Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » Organizing

Do NLRB Election Changes Matter If No One is Organizing

jstuart — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:29:51 +0000

New Orleans The surviving members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) published a final rulemaking on some “modest” (quoting Rich Trumka of the AFL-CIO) changes to election procedures this week. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has quickly announced that they will file suit to block the regulations as an assault on “free speech” before they are scheduled to take effect on April 30, 2012. This surely is a political posturing exercise on their part in order to prevent more extensive and perhaps more meaningful proposals from emerging in the workplace, because these changes are at best technical and though important will not change the organizing climate significantly for workers.

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.

Cyber-Communication Crackdowns Continue

Chieforgasst — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 17:23:40 +0000

Lafayette The notion that whole governments including ostensibly liberal democracies like the United Kingdom would simply throw all pretense about freedom of speech out the window when it comes to social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter, and various instant messaging services proves that all of the freedoms we take for granted are just that, taken for granted and as fragile as an egg shell.

Police and government officials in the UK asked Twitter if they could eliminate this nuisance of using Twitter names that were not real name, so that it would be easier for them to bust people Twitter luckily in this case demurred.

The Blackberry people with Research in Motion in Waterloo, Canada seemed from these reports to be read to fold as easily as a cheap suit to virtually any government request, which was disconcerting since so many of us are (were?) hanging on as Blackberry users and fans. Luckily, I don’t use whatever Blackberry Messenger is, but I found myself reaching out to colleagues in Toronto with ACORN Canada pretty damned quickly after reading about their weak knees to make sure that was the case.

The Iranian government is having a bit of fun with this and offered to send a human rights delegation to London to investigate abuses, since the UK had offered to do much the same when they shut down Twitter and Facebook during protests a couple of years ago. Ha-ha-not!

In San Francisco reputedly a bastion of both freedom and certainly speech, the BART rapid transit system has been stubbornly defending their willingness to cut off all access to the internet to block protests. There are now reports on stalking based on pejorative tweets within the Buddhist community in the USA.

Do we really want this? I don’t think so, and I say this as someone who has gotten a good share of flaming, threatening, and violently abusive messages over the internet transom at different times. I worry less about those crazies than the ones hiding behind doors, if you know what I mean. As long as there is a Delete button, I’m able to weather all of those storms with“sticks and stones” vigilance while letting the “words” roll off, like water off a duck’s back.

We have to have the ability to organize and associate, even when others go over the line. It’s easier to say we’re sorry in such circumstances, than to imagine the lack of freedom involved in having to ask permission to be able to speak to ourselves much less our governments about our interests and issues.

New NLRB Rules: Changing Post-Election Strategy

jstuart — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 13:23:41 +0000

New Orleans One result of the proposed new NLRB election rules, if and when adopted, may require a shift in post-election strategy.

A union will know the results of the election and whether or not the challenged ballots on any unit questions affect the outcome or are aggravations waiting for hearings. Either way this would mean that the long delays for hearings, decisions, and the potential for appeal to the Board in DC could mean lengthy waits for certification triggering collective bargaining.

Unions may now need to develop strategy and tactics for mounting post-election campaigns to try to do two things. First to firmly establish the union as a reality in the work, regardless of the NLRB, certification, or bargaining, by electing stewards, defining issues, and taking direct actions on the job around issues and interests, clearly demonstrating concerted, protected activity. Secondly, the union will have to apply these tactics and others to convince the employer to abandon or negotiate out the unit issues that are slated for hearings in the interest of obviating hearings and accelerating the process to bargaining. Some of this will be standard operating procedure in settling hearing issues at the 11^th hour before the hearing starts, similar to the practice now before representation hearings which are frequently delayed for last minute bargains or caucuses between the parties.

The more the union establishes itself and engages the employer on these issues in “campaign mode,” the more likelihood of a quicker and better settlement. Too often now post-election work means withdrawing the organizing staff, bringing in the union officers or reps to begin the preparation for collective bargaining and selecting the committee members. In the new regime with a quick election the campaign strategy should involve a “follow through campaign” of putting the pedal to the metal and pushing the employer to recognize any victory and abandon hearing and unit questions to the union’s interest PDQ…pretty damn quick.

Spontaneous? No Way! Organizers Speak in Egypt

dine — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 14:22:01 +0000

Tahrir Square

Houston You know the old saying, “If I had a hundred dollars for every time,” blah, blah, blah. We’ll if I had a $100 for every time Anderson Cooper or someone on CNN or Fox or any of the other pundits, reporters, or talking heads told the story of the demonstrations in Cairo being the product of a “spontaneous” uprising of the Egyptian people, then ACORN International would have the money to open a half-dozen new cities around the world this year.

