by Mike Elk

Mike Elk

For the 1st time in my journalism profession, throughout 1 week I wrote 4 stories about workers winning tough fights. The victories consist of GE and Cablevision workers unionizing after numerous failed organizing attempts, the end of the bloody Longview Port longshoremen dispute and the State Division issuing new rules governing student guest employees right after last summer time’s strike by youthful Hershey foreign workers.

This extraordinarily uncommon string of victories leads me to feel that despite main attacks on workers’ organizing and collective bargaining rights, unions can take benefit of employees’ backlash against these attacks and win huge victories. They can even now organize.

This is not to say the tide is turning for labor due to the fact of the overreach of anti-union forces. In the course of the identical period of these small but substantial victories for workers, other individuals suffered a amount of significant defeats. Indiana passed correct-to-operate legislation aimed at gutting the energy of private-sector unions, and Senate Democrats passed a bill rolling back the organizing rights of airline and rail workers.

But the important lesson of these these modest victories is this: When workers develop individual tactics for their very own workplace—rather than depend on gran master plans from union leaders—they’re a lot more likely to win. It’s to research the GE, Cablevision and the the longshoremen union (ILWU) campaign in Longview to comprehend what works.

In 1 of the smartest union campaigns I have ever covered, the Communication Employees of America organized 282 Cablevision workers in Brooklyn that had been attempting to organize into a union for 13 years. CWA initial built a sturdy store floor committee to construct solidarity in the workplace prior to even attempting to file for an election.

Then CWA employed the assistance of prominent Democratic politicians to make statements against the intimidation these employees were encountering as they attempted to unionize. The outcome was that Cablevision couldn’t stymie the organizing drive by firing workers, and employees voted 3-to-one to join CWA.

Not only did CWA win the Cablevision union election, but it inspired yet another a group of 120 nonunion Cablevision contractors to go out on a wildcat strike in Bronx demanding union recognition and the restoration of a 30-percent wage reduce proposed by the organization. (See my story here).

Right after a bitter seven-month struggle that occasionally involved breaking the law, the Worldwide Longshoreman and Warehouse Union (ILWU) was in a position to prevent port firm EGT from opening the initial terminal on the West Coast not to be represented by the union. On a single event final July, more than a hundred union members have been arrested for breaking down a fence and invading the grain terminal in an effort to shut it down. On other occasions, hundreds of ILWU members confronted baton-twirling riot police as they attempt to blocked railroad tracks to avert goods from moving workers at ports in Vancouver and Tacoma went on wildcat strikes to display solidarity with the Longshoremen. On one more occasion unionists vandalized trains carrying grain to the port. Throughout the confrontations, a lot more than 125 protesters had been arrested.

Union leaders, of program, seldom inspire union members to vandalize house and break the law. Workers in Longview decided that that’s what they needed to do. Ultimately, the prospect of far more confrontations between the company, police and union members prompted Washington Governor Christina Gregroie to finally push the company to settle.

Also earlier this month, I covered how GE workers in Kansas City won an organizing drive by a margin of 44-41. The workers at a modest service plant in Kansas City had attempted to organize 3 instances ahead of ultimately on the fourth time, pro-union workers won an election.

The organizing good results was the result of older pro-union employees on the very first shift who were prepared to remain late into the evening after their last shift to talk to younger workers, as properly other unionized GE employees from various plants going to to talk to employees about joining a union. There was no large master strategy in the GE organizing victory. The organizing success was the outcome of rank-and-file worker action.

Likewise, last year I covered how cultural exchange guest employees at a single of Hershey’s warehouses in Pennsylvania made the decision to strike by themselves immediately after receiving only $ 20-40 a week (after housing and other costs were deducted from their paychecks). They reached out to the neighborhood labor neighborhood to help them, but the strategy to strike came from employees themselves.

The action was wildly profitable receiving widespread media focus. It eventually brought on the State Department to announce it will assessment all policies regulating the J-1 student guest visa plan, and will limit the sort of perform that nearly 350,000 “cultural exchange” employees who enter this country yearly are allowed to do. (The State Department also debarred guest worker recruiter Council for Educational Travel from  the J-one plan CETUSA had supplied the college students to Hershey.)

Men and women inside of America’s labor movement are often browsing for the massive solution of how to organize lots of employees rapidly, or win fights swiftly by means of a grand leverage scheme designed to force employers to agree to voluntary union recognition by means of card examine neutrality, rather than challenging-fought NLRB union elections.

A handful of years ago, I traveled to Boston to cover an attempt by top SEIU strategist Stephen Lerner to organize financial institution workers at Santander, a foreign-owned company. The organizing committee meeting I attended had almost twice as numerous union organizers and neighborhood allies in the room as actual bank employees. It was clear that the campaign to organize Santander workers was driven mainly by SEIU staffers, not by employees. The campaign collapsed, and is now largely forgotten.

“Organizing correct now is characterized by fantastic suggestions, fancy power points, 1-year investment and then moving on to grand scheme. It works for specialist organizers, but it does not work for really organizing employees,” ILWU Organizing Director Peter Olney told me earlier this year. “The fundamental moving force in any labor struggle has to be the workers. [But] the art of listening to employees and analyzing their electrical power is gone in the labor movement today.”

All as well usually I see unions announce enormous organizing drives that intend to organize a entire group of employees. A plethora of press releases are released, millions of dollars are committed to organizing an market, even prior to the union has organized committees of workers in the industry. Whether it’s SEIU’s financial institution industry strategy or UAW’s approach to organize foreign-owned car plants in the proper-to-perform South, it appears that union leaders typically have big strategies to win enormous gains—but seldom are individuals methods crafted by the workers unions look for to organize. Usually, these campaigns involve obtaining an employer not to intimidate workers instead of operating to support men and women overcome anti-union intimidation campaigns. As UAW President Bob King recently told Reuters about how the struggling union will organize southern plants: “It really is in the end up to the organizations.”

But possibly the greatest way to make significant gains is to focus on a lot of little workplaces in which employees actually want to organize. These victories show that the crucial to achievement is  providing them the abilities to organize, and sticking with the organizing campaign of employees, whether it requires four many years like it did with the GE store in Kansas City, or 13 years like it did with Cablevision employees in New York City.

“I consider there is a lot of truth in that model of moving gradually forward. You perform modest ball and all of a sudden that begins adding up to a lot of workers,” says CWA District 1 Organizing Director Tim Dubnau.

The truth is—and it is a difficult 1 for labor leaders—is that there is no true approach to rebuild the labor movement other than to support employees to the max in their attempts to organize – even so modest or unsexy they are. If we are going to rebuild this labor motion, workers are going to have to do it themselves.

Mike Elk is an In These Times Staff Writer and a standard contributor to the labor blog Operating In These Occasions. He can be reached at mike@inthesetimes.com. This post originally appeared on the Operating In These Instances blog.

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Occupy! was a pervasive presence at the 39th annual Conservative Political Action Conference, held in Washington, D.C. on February 9-11.

In his kick-off speech on Thursday, Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union which sponsors CPAC, gave the movement five paragraphs. [see sidebar] Seven minutes into Sarah Palin’s closing speech on Saturday she was interrupted by a dozen Occupiers yelling “mic examine.” They were escorted from the ballroom even though the audience yelled “USA, USA, USA” —&nbspa standard response at Republican rallies to drown out verbal disruptions. Once off the hotel grounds they read the statement they had not been in a position to read within.

In among there were 3 demonstrations outdoors the conference hotel, zap actions inside, repeated referrals to Occupy by conference speakers, and a couple of panels inspired by 5 months of occupations all more than the country.

