New Orleans  

Looking at a chart in the Wall Street Journal, it seems clear that workers are “voting with their seat,” rather than “voting with their feet” and hitting the street.

The 21^st Century is not a striking century for workers and their unions.   The graphic recorded both strikes and lockouts, and it goes without saying that a lockout is a management tactic to coerce a unionized group of workers to accept certain terms and conditions of employment, in the same way that a strike is a tool for workers to try and bring a company to heel or , these days, back to reason.   The chart indicted that in this century only once has there been more than 20 of these things and in some years, hardly a handful.

Caterpillar, the tractor maker, is once again a screaming canary in this mind shaft and trying to force its workers in plants to take frozen wages over 6 year contracts, with fewer and fewer seniority rights for shifts or jobs.  Workers in Joilet, Illinois seem to have come to that cold place in the night where you may know the boss may beat you, but he’s going to have to whip you first.

No one pretends that this is a winning strategy, only that when there was no other recourse they then had no choice.

At the same time the “reforms” of the more activist Obama appointed members of the NLRB seem to have stalled again.  The simple “notice” provision which would have required a posting of the law and protections for workers to organize freely at all workplaces, seems to have been stymied.  The rules on quicker elections seem lost in a deep quiet zone as well, where perhaps no news is good news, since the only safe bet would be lawsuits trying to block the rules.

The election, if lost, would eviscerate the NLRB in the same way we now see the right moving to de-unionize the public sector in state after state.  Where does this leave workers?  Fewer strikes, more lockouts, and fewer victories from either one may argue for more corporate campaigns, but watching the Walmart corruption press rise and fall and the shell game of corporate social responsibility, and the diminishing “power” of the press, and it is clear that there is no silver bullet here.  In the same way we need to adopt new organizing strategies, we need the same new thinking for action tactics.

New Market     

Nonetheless this was all background and scenery for very important discussion and hard work for a diverse and exciting group of activists, academics, and seekers from Memphis who had come together at the call of Professor Ken Reardon of Memphis University and Professor Katherine Lambert-Pennington of Rhodes College to discuss as the agenda signaled:  “Building a More Just and Democratic Memphis through Grassroots Organizing.”  I had been honored and overjoyed when Ken had reached out for me some months ago and asked if I would be willing to help “facilitate” the discussion of this group trying to struggle with the how’s and why’s of whether or not it made sense to support building a community organization in Memphis.  All I could think of was what a great opportunity for a great city!

The group included a mixture of professional and academic urban planners from the universities as well as from multi-county agencies around Memphis and design centers.  There were also community leaders and activists from the Vance Avenue, savvy and sharp young men and women with a group called BRIDGES that works with various youth cohorts pushing the limits of the schools.  There were other groups of  community based organizers and advocates from the 30 year old Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, along with a collection of other activists from the music scene, housing projects, and community.

The “meat and potatoes” for the first day were two sessions, one on the “role of power in producing and maintaining uneven patterns of development” and the other on “how poor people and their allies get power.”  This was a razor sharp, wicked smart crew so they kept me on my feet and dancing.  Outside of the academics it was still somewhat surprising to an old cynical organizing hand, how the analysis of many of the others was so deeply alienated.  If these were the youth that jumped behind the “hope” of Obama, they had climbed to the roof and then walked back down to the basement to find their perspectives on the future.  Several of them pitched a couple of tents to enjoy the last of an Indian summer in the mountains, which I couldn’t help dubbing “Occupy Highlander.” The challenge in organizing south Memphis where so much of the conversation centered will be to build an organization that both has the potential to build and wield real power and can actually be fierce, feisty, and focused enough to convince its actual base that its work is crucial and matters.  It was an education for me, because I could read the time and the clock for the poor and powerless had somehow turned back to the anger I remembered in the streets in the 60’s and 70’s.  This recession is putting steel beams in the ceilings above people blocking any view of the future.

