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.

New Orleans

I have a lot of respect for Ballinger that dates to the time the Organizers’ Forum delegation visited Indonesia several years ago and heard the stories of his expulsion for too aggressively doing his job with the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center and insisting on US and other companies paying fair wages in just conditions.  Nothing in subsequent visits every did anything but add to his reputation.

After his expulsion he fought a long campaign to bring accountability particularly to Nike, the giant shoe and sportswear company.  For a 5+ year period in the 90’s the anti-sweatshop movement on campuses and broadly had the company on the ropes with 40% declines in sales and stock pricing.  Clearly, as organizers we know that is the time when leverage for victory would have been the highest, but alas….

The opening of a piece Jeff sent me from Summer 09 Dissent summarizes the situation now painfully:

“That nearly twenty years of anti-sweatshop activism has come to naught is suggested by the cost breakdown of a $37.99 University of Connecticut hoodie that appeared in the Hartford Courant a couple of years ago:  the workers received a mere 18 cents, while the university received $2.28 in licensing fees. (Mexican factor:  profit, 70 cents; overhead, $2.12, material, $5.50 – importer [Champion]: overhead, $5.10; profit, $1.75 – retailer [UCONN Co-op]: overhead, $14.49; profit, $4.50).  Use of the log was 80 cents, and the royalty to the National Collegiate Athletic Association was 57 cents.  The workers’ share could hardly have been lower when the movement began.”

It’s hard to even imagine an excuse for 18 cents for the workers, because there’s no reason for this.  Ballinger gives the credit to slick public relations work done by Nike and similar companies pretending to embrace “corporate social responsibility” or CSR.  More painfully has I talked to him and read his emails, was the feeling that too many non-profits here and around the globe had effectively sold out the workers as they “partnered” with corporations in these CSR schemes.

Elsewhere Ballinger does a back of the envelope calculations that makes it clearer since Nike might have spent $220 million on raising wage standards for its subcontractors in Indonesia and elsewhere, but the CSR program hardly cost 10% of that with a price tag of $25 million.  Ouch!

These have been unsettling conversations because a 3^rd stage of the campaign, especially when so many of us have been lured into hoping and believing progress had been made, will no doubt be a harder sell and a steeper climb.  Not that there is a choice.  18 cents for workers is immoral and unacceptable!

Washington

I stumbled into the fine hall after the ceremony had already begun, taking a seat just behind Jon Hiatt, Sweeney’s long time general counsel at SEIU and now the AFL, who reached out his hand, and Bill Lurye, from New Orleans sitting down the row past Ray Abernathy and Denise Mitchell, the communications wizards I had known so long.

Listening to John read his very personal speech, I could see Ray imperceptibly nodding as he heard the words that he had no doubt helped shape for John as he has so many times before.  In the wake of the Ted Kennedy funeral and the very public expressions of faith, including the revelation of the recent letter from Senator Kennedy that was hand delivered by President Obama to the Pope, John and Ray had obviously decided in this very Jesuit institution to have John speak very comfortably and personally in his own testament to his Catholic faith as part of his service to working people.  Bob Welsh later commented to me at the reception that for all of the thousands of speeches he has heard John give this was the first one he could recall that was so deeply and personally Catholic as a man, rather than as even a Catholic labor leader.

Having long heard the Sweeney standard preamble that recognizes virtually every labor leader in any room where he is speaking, the beginning was more personal and less political as he named every Sweeney relative in the room and only mentioned Rich Trumka, his coming successor, whom I visited with later, and Arlene Holt, who I may have missed in the crowd.  Clearly, I was hearing the end of Sweeney’s political service and something of his transition to whatever his new and more personal service is likely to be.

Reading the program, it was hard to believe that he had been at the AFL-CIO for 14 years.  Could it have been that long?  And, that he had headed SEIU for 15 years.  Was it really that brief?

The President of Georgetown, Dr. John DeGioia, may have captured his recent career better in noting what I would call his “stewardship” in keeping faith in hard times for institutional labor.  Perhaps that subdued and solid note is most apt. Though it’s sad in a sense of what “could have been” to those of us who stood and hollered, as I did as a proud delegate from the New Orleans AFL-CIO and comrade from SEIU for my President as he spoke as the candidate of change and hope to reform and revitalize labor and offered to lead the AFL-CIO in a different direction in New York in that convention, when Sweeney won as a reform candidate there now years ago.  Now, we have a shattered house of labor still trying to find its future, and an AFL-CIO that is still profoundly better than what he found there, I believe, but still not what we had hoped it might have become.

My friends, comrades, brothers and sisters with whom I’ve shared so much were there in full, graying force.  It was good to see Gerry Shea whose path has now crossed and intertwined with mine for 40 years now back to welfare rights.

It was sobering at the reception to visit with Steven Greenhouse, the Times’ labor reporter, and ask him, as one of the most knowledgeable observers from outside the various houses of labor, where he thought the best new organizing was happening in the country, and realize that what used to a casual and easy question, had clearly caught him off guard.   He easily cited for Joe McCartin the stories where he had covered my organizing on his beat, when I directed the HOTROC campaign among hospitality workers in New Orleans as part of the early Sweeney AFL-CIO organizing offense when our shared friend, Kirk Adams, was the AFL’s Organizing Director, and again in Orlando and Tampa when he covered the drives we were running among Wal-Mart workers on a project supported by the AFL, SEIU, and the UFCW, when we were still all together and still trying to break new organizing ground just five years ago until everything split apart in the middle of our work.  On one hand he confessed that his editors weren’t really interested in organizing, but also conceded that there wasn’t much he could find either.  His last big organizing story he said might have been the campaign that I had helped develop and shepherd through as a partnership with ACORN and the UFT to organize the tens of thousands of home child care workers in New York City.  Joe more gracefully changed the subject to the organizing I was doing internationally to create unions of waste pickers in India, but the work there doesn’t explain or excuse the “waiting for EFCA” vacuum in so much organizing here.

Sweeney time and service was being appropriately recognized, and he and his team deserved the thanks for progress made and promised kept, even if there were many dreams unrealized and disappointments on the road.  It was an honor just to be in the room and to be fortunate enough to be there for such a great occasion with some many comrades and friends.  Many if there were more hosts and facilitators like the good, committed Jesuits of Georgetown and the thoughtful wise veterans in the allied trades, like Professor and friend, Joe McCartin, we could still make many of these dreams still come true.