Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » labor

Pink Sheeting One on Ones

jstuart — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:42:12 +0000

New Orleans Obviously an article in the Times by Steven Greenhouse entitled, “Some Organizers Protest Their Union’s Tactics,” would catch my eye. One reads it with some peril given the bricks still being thrown from one glass window or another between SEIU and UNITE HERE, but despite that caveat, it’s worth serious attention. The article looks at the complaint from former UNITE HERE organizers about “pink sheeting,” which seem to have been a practice of recording highly personal information on pink sheets (they are now a different color) and allowing supervisory access to such information and using it to direct and drive organizers in a way that some find manipulative. Now in one of the rare articles we have about internal union business we get to read about tawdry internal affairs and psycho-babble mind games: kill me now!

The story gives way too much information about the internal conflicts lying in the back story of individual union organizers from broken families to weight issues to presumably everything else that they share with the life history of many in modern America. John Wilhelm, the head of UNITE HERE, said many of these practices have been reformed, and I’m confident that this will be done at the human resources and personnel management level.

Having talked with a lot of UNITE HERE organizers though, I actually think the issue is deeper and perhaps more serious and lies at the heart of the fundamental interchange that organizers are trained to have with workers based on the construction of “one-on-ones” which are common in some forms of organizing methodology. “One-on-ones” are commonly used by community organizers, especially in the faith based practice found in the Industrial Areas Foundation and other operations, as a basic construct for doing the hundreds of leadership visits to assemble a project. They are designed to achieve many goals, but one of them is establishing a connection between the organizer and the community leader by deliberately sharing some personal experience to establish a common bond.

I should disclose quickly that although I understand “one-on-ones” as a methodology, I have never been comfortable with their practice or their claims, largely because in my view they inappropriately elevated the role of the organizer in a way that both create a false mutuality with potential leadership and a distortion of the roles that would most effectively build the organization particularly around the issues of organizer-dependency and a conflation of organizers and leaders making them almost synonymous. It is neither the way I have trained or supervised organizers nor the way I have been involved in building organizations or organizing models. Nonetheless, I have always been respectful of the practice, despite my reservations, because I was confident that the best practices in the craft probably protected against some of these potential problems. In organizers’ shoptalk we used to kid about talking to organizers from other “schools” and having the conversation turn creepy when they started “one-on-one-ing” us and crossing boundaries on a personal level. But, realistically in doing leadership visits and building leadership relationships over time, all of us understood that real personal friendships would emerge and rigid protocols would evaporate over years of work and mutual understandings.

As the use of “one-on-ones” from community organizing morphed into some labor organizing, I think the adaptation got even more bent. In looking under the hood with HERE UNITE organizers, part of the construction of the “one-on-one” was more deliberately an effort to pull out of the organizers a core motivation for why they did the work that was deeply rooted in explaining their motivations, angers, and sense of powerless they shared with the workers based on intensely personal experiences in the organizer’s life. Divorces, family issues, dependencies, addictions, and whatever else frequently emerged as core issues for sharing in the one-on-one. Staff meetings and training sessions described to me were sometimes too eerily reminiscent of some of the old, hugely discredited Synanon sessions so notorious from the last years of the United Farm Workers under Caesar Chavez.

It’s easy to see how the fruit can start rolling from that tree and end up being stored away an allowed to rot when used inappropriately.

Wilhelm will stop abuse from the supervisors. I’m confident in that.

Might be harder, though frankly way more important, to take a harder look at the core organizing model of UNITE HERE and whether or not the ways and means of using “one-on-ones” doesn’t need a total review and reworking right at the foundation level.

Election Lessons on the Hudson

jstuart — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:17:58 +0000

New Orleans It’s a small sample, but the Virginia bellwether and the deeply blue state New Jersey went hard Republican and in Jersey tossed a Democratic governor looking for a second shot. Across the river, New York City voters surprised the chattering political classes by almost moving Mayor Bloomberg to his next career as a philanthropist and out of his current posting as a semi-politician. A couple of thoughts crossed my mind.