The other surprise I found during the day in listening to what drove the academics and others into the circle at Highlander were tales of almost unmatched arrogance from public and private interests around Memphis development that are almost unheard of in the framed and packaged programs of the 21^st century.  Painstaking processes of creating plans with community engagement that were insultingly dismissed by city planning agencies with announcements that stated flatly that it was the essentially the city’s job to plan and the citizens job to like it.  These were stories of a government unaccountable, anti-transparency, and out of control.  All cities play footsy with their citizens and pretend that input is the same as influence or impact on their decisions, but few of them take the time and trouble to then rub the people’s noses in it.  Not Memphis!  One true story after another seemed to carry the theme, “stop us if can, and to hell with you if you can’t.”

That may be a dare that is going to be called in Memphis.  I sure hope so.

New Orleans

The federal judge in Pennsylvania had determined last year that the controversial H-2B visa program was in fact setting wages at such a substandard level that it was preventing American job seekers from applying and getting the work.  All of which is the opposite of the H-2B program design.  The rationale for this importation of foreign workers is that they are being brought into the country to do work that for whatever reason no citizens will do.  Given the recession, it is not clear what jobs wouldn’t appeal to American workers now?  Furthermore, what choice did the judge really have?  The wages that are supposed to be paid are set at prevailing rates, rather than pushed to the bottom in the current, common and subsidized fashion.

Most of the uproar is coming from seafood processors in Louisiana and Maryland it seems, but why in the world is the New Orleans hotel and tourism industry part of this play?  All of our jobs here are low wage and that’s the way they like it, so who and how would anyone determine that there are some hotel jobs too lowdown for citizen-workers?  This is all preposterous on its face.  Jacob Horwitz with the New Orleans-based National Guest Worker Alliance stated the obvious in the local paper, “…if they tried paying a little more, they would be able to find many people happy to get the work.”  Amen, brother!

The pay now for many of these jobs is at $8 and $9 per hour and the increases will push the numbers, if and when allowed to prevail, to $13 and $14 per hour.   It is a lead pipe cinch that at those numbers there would be a line in Houma and throughout Lafourche Parish for jobs in that industry.  In New Orleans hotels, this would lead to an immediate pay bump for many hospitality workers both directly and on the ripple impact, and we have the unemployment numbers to prove it.  Some of these hotels will have to set up police barriers to handle the lines for jobs at legally decent wages.

The fact that this is also about exploiting workers (and don’t get me started on predatory remittance charges!) is an international embarrassment.   Fair wages would kill two birds with one stone, helping domestic workers and stopping abuse of foreign workers.  What a no-brainer!

New Orleans

An organization called Slavery Footprint has come up with a methodology (and $20000 in funding from the State Department) to allow you to go to www.slaveryfootprint.org, and take a quick survey to determine how many “slaves are working for you?”  Yes, you!  It’s worth a good, hard look.  Don’t wait for the weekend!

We stumbled on this reality almost a decade ago in the second Organizers’ Forum International Dialogue when we visited India and journeyed by bus several hours outside of Delhi, the national capital, and visited a compound that was schooling and training young adolescent and teenage boys in new skills, all of whom had formally been forced to work in  unpaid, slave labor in mining in the area, largely impressed for their labor in exchange for contrived, historic debt to mine owners or labor suppliers, sometimes for generations.   We felt not only shocked, but profoundly naïve for not having realized that so much of this kind of forced labor was still enduring in modern times just beyond our daily recognition in the silence of sweat, hidden from eyesight by thousands of miles.

Cases involving women from Eastern Europe shanghaied for years to the west as sex slaves grab headlines in the 21^st Century.  Factory workers report child sized handprints on imports from Asian on their assembly lines.  Even in the United States wage theft and the kind of exploitation that finds immigrant workers at Hersey plants (see special on-line report at www.socialpolicy.org) and in Canadian agricultural fields, is really only a different distinction by a matter of degrees from such oppressive slavery.

Seems like this is something that we should be able to end completely, and if not, we should stop pretending that we stand for any kind of civilized society.