Thursday morning, Vinnie Vernuccio of the Competitive Enterprise Institute informed a hundred people who had come to hear about “The Return of Large Labor” that “Occupy is targeting this panel because they are afraid of you.” He created a reference to what was going on outside, as he attacked unions for investing dues on politics rather than representation. That day, absolutely nothing was going on outside. The unions were marching on Friday and OccupyDC was marching on Saturday.

Two hours later on Citizens United Productions hosted a “Blogger Briefing” on its upcoming films. The only one particular promoted in the two-hour “briefing” was Occupy Unmasked, which is still in production.

CUP is the documentary film production and advertising and marketing arm of Citizens United, which promotes conservative causes. CU sued the Federal Election Commission after the FEC deemed a 2007 film critical of Hillary Clinton to be an election communication which could not be publicly distributed inside 30 days of the 2008 Democratic primaries.

When CU v. FEC was decided by Supreme Court a year ago, 5 Justices explained there could be no limits on election expenditures by firms and unions as extended as they had been created independently of candidates’ campaigns. This led to the formation of “superPACs” which have poured millions of dollars into the 2012 election. A various CPAC panel celebrated this determination.

The audience gawked as 3 men wearing Guy Fawkes masks and black capes marched up the aisle to the front of the room. They weren’t Occupiers&nbspbut the producer, director, and a single narrator of the film. The Guy Fawkes mask is worn in demonstrations by some Occupiers and has turn out to be symbolic of the movement.

In between two showings of the film trailer, panelists described Occupy as “dangerous” and the film as “scary.” “This is a war film” they mentioned repeatedly. Occupy is portrayed as “Obama’s shock troops,” whose occupation is to promote the thought that “income inequality” is undesirable. In order to tell “the accurate story of the radicals behind the Occupy movement” two of the panelists went undercover to get footage and quotes. CUP is seeking for far more, offering an e-mail address for it on the film’s webpage.

What they didn’t say but was evident from the trailer, is that Occupy Unmasked is a campaign film, as was the 2007 Hillary: The Movie. The movie makers juxtapose scenes of violent residence destruction following to footage of President Obama and Residence Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi seeming to make optimistic statements about Occupiers. The trailer also manages a dig at Michael Moore and the “liberal media.”

While the movie is still a perform in progress, the trailer does expose one critical difficulty with Occupy. It proclaims itself a non-violent motion, but has no handle above people who decide on to disregard this mandate. There were plenty of demonstrators for the duration of the 1960s civil rights movement who have been not personally committed to non-violence, but they were kept in verify by employees who worked the crowd to deter violent acts and verbal provocations. Occupy does not have any staff, or the equivalent.

Some of the scenes in the movie trailer had been quite a contrast to the discipline shown by the over 600 union members and their supporters who protested at the front entrance to the Mariott Hotel on Friday. They marched up the street carrying tents, signs and posters saying “Stop the War on Workers” and “We Are the 99%” to be greeted by a 20 foot inflated “fat cat” choking a worker.

As the unionists marched, a dozen school college students wearing t-shirts that mentioned “Income is Speech —&nbspPoverty is Silence” walked into an overflow room for CPACers listening to Mitt Romney’s speech and stood in front of the screen with tape above their mouths. The crowd yelled at them for a couple minutes just before they had been removed by hotel safety.

It was CPAC’s invitation to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to be its keynote speaker that prompted the protest. Walker has been a union target because final year when he and the Republican state legislature passed a bill undermining collective bargaining rights of most public sector unions. So broad is the anger at the Republican Governor that busses came from New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia to augment the ranks of regional union members. Some had been dressed in baseball costumes with 𔄙% Tax Dodgers” on the front.

Organized by the DC Labor Council, the action was originally timed for Walker’s 7:30 p.m. &nbspspeech at the “Ronald Reagan Banquet” on Friday (at $ 275 a ticket). The need to have to accommodate union members’ schedules resulted in a main protest at noon, and a smaller a single of about one hundred at 5:00 p.m. &nbspMost of the unionists at the noon protest had gone home, to be replaced by people who couldn’t get off function earlier. There had been two to three dozen men and women from Occupy at each, though they had the greater indicators.

Ironically, the police presence at the larger protest was lighter than at the smaller sized a single. Police confined protestors to the sidewalk in front of the hotel, not allowing even media to step on the hotel lawn. At some point the DC police permitted protestors to take over the street for an hour, in which they picketed with indicators saying “Greed is Great —&nbspRomney-Gekko 2012” and extolled the virtues of “Walmart for President.” (If companies are men and women, surely one particular can run for President).

CPAC attendees came out from the hotel to shout and argue. Carrying signs saying Stand With Walker, printed for his look that evening, some faced off against unionists who hoisted signs demanding Recall Walker! Although at times loud, it was a civil confrontation.

As the crowd dissipated about 6:00, a group of two dozen young people, largely Occupiers, marched all around the block and up a driveway to the rear entrance of the hotel, exactly where some entered a single of its restaurants. They were removed by hotel safety, as DC police, who had been prowling the hotel all day, ran to blockade everyone else.

Whilst the police had been herding the young men and women back down the driveway, an very agitated Andrew Breitbart came out of the hotel and started shouting at them. Breitbart, a former lefty turned righty, is featured in CUP’s film on Occupy. Whilst he had employed some strong language in the course of the “blogger briefing,” when facing real Occupiers, he lost it. Calling them “freaks and animals,” he yelled “stop raping folks.” As hotel safety gently pushed him back within, he ranted &nbsp”you, filthy, dirty, murdering freaks.”

Back on the street, Occupiers when once again exchanged words with some CPACers who had followed them. Whilst police blocked the road to the rear hotel entrance, but otherwise only watched, a couple of CPACers and Occupiers traded words in a manner a bit much more cordial than a shouting match.

The shouting resumed the subsequent day, when Occupy returned for a rematch, although much of it seemed like an anti-climax to Friday. Whilst a handful of dozen Occupiers congregated on the street in front of the Marriott, hotel safety removed 6 grungy searching young men lurking outside Sarah Palin’s noontime speech to the Clare Boothe Luce luncheon for female undergraduates, only to discover that they were a patriotic band hoping to give her a CD.

In the meantime a dozen or so Occupiers were casing the joint, obtaining effectively blended in with the thousands of CPACers filling the lobby and the halls. Some of them got into the ballroom exactly where Palin gave the closing speech at 4:30. Others pasted stickers on candidate literature which would later on be handed out. They also dropped a banner from a balcony into the lobby, and distributed balloons with Occupy written on them. Every single time an Occupier did one thing provocative, CPACers responded by shouting “USA, USA, USA.” It was a extremely patriotic day.

Jo Freeman is a political scientist and attorney.&nbspShe is presently writing a book on her experiences in the Southern civil rights motion. Her experiences in the Bay Location civil rights movement are recounted in the book&nbspAt Berkeley in the Sixties.&nbsp This piece&nbsp originally appeared on the SeniorWomen Net and appears here with the authors permission.&nbsp Jo Freeman’s site&nbsp contains several fascinating photo and political buttons from the civil rights and women motion.

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by Josh Eidelson

Months-lengthy pressure campaign pays off

The dispute has been going powerful for some time. Right here, a CIW supporter pickets a Trader Joe's in Manhattan on February 28, 2011 (Mario Tama/Getty Photos)

On Thursday, the Coalition of Immokalee Employees announced it had signed a Fair Food Agreement with Trader Joe’s, a significant step forward its efforts to bring fairness and accountability to the food sector.  “We are really pleased today to welcome Trader Joe’s aboard the Fair Food Program,” CIW’s Gerardo Reyes explained in a joint statement issued by CIW and Trader Joe’s.  “Trader Joe’s is cherished by its consumers for a quantity of factors, but high on that list is the company’s dedication to ethical getting practices.”

