maybe it will be a broader role in helping cement the coalition that continues to try and build real power for the majority of people in this city.

After a slip and fall, what’s most important is finding a sure path to continue on making progress as you make your way.

Hanoi

We had started our trip with a small dust-up with the vice-president of the HCM City labor federation over the existence of wildcat strikes in China where he maintained stern denial and then open interest in other areas.  We then met with the vice-president of the entire VGFL along with the head of their international department in Hanoi at their central headquarters later in the week, where we got an entirely different impression.

It was clear in that conversation that there were strong and arguments going on the run-up to the coming policy congress about essential issues to unions and their members particularly on issues we believed were central around what we saw as “living wages.”  There was dispute covered in the papers around not simply the growth of the Vietnamese economy which has continued to roar above 6% even during the worldwide recession but also about the impact of inflation hovering now above 9% in 2010.    The minimum wage in Vietnam is 1,340,000 dong which is about $65.00 per month for a standard 48-hour workweek.  The very important Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry had argued to us that essentially it was a problem, but “get used to it” and we would have to agree to disagree.  The VGFL position was adamant and unyielding that something had to give on this issue, and that the wage set had to be a wage that would allow workers to adequately live not simply survive.

Other issues resonated with us from our conversations with the VGFL.  Their priorities and problems in dealing with foreign multi-nationals were issues we had in common.  They were particularly clear about the challenges in dealing with cleaning and security companies which was another verse from the SEIU songbook.  They claimed to have 1000 organizers and a goal to grow by 1.5 million members in the next few years from their current membership of about 6 to 7 million.  They  had achieved virtually 100% membership in state-owned industries and operations, but had almost no density in the informal sector but wanted to grow to 70% density in the rest of the formal, private sector.

Outside observers like Chuck Searcy, who we respected as an outside observer without a horse in the race, had the impression that the VGFL was militant and strident.  He reported that he read regularly about strikes and threatened strikes where the government had to intervene and settlement efforts were necessary to maintain labor peace.

On the other hand in our final meeting with PACCOM, the government liaison to NGO’s in Vietnam and our host in most ways, the head of the American desk almost offhandedly shared with us that the VGFL was funded directly by the government, and when I asked if that wasn’t the case as well for the other “associations” that were part of the Fatherland Front along with labor like the women’s union, veterans, and others, he indicated that certainly, they were all funded by the government.

We discussed with the representatives of the VGLF their relationships with the North American labor movement.  They knew Barbara Shailor, the long time assistant to AFL-CIO presidents for international affairs, very well and mentioned that Rudy Porter, the area chief – and long time friend of the Organizers’ Forum – had been there recently with a visiting delegation.  They emphasized that there were frequent exchanges along these lines as well as joint exchanges in unions in California.  They seemed confident that deeper, mutually beneficial relationships would develop.  They were wise and temperate in their remarks.

This whole problem of a state managed “market economy” presents a different kind of alignment between government, business, and labor which challenges the normal frameworks that we are used to leaning on as we analyze unions, therefore creating quite the puzzle for us.  At the same time where the Party and the government are so powerful, who would not want a strong voice for unions and labor in policy for workers?  Unions throughout the USA, Scandinavia, and Europe also get money from the government, so is this a matter of degree or a game changer?

We ended up with no one answer.  I think we have no choice but to fully engage such a labor movement, but there are a lot of apples and oranges out there and it would be a mistake to be confused that all unions are one thing or another.  Given the weakness of our own unions and labor movement and our ability to deliver for workers with the fickle friends in our own parties, I’m clear that we have to be careful throwing rocks from our glass windows at the very least.

Atlanta

The questions were music.

“Why didn’t the IRS do more outreach to ensure participation in the Earned Income Tax Credit?”

“Why didn’t the government move the program away from the IRS to someone who would make more happen with it?”