Voter slaps at Corzine and Bloomberg have a populist anti-Wall Street and decidedly, “money-can’t-buy-my-vote” cast to them for two rich guys willing to spend whatever it takes, particularly the record setting $90M outlay by Mayor Bloomberg in his very close race.
Unions need to listen to their members more and to political pros and consultants less. It’s embarrassing to know that two huge NYC political players, SEIU and UFT/AFT, took a walk on this election. Their members didn’t. Controller Thompson, the challenger, romped with African-Americans and voters making less than $100,000 both of which are heavily represented by those two unions. Had they not been twiddling thumbs on the sidelines, this race would have been even closer and might have sent a message against big money politics that could reverberate around the country.

The Working Families Party of New York is once again a HUGE winner this election! WFP was vocal from the first blush against the 3^rd term effort and said so unabashedly. They refused Bloomberg access to their line, despite persistent pressure. Not having the WFP doing turnout hurt the Mayor, and having them do turnout for Thompson dramatically helped him bring the race close. Big, WOW, here with props for Danny Cantor and all of the WFP team!

What are the progressive forces going to do without the GOTV and registration work in the community which ACORN has indicated it is unlikely to play in 2010 and beyond? It was wild to read the pre-election right turnout scare tactics using ACORN as the boogieman. A DC spokesperson for ACORN said they were not even involved anywhere in this race in New Jersey, and despite all of the strum and dang, ACORN had no base or operations in the NY-23^rd race. Turnout was low and decidedly down among minorities and youth. The more one reads and studies this rightwing ideological attack the smarter and more effective it seems, if its main purpose was to help level the playing field by successfully pushing one of the players off the field.

And, yes, none of this was about Obama, but all politics is local and the President will get the message. According to the New York Times, Bloomberg was effective in putting the President and his people to the sidelines with a head fake and some bluster, and Thompson’s work as the standard bearer for the Democrats could seen a different storyline with real White House help rather the shrinking back, timidity that came with riding the donkey in New York. What’s up with that?!?

If I were in one of the President’s men, I would be getting an apology together (and maybe offering my resignation!), because this is a huge wakeup call from the base, and it needs to be heard clearly without putting more sugar in this sad cup of coffee.

Sustaining Majority Unions

jstuart — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:22:32 +0000

Philadelphia It was a lot of fun to be the guest speaker at the annual Labor Lawyers reception to support Philadelphia Jobs with Justice. It was a good, there were people, old friends and comrades came out of nowhere, and once we got to the problems of “majority unionism” as discussed in Citizen Wealth, and the questions were excellent and interesting.

I was not surprised because part of the reason I had agreed to support the great work in Philly lay at the footsteps of a good example of the potential of majority unionism. For several years JwJ here under its director Fabricio Rodriguez had been involved in the long, arduous process of supporting the building of an organization among the 175 security workers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. After several years the organization had navigated the obstacles for security workers in organizing and recently had transitioned to an independent union, filed, and won a representation election handily, and not surprisingly having already proven the organization at the workplace long ago. Now, they challenges of bargaining away, but that’s another story.

Majority unionism is what I have called the process of changing the labor organizing paradigm to allow workers first (not employers!) decide they want an organization, build strength through direct membership and direct action, and using that power along with community and political leverage to win recognition and advances regardless of any other obstacles in law or habit. This kind of strategy led to the huge success in our generation among informal workers (home health and home day care) which have added more than a half-million members in the last 30 years to the ranks of organized labor. This is also the heart of the successful pilot we led in Florida several years ago to prove that Wal-Mart workers could be organized a different way.

The hard question asked by several of the union lawyers and reps in the room, was how do you make the organization sustainable over the time frame necessary to win? This question was particularly important because the examples from home health care and Wal-Mart were based on more modest dues levels (in some cases only $10/month) than what many of them were accustomed to seeing in existing unions. Certainly this had also been our challenge as well, and led to our independent union becoming part of the SEIU, and kept us from continuing the Wal-Mart Workers Association as an independent entity.

The answer I was too well mannered to give was that this question lies at the heart of the dilemma between being a union movement and an institutional structure. The efforts among farmworkers, home care workers, and others – including what we are doing with ragpickers and cartoneros now – are rooted in deep political, individual, and organizational commitments over long time frames of sacrifice and struggle until victory is achieved. These are projects that don’t fit the normal box of excellent wages and benefits for union organizers, but will be driven by rare organizing zealots willing to pay the price for years in the conviction and passion that success will justify the climb long into the future. There’s a crazy, courageous history to this, but my friends were right: it’s not a model.