Finally, since President Mubarak and Vice-President Suleiman were trying to spin a story from their recent negotiations that there were an emerging consensus shared by representatives of the young organizers behind the rising of the masses, some of the local organizers finally came out from around the screen of silence to more explicitly detail how they had set the stage and sequencing for this historic drama. And, despite the attempt of the New York Times reporter, David Kirkpatrick, to try and shoehorn Facebook and all of the new tech tools into the factual accounts to fit into the modernist, American-touched narrative he would like to tell, these are simply down and dirty stories of exceptionally good, shoe leather, street sense, and solid strategic community and political organizing.

Here are the elements they have now revealed:

The core cadre was about 15 organizers all less than 30 years old forged from a variety of oppositional parties and experiences.
The coalition was held together on a non-ideological and non-partisan framework of uncompromising opposition to the current regime based on a sense of what one organizer in the video called the “spirit of Tunisia:” the sense of movement that something was possible now that might not have been possible before.
Old school organizers with proven skills whether from the Muslim Brotherhood or the Communist Party in Egypt were critical because they knew how to organize from their years as persecuted minorities despite the fact that they lacked a mass base and in the words of one young, feminist organizer, would be unlikely to pull “10%” support if allowed on the ballot. This was a pragmatic coalition.
Communications, it seems, were rudimentary. The messages in the tree hole or posters plastered after midnight in communications from past rebellions were replaced by some connections via Facebook or Google Talk, but these were only ways to secure safe conversation and contact, not to actually move and organize people. I know this seems obvious to organizers, but it’s important not to be confused.
The organizers were aspiring middle class professionals it seems, but the masses that moved were unique compared to past efforts because in the words of one of the organizers, this time they went to the poor neighborhoods rather than the middle class areas as they had in the past. [Starting in a poor neighborhood was itself an experiment. “We always start from the elite, with the same faces,” Mr. Lotfi said. “So this time we thought, let’s try.”] And, the poor and working class areas in these “field tests” followed them out of their houses, cafes, and businesses into the streets and didn’t stop until they were done and the organizers outlasted and out lapped by the people.
The organizers worked in teams. Smart!
The organizers recognized that surveillance was a part of their lives and political work so they continually masked their plans and feinted with false locations, targets, and so forth to confuse the police state. Shrewd!
The organizers finally used real, bread and butter issues not democracy and pie in the sky, and to no organizers’ surprise, people responded by putting boots on the bricks: “Instead of talking about democracy, Mr. Lotfi said, they focused on more immediate issues like the minimum wage. “They are eating pigeon and chicken and we are eating beans all the time,” they chanted. “Oh my, 10 pounds can only buy us cucumbers now, what a shame what a shame.” Yes, Virginia, self-interest still has to be mixed with aspirations to create the chemistry of social change.
The organizers moved within the intensity of crowd and it’s energy understanding that you cannot simply repeat the same drill day after day and scheduled the big events on Tuesdays and Fridays to allow the crowd to reenergize. This is brilliant and shows these folks were real police…amateurs never get this, but professionals know!

Enough said.

These folks are organizers not keyboard punchers, and they are writing the case study on how to organize within the moment of a movement the changes that matter. Nothing can take away the spirit and courage of the masses of people moving to the call, but people are being served by some great organizers and this is where the future of Egypt and many other countries will be determined.

Sorry, Glenn, the Organizers’ Forum Dialogues are Only for Organizers!

dine — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:37:44 +0000

Vietnamese Organizers exchanging with the Organizers' Forum of 2010

New York City After a long day of meetings in the big city, I got back to my priceline special in Chinatown on the Bowery to find a curious email from a conservative blogger asking me about the date of posting for the Organizers’ Forum announcements on the home page www.organizersforum.org. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but once there I found nothing special other than the usual background on the Forum and the notice of the 2011 dialogue to be held in Cairo at the end of September. Turned out from my correspondent that Glenn Beck was fixated on something or other about the Organizers’ Forum and particularly the trip to Cairo.

I didn’t see the show, but I’m betting Glenn was hoping he could join the delegation of community and labor organizers from the USA and Canada traveling over to Egypt to meet our counterparts there, especially in light of all of the excitements triggered by the mass movements on the streets these days. Unfortunately, one of the duties of being the chair of the Forum is that sometimes I have to deliver the bad news, and in this case I’m going to have to disappoint Brother Beck and tell him that despite the fact that I bet he’s a bundle of laughs on a trip, this is really an experience exclusively for organizers, so there’s no room in the end.

Furthermore, not surprisingly, this is a hot ticket already!