New Orleans

Here’s the honor roll of banned groups:

“None of the funds made available by this Act shall be made available to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, Acorn Beneficial Assoc., Inc., Arkansas Broadcast Foundation, Inc., Acorn Children’s Beneficial Assoc., Arkansas Community Housing Corp., Acorn Community Land Assoc., Inc., Acorn Community Land Assoc. of Illinois, Acorn Community Land Association of Louisiana, Acorn Community Land Assoc. of Pennsylvania, ACORN COMMUNITY LABOR ORGANIZING CENTER, ACORN Beverly LLC, ACORN Canada, ACORN Center for Housing, ACORN Housing Affordable Loans LLC, Acorn Housing 1 Associates, LP, Acorn Housing 2 Associates, LP, ACORN Housing 3 Associates LP, ACORN Housing 4 Associates, L.P., ACORN International, ACORN VOTES, Acorn 2004 Housing Development Fund Corporation, ACRMW, ACSI, Acorn Cultural Trust, Inc., American Environmental Justice Project, Inc., ACORN Fund, Inc., Acorn Fair Housing Organization, Inc., Acorn Foster Parents, Inc., Agape Broadcast Foundation Inc., Acorn Housing Corporation, Arkansas Acorn Housing Corporation, Acorn Housing Corp. of Arizona, Acorn Housing Corp. of Illinois, Acorn Housing Corp. of Missouri, New Jersey ACORN Housing Corporation, Inc., AHCNY, Acorn Housing Corp. of Pennsylvania, Texas ACORN Housing Corporation, Inc., American Institute for Social Justice, Acorn law for Education, Rep. & Training, Acorn Law Reform Pac, Affiliated Media Foundation Movement, Albuquerque Minimum Wage Committee, Acorn National Broadcasting Network, Arkansas New Party, Arkansas Acorn Political Action Committee, Association for Rights of Citizens, Acorn Services, Inc., Acorn Television in Action for Communities, Acorn Tenants’ Union, Inc., Acorn Tenant Union Training & Org. Project, AWA, Baltimore Organizing Support Center, Inc., Bronx Parent Leadership, Baton Rouge ACORN Education Project, Inc., Baton Rouge Assoc. of School Employees, Broad Street Corporation, California Acorn Political Action Committee, Citizens Action Research Project, Council Beneficial Association, Citizens Campaign for Fair Work, Living Wage Etc., Citizens Consulting, Inc., California Community Network, Citizens for April Troope, Clean Government Pac, Chicago Organizing and Support Center, Inc., Council Health Plan, Citizens Services Society, Campaign For Justice at Avondale, CLOC, Community and Labor for Baltimore, Chief Organizer Fund, Colorado Organizing and Support Center, Community Real Estate Processing, Inc., Campaign to Reward Work, Citizens Services Incorporated, Elysian Fields Corporation, Environmental Justice Training Project, Inc., Franklin Acorn Housing Corporation, Flagstaff Broadcast Foundation, Floridians for All PAC, Fifteenth Street Corporation, Friends of Wendy Foy, Greenwell Springs Corporations, Genevieve Stewart Campaign Fund, Hammurabi Fund, Houston Organizing Support Center, Hospitality Hotel and Restaurant Org. Council, Iowa ACORN Broadcasting Corp., Illinois Home Day Care Workers Association, Inc., Illinois Acorn Political Action Committee, Illinois New Party, Illinois New Party Political Committee, Institute for Worker Education, Inc., Jefferson Association of Parish Employees, Jefferson Association of School Employees, Johnnie Pugh Campaign Fund, Louisiana ACORN, New York Communities for Change, Affordable Housing Centers of America, Action Now, Pennsylvania Communities Organizing for Change, Arkansas Community Organizations (ACO), The Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, New England United for Justice, Texas Organizing Project, Minnesota, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, Organization United for Reform, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, A Community Voice, Community Organizations International, Applied Research Center, or the Working Families Party.”