But it is a way to shift the paradigm and turn the tide, especially if we can convince unions and others to help balance the books while the work is done until what I, perhaps crazily, believe will be the inevitable victory. The workers want organizations. They want power on the job. Eventually, we are going to have to pay the dues, and give them what they demand, even if it is harder than we like and different than what we know.

So Long Card Check

jstuart — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:12:11 +0000

New Orleans Steven Greenhouse reported in the Times today what most in the labor movement have come to expect for quite a while: card check is not going to emerge in any final labor law reform at this time.

Card check, as many must know, is a procedure allowing for recognition of a union as the workers’ representative based on counting the workers’ voluntarily signed union authorization cards, rather than going to a government supervised election. Put politicians in the squeeze with business and add the confusion over workplace “democracy” and elections, and all of us knew this was going to be a hard, hard sell.

Quick elections would get the job done and probably make bargaining a little easier, so there’s still a heartbeat for real reform.

More troubling to me was seeing that Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania were key members of the gang of six that are pushing for this watering down of employee free choice. Senator Pryor from Arkansas is to be expected as a moderate voice, and if he can bring Senator Blanche Lincoln from Arkansas and leverage Senator Mary Landrieu from Louisiana, then we may not have to cross the street in Little Rock when we see him coming down the same side.

But, I don’t get Brown from Ohio, where unions still have some size and scale and were absolutely fundamental in his election just a few short years ago. Furthermore a key architect of his victory, as campaign manager, was John Ryan, who had been executive secretary of the Cleveland AFL-CIO. You can’t get much closer to labor than that, and Ryan was no pork chopper, but a guy who had gone from leadership of Jobs with Justice to running a big central body. How could Brown have become a “moderate” on labor law reform?

Specter is more troubling. A former Republican until months ago, he had chilled the prospects before his switch and has been looking for a compromise to get back in labor’s graces, so maybe this is a face saver for him.

But, Sherrod Brown? If this is true, we have big troubles ahead of us.

SEIU’s Good Obama Bet

jstuart — Sat, 16 May 2009 14:02:14 +0000

Andy Stern, SEIU

New Orleans Recent press reports and a big story in the Wall Street Journal have been sniping at the huge $85M set of contributions that the Service Employees International Union made on the Obama campaign. On one hand they seem to be insinuating crass influence buying and on the other hand they are hinting at financial mismanagement. Poppycock! Pundits, pols, and others can throw a lot of brickbats at SEIU and its leadership, but not for these decisions that actually show real leadership, risk taking, and exactly what it should mean to accept the challenge in these hard times to run a union and try to organize the unorganized.

Unions are dying and bleeding members on a daily basis. SEIU under its president, Andy Stern, made a huge bet with Obama once they came into the Obama camp in the spring of 2008, and understood that their stewardship of membership dues only mattered if they could prove it really meant something in terms of real change, and that means a different set of labor laws and a chance at real health care reform for members whose wages can’t afford most policies now and members who work in that industry.

Stern is quoted as in the Journal reminding people that a union “is not a bank,” and it’s a point well made. Too many union leaders believe that the way to serve a membership is to present a big, fat balance sheet filled with investments, property, and conservative investments of the “members’ money,” and forget that the members are paying dues in the hopes of good representation on the job and the hope for a better life – not investment advice! My good comrade, Jonathan Tasini, has written pointedly and correctly about what he terms the “edifice complex” in too many unions that sunk the dues into real estate rather than organizing. In fact I would worry more about the strain of the huge $90 M building loans for the new headquarters on Massachusetts Avenue at DuPont Circle than for trying to change the political and business climate for workers! I can live with the building over time a lot more easily, since my dues money and the dues of my members also was leveraged on trying to make real change.

The Journal tries to insinuate that the appointment of Patrick Gaspard, as White House political director, and the pending appointment of Craig Becker to the NLRB are examples of early dividends on the investment. The dividend on $85 M better be a lot more than those two great friends of ours! In California there are constant editorials and reports in the press out there that SEIU has leveraged its “Obama cards” into a holdback on bailout funds to the state because they don’t want to see cutbacks to their hundreds of thousands of home health care members or layoffs of their state worker members. Hello, anybody home out there? A union is a NOT a public interest group or a policy advocate, but a membership organization that is supposed to use its good offices, resources, and, yes, even power, to stand for its members. If SEIU converted its leverage to the good of low waged home care members in Cali, that’s exactly what it is supposed to do!