On Sunday as all hell seemed to be breaking loose my colleague, Judy Duncan with ACORN Canada forwarded me a tweet that was wondering if I was in touch with the street organizers in Cairo. I wish! I said the same on one email inquiry. On the other side I got one email from an organizer in Chicago who was recruiting 4 or 5 organizers to go and a text from another who was already committed to attending from Maryland who was widely excited about what we might learn in the wake of these massive social changes.

Contrary to Beck’s fertile and creative imagination, the Organizers’ Forum is a great experience for organizers because we are able to learn from our counterparts in other countries what is the same and what is different in their organizing experiences. We try to wrap our arms around a different culture and a unique set of organizing obstacles and challenges. Greg Galluzzo of the Gameliel Foundation was speaking to me the other day and was telling me that the report from their participant in the Vietnam dialogue in 2010 was so moving that it not only almost brought tears to other organizers eyes because it was such a transforming experience for him, but they already had a list of people signing up for Cairo.

Beck should be worried about the Organizers’ Forum. This is a capacity building experience that is now self-sufficient thanks to the level that organizers, their networks, and their unions value it so dearly. Achieving even this modest level of sustainable capacity building should be a frightening and disturbing thing to the Becks of the world.

But organizers need something of our own, and this is it! From what I read there are hundreds of meetings for right wing pundits and radio/tv personalities, so hopefully this disappointment will build character for Beck over the long arc of his future. For organizers, get your names in early for this one!

Impacting Healthcare: Organizing Medical “Hotspots”

jstuart — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:28:41 +0000

Toronto Dr. Atul Gawande writing in the current issue of The New Yorker (1/24/11) interjects himself once again into the national (global?) health care debate by pointing out that hard data often reveals, as it did in Camden, New Jersey, that as much as 30% of health care costs are generated by as few as 1% of the patients. Drawing from the Comstat work in policing, where computer aided analyzed systemic data collection and pointed to crime hot spots, arguably allowing police departments to focus more energy and personnel to deal with such problems, some of the same applications Gawande reports are shifting attention to patients with significant results in Camden, Atlantic City, and other innovative hospitals and health plans.

This would seem to be an “ah ha!” moment, it seems so obvious. In union organizing and administration it has long been an understood fact in the tension between organizing model and service model unions that the same rough distribution of resources, if not more, are true in membership maintenance: 1% of the members require 30 to 50% of the contract administration and grievance handling resources. In community organizing among lower income families I was introduced to the insights about “multi-problem” families virtually from the day I hit my first doors with welfare rights in Springfield, Massachusetts. I would run into other organizers in Boston who had gone to social work schools and they would joke about it all the time in a general way before computers allowed any of us to understand what such families said about gridlocks in resource and personnel distribution. Inevitably changing such patterns caused huge conflict, because inexperienced organizers would get drawn into virtually personal service relationships with particular members or leaders, which might have seemed a good idea to them when they were trying to win trust “on the cheap,” but always caused conflict when more real organizing programs more equitably distributed staffing to goals and membership production, rather than individual leader or member service. My memory of “firing” a volunteer when I began in Arkansas, upon realizing he had become little more than the chauffeur, lender, and problem solver for one old leader, made it possible to work with everyone, but was something the “leader” never forgave me for!

The community organizing opportunity around health issues here is also obvious. Gawande tells several stories where the data led health care folks to sets of buildings where the 1% usually lived right down to the point where it was possible to identify the top couple of buildings that generated costs that could run to $60,000 per resident annually. Stepping back there are few community organizers without computers who couldn’t identify the likely medical hot spots just from shoe leather already exhausted over the years. Even union organizers who have done a lot of house visits know the areas where on every drive of lower waged workers you always have 5 to 10 visits, because of section 8 congregations, low rents, no deposit policies, and so forth in some complexes. A couple of senior high rises quickly come to mind in different cities. And, if we didn’t already know, it wouldn’t take but a couple of hours standing in front of any public hospital and talking to ambulance drivers or doctor shuttle drivers for them to tell you where they do the bulk of their business.

So why would we care? We don’t necessarily gain immediately from cost reductions in the way the hospitals or health plans might, but that’s only half of the equation. Forcing hospitals and health plans to adopt targeted programs delivers better health care and organizing the residents of the health care hot spots to demand such a program would create tangible results in terms of increased medical and related social services delivered on the spot. In one case Gawande wrote of a building where a hospital located an on-the-spot clinic for example. People might not be willing to organize to live longer and better, but we could definitely organize them to demand – and win – more and better health care services.

And, that’s not all. It turns out, if Gawande, is right about where health care may be going, our very organizing could move the needle on which hospitals survive and which die, based on their attentiveness to our demands in this area. He writes about the experience of Denmark’s health care system which has already retooled along cost and capacity terms, leading to a downsizing of institutions which might have as few as 25% surviving when the shakeout is finished for “industrial health care.” It is clear that this is the basic incentive for the hospital administrator in Atlantic City. He wants to end up as one of the survivors.