Weigel was looking at the bill to try and understand how Congress was going to shift resources that would have been spent in Joplin, Missouri, still suffering from their tornado damage, to help folks on the East Coast who were battered by Hurricane Irene.  There is a huge story that is covered my appendix about Lessons from Disaster in my book, Battle for the Ninth Ward:  ACORN, Rebuilding New Orleans, and the Lessons of Disaster (available www.socialpolicy.org), but that, as they say is another story, though it is the same story with simply another verse of governmental inaction and incompetence at the highest levels.

Some of the list is simply overkill.  ACORN International is banned by both that name and our other name, Community Organizations International.  ACORN Canada is banned though it doesn’t even work anywhere but Canada, duh.

Much of this is simply meanness.  The poor Applied Research Center is banned I assume just because they are my friends, and I have spoken supportively of them.  Oh, that and their founder was the great Gary Delgado, the first organizer I ever hired after founding ACORN, so sins of the fathers, I guess for the hater clan in Congress appearing near year on HBO’s Game of Thrones.

But among the elected Congressional haters accuracy is not the point after all.  One of the things I loved about reading this Honor Roll is that though they banned six or seven different entities that are component parts of Local 100, United Labor Unions, in fact Local 100, if it were of a mind, could go crazy applying to FEMA to help disaster victims, as could a number of other entities I direct that are not on the list.

Given that Congress sure isn’t helping disaster victims since the FEMA bill is stuck now between the House and Senate, maybe that is exactly what we should do.  Years ago I listened frequently to a story from my ex-mother-in-law (may she rest-in-peace) as she would say, “Wade, let me tell you what’ I’ve learned raising five children.  Never tell one of them not to put a bean up their nose.  As soon as you do, you’ll catch one of the little scudders in the kitchen doing just that!”

Seems to me like the Republicans in Congress are trying to put a bean up our noses now.

Carlos had been pushed into a too early retirement and silencing of his voice and in that interval last year we had had a number of conversations about pieces I wanted him to write for Social Policy.  I urged him to write an overview of the prospects for immigration reform early in 2010, but he continually demurred that he wasn’t up to speed and promised to try with both of us knowing he wasn’t going to do it.  My bigger regret was that he had not delivered on his promise to write the larger piece I had asked for which would give his perspective on his time as an organizer and activist with La Raza Unida Partry, the political organizing and takeover of Crystal City, Texas, and all of the events in which he was so prominent when I knew him in Robstown, San Antonio, and Washington in the 1970’s.  We emailed, phoned, and Facebooked on the project for months through one missed deadline after another as I tried to wheedle him back down memory lane.  He would always counter with an invitation for me to come down to the Corpus area and share his passion for fishing on the Gulf and cooking whatever came up on the line.  That was a promise I often made, which I regret not having kept.

When I Googled for the story of what could have happened, it seems to have mostly been noted by young Hispanic writers he had influenced or who had seen his career as a pioneering breakthrough.  I gathered he had passed suddenly of a heart attack or stroke by himself at a rented condo at Port Aransas, which I remember mostly as a working class small town on the  before you take the ferry to Corpus.

Without a doubt Carlos was a standup progressive voice at the paper.  He gave my work some props in the 1990’s when Local 100 was organizing city and county workers in San Antonio and Bexar, and bought me a couple of lunches thanks to the paper and his friendship.  Nonetheless I was surprised not to see more voices from the days when he was the chief fundraiser and facilitator at the sharp edge of the Chicano movement in Texas as director of the TIED, the Texas Institute for Educational Development, which was essentially the 501c3 arm of the movement.

It is hard for me to believe that any organizer doesn’t know the name Jose Angel Guiterrez, who last I knew was a lawyer in Dallas after a stint in Oregon, but as Mayor of Crystal City was the face and voice organizing the “brown power” political takeover of the city and schools.  Those of us organizing low and moderate income people and people of color followed every detail and made pilgrimages to the city and county deep in the Texas valley to see what power meant in practice.  I can remember driving down there on vacation in either the fall of 1975 or maybe 1976 and camping along the way with my dog at the time, a cocker spaniel named JP (for Justice of the Peace after our own Pulaski County version of a political takeover, but that’s another story) to visit folks and see it all for myself and take away what I could learn from the experience.   Guiterrez was quoted in one Carlos’ obituary where he was only identified as a political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington.