The identical statement, which the business has posted as a letter to customers on its web site, hails Fair Food as “a groundbreaking method to social duty in the U.S. generate industry that combines the Fair Food Code of Conduct…with a little cost premium to aid increase harvesters’ wages.” Trader Joe’s did not respond to a request for more comment.

But it wasn’t prolonged ago that activists had been carrying “Traitor Joe’s” banners, and Trader Joe’s was condemning Fair Meals Agreements as “overreaching, ambiguous, and improper.”

Trader Joe’s’ reversal follows a months-prolonged campaign. As Michelle Chen has reported for In These Occasions, it included “Trader Joe’s tours” final summer that picketed stores, educated consumers, and met with allies along the East and West Coasts.

In Boston, a group of fifth graders organized a rally outdoors a shop. In New York, activists held a one.6 mile run amongst two outlets. The announcement of the settlement came on the eve of two planned days of coordinated protest pegged to the grand opening of Trader Joe’s’ very first-ever Florida area. That shop, the company’s 367th, is positioned on Immokalee Road in Naples, 35 miles from the fields where the CIW was born.

CIW announced Thursday that Friday’s and Saturday’s demonstrations, planned for Naples and 32 other cities, had been becoming cancelled or replaced with actions targeting Fair Meals holdout Publix rather.

CIW is a workers’ organization that partners with faith, labor, and buyer groups to push enhancements in farm workers’ operating conditions and voice on the work. It’s element of a expanding trend of labor activism that will take spot outdoors of the protections and restrictions of the National Labor Relations Act. CIW’s Trader Joe’s agreement is the most up-to-date in a series of victories reached through extensive campaigns that leverage buyer and media stress at strategic points in the tomato provide chain.

CIW reached national prominence throughout its multi-year boycott of Taco Bell, which successfully forced the fast meals giant to absorb the cost—a penny per pound—of modest labor reforms for employees in the fields. The 3 other greatest rapidly food chains later followed suit.

CIW took the momentum from these victories—and the promise of an further penny—and turned its concentrate to the growers who immediately utilize tomato growers.

As Kari Lyderson has reported for In These Occasions, agreements with key growers in 2010 suggest that 90 % of U.S. tomatoes come from growers who have signed Fair Food agreements. CIW estimates that a lot more than 10,000 farm employees are now covered by these agreements. They incorporate fundamental specifications on wages and working ailments as nicely as a complaint method, independent auditing, and meetings in between employees and management to monitor compliance. CIW is currently instruction farm employees on their rights underneath Fair Meals Agreements, and how to enforce them.

Following its agreements with fast-food chains and growers, CIW turned its interest to yet another point the tomato supply chain: supermarkets. For these businesses, signing a Fair Food Agreement indicates a commitment to absorb the penny-per-pound price, supply tomatoes only from growers that are complying with a Fair Meals Agreement, and meet with CIW relating to compliance. Absent acquire-in from supermarkets, CIW warned, growers that are currently abiding by Fair Food Agreements could violate them in the future, safe in the understanding that noncompliance would not price them supermarket enterprise.

During the months that it rebuffed CIW’s get in touch with for a Fair Food Agreement, Trader Joe’s insisted that it was currently having to pay the further penny-per-pound. Given that main growers had been already signed on, that might well have been true—which suggests that Trader Joe’s accurate objection might have been significantly less about spending funds than about sacrificing energy.

Despite the fact that CIW never ever referred to as a boycott of Trader Joe’s, “it was usually a chance if we needed to get there,” says CIW staffer Julia Perkins. In November, CIW sent an e-mail promoting a campaign by the New York Community/ Farmworker Alliance to send “Dear Joe” letters breaking up with the firm over its refusal to sign a Fair Food Agreement. “The persistence of fair meals activists,” says Perkins, “and of their shoppers too, who kept going more than and above to them…helped to display them that this was something they wanted to do.”

In August interviews (for Alternet) during their East Coast Trader Joe’s Tour, Immokalee tomato workers Oscar Otzoy and Wilson Perez described how the 2010 agreements had, along with bettering their wages, altered their operating situations: managers stopped rampantly stealing wages, denying breaks, and demanding sex in exchange for less strenuous assignments.

Their pay remains nicely short of a residing wage.  But for the first time, mentioned Perez, “We have a voice in the camps.”

Whole Foods was the initial key supermarket to sign a Fair Food Agreement Trader Joe’s is the second. Perkins says Trader Joe’s “didn’t agree to anything less” than Whole Foods had in its very own agreement. CIW’s subsequent key target is Publix, which has been refusing requests to sign an agreement.

CIW and religious allies have announced a six-day protest quick outside Publix headquarters that will begin March five. Publix, charges Perkins, is “not just turning their back and refusing to meet with us, but genuinely getting a blockade in the road to truly modifying circumstances for farmworkers.”  But she expects Publix will sooner or later stick to Trader Joe’s and Publix in signing on to the Fair Meals model.  “It’s genuinely the long term of the business.”

Josh Eidelson is a freelance writer and a contributor at In These Instances, The American Prospect, Dissent, and Alternet.  Following receiving his MA in Political Science, he worked as a union organizer for five a long time.  His site is http://www.josheidelson.com. This post originally appeared on the Working In These Times web site.

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 When I read the otherwise nicely researched characteristic story in the New York Times, in which Apple announced it would have the Fair Labor Association audit the factories of its suppliers, I noted the absence of comment by the Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM).  Hong Kong-based mostly SACOM has been the most productive advocate for the rights of Chinese workers in the electronics market, and its reseachers have uncovered and publicized the most flagrant abuses at Apple supplier Foxconn’s sprawling factory complexes in China.

In response to my inquiry, SACOM director Sze Wan Debby Chan responded that the media had attempted to get in touch with her, but throughout the evening when she was sleeping.  She  linked herself with the crucial comments of U.S. NGOs United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and Workers’ Rights Consortium (WRC) about the record of the Fair Labor Association (FLA) as portion of a corrupt “Social Duty business” that mostly serves to safeguard corporations against their critics instead than as a indicates for correcting abuses.

Debby Chan also forwarded a synopsis of comments she created for a Hong Kong newspaper.  In essence,  the issue is not audits, but whether Apple actually is committed to correcting structural abuses in its key suppliers.  Apple has extended performed inspections of its production facilities in China, and understands of the difficulties of excessive overtime, overwork, and security violations that have killed or maimed numerous workers.   Apple has even produced reports that show key problems, but has never identified particular violators nor effectively insisted on reforms.  So it is excellent that there is a lot more public discussion of the huge violations of workers’ rights and much more awareness amongst Apple clients in the USA, but this will not lead to enhancements for Chinese employees without having substantial mobilization.

Debby went on to remind us of SACOM’s most recent campaign against forced labor by college students at main Apple suppler Foxconn.  “For illustration, the use of student workers at Foxconn is a type of involuntary labour.  Vocational students who study education, tourism, pharmacy, journalism, English, etc., are forced to do involuntary internships at Foxconn plants in Chengdu and Zhengzhou, the iPad and iPhone suppliers respectively.  The operate is irrelevant to the student’s studies, but except if they perform at Foxconn they will not get graduation certificates.”

I have just come across a exceptional post by Arun Gupta on Truthout,
“iEmpire: Apple’s Sordid Business Practices Are Even Worse than You Consider.”   Utilizing SACOM’s grassroots research, an interview with Debby Chan, and scholarly analysis by Ngai Pun and Jenny Chan (Debby Chan’s predecessor as SACOM Director), Arun Gupta describes in great detail the substantial use of involuntary forced labor by hundreds of thousands of student “interns”  by Foxconn’s Apple factories in China.