For the campaign targets that “get it,” our winning could mean their survival, and targets that move to partners will mean that effective organizing allows us to leverage more community benefits.

It would be nice if we could win simply with the argument of saving lives, but the stories of doctor pushback in the article are also instructive. There are a lot of folks who are benefiting now because they get paid well to manage a broken system. Organizing in this way around health care with a localized focus, we could not only change the system, benefit our community, create more equity, but also save lives. What a win!

This is a campaign calling out to all organizers

Qualifying Parties via Internet

dine — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 14:18:30 +0000

New Orleans In a piece about the feinting being done by billionaire NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Matt Bai in the New York Times correctly pointed out that not only money but “ballot access” was a huge impediment to alternative political parties and candidacies. A throwaway comment though got me thinking when he mentioned that qualifying such efforts would be easier in the internet age because “…signature-gathering…is far easier to organize now, through online communities….” Bai is simply talking theoretically about organizing efficiencies here, but what hit me like a brick was whether or not it was legal now – or would soon be legal – to actually qualify such petitions through direct internet signature gathering, which would be a revolutionary breakthrough.

I don’t fully know the answer about what might be possible now, though my friends at Google pretty quickly revved up their search engines and allowed me to piece together enough in a sideways fashion to determine that internet petition gathering is already legal in California in seems and at least Utah for a certainty. I don’t normally associate Utah with progressive breakthroughs, so I would not be surprised to hear that other states (I would almost bet on Washington and Oregon for examples) have also joined the 21^st century and allowed internet signature gathering to legally qualify candidates and parties.

I have sent a couple of emails out to colleagues who are mega-domes in this area since surely they would already know where this can be legally done, and when I hear, I will definitely share the news. Whether just these two or another dozen, more interestingly it seems inevitable that within a couple of years or at most a decade, one could qualify alternative parties successfully on a state by state basis via the internet at a fraction off the cost thereby making alternative parties accessible in a way that has not been allowable since the 1890′s when the two-party stranglehold became embedded in law in one state legislature after another.

Visionary thinkers in political strategy and tactics, particularly among progressives, would do well to start tilling these vineyards. This could be big and a total game changer! This is a political forward pass in a landscape dominated by three yards, a cloud of dust, and a rock pile of money: parties, programs, and candidates get ready to step up.

Bet on SEIU in West Coast Family Feud

jstuart — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:43:42 +0000

New Orleans In about a month the biggest union election in 2010 will be counted once all of the mail ballots are in from over 40,000 Kaiser Permanente workers who are being polled. Unfortunately this not another milestone of successful union organizing, but hopefully the final major battle in the intense and long standing, bloody war between SEIU and what is left of its breakaway dissident local of many names, but most recently United Healthcare West, old Local 250. Elections even in the constrained settings undemocratic workplaces are never easy to predict, because when it’s all said and done, workers vote with their feet and they’ve been running all different directions at Kaiser in the last several years of this internecine war. Nonetheless without talking to any insiders and without being privy to any internal voter assessments or polling from either side, I’m pretty confident that it’s not too early to declare SEIU the winner now, way before the votes are counted.

Here’s why I believe they will win:

Delays Always Favor the Company: This decertification election has been on and off too long to allow the challenger to maintain the momentum against the incumbent. In regular organizing that means the company wins more than 2/3rds of the time that the election is over 60 days from the filing. In this case the “company” is SEIU, and its ability to tie up the challenger means just on the numbers, before any work was done, if normal odds prevailed their chances of winning were at 2/3rds.
Change the Boss: One of the standard pages in any law firm or company side labor relations manual holds that when you are caught behind, it’s best to change the boss or whomever the workers see as responsible for the problem. SEIU’s boss has changed. In this very personal struggle between Sal Rosselli from Oakland and SEIU’s Andy Stern from DC, too much of the dissident’s campaign always presumed it was safe to individualize the attack and target Stern as the problem. When Rosselli saw me in the Detroit hotel hallway and told me he had heard that Mary Kay Henry had the votes to become SEIU’s president, he chortled that it was “good news for the union, but bad news for me.” Had Anna Burger, Andy’s longtime leadership partner prevailed in the board election, the dissidents would have easily just said “same ol’ same ol’” but in Henry the workers would see a new leader from California harder to brand with the problems in Stern’s legacy, yet someone who had fought Rosselli for 20 years and had been the losing candidate as Secretary-Treasurer to Rosselli’s winning slate when he took over Local 250 after that trusteeship. I’m not saying that Stern left SEIU because of this election, but I will say that SEIU’s organizing expert, Tom Woodruff, has been in too many hard fought company/union elections, not to have calculated the impact on this election.