I think I met Carlos that trip in Robstown, his old hometown, where he showed me around.  I can remember another time visiting in San Antonio for something, where he picked me up in a Mustang and later I stayed at his place on the couch.  I can also remember a cute girlfriend of his and us waking up and almost missing my flight as hotroded me out to the airport.

In those days Carlos was the behind the scenes organizer maintaining the research, communication, and paper trails that provided the financial support work for Crystal City and the movement.  His skilled writing moved the proposals, his silver tongue knocked on the doors in DC and NYC to raise the money, and his time as an activist allowed him to beat it back to lead the David Hunters of the Stern Fund, the Dick Boones of the Field Foundation, and anyone else he could down to the Valley to deepen their commitment and support.

La Raza Unida Party was big stuff.  In 1972 the party fielded a third party effort in Texas behind a 29-year old Ramsey Muniz and while losing garnering over 215,000 votes or 6% of the total establishing its ballot line for years and its position as a force not only in Texas but throughout the Southwest and wherever Hispanics where looking seriously at politics.  Carlos was active in the campaign, though I never can recall whether he was campaign manager on the first run in ’72 or the second in ’76..  I think likely the second shot, since the overt nature of the party effort and his role would have made it harder to protect the tax exemption of TIED.

There is no bigger backer of multi-party endorsement or fusion tactics than I have been, but even the great Working Families Party of New York is only now pushing past 200,000 votes while the La Raza Unida Party had lightening in a bottle almost from the beginning if only the pieces could have been welded together as tightly.  They were the civil rights movement in the Texas Rio Grande Valley and built the inspiration and bridge for majority Latino political constituencies to win empowerment.  Their local base was always contentious given the history of Democratic machine voting and the padrone system in the Valley made so famous in Lyndon Johnson’s elections all the way to the White House.  The push back on their radical empowerment and educational programs from more conservative Latino voices and entrenched business and agricultural interests was intense and still casts a long shadow.

All of these are stories that Carlos should have told and could have told better than anyone.  Almost two decades as a San Antonio journalist and columnist no doubt gave him the skills to weave the pieces together.  Missing his work and writing creates a vacuum.

But this is my disappointment, not necessarily Carlos’ regret.  We got together a few years ago in San Francisco at a dinner where I cadged him an invite to see me and other old friends on the Coast.  He was visiting his daughter who was taking a program at Stanford that summer.  We all laughed about the old times.  We worried about the new times and the usual struggles of jobs and L.I.F.E.  He was happy and resiliently rode good spirits through the struggles and setbacks of the day right to the end.

There are many stories that must continue to be told and learned.  We lost many with Carlos.  Enough said.  Deeply missed.

Orange Beach

My old comrade, Gary Delgado, had recommended the book and given me a come-on line about Cesar Chavez’s vision of building a Poor People’s Union, which piqued my interest and sent me to Amazon, but that was a tease.  The power of this book is the picture it paints of the unraveling of the United Farm Workers from the inside with Cesar Chavez as the primary string puller of the demise.  Marshall Ganz in his book on the farm workers opened the window a crack sufficiently to confirm some of the stories one had heard over the years.  Reading Pawel, I suspect he had no choice, especially given the multi-part series in the Los Angeles Times a couple of years before which opened the box on the Game, Synanon, and Chavez adaptation of the tool as an internal disciplinary device within the union.  Other recent writers took different angles on the story, but Pawel’s book will reshape the debate for professionals and impact the discussion on Chavez’s legacy for everyone else.