As we have long pointed out in posts on Speaking Union, based on earlier reports by SACOM researchers, our iPads and iPhones are drenched in blood.  Nearly a million young Chinese, who monotonously assemble tiny components by hand or polish situations with toxic supplies for limitless hours, kind the underbelly of Apple’s profitable company empire.  About  2% of the final price of an Apple item goes for the labor expenses of assembly.   Doubling that labor cost, somewhat reducing Apple’s large profit margins, would enable shorter hrs, better working situations, and the elimination of forced teen-age labor in Foxconn’s huge complexes of factories in China.  Apple is now the world’s largest and most profitable corporation (and Foxconn is no slouch at 60th largest).

You can sign on to SACOM’s petition against forced labor by Chinese student interns here.

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Latest AFSCME Treasury Secretary Lee Saunders. (Photo Courtesy of CSEA N.Y. Neighborhood 828)

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Thirteen persons from Occupy Atlanta, Atlanta Jobs with Justice, and Communications Workers of America, such as 4 members of Atlanta DSA, were arrested on Monday 13 February after sitting in at AT&ampT’s Atlanta headquarters.  They had been protesting the firm’s modern announcement of 740 planned layoffs after boasting of record earnings and having to pay their CEO $ 27 million in 2011.

Atlanta has the largest wealth gap among wealthy and poor people, out of any major city in the US. AT&ampT will make that gap even bigger by laying off 95 workers in Georgia and 70 in Atlanta and adding to Georgia’s 9.seven % unemployment rate.

Seventy union members and supporters rallied outside. “There’s plenty of function out here to be done, there is a lot of forced overtime and not sufficient folks to do the perform. AT&ampT needs to minimize the cash going into the CEO’s and the large manager’s pockets. That income requirements to go to keep individuals on payroll,” said Walter Andrews, President of Communications Workers of America local 3204.

Occupy Atlanta set up 15 tents in preparation for a more substantial rally outdoors the AT&ampT headquarters on Valentine’s Day.

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Steve Early

Forty years ago this December, members of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) did the unthinkable. They elected three of their own–rank-and-file coal miners–to top national positions in the UMWA. The labor establishment was deeply shocked and unsettled.

This kind of thing was just not done–and not a single labor organization (with the exception of the always independent United Electrical Workers) applauded W. A. (“Tony”) Boyle’s well-deserved defeat in his bid for re-election as UMWA president.

Then and now, rising to the top in organized labor normally requires waiting your turn (and, when you capture a leadership position, holding on to it for as long as you can, regardless of the organizational consequences). For trade unionists who are ambitious and successful, upward mobility usually follows a long career track that looks something like this: shop steward, local bargaining committee or executive board member, local union officer, national union staffer, national union executive board member, and then national union officer–president, vice-president, or secretary-treasurer.

Aspiring labor leaders can most easily make the transition from membership elected positions, at the local level, to appointed national union staff jobs if they conform politically. Dissidents tend to be passed over for such vacancies or not even considered for them unless union patronage is being deployed, by those at the top, to co-opt actual or potential local critics.

As appointed staffers move up, via the approved route, in the field or at union headquarters, they burnish their resumes and gain broader organizational experience “working within the system.” If they become candidates for higher elective office later in their career, they enjoy all the advantages of de facto incumbency (by virtue of their full-time staff positions, greater access to multiple locals, and politically-helpful headquarters patrons). Plus, in the absence of any one-member/one-vote election process, most seekers of union-wide office only have to compete for votes among several thousand usually docile national convention delegates. In unions that provide geographical representation on their board, candidates for regional leadership positions can even get elected, at conventions, with the support of just a few hundred local union delegates. Either way, candidates who are part of an “administration team” usually win over independents and rank-and-file slates (particularly in unions where all board members are elected “at large”).

The MFD’s Unwelcome Victory

In 1972, the Miners for Democracy (MFD) blazed a trail directly to the top, under admittedly abnormal circumstances because the UMWA permits direct election of top officers by the entire membership. Three years before MFD candidates ran, there was a contested race of a different sort, involving two longtime union insiders. Fed up with Tony Boyle’s coziness with coal companies, executive board member Joseph (“Jock”) Yablonski challenged Boyle for the presidency. Unfortunately, the election was stolen by the incumbent, although the results were later overturned by the U.S. Department of Labor. When it came time for a government-supervised rematch, Yablonski was, tragically, no longer available to run. He had been assassinated in the meantime (along with his wife and daughter).

Three little-known local union officers hailing from West Virginia or Pennsylvania–Arnold Miller, Harry Patrick, and Mike Trbovich–entered the lists instead. They had never been on the UMWA national staff or executive board but carried the banner of union democracy and reform anyway. Even though they were running, at the top of the ticket, against a management-friendly incumbent– soon to be indicted for his role in the Yablonski murders–the MFD slate won by only 14,000 votes out of 126,700 cast, hardly a landslide.

From a vantage point four decades later, the choice between Boyle and the MFD should have been a nobrainer. But in the rough-andtumble world of trade union politics, the advantages of incumbency should not to be underestimated, in any era. As a grassroots organizing project, mounting an electoral challenge to any candidate favored by the national union establishment is an uphill fight, even when the bureaucracy itself is discredited or split. Competitive elections (aka “this is what democracy looks like”) are far more celebrated in the breach than the observance in organized labor. In fact, within labor’s top officialdom, there’s no announcement more pleasing to the ears than “re-elected by acclamation.” Whether that’s healthy for the labor movement is another question.

To explore the rare but important phenomena of contested national union elections, this article begins with the MFD saga. It then examines the Teamster presidential election campaign of Ron Carey twenty years later and reports on the experience of two present-day local union officers who had the audacity to run for top jobs in their respective national organizations just last year.

A Partial UMWA Revolution

The MFD victory and its tumultuous ten-year aftermath has been variously chronicled by former UMWA lawyer Tom Geoghegan in Which Side Are You On?, labor studies professor Paul Clark in The Miners Fight for Democracy and journalist Paul Nyden’s contribution to a recent Verso collection entitled, Rebel Rank and File. As Nyden notes, the election that thrust three rank-and-filers into unfamiliar jobs in a disfunctional national union headquarters in Washington, D.C., “channeled the spontaneous militancy arising throughout the Appalachian coal fields” during the previous decade. In the 1960s, miners staged two huge wildcat work-stoppages protesting national contracts negotiated in secret by Boyle (with no membership ratification); in 1969, 45,000 UMWA members participated in a statewide political strike which accelerated passage of new federal mine safety legislation and creation of the first West Virginia program for compensation of miners disabled with “black lung.”

According to Nyden, candidates backed by the MFD, a group founded at Yablonski’s funeral in 1970, “succeeded in ousting one of the country’s most corrupt and deeply entrenched union bureaucracies” because they had key allies inside and outside the union. In the coalfields, “wives and widows of disabled miners, the Black Lung Association, the wildcat strikers, and above all the young miners who were dramatically reshaping the composition of the UMWA constituted the backbone of the campaign.” Also aiding the MFD was a skilled and committed network of community organizers, former campus activists, journalists, coalfield researchers, and public interest lawyers, some of whom would later play controversial roles as headquarters staffers for the union.

The UMWA had been run in autocratic fashion since the 1920s when John L. Lewis crushed the last major rank and file challenge to the leadership, a campaign mounted by progressive miners like John Brophy and Powers Hapgood. So when the MFD took over, the institutional context was a smaller scale union version of the political turmoil following recent Arab Spring uprisings or any similar overthrow of a dictatorship in place for many decades.

The new leaders inherited formidable internal and external problems that would have been vexing for anyone in their shoes. They succeeded in the project of structural democratization and, for a time, more competent union administration. But membership expectations in the crucial area of contract negotiations and enforcement were not met. As the 1970s progressed, new UMWA organizing initiatives failed to counter the coal industry’s systematic “de-unionization,” a process that continues unabated today.