The New Kaiser Contract Helps: The other thing that SEIU’s legal team bought the International and their folks in the bunkers of Northern California was enough time to negotiate a new contract with the employer, Kaiser Permanent, and its chain of hospitals and clinics in the state. NLRB lawyers are maddening to union organizers and have driven many to drink and screaming as they argue from their training manuals that the contract ratification vote is a bellwether for a decertification vote, so “why do you care if there’s a decert; you ratified the contract?” The dissidents needed to bleed the new contract, make the ratification close, or block the ratification entirely and for whatever and a number of reasons, they were unable to do this. In fact the published reports indicate that the new contract was wildly popular with the Kaiser members and approved by 80%+, as I recall. The tactical advantage lay heavily with the incumbent, and SEIU seized the advantage and powered it home, but this also hurt the dissident campaign, since much of Rosselli’s framing has been that SEIU’s merger-mania in California would “reduce standards.” People like Dave Reagan (originally from SEIU Local 1199 WV/OH/KY, Woodruff’s old local) and Hal Ruddick (who worked at my SEIU Local 100 for 10 years) know how to negotiate a contract and made the most out of it.
Majority Signs SEIU Election Support Petition: Another classic tactic that all of us have used in elections with the company focuses on rebuilding the majority during the election campaign. This is a huge barometer and seeks to restore the momentum that usually falls off at the point of filing for the election, which is usually the union’s strongest moment against the company. The 30%+ showing of interest that Rosselli’s forces mustered both before and during the original chaos and rage at the SEIU trusteeship has long dissipated, and the ability of the current SEIU ground forces to produce and show a “public” majority that workers at the hospitals and centers will see sends a huge blinking message to the full Kaiser workforce that SEIU has the majority and is going to win. Workers like it or not, vote overwhelmingly with whichever side they believe is going to win. That’s why companies are willing to break the law, coerce, intimidate, and fire leaders to send a message of power to back off workers and convince them that struggle is futile and victory impossible. Workers have to survive. Individual bosses and union leaders come and go. A majority on a petition within 2 months of the vote count should make SEIU the heavy voting favorite.
SEIU Ready for the Ground War on GOTV: In the last huge test in this blood battle SEIU proved it was willing to do what was necessary in the Fresno home health care challenge and eked out a narrow victory after pouring in millions and moving thousands of people into the Fresno get out the vote effort. The dissidents and their supporters took some comfort and counted some coup, because they were able to keep the margin down with SEIU only narrowly holding the unit. That was then, and this is now. Time has traveled and other benchmarks have been set, but SEIU will spend millions again and every indication is that they will once again put a thousand or more people on the streets in the GOTV effort. The dissidents are in less of position to match this effort now than they were.
SEIU Has Crippled the Dissidents Financially: One thing I have learned as a union organizer over the last 30 years is that when the company really wants to beat you, they can absolutely beat you: it comes down to will. The real story financially in the SEIU battle is their willingness to barter their future and “play for anything” stakes in this internal fight. They isolated the dissidents financially by cutting off the critical outside sources of money and organizing talent. Stern did this first by making peace with what used to be called the California Nurses Association, now an AFL affiliate, and essentially giving up the fight that SEIU had made for nurses jurisdiction for years, helping his cause first within Kaiser where they would have been a formidable problem and inside the workplace voice against SEIU had he not neutralized them. The price was high and included walking away from thousands of workers that SEIU had everything but won in Ohio and elsewhere, but this is part of the “below the line” calculus on this deal. Mary Kay Henry finished the job with Stern’s departure by making peace, also at a huge price, with John Wilhelm of Unite HERE and his former co-president Bruce Raynor, now an SEIU VP with Workers United. A couple of months ago when I was in northern California briefly it was clear that HERE’s interjection of money and organizers into this family feud was effective and was hurting SEIU. This was not a deal that Stern turned out to have been able to make, but Henry made it job #1 and got it done, and done in time to impact this election. Wilhelm didn’t have many cards but he played what he had, particularly his strength in Local 2 with Mike Casey and his ability to leverage Maria Elena Durazo in Los Angeles with the county federation, perfectly. Oh, yeah, they lost a lawsuit, too, but who cares that was just garnish and no money has changed hands. With these two deals, SEIU cut off the outside bankers and made the fight totally uneven in terms of resources.
Mail Ballots Favor GOTV Outside the Workplace: We love mail ballots. We never lose them. We’ll do almost anything to get one in an election. Clearly, a unit of 40,000+ had to have a mail ballot, and with such a ballot the odds roll over to whichever side can get to the voters where they are voting and in this case that means at home, not at work. The dissidents can’t match the home field advantage here. What they have is at the workplaces where they still have committed workers in place. I don’t need to talk to anybody to know that SEIU’s willingness to gear up a huge GOTV operation means that their assessments and polling indicate that the more that people vote; the more likely they are to win. They obviously feel now that their real campaign is against apathy and not Rosselli, and that they can only lose if they get a light turnout and the diehards are both sides are left to decide.