Furthermore this is big time stuff not just petty backroom deals and the Obama administration is getting way more than a bang for its buck in the partnership as well. The big news this week at the centerpiece of saving the Obama health care reform initiative was the announcement by some of the big healthcare operators that they would deliver MEGA-SAVINGS to help make the health care reform happen. Not surprisingly Andy Stern was there along with Dennis Rivera, head of SEIU’s health care division, and they were the only labor leaders there for good reason. Buried in the story in the New York Times lead report that day was the following sentence: “Dennis Rivera, coordinator of the health care campaign of the Service Employees International Union, led efforts to bring the industry groups together, with help from Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform.” Dennis delivered for SEIU and the White House in only the way that he can. Tell me that 1199’s former political director, Patrick Gaspard (EDIT: This line used to contain a reference to Patrick Gaspard working for NY ACORN. This is untrue, he never worked for ACORN. To see Wade’s correction: http://tinyurl.com/y9bscr8) didn’t reach out from the White House and help make that happen, and I’ll tell you to take some remedial classes in “politics 101.”

Payback is hell. My local has sent $100,000 almost from held in our strike reserves in the good cause as well as our per capita to SEIU, and we were the least of it. Stern was quoted saying that $10M of the $25M political loan had already been retired. The layoff of 40 managers and 80 organizers (for some reason the WSJ said about 40 organizers, but that understates other reports) is even more painful within the organization. God only knows who they might have all been in a huge organization like SEIU and some may have been good to go and get, but there were also some great organizers I have been honored to work with for decades that were caught in this bureaucratic and financial bind. My best friends have managed to land on their feet elsewhere in the organization where their skills will be more appreciated, but still it is painful to see a bet on more organizing lead to less organizing and that is happening throughout the union now it seems.

Everything being equal though, win, lose, or draw, I’m proud to have voted in San Juan almost a year ago to give the union the capacity to make just this kind of bet, and for a change I feel pretty darned good about my dues dollar having been spent for exactly the right kind of risk to gain a just reward for my members and all other workers.

Employee Free Choice Compromises

jstuart — Sat, 09 May 2009 19:09:55 +0000

St. Petersburg Meeting with the WARN (Worker Action and Research Network) staff yesterday in St. Pete, we found ourselves talking about Wal-Mart and the organizing challenge represented by huge retail employers like W-M in the US and Canada. All of which brings up the daunting issue of labor law reform and the imbalance now that favors such companies over workers and unions in such a woeful fashion.

The papers were full of reports of possible compromises looking for a way to secure a vote here or there. Some of it was patently absurd. Workers just can’t seem to catch a break!

Good example: Chamber of Commerce. One story, I think by the Times’ Greenhouse said the Chamber was demanding 45 days between filing and an election – heck, the average now is less than than I think! These folks are obviously just obfuscating.

There is talk about “quick” elections in the 21 day or 3 week range, which would be about half the average now. Anything might be better than what we have, but one world of hurt can be administered to workers in 3 weeks by these lawyer and consultant goons, so it’s unclear whether that will solve the problem or any real problem at all?

Senator Diane Feinstein from California seemed to be shopping a compromise that would forego elections if a majority of workers mailed in their signed cards to the NLRB for cross checking. Frankly, that’s a hard one for me to follow. A business might want to challenge the demand for recognition if it is presented to the labor board, but would not if it were mailed to the labor board? Would the future rely on constant litigation trying to prove whether a worker personally went to the mailbox or had a friend or their local union representative go to the mailbox for them? Huh?

Why all of the grabbing at straws? This is broken. Fix it!

A Cinco de Mayo NOLA Appreciation

jstuart — Sat, 09 May 2009 19:02:57 +0000

New Orleans A surprisingly, frank and spot-on piece ran on the op-ed page of the Times-Picayune by Coleman Warner, speaking “truth to power” about the value of immigrants, especially mexicanos, in the recovery of New Orleans. I wanted to share it with all of you:

The Times-Picayune May 05, 2009
Newcomers deserve day to celebrate
Posted by Coleman Warner, assistant city editor,
It was sometime in 2006, one of the countless Katrina rebuilding days, and around noon I stopped by my gutted house in Lakeview. En route to the FEMA trailer in the back yard, I stepped into what was left of my old living room — wood studs and rusted nails, mostly — and found the air thick with smells of a freshly cooked meal.
As my eyes adjusted to the dim space, I noticed several men, sprawled about the floor, asleep. One of them opened an eye, nodded and resumed his doze. A battered radio blared Latin music, loud enough for all the neighbors to hear.