An Erratic President

Within the union, the conservative Boyle forces quickly regrouped and maintained their own baleful, disruptive influence. The three top MFD officers fell out among themselves, with the best and youngest of them–Harry Patrick–leaving the UMWA after a single term of office in 1977. Arnold Miller’s weak and erratic presidency became an unmitigated disaster; in 1977-78, 160,000 miners had to battle UMWA headquarters and the White House while shutting down the bituminous coal industry for 110 days . Highlights of that struggle included two contract rejections and a failed Taft-Hartley back-to-work order sought by Jimmy Carter.

To this day, the MFD experience (for those who remember it) remains a Rorshach test for how one views sudden regime change in labor, engineered from below. Some MFD veterans, who were ex-coal miners, blamed (and even red-baited) “the outsiders” for what went wrong. By the late 1970s, most of the college educated non-miners, who were swept into influential positions by the MFD’s victory, left in frustration over the failings or political setbacks of their friends and allies. Some went on to work for other unions, most recently the Service Employees International Union.

Washington, D.C., labor insiders viewed UMWA turmoil as proof that “inexperienced” people should never be allowed to run a major union. On the labor left, the shortcomings of the Miller Administration have always been attributed to its unwillingness to empower fully the rank-and-file. If only “the MFD hadn’t been disbanded” and top officials had been willing to embrace the right to strike over grievances and employed the militancy of the UMWA’s wildcat strike culture, rather than clashing with it, the outcome would have been different.

Some semblance of stability and forward motion was not restored until a second-generation reformer, Rich Trumka, took over as UMWA president in 1982, after defeating a former Boyle supporter who replaced Arnold Miller when he retired for health reasons in the middle of his second term. Trumka gained valuable experience as a headquarters legal staffer during Miller’s first term. Plus, he had the street cred of working underground before and after his initial tour of full-time union duty in Washington, D.C. But even with steadier, more skilled hands at the helm–and an inspiring strike victory at Pittston in 1989–the union has remained on a steady course to near total marginalization; its actual working membership today is only about 12,000.

History Repeats Itself in the IBT?

The most high profile challenges to the leadership of other major industrial unions, in the 1970s and 1980s, did not take the form of pure rank-and-file insurgencies of the MFD sort. Instead, they looked more like Jock Yablonski’s break with Boyle in 1969. In the United Steel Workers and Auto Workers, two dissident regional directors in the mid-west, Ed Sadlowski and Jerry Tucker, challenged their respective union establishments. Both called for reform while serving as national executive board members, after winning those positions in elections that were initially stolen. Both were forced out of top leadership positions after trying to move up or just get re-elected. Tucker fell victim to tight control of convention delegate voting by the UAW “Administration Caucus,” which has ruled his Detroit-based union for six decades. With some former UMWA reformers assisting him, Sadlowski ran strongly, but unsuccessfully, for USWA president in 1977 balloting involving nearly 600,000 of the union’s then 1.4 million members.

A campaign like Sadlowski’s was impossible in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) when that union picked its top leadership at national union conventions heavily influenced by organized crime. As part of the settlement of a controversial Justice Department anti-racketeering lawsuit in 1989, the IBT was forced to hold its first-ever direct election of officers and board members two years later.

Fortunately, the IBT was the longtime turf of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which campaigned for this more democratic method of voting. TDU was launched just a few years after the MFD, as a vehicle not just for electioneering but for long-term rank-and-file organizing. In the IBT two decades ago, there were no credible or trusted defectors from the national leadership like Ed Sadlowski or Jerry Tucker; but, helpfully, the Teamster “old guard” became badly splintered. Two rival slates formed, composed of existing IBT executive board members, wellknown regional officials, and other principal officers of large Teamster locals.

For fifteen years, TDU had been conducting unofficial, bottom-up “contract campaigns” and helping Teamsters democratize their local union by-laws and run for local office. TDU helped assemble a full slate of executive board and officer candidates headed by Ron Carey. Carey was an ex-Marine and militant leader of United Parcel Service (UPS) workers in New York City; his vocal criticism of Teamster corruption had turned him into a pariah among fellow local union officials (only several of whom agreed to run with him). Most of Carey’s running-mates were TDUers who had never held any union position above the level of shop steward or convention delegate.

As Newsday labor reporter Ken Crowe recounted in Collision: How the Rank-and-File Took Back The Teamsters, the 400,000 Teamsters who cast their ballots in 1991 were participating in the largest government-supervised union vote since the MFD ousted Tony Boyle. Carey garnered very little delegate support at the IBT convention where presidential candidates were nominated that year. So Teamster employers, the AFL-CIO, and the mass media were all much surprised when he won the union presidency with 48% of the membership vote. Carey’s largely rank-and-file slate swept all but one position on the union’s executive board.

The Rise (and Fall) of Ron Carey

Anyone who had experienced the MFD years at UMWA headquarters and then spent some time in the IBT’s “Marble Palace” in Washington, D.C., after Carey became president could not help but feel a sense of deja vu. Carey inherited a hostile and disfunctional national union bureaucracy; at the local level, scores of Teamster affiliates were cesspools of corruption, headed by crooks and thugs of all sorts.

Like the Boyle forces in the UMWA, Teamster regional barons remained bitter foes of the new reform administration. They had been ousted from the executive board, stripped of costly perks, and then deprived of additional paychecks for their multiple union positions by a TDU-backed reformer. Much of the Teamster officialdom, while not corrupt, nevertheless feared and disliked Carey’s strong commitment to rallying the rank and file in contract campaigns and strikes. That approach to union bargaining was perceived as undermining “local autonomy”– i.e. the ability of IBT officials to negotiate any kind of sweetheart contract with management.

Carey defeated Hoffa in 1996–by a mere 16,000 votes–but in a tainted fashion that sadly turned reform-oriented rule into a mere interregnum in Teamster history. Carey’s career came crashing down in “Teamster Donorgate”–a re-election campaign financing scandal that ensnared many, inside and outside the union, including Rich Trumka, then secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO.

Trumka took the Fifth when he was questioned before a federal grand jury about the federation’s role in a complicated contribution swap scheme arranged by various Carey campaign consultants, vendors, or union staff members. Most pled guilty, while one, the Teamsters’ political director, was convicted and jailed. Carey himself was forced from office and indicted for perjury; denying any knowledge of the transactions, he was later acquitted. Trumka was never charged.

But, in collective bargaining, Ron Carey was no Arnold Miller. Before Carey was forced out in late 1997, Teamster reformers, working in his Washington and in the field, still managed to pull off the biggest, best-organized strike of the decade. Under Carey, the IBT orchestrated an unprecedented mobilization of 200,000 UPS workers that ended in a widely supported 15-day national workstoppage. It was widely hailed as just what the labor movement needed to go on the offensive again. Unfortunately, when the 1996 election was overturned and re-run, Hoffa won the first of his now four presidential campaigns. In each election, until last year’s race, the local officer running as TDU’s candidate got more than a third of the vote, while agitating for a return to the militancy and membership mobilization of the Carey years. Hoffa and his leadership team have taken a less adversarial path. Much to the dismay of some Teamster dues payers, the current Teamster president has also helped solidify his support by condoning (and contributing to) the collection of multiple union salaries by Teamster officials, a practice that drains the IBT treasury of $ 12 million a year.