Anyway you look at it, this is life or death for both sides, and SEIU knew it and has taken advantage of it powerfully to paint the dissidents into an impossible tactical bind, regardless of the support and sympathy they have in California and in much of what passes for a chattering class in the rickety house of labor. I’m not saying that Stern’s sudden and still largely inexplicable resignation from SEIU was motivated by this election, since by all accounts much credibility should be given to the fact that he was “tired” as he’s said publically, and winning the health care vote at least left the rationalization of leaving well, but no one will ever convince me that all of these factors didn’t come to play in the decision and all of its aftermaths. If he was going to leave mid-term anyway, then the spring was the perfect time so that all of this business could get done the way SEIU needed it to be done.

SEIU will retain its support among Kaiser workers and keep this unit. I would bet they will get more than 65% support when all the votes are tallied.

I could be wrong, but I sure would be surprised if it turned out any differently than all of these signs are pointing.

Selling Out Tea Party Populists

jstuart — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:04:24 +0000

New Orleans The other day when I had seen a piece touting the first ever national Tea Party Convention in Nashville in February, I looked at the calendar, noted the date, and sent an email to a friend in LA suggesting we go check it out. I know now I must have been kidding myself – the convention is too expensive to even consider at over $500 a pop being paid to a for-profit outfit called Tea Party Nation run by an entrepreneur, rather than an organizer, named Judson Phillips.

Looks like some folks are merely trying to cash in on the movement, because I can guarantee you from my experience with the grass roots tea-people in Memphis and Springfield, they are angry and alienated and looking for a political home, but they are sure not folks who would be willing or able to write a full board check for $549, plus transport and house themselves in Nashville. Even the dates should have made me suspicious of a Thursday through Saturday affair rather than a weekend only convention. Whoever was organizing this mess wasn’t thinking about the little people in the base who are fueling this outburst with their passion.

Looking under the hood, it seems now that many, if not most, of the real grassroots tea people are in an uproar and pulling out of any connection with what presumably would be their “own” convention. Part of it is the Super Bowl level ticket price of course. Part of it also seems some real upset that the queen of the ball, Sarah Palin, is reportedly receiving $100,000 to keynote the affair. What’s up with that? This sister is obviously completely out of politics. I can’t believe that she wouldn’t have been willing to speak to a real Tea Party convention for car fare, and of course in her case, maybe a suit of new clothes or something. If tea people are not her base, then she doesn’t have a base at all. This is the problem with populist outrages that don’t have set principles. There’s no one to shoo away the fast buck artists trying to exploit the movement. I would bet within days – if not hours – Palin will be saying that she’s donating her fee back to the movement or waiving the $100K or whatever. She can’t want this to stick on her shoe while she continues to act like she’s one of the regular folks.

The other problem is that this nascent populist movement seems to have been pretty much already hijacked by the Republicans who seem desperate to convert tea people into their storm troopers for coming electoral battles. The usual 3^rd party debates are happening, but without any integrity. The Republican strategists and party apologists, including wild eyed elected officials, desperately want the tea people not to figure out how much power they might have in building an independent platform on a state-by-state level (look at the Working Families Party in New York for example). The Republicans want to convince them that they would be spoilers, but one party’s view of spoilers is another party’s view of power brokers.

All this anger has to go somewhere, but it’s pretty clear that this fascinating and important phenomena is now splintering and as a fledgling movement is most likely to die in the pains of birth.

This anger will go somewhere. If the right can only see dollar signs from this passion, maybe the left can finally start thinking about where this anger finds common ground on issues of jobs, trade, banks, Wall Street,and more. At the grassroots there’s a fertile field worth walking carefully and plowing well.

Hospitality Wars Close to Settlement

dine — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:43:27 +0000

New Orleans It’s amazing to me how many people came up to me over the last week on the East Coast and mentioned having read my recent blog about “Pink Sheeting and One-on-One’s” in UNITE-HERE and elsewhere in the labor movement. Google analytics tells me that this is most frequently visited current item on the list.

An email shared with me by some young labor organizers who were veterans of the Cornell program reminded me how destructive such conflict is to the future of the labor movement. An SEIU organizer was recounting the struggles to put together a majority in a unit of a couple of hundred workers over a number of months to suddenly find six UNITE/HERE organizers swoop down to turn the unit topsy-turvy. There are probably similar stories with the union’s names reversed. All of this redefines the “race to the bottom” in union membership and relevance for working people in America.