In Atlanta where I found later that foreclosures are a big enough issue that Ken Johnson, the Southern Regional Director of the AFL-CIO told me they were quietly sponsoring a hearing on the lack of activity on modifications for various unions, I was not surprised to hear many questions on why so little was being done in this area as well.  This was a class under Professor Fred Brooks at Georgia State University and the students were social work or sociology undergrads or graduate students, so I was not surprised that there questions were closer to the ground.  One woman asked an especially poignant question about a friend who was droning on student loans, penalties and collection fees, and trying to somehow put the pieces together.  I was saddened to suggest she consider bankruptcy, though I warned her that I no longer believed that was sufficient to escape student loan burdens, it at least might give her some relief.

A panel that then discussed the Citizen Wealth themes with representatives from 9 to 5, Association of Working Women, the Teamsters, and the Atlanta Prosperity Campaign were also on point and very interesting.  The APC did 10,000 tax returns in 40 locations the woman shared with me after the panel, and was trying to benefit test as well now, though only able to directly move applications for food stamps, but this made a difference since Atlanta participation was less than 70% of eligibles there.  9to5 told the story of how close they came to passing a living wage ordinance in Atlanta though they, like so many places like Louisiana, Texas, and now Florida, had been thwarted by action of the state legislature taking away the right of cities to regulate anything about wages.  Ben Speights, the local Teamsters organizing director who I had know from his time at ACORN in Vegas, told the story of the struggle of workers to get a union at the Coca-Cola bottling plants in Atlanta in the shadow of the corporate headquarters, but the tale was not ending well yet for all of the workers’ courage.

It was exciting to feel the energy from the students, many of them committed to staying in Atlanta and making a big difference, as well as how much organizations are trying to make happen around income security in the city and to hear the number of folks asking for help to make more happen, but at the same time one could feel a city in crises without enough being done.

This is becoming a familiar song in too many cities around the country with too many of the same refrains.

Johannesburg

We started slowly with another fast moving series of matatu rides which amazingly got us to Trinity Catholic Church right outside of Korogocho in record time of hardly a half-hour. It’s impossible not to like Father John. He seems young, but is probably 40, and wearing a white Kenya soccer jersey, there would have been no way to ID him as a priest, if we were not in the rectory meeting with him in a side room. He was a kindred spirit in the “cultural” wars of overturning the NGO and donor dependency that created false consensus in meetings where local people now thought they simply were supposed to ask that something be done and learn to accept whatever the NGOs offered. Unions are so unknown to poor people in Nairobi that it was easier to talk about the comparisons between the Church as a gather of believers and our community organization as similar with dues instead of a collection plate. Father John agreed that we could work out of his school when needed and would always be welcome to a desk, and we walked out feeling we had a true friend here for our work in Korogocho.

Much of the rest of the day was spent in housekeeping around the sundry administrative details we needed to move the work forward from our registration to simple bookkeeping to work on the internet, websites, Facebook, and even a fundraising program for the organizers to move forward around Citizen Wealth. All good stuff, but the heart and soul of the afternoon was doing campaign planning for the next steps we needed to take to develop action and progress on the “slum upgrading” commitment on housing, forcing the promised hospital to be built, and moving on education both to deliver “bursary scholarships” as they are called and see if we could develop a plan to force the building of a public, primary school in the slum. It’s a pleasure to be able to sit down for 6-7 hours with organizers and come out of it with a full list of things to be done and, importantly, a feeling that tasks are clear and problems are being solved. We have a good, talented, raw team in Kenya, so now we have to ensure that they succeed.

I managed to top off the day at dinner with old comrade, Rick Hall, from the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center. We celebrated the fact that having gotten me to ferry Jameson’s to him a year ago, he had converted me in that direction. He had exciting plans that also found me a quick volunteer to build an “organizing institute” in the countries he works with in East Africa. Rwanda for example has no unions and no collective bargaining now and is virtually what Brother Hall called a “US client state” where even commercial institutions are willing to encourage the building of unions (though it may be temporary of course) to help bring stability and restore some measure of strength in civil society. Spending some time helping him there would be worth the climb. Our conversation also reminded me of my blog a year ago about enforcing the new wage and benefit standards for domestic workers. Nothing has changed in a year, but perhaps its high time.

It was nice to be in Kenya doing real work with our organizers, members, and leaders finally after the long trips over several years to pave the way so that we could now see the path forward.