The IBT’s Latest Three-Way Field

Mounting dissatisfaction with Hoffa’s now fourteen-year year reign spawned not one, but two local union challengers, who went the distance in the IBT’s latest direct election battle. Despite more than two decades of federal court oversight, Teamster conventions still reflect the culture of an unrepentant one-party state. So when supporters of Sandy Pope, a local president from Queens, N.Y., and Fred Gegare, a local president and dissenting Teamster board member from Wisconsin, went to the microphones to speak on behalf of their respective candidates (or any other issue) in Las Vegas last June, they were drowned out by the thunderous boos of a pro-Hoffa crowd numbering more than 4,000.

A TDU supporter since the late 1970s, Pope was photogenic, articulate, and a tireless campaigner with a substantive critique of Hoffa’s record. She also had a solid personal resume featuring actual Teamster work experience, followed by years of full-time union service as an effective organizer, international union representative (under Carey), and elected leader of a model Teamster local. Gegare similarly stressed his own rank-and-file background, as opposed to Hoffa’s lack of it; his attacks on “Junior” had the additional bite of coming from someone who was, for years, a Hoffa backer and leading mid-western member of his administration.

\Both Pope and Gegare were, in their own way, intent on forcing an important debate about the future of the union. But, in Las Vegas, where each Hoffa critic was nominated with about 9% of the delegate vote, the pro-Hoffa delegates, alternates, and guests weren’t much interested in listening to them. When the two opposition candidates went to the podium for their 20-minute nomination acceptance speeches, their audience immediately dwindled to their own combined delegation of about 300; everyone else walked out of the hall.

Barnstorming around the country, in a grueling campaign for anyone with local union responsibilities, both fared much better. Their combined anti-Hoffa vote among the 250,000 Teamsters who cast ballots last fall was twice the percentage they got among IBT convention delegates. But, in a blow to TDU, Gegare (who was running with a near full slate of running mates) got 23%–taking more votes away from the reform movement’s past base of support than he did from Hoffa’s constituency.

As a result, Pope–who was running alone, just against Hoffa–placed a disappointing third, with 17%. The 70-year old incumbent was re-elected, with 40 percent of the vote, for another five-year term. As TDU organizer Ken Paff points out, Hoffa’s huge fund-raising advantage explains a lot about the results. The Teamster president “raised $ 3 million, according to his slate’s financial reports, most of it from officials who owe their positions or power to him,” Paff wrote in Labor Notes. In contrast, Pope raised about $ 200,000, “could afford a mailing to less than 20 percent of the union’s membership” and relied on volunteer phone banking for her GOTV effort. Hoffa “did multiple mailings to the 1.3 million members, the bulk of them devoted to vicious attacks on Sandy Pope.” Hoffa also benefited from controversial IBT- funded robo-calling that was ostensibly non-partisan and aimed at boosting turnout but subtly reinforced his core campaign message about “unity.” Both Bill Clinton and Danny DeVito taped messages urging Teamsters to vote, which 20% did.

This lowest ever turn-out–and the cost of direct elections every five years–is now cited, by Hoffa supporters, in their revived drive to switch back to the old Teamster method of electing top officers and board members at convention. In response, defenders of “the Right to Vote” note that the twoyear administrative costs of the most recent direct election add up to about the same amount the IBT spends, in a single year, bestowing additional pay-checks on favored officials already receiving one or more for their local or joint council positions. As a percentage of Teamster dues income over five years, argues TDU, “democracy costs less than one half of one percent of your dues!”

A CWA Convention Challenge

A few weeks after the Teamsters vacated Las Vegas last summer, local union delegates from the Communications Workers of America (CWA) came to town to pick their own national officers and executive board members. Although only convention delegates, rather than the entire membership, get to vote on the union’s top leadership, the culture of CWA convention elections is relatively democratic, if still tipped very much in favor of incumbents and de facto incumbents with headquarters connections and backing.

For example, it’s not unusual, although difficult, for the president of a large local, who has never been tapped to serve on the national union staff, to run successfully against an incumbent CWA vice-president in charge of one of CWA’s fourteen geographical or occupational groupings. The odds are better when there’s an open executive board seat, like the one won last year by an African-American president of a large telephone local in Texas. He defeated a top assistant to the previous CWA executive board member from District 6, which covers a five-state region. 

In 2011, however, Don Trementozzi, a telecom local president in New England, became the first local union leader in thirty years to run for a CWA national officer job. (The last such challenger, also from Texas, actually succeeded when two headquarters officials vied for the same vacant position as Executive Vice-President.) Last year, to save money, CWA eliminated this EVP slot–a position held, at the time, by 20-year national union employee and former CWA District 7 leader, Annie Hill. Hill teamed up with incumbent President Larry Cohen to run for secretary-treasurer, when the holder of that office decided to retire.

In the normal course of events, the Cohen-Hill “unity team” would have been chosen by acclamation, due to the long political coat-tails of the widely-respected Cohen, who made it known that he also plans to retire in 2015. But Trementozzi, like Pope and TDU, wanted to force a debate about issues–in this case the breakdown of CWA bargaining coordination and solidarity within AT&T, the union’s largest employer three years ago.

No Time For Debate?

A 52-year-old native of Rhode Island, Trementozzi is a Verizon customer service rep and former activist in AFSCME and the IAM, who was elected president of CWA Local 1400 in 2002, after running on a reform slate. He was involved in last year’s strike at Verizon and serves as a member of the regional union committee trying to negotiate a new contract covering 45,000 VZ workers from Massachusetts to Virginia. Last February, Trementozzi announced his independent candidacy for CWA secretary-treasurer with a statement redolent of union populism from the past. Dubbing his effort “Save Our Union 2011,” Trementozzi declared that CWA “needs more people in the top leadership who can better reflect the perspective of those of us closest to the membership, who must deal with rankand- file concerns every day.” (See http://www.saveourunion2011.org/)

In their low-budget campaign, Trementozzi and his backers blamed Hill for AT&T bargaining miscues in 2009. Taking a supportive and conciliatory stance toward the top of the administration ticket, Trementozzi argued that “President Cohen needs a stronger partner in Washington than he’s going to end up with for the next four years if Annie Hill becomes secretary-treasurer.”

Unfortunately, Trementozzi’s appeal for “ticketsplitting” as “the way forward in CWA” failed to sway delegates from the union’s flight attendant division, newspaper guild, manufacturing sector locals, and public employee bargaining units in New Jersey that Cohen helped organize three decades ago. Save Our Union (SOU) drew support primarily from telecom locals in upstate New York and New England, plus unhappy AT&T local officers in other parts of the country (including leaders of the largest telecom local in Texas). SOU’s total campaign budget was about $ 7,000.

The day before the vote, Hill haughtily boycotted a candidates’ forum that Trementozzi had arranged so the two could finally have a face-to-face debate. Taking a leaf from Hoffa in the Teamsters, Hill had earlier refused to make any joint appearance with her opponent, via conference calls or in person, before delegates anywhere in the country. Instead of debating in Las Vegas, Hill handed out a list of “Cohen-Hill supporters” that included the names of more than 70 union staffers, lawyers, and executive board members who were not even delegates or eligible to vote.

CWA convention rules unfairly limited “Save Our Union” speakers to just the two delegates who nominated Trementozzi and then second his nomination. They were granted a total of four minutes to make the case for electing him. There was no time allotted for either secretarytreasurer candidate to address the delegates before the convention recessed so secret balloting could begin.

About 1,100 delegates cast votes based on the membership strength of their locals. Hill received 276, 769 votes (or 74.5% of the total), while Trementozzi got 94,733 (25.5%). While Sandy Pope and other TDUers will be resisting efforts to make the 2011 Teamster presidential race the last one decided by a popular vote, Don Trementozzi and other SOU supporters have a more modest procedural proposal to make. They’d just like to change CWA’s convention rules, in 2013, so any future contenders for top union office get the same twenty minutes to make a nomination acceptance speech that Teamster candidates had. In CWA, they believe, most delegates might even stay in their seats to hear what the opposition has to say.