Other former organizers tried to pull me on either side of the divide. An ex-AFSCME organizer told me about a recent fundraiser in Montclair for the divisive effort being led by Sal Roselli in the Bay Area. He was interrupted by an SEIU contractor who had done some communications work in California telling him he had no clue of what was going on. I left them still arguing the fine points of this disaster.

Most interesting to me have been the messages from ex-UNITE/HERE folks chiding me for being too easy on John Wilhelm and protective of Carl Lechow, the long time organizing director for HERE. In my earlier piece I assumed that Wilhelm and Lechow were distracted and the pink sheeting was an aberration and the “one-on-one’s” simply out of control. These folks believed they both knew and encouraged these kinds of practices. It is so contrary to my experience with either of these brothers, that I simply can’t believe it, so I won’t, but neither have I have wanted to really believe the Synanon period of the farmworkers until at this point there seems no way to deny its existence and impact.

The best news shared with me on the trail was the rumors that there may finally be a real resolution and a true peace in this inhospitable conflict between SEIU and UNITE/HERE. The architect of this potential settlement seems to have been Joe Hanson, president of the UFCW, who from what several people shared with me, has been indefatigable in trying to keep front doors, back doors, and all channels open in pursuit of an agreement. What both parties are reviewing now was described as a “tough, but fair” settlement with each side having to eat some good portions of crow and a fair division of units and assets. All of which is dandy for the accountants, but most importantly in my view I also heard that there would be real clarity and a complete understanding on organizing jurisdiction and that would be huge.

The only happy ending to this tawdry episode would be a real agreement on jurisdiction that once again paves the way for unions that have been committed to organizing, having their sights clearly trained on real targets and the objective of building mass organization among hospitality and other low wage service workers who desperately demand their own organizations and the right to fight for a better future at their workplaces. To me it all seems to come down to whether or not President Wilhelm wants to keep fighting or to have peace and get back to organizing, since he has had the strongest cards in his hand throughout this mess. John Wilhelm has been a seminal organizer and leader for hospitality workers in our time. I hope he sees a way to be a leader here in binding the wounds of our crippled labor movement.

Memphis Giveaways to Developers

jstuart — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:54:56 +0000

Memphis Even though I wasn’t speaking at the University of Memphis about Citizen Wealth until Monday evening, it was worth flying in the predawn on Sunday to be able to take advantage of Professor Ken Reardon’s offer to meet with twenty community leaders who wanted to talk over dinner about how to push Memphis to do both more and better in serving all the communities and constituencies in the Bluff City. It was a treat to meet members of the faith community, organizers, lawyers, activists, and academics that had led efforts over the years, including Shelby County Inter-faith, a significant community organization here in the 80’s and 90’s, and RISE, an important campaign in Memphis targeted at predatory practices (music to my ears!). I couldn’t believe we had been talking for four hours with the clock struck 11 PM! The time had flown with so many ideas, issues, and things that needed to be done.

Many themes returned again and again, but one of the themes that echoed so loudly that it was impossible not to hear was the way that developers were literally having their way with the City of Memphis and Shelby County. A more than $100 million dollar giveaway of public dollars for one developer of the Memphis Fairgrounds was averted with no community benefits agreement asked or offered for the nearby communities. Planners in the afternoon told me story after story of developers benefiting from 15 year tax incremental financing (TIF) districts in the by-and-by hopes of community benefits without any efforts to assure community benefits on the front end. It was enough to make my head spin.

These were great leaders, well trained and experienced with a good grip on the issues and the nuances of Memphis, who needed a process to finally make a decision to re-engage resources and participation for this generation of organizations and activists to curb the excesses and try to wrest the city away from the developers and their public lackeys and back to the people.

The last point made by a well respected minister at dinner caught my ear. A developer named Harold Buehler was being given 140 lots in a lower income, inner city area of Memphis, despite owing over $2 million in taxes for his previous developments. People were outraged. There was a roar of response about the “fix” being in with the County Commissioners. It all seemed so wild and bizarre, I knew I would have to look under the hood to try and figure it out.

I found a squib by Jackson Baker in something called the “political beat” in the Memphis Flyer. Despite Baker’s bias in favor of Buehler and his contempt for Commissioner Henri Brooks, and anyone who opposes this project, his piece does confirm the facts behind the minister’s disgust and my new friends’ revulsion at this action:

Memphis Mayor Pro Tem Myron Lowery spoke before the commission on the premise that it would be folly not to develop the vacant lots Buehler sought title over (140 out of some 3,000 in the inner city, including many that were the result of arson and neglect). Antonio Burks, the former Memphis Tigers basketball star who was recently wounded by gunfire, showed up on crutches to extol Buehler for having provided Burks’ mother a rental home for the past decade.