Perhaps its tangential but I couldn’t believe how much of Pawel’s book was inarguable because it came directly from tapes of National Executive Board and other meetings and conferences, hidden conveniently right out in the open at the Wayne State University labor archives in Detroit.  Chavez is clearly on record questioning the work and loyalty of long time staff and even organizers and leaders working at the time of the meetings themselves.  It’s almost a Richard Nixon – Rosemary Woods repeat.  What were they thinking ?  How could the vaunted UFW Legal Department have allowed them to have those tapes?  How did they prevent these tapes from being regurgitated in the hundreds of lawsuits and injunctions filed to stop the union?

The other major sources are the private papers of Chris Hartmire, former head of the ministry supporting the farm workers, and Eliseo Medina, all of which included letters back and forth with Chavez and each other, as well as the kind of self-serving notes and unsent letters and memos that most would have lost or destroyed over the last 30 to 40 years.  Undoubtedly they kept what they had because they knew they were playing a small part in something historic, but…gee?

The Farm Worker culture was to keep the union business inside the union, which makes good sense for institutions under constant attack.  I wonder now if many of the principals didn’t have one eye on history, including their own role, and the other on the grape.  There’s more to come before we find a real balance to this important story and the role of everyone who played a part in both the dream, the history, and its real tale telling the best we can be and the most human we often are.

Ho Chi Minh City

We have a strong delegation this year, as usual, with representatives from SEIU, BCGEU, United Labor Unions, Gameliel, ACORN Canada, Tides, Social Policy, and ACORN International.  Two of the most interesting meetings on the  first formal day of the Forum were with top representatives of the Ho Chi Minh City Labor Federation, headed by their vice-chair, and with the head of DoLISA, the Department of Laborers, Invalids and Social Affairs.

The hard problem in one-party regimes, like Vietnam, where the space between government and governing party is narrow, and where labor is part of the ideological foundation of the government and unions are an operating part of the ruling partnership through one single labor federation is parsing how much autonomy of action and independence of thought and initiative unions really have in such an alignment.  Even with the Cold War long over and the George Meany and Lane Kirkland wing long out of power at the AFL-CIO this is still a contentious issue with some of our friends still arguing relationships should be avoided with such unions, and others arguing their size and stature, and frankly in my view their sincerity and authenticity, mean it is necessary to engage them  deeply.  Kent Wong, a much valued colleague from the UCLA Labor Center, made the passionate case to me of the importance of the Vietnamese labor federations and full engagement from his many trips to this country.

Our early hours with Truong Lam Danh, vice president of the HCM City Confederation of Labor, and his staff were fascinating.  He described an array of programs under their hand for their 880,000 members, and couldn’t have been more accommodating of our questions.   For a minute though we could see the steel, when I asked how the federation would respond to a situation like the wild cat strikes in China:  would they embrace the workers and their cause or feel compelled essentially to shutdown the strike.  His answers were snappish here.  First he claimed to have no knowledge of any such problem among Chinese workers and insisted that this was the first he had heard of such situations.  Unlikely.  Secondly, he was brusque in indicating that the local union representative in such a situation would be replaced as ineffective and not satisfactory to the workers.  The mood then changed as suddenly with Danh asking more questions, more open, and more flexible.  We had hit a nerve perhaps, and then he was able to return to the interests of the dialogue.  These where obviously questions much on his mind as well.

It’s not hard to see the tension.  Outbreaks from workers would indicate impotence by the union.  The government is resting a lot of its economic program on foreign investment and labor unrest would be an issue.  There have surely been debates and instructions from every level.

Our labor friends insisted that membership was voluntary, and at about 25 cents per month dues, we suspected that they were right when talking about the vast majority of informal workers (my guess is 80% of the workforce in HCM City on a back-of-the-envelope), but though not compulsory they said where represented, the legal requirements are such that unions need to be recognized within 6 months of operations.  Later at the DoLISA meeting when we got down to brass tacks here there were admissions that foreign multi-nationals were giving them fits.  Vice-President Danh also was less than satisfied to hear how impotent our unions were when companies went bankrupt and left workers holding the bag, so these are issues we share.

There’s a lot more we have to learn to be able to say, but the questions are moving us in interesting directions so far.