TALKINGREADER.COM

by Bob Simpson

R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Find out what it implies to me
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Take care, TCB—- from the song “Respect” by Otis Redding

If you drive down I-55 or I-80 out of Chicago toward Joliet, they are tough to miss. Sprawling boxy-seeking buildings, usually windowless, but with continuous activity as semi’s pull up to disgorge their contents. These are the warehouses of Will County, exactly where goods meant mainly for North America’s huge box shops are routed to their ultimate destinations. They make use of thousands of folks, mainly people of color, several of them immigrants. It is one of the greatest and fasting growing USA centers for merchandise distribution by truck and rail.

It was amongst these warehouses that Uylonda Dickerson, a single mom, discovered a work. What she did not discover was respect. Not only was the spend rock-bottom, but when she reported for operate, she was often sent home instead, since there was not enough to do. This is in direct violation of Illinois law, making it a situation of wage theft. If employees are scheduled to work, but are sent house, the organization should shell out them at least 4 hrs of wages.

Uylonda Dickerson occasionally did not get hourly spend, but was paid by piecework, the hated technique utilised by the sweatshops of the early 20th century. Piecework meant staying paid according to the numerous trailers that she unloaded, a race against time to empty them, resulting in larger anxiety levels and a higher chance of injury. In spite of the psychological and physical hazards of piecework, she received no well being benefits, sick days or getaway time.

A Will County warehouse

Uylonda Dickerson endured sexual harassment, continuous pain and sooner or later formulated a bladder infection simply because the womens’ bathroom was so far away and making use of it angered her supervisors. Even though the boxes that she unloaded had been bound for Walmart, she did not operate directly for Walmart, but for a temp agency. Her thoughts and entire body driven to the limits of exhaustion, she sooner or later quit and lived on public assistance, accompanied by the aches, pains and migraines that came from operating in the Walmart empire, an empire that has no respect for hard perform.

Welcome to the warehouse gulags of Will County. In Stalinist Russia, gulag meant the system of forced labor camps where prisoners had been worked to the point of exhaustion and even death. In the area around Joliet, Illinois with its official unemployment price of 9.6%, employees are typically forced to take these lower having to pay warehouse jobs just to survive. The stress and physical hazards connected with an inhuman operate pace take their toll and can shave a long time off of a particular person’s life. Unlike a Soviet gulag, men and women are often free of charge to leave , but the punishment can be even worse poverty. Uylonda Dickerson ended up in a home without having electricity and operating water.

It is the temporary employees who have the worst of it. The median wage for warehouse temps is $ 9 an hour even though direct hires make $ three.48 more. The majority of Will County warehouse employees are beneath the federal poverty line. A single research calculated a living wage in Will County for a family members of four to be $ 15.87, above what most warehouse employees make.

Chris Williams, an lawyer who handles several legal situations for aggrieved Will County warehouse workers believes that wage theft could cost the nation millions in lost workers’ pay out, thus escalating organization profits. He focuses lawsuits against the temp agencies that service Walmart and distance it from the many abuses. Williams says

“I feel Walmart is experimenting…You’ll see temp agencies that supervise temp agencies that deal with temp agencies. It just adds another degree of distance.”

There is a heavy turnover of temps as they frequently have to move from warehouse to warehouse, creating it hard to establish relationships with other workers and with management, relationships that can be critical for profession advancement. One veteran teamster who took one particular of these non-union jobs to survive thinks that this a deliberate policy. Uncertain schedules make it more complicated to arrange for physicians’ appointments, college visits and appropriate leisure time, damaging both individual and household life. It also helps make it challenging to organize for greater wages and circumstances via unionization.

Workers at a Sony distribution center meet to examine grievances

Some will say with sneering contempt that, “Those people are lucky to have a task.” This  is thinly disguised racism because most Will County warehouse workers are people of color. Other people will say it with far more excellent will, but with condescending pity and a sigh of relief, “Better them than me.”

The Will County Center for Economic Improvement issued a glowing report about the future of Will County’s warehouse industry, but did mention feasible environmental and targeted traffic congestion difficulties. No mention although of the tax breaks to entice firms, the simple fact that a lot of warehouse workers depend on public assistance, or the usually poor quality of the jobs that have been generated.

All of this demonstrates a profound contempt for hard work in a nation that claims to revere it. When it comes to occupation creation, we set the bar way also reduced, especially considering how much wealth flows to the top rated.

Monica Morales of Warehouse Employees for Justice (WWJ) certainly agrees that we could be undertaking much better.

“If it wasn’t for us, none of the stuff you have in your residence would be in your residence,”says Monica Morales, a former worker at a warehouse for Bissell, the vacuum cleaner maker. “There’s not numerous objects that we don’t touch.”

Demonstration for justice at a Bissels distribution center

Morales was fired in 2009  because she was among 70 workers who filed costs against labor contractor Maersk Logistics for civil rights, minimum wage and labor law violations. Maersk is a world-wide Danish-based conglomerate with above one hundred,000 personnel in 130 countries. Warehouse Employees for Justice is a group of warehouse workers with a crowded workplace in Joliet who take on some of the biggest and most strong firms on the planet.

No one particular expects Warehouse Workers for Justice to win effortless victories, but it has had successes by employing the courts combined with worker solidarity and organizing neighborhood assistance. WWJ not too long ago filed suit against a firm contracted to food giant Tyson for forcing personnel to work an further 45 minutes with no pay out, a type of wage theft. This is only the most modern in a series of lawsuits. In another case Latino workers alleged racial discrimination when they have been fired. After a huge group of Latino community leaders visited and threatened a boycott, the workers were rehired.

Warehouse Workers for Justice is sponsored by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers a union with a history dating back to 1936. Once one of the greatest unions in the USA, it was hit by red-baiting for the duration of the McCarthy period. It evolved into a a lot smaller, but member-driven democratic labor organization. It organized the Republic Windows and Doors plant occupation that caught the globe’s interest in 2008.

Uylonda Dickerson, who quit her warehouse work for wellbeing motives, is an enthusiastic member of WWJ:

“We speak amongst ourselves to see what we can do much better. We make each other experience great, simply because we may well be down and out. If you can go sit down and talk with strangers that feel like loved ones to you, that tends to make a large variation.”

WWJ is element of a nationwide motion of labor organizations who function outside of the Nationwide Labor Relations Board conventional model. In our labor-hostile economy with its primitive labor laws and uncertain enforcement, employees are experimenting with new methods of winning victories and gaining the respect that is in such brief supply. It is unclear exactly where this movement is going, but 1 can find evidence of it across the country. Even some AFL-CIO unions help it in the hope that will at some point rejuvenate our now battered and shrinking labor motion.

Cornel West and Tavis Smiley visit Warehouse Employees for Justice

The warehouses of Will County are only a part of a huge provide chain of exploited labor that starts in the 21st century of sweatshops of China, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia and other creating countries and then goes through the USA to the shelves of the massive box shops with their underpaid and distressed retail workers. Is this the only way to do modern day manufacturing and distribution? Is this how we respect challenging work?

And do we genuinely need ALL of this manufactured stuff, given the human unhappiness that accompanies it? Some of the stuff is useful, but how significantly of it is wasteful production that unnecessarily harms our surroundings, and misuses valuable sources? How significantly beneficial time and human labor is lost that could go toward far better purposes? How considerably of this stuff is simply filling a customer goods addiction among people bereft of enough human connection and spiritual fulfillment?  These are difficult queries we need to have to be asking, not just for the advantage of the warehouse workers of Will County, but for ourselves as properly.

