New Orleans

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.

In the bitter court battle and divorce struggle within UNITE HERE as they try to unwind the merger of their organizations several years ago and reassemble various pieces into a new formation or in the former UNITE case to affiliate with SEIU, like the worst of Hollywood divorces both sides seem unrestrained in trying to destroy the other, no matter who and what is hurt at the hindmost.  Most recently when the HERE forces seized the building in New York City where the former UNITE forces had been operating, a flood of documents has been unleashed in internet way past acceptable boundaries.

One details the declining financial fortunes of UNITE laying the cupboard bare for employer inspection at a time when employers are trying to deny recognition – and therefore – dues income to the union claiming (with way too much credibility) that they can’t tell who and what the union really is.  ARAMARK, who I know too well personally from a dozens of organizing campaigns run by my local union or partnerships we managed, seems to have been predictably quick to now refuse to bargain and deny recognition I heard from a colleague in California on the phone yesterday.

Hospitality workers desperately need organization, and here where Local 100 works in the middle South, especially places like New Orleans and San Antonio where such industries dominate, the lack of organization is a tragic factor in impoverishing entire communities.  I would like to pretend all of this mess was in service to a potential organizing program, but there’s no sign of this yet on the horizon.  All sides seem instead to be set on weakening unionization in this critical sector by throwing all of our laundry into the street.  Maybe it was bad judgment to leave these memos lying around, but it was equally wrong to serve them up for public consumption.  We have to be better than our enemies, not the same.

All may be fair in love and war, as the expression goes, but even where there now seems to have been little love, there needs to be an understanding that this is still not really war, so some standards need to be upheld.