It was as if I had stepped into a rustic Baja cantina.

The Mexican workmen were deep into their siesta, not to be disturbed. I had hired the contractor who hired them, but wasn’t annoyed at their extended break.

Why? They arrived early in the morning and stayed late, performing all sorts of hauling and tearing and hammering tasks. These men, most of whom spoke little English, did the hard, early work on our wounded place.

It is to them, and to many other Latino workers in New Orleans, that I’ll raise a toast today, Cinco de Mayo.
The “Fifth of May” holiday recalls an unlikely Mexican military victory over the French in 1862 — and, north of the border, serves as a day for celebrating Mexican culture.

Not enough of that these days, especially here.

Hispanic workers have come to the New Orleans area in large numbers since Katrina, providing a critical labor pool for all the roofing, gutting, pipe-laying and wall-hanging. From what I’ve seen, they’ve tackled the sweat jobs with good cheer, no doubt because they are able to send needed cash back to relatives in Texas or Mexico or Central America.

What they’ve gotten in return is fairly shabby treatment.
If you believe a survey of Hispanic immigrant workers by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., eight of 10 of the workers in New Orleans have been ripped off by employers while engaged in rebuilding projects. And there have been threats of violence against workers by employers, the survey concluded.
On the more brazenly criminal side of civic life, Hispanic workers are dubbed “walking ATMs” because they tend to carry cash — and are prime targets for holdups.
In one incident reported by this newspaper in December, Porfirio Martinez, 35, a laborer who sends money to his wife and children in Nicaragua, lost $87 to a robber carrying a .38-caliber pistol. Martinez later regretted the arrest of a suspect because police said the 19-year-old could land in prison for many years.

“I believe in second chances, ” he said.

There is hard feeling among some New Orleanians toward migrant workers who can’t speak our language, who require medical services and, especially, lack legal status. These same issues give me pause. We can’t toss aside immigration rules (even if we have immigrant family histories of our own) without inviting chaos.

But any debate on these questions should be couched in the realization that these laborers were among the shock troops of our recovery. Many of them remain, giving new seasoning to the cultural mix.

I’ll admit to not probing the legal status of the Hispanic men who descended on my home. There was Martin, the lanky, soft-spoken carpenter of Mexican ancestry who had a gift for intricate woodworking, and George, a gregarious painter who did meticulous work before returning home to Guatemala to run a cattle ranch.
And there was the Latin American crew — its background unclear — that saved me from building paralysis. I could not, for many weeks, find a local brick mason to assemble porch entries unless I was willing to pay twice the pre-Katrina rate. A contractor friend tipped me off to Hispanic brick masons who, in a furious few days of toil, got the job done, and at a reasonable charge.

That now seems like a long time ago. But just last week, yet another Spanish-speaking crew was on my block, pushing wheelbarrows and digging trenches. Their labors will ultimately remedy one sad gap in the city’s residential fabric.
. . . . . . .
Coleman Warner is an assistant city desk editor. He can be reached at 504.826.3311 or cwarner@timespicayune.com.

Union Made and Union Owned

wade — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:34:53 +0000

New Orleans       News of a settlement by the United Auto Workers (UAW) averting bankruptcy at Chrysler and announcements by General Motors of their strategy for survival create a historic reinvention of capitalism in modern America. If these plans are implemented, then the UAW will own some 39% of GM and 55% of Chrysler. The US government would own the majority of GM, making the autoworkers a new kind of public employee union.
   Amazing how times change. It was not that long ago when it was considered the end of civilization as business knew it when Doug Fraser from the UAW took a seat on the Chrysler board of directors. Now, the UAW could virtually appoint the full board if this all comes to pass.
   For many of us who have made sure that we owned cars and trucks made in our auto plants by union labor, this ups the ante. How could we explain ever owning a car that was made — and OWNED — by union labor? Every one of our car payments would be going to not only pay decent wages of union workers but also pay for the retirees depending on the value of the stock and the UAW share for their health and welfare.
   I’ll have to keep the Suburban on the road for many more years now, because it will take all of us to make this deal work.