Marble Falls There aren’t many community organizers that haven’t had to organize a petition drive. Increasingly, the same can also be said about some union organizers as well as almost anyone trying to step on the first couple of rungs on the ladder of social change.
With Arkansas Grassroots United, we have a petition we’re supporting to get sirens adapted to give warning for impending floods. With BRAVO, we’re out there near welfare and food stamp offices in Philly, Baltimore, and Little Rock with our clipboards out talking to people about Trump’s Bad Budget Bill, and how they can try to change it. With ACORN, there was a time back in the day, when we were on street corners, airport concourses at O’Hare, and anywhere there was a crowd doing something we called “petitioning” as partly advancing campaigns on any and everything from domestic abuse to utility rates to whatever and partly as a fundraiser requesting donations for the campaign. Of course, we also managed and ran huge petitioning campaigns to get issues on the ballot for everything from raising minimum wages, to lowering utility rates, to getting taxes off of food and medicine on either a statewide or local level.
All of which is a long way around by Susie’s house to share how my eyes popped reading a piece in the Times about California petitioning efforts. It’s a well-known political tool and tactic along the Pacific coast, whether Cali or Oregon or Washington, where petitions are central weapons in trying to win things with the voters that might not have been able to muster up the votes from legislators. We get that, we’ve been there, and done that. None of that was a surprise. This season we’re closely watching the results of Dave Regan and SEIU’s big healthcare union’s effort to win a tax on billionaires to replace some of what Trump’s Big Bad Bill has wrought. What was an eyeopener was how much do-re-mi the petitioners were making!
The reporter, Laurel Rosenhall, followed around some petitioners. She said some “Campaigns paid as much as $15 per signature…” She talked to one guy who claimed he made $200 an hour and was only petitioning for causes “he believed in.” Another said he made $43,000 in three months. The Times says she covers politics for the paper from Sacramento. I don’t know how much she makes, but I wonder at these rates, if she was just watching, or didn’t grab a clipboard and work the crowds herself? She talked about petition crews from all over the country swooping down on California to make some hay there while the sun was shining. I wish we had been there, too!
Where these efforts are routine, petitioners seem to not just work the street corners as we were often forced to do, but to also be able to work shopping centers and supermarkets. We would have given part of our right arms, if in places like Arkansas, Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri and Florida, we could have been able to work shopping centers or stand in front of Walmart’s.
Those were the days of course, and these are the days in California where taxing billionaires has also brought out the big money paying top dollar to put issues on the ballot as a hedge against the passage of a tax on their wealth, making these the boom times, “California ballot measure campaigns spent $126.5 million on circulating petitions during the first half of the year, four times as much as they spent in the same period in 2024, the last regular election year, according to state campaign finance reports.”
Rosenhall reports that some of these petitioners were working multiple petitions at the same time spread across their card tables. Who does that? Some claimed with that tactic they could make as much as $125 per person, if they could get a registered voter to “John Hancock” all the petitions in their array. Maybe we should have thought of that to help finance some of our rubber band and masking tape efforts that we ran with little more than elbow grease and shoe leather.
There’s an element of derision in the tone of the article that makes the art of petitioning seem a little seedy, and in the words of New Orleans French Quarter buggy carriage drivers who would argue whether theirs was “a job or a hustle.” Good petitioning is a skill, not a scam. I just wish we had been on our toes and gotten a crew out there to help little “d” democracy ourselves! Let the voters decide, and don’t look down at the big — or little people — who give us an opportunity to make change happen.