Even a Klondike resident who had been featured in The Commercial Appeal as opposing Buehler rental property on style points was shown in a Buehler-produced video extolling the builder for having arrived at new designs. (Both the video and several posterboard displays of previous Buehler properties were stage-managed by Upton.)

Buehler opponents got up to speak, too, including one man who said,” We need to do a background check on this criminal.”

Besides Brooks, overt opposition on the commission itself was limited to another longtime critic of the builder, Mike Ritz, who succeeded in adding an amendment to Commissioner Steve Mulroy’s enabling resolution, one that required full repayment of Buehler’s delinquent taxes. Another Ritz amendment, which would have mandated approval of Buehler designs by community development organizations in all affected areas, was rejected.

In any case, Wednesday’s apparently definitive vote notwithstanding, Brooks announced that she intended to soldier on. “I’ve just begun to fight,” she said — though how and with what allies and to what end remained to be seen.

From this piece it looks like a “Hail Mary” pass forcing Buehler to pay up before he cashes in on these lots may have landed safely in the end zone, so I’ll have to check on that, but regardless of the pros and cons here, there’s no doubt that the community is increasingly clear that Memphis cannot continue to be developer heaven and community hell. One dinner guest who lives near the development in Memphis caught my ear making the point that the area had housing, but “needed jobs!” There were other comments that could not be missed about the need for people to have a “voice” again and the lack of equity and citizen centered priorities in Memphis.

It was great to be a fly on the wall and an excuse for some great people to get together who could make a difference in Memphis by deciding once again that “enough is enough,” and taking the next steps to make something happen again in this great city.

Taking a Punch

jstuart — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:28:20 +0000

Washington I’ve often told this story. It’s about a big, rookie mistake I made as a green organizer of 20 years old trying to figure out how to be head organizer of Massachusetts Welfare Rights when total craziness broke out between two contending groups of leadership. Because of some idealistically pure view of staff and leadership roles I had at the time, I sought to keep the “staff out of the middle” of the dispute by closing the office for a couple of days until everything calmed down. Maybe a good idea, maybe a bad one, but it turned out to make everyone even madder, because they didn’t have me available to yell out for better or worse. In retrospect I learned that I should have closed the office perhaps, but sat in a chair outside and waited until leaders showed up, and then taken whatever yells and shouts they had to offer until a plan was made moving forward. They needed someone to take the punch, and I was too young to understand that was part of my job and came with being an organizer, and that it was political and not personal.

A friend who worked with me 30 years ago sent me a note of concern suggesting it might be time for stepping back, rather than stepping forward. He was worried about me, and I appreciated that, but found myself explaining why it is precisely the time to step forward. First, it’s been a while since I worked for ACORN, and, secondly, the situation is such that the chance of collateral damage is now zero. There’s no election in the offing where this could be a distraction, and the host of locusts that have swarmed on the organizations couldn’t be much worse for me shooing some of them off.

I also think in a very, very small way, I can already sense a small turnaround.

Last night at Busboys and Poets talking about Citizen Wealth I actually had the folks from biggovernment.com (the ACORN sting people) compliment my manners (making my mother proud!), and a gentlemen from the National Review applaud my “courage” for being out in the public and taking his and other questions. I know I’m grabbing at thin straws here, but at least it’s something.

Newsweek magazine flinched a quote of mine they found in the Washington Post as one of their “quotes of the week” in the front of the magazine, where in reaction to the Congressional dog pile defunding of ACORN, I responded that “it was balderdash with a side of poppycock.” Truer words have hardly ever been spoken. Good to have them out there!

On a Baton Rouge NPR call today with Jim Engster of the 5 calls only 1 was whack and 4 were dead-on positive about the need for ACORN and its future. An article from my hometown paper, The Times-Picayune, after starting out snidely was actually to the point, and reasonably objective as these things go.

The Google alerts are down and perhaps people are taking a breath and finally looking at what is really going on.

I may be deluding myself, but I feel like I’m even getting traction on my argument that we have to all stand up and stand together to oppose McCarthyism. That is what is really at stake here, not ACORN, me, or whatever. Unfortunately, I can’t say that without also being willing to also go 15 rounds with what seems to be all comers. It’s not pretty and it’s not fun, but being able to take a punch has a value still it seems just as I learned 40 years ago.

Maybe soon people will in fact really hear what I’m saying – along with the voices of so many others. And, maybe soon, the progressive forces will finally unite together rather than continuing to stand apart and scoff and at best say to themselves, “there but for the grace of God go I as well.”

If we don’t jump out there, we won’t find out.