Warehouse Employees for Justice office

Cartoon by Carol Simpson CartoonWork

Sources Consulted

The New Blue Collar: Temporary Perform, Lasting Poverty And The American Warehouse by Dave Jaimeson

Illinois County Unemployment Price Rankings

Wal-Mart Warehouse Employees File Class Action Wage Theft Lawsuit by Kari Lyderson

Wage theft lawsuit against a Walmart distributor from Crain’s Chicago Enterprise

Warehouse Employees for Justice

Poor Jobs in Goods Movement by Warehouse Workers for Justice &amp the  Center for Urban Economic Advancement at the University of Illinois at Chicago

Will County Center for Economic Improvement

Chicago Warehouse Workers Navigate Maze of Contractors to Organize by Jane Slaughter

Our Walmart

Group maintaining battle for fair laborby Cindy Wojdyla Cain

Function pressure and risk of cardiovascular mortality: potential cohort study of industrial personnel by Mika Kivimaki and other folks

Bob “Bobbo” Simpson  spent many years as a historical past teacher on the South Side of Chicago in a working class neighborhood.  social media writer based mostly out of Oak Park Illinois. He performs for WebTraxStudio which does operate for unions, non-profit groups, social advocacy organizations and educational institutions.  He is also one/2 of the Carol Simpson labor cartoon team. He routinely blogs at Daily Kos underneath the monicer Bobbosphere. This post originally appeared on DK, go there and suggest it.

TALKINGREADER.COM

SEIU and others are embracing the movement that has succeeded as they have faded.

 

Unions and Occupy: who’s leading whom?

Unions are in a death spiral. Private sector unionism has all but vanished, accounting for a measly 6.9 percent of the workforce. Public sector workers are being hammered by government cutbacks and hostile media that blame teachers, nurses and firefighters for budget crises. To counter this trend organized labor banked on creating more hospitable organizing conditions by contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to the Democratic Party the last two election cycles. In return Obama abandoned the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made union campaigns marginally easier, failed to push for an increase in the minimum wage, and installed an education secretary who attacks teachers and public education.

The Obama administration’s dismal record on labor issues has been compounded by the rise of the Tea Party movement, which portrays unions as public enemy No. 1, and the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which opened the political floodgates to corporate money. By last year, organized labor realized that its days were numbered unless it took a different approach.

So it went back to basics. Across the country unions threw resources into community organizing, aiming to build a broad-based constituency outside of the workplace for progressive politics. In cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and Portland, Ore., newly formed community groups found ready support for organizing around issues of economic justice, but they were stymied by a national debate dominated by voices blaming government spending for an economic crisis caused by Wall Street.

Occupy Wall Street changed that. It flipped the debate from austerity to inequality, uncorked a wellspring of creative energy and started taking creative risks that unions typically shun. Within weeks unions adopted the 99 percent versus the 1 percent and started organizing actions under the Occupy banner. One labor leader said “the Occupy movement has changed unions’” messaging and ability to mobilize members. Union-affiliated organizers around the country say it has helped workers win better contracts and bolstered labor reformers.

While union organizers stress the importance of the movement’s autonomy, they are also joining in, providing advice, experience, supplies and access to money and space. Many believe, as one Chicago labor activist put it, that “Occupy is too big to fail.” In fact, the Occupy movement is in the vanguard of labor, enticing workers into the streets, making them negotiate harder and think bigger.

But the Occupy movement is also a double-edged sword. Some observers say organized labor shares the blame for its decline because unions treat members as clients who pay dues in return for benefits, are riddled with self-serving leaders, stuck in a busted collective bargaining system, too close to Democrats and too willing to ally with big business in return for jobs. If the Occupy movement revitalizes labor, as the left did during the 1930s, then it could invigorate rank-and-file militancy, foster internal democracy and sweep out officials who protect their fiefdoms and perks at the expense of fighting for the 99 percent.

“Point of no return”

Angus Maguire is communications director at We Are Oregon, a community group active in Portland that was established last summer by two Service Employees International Union locals. In 2011, he says, “there was a general conversation throughout SEIU, taking a sober look at the decline in labor organizing. It was an explicit acknowledgment that if labor doesn’t change how it engages with people it would cease to exist in a meaningful way. It was reaching a point of no return.”

In Oregon, SEIU locals 49 and 503, which represent more than 30,000 workers, decided they needed to organize non-union members outside of the workplace “around the most pressing issues relating to the economic crisis.” The genial 35-year-old father of two says, “We did a door-to-door outreach campaign in East Portland, the poorest part of the city, talking to people about unemployment and foreclosure.” Maguire says We Are Oregon’s goals are twofold. “One is to organize and achieve material wins. The second is to change the political environment and conversation. When we started last summer there wasn’t much conversation in the media around wealth disparity.”

On the East Coast, Anne Gemmell, political director of Fight for Philly, says the organization was founded in May by labor and faith-based groups such as the SEIU, to organize around issues of economic justice. One factor was Citizens United, which she says “was a scary development for churches and labor. If the gates are thrown wide open to corporate money, then traditional organizing models could be in danger.”

Fight for Philly also began with a door-knocking campaign, she says. “We were testing interest in fighting back against inevitable service cuts as the economic meltdown hit municipalities, and we had over 10,000 conversations.” Fight for Philly, she went on, is “trying to educate people that the budget crisis is due to the 2008 economic meltdown caused by banking and corporate greed, not by government waste, fraud and mismanagement as many anti-government voices would have the public believe.” But last summer, she explains, the media discussion “was all about austerity debates, the super committee and how we are going to cut social spending. It was not about growing inequality.”

In stepped Occupy Wall Street on Sept. 17, but nearly every left, progressive and labor group was skeptical or even dismissive of the few hundred scruffy campers raging against the machine in downtown Manhattan.

Some of the wariness stemmed from OWS’s congenital aversion to establishment politics. On the first day of the occupation Zuccotti Park I talked to organizers, seasoned and new, who were committed to radical democracy, skeptical of electoral politics and opposed to capitalism. Their politics couldn’t have been more distant from unions like the SEIU, Teamsters and United Auto Workers, which are top down and centralized, joined at the hip with the Democratic Party and eager, even desperate, to be the junior partner of capital.

Even before Occupy Wall Street pitched its first tent, the politics were so amorphous that one person kept blocking outreach to unions on the grounds that it needed to attract Tea Partyers. “When Occupy was conceived there was no outreach to labor,” says Ari Paul, a New York City labor reporter. “They were hesitant to even let unions be a part of it, because they were seen as bureaucratic and short-sighted.”

Jackie DiSalvo, who attended pre-occupation general assemblies, helped change that by forming the labor outreach committee the first week of OWS. She is a retired associate professor of English who took part in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer.

“I was attracted to the movement because they adopted the line of the 99 percent against the 1 percent,” DiSalvo said in an interview. “It was very class-conscious politics. I thought the only way it was going to have any strength was to have a working class and trade union base because they bring resources, numbers and political realism. They would give Occupy a broader constituency than the young people sleeping in Zuccotti who were precarious workers, unemployed or students.”

For the first few days, however, the unions stayed away because “the initial press reports were Occupy Wall Street was a bunch of freaks,” says DiSalvo.

On Sept. 22, five days after it began, Occupy Wall Street received its first union backing: delegates from the City University of New York’s 25,000-member Professional Staff Congress marched to the park in a show of support. Other unions “were hesitant,” says DiSalvo, “because they didn’t know who we were and what we were going to do, but they very quickly got over their hesitancy and embraced us, endorsed us, and provided support such as supplies, storage room, printing literature and meeting space.”

What changed?

On Saturday an unpermitted march that began at Zuccotti Park swelled to more than 2,500 people as it coursed through the streets of Lower Manhattan. It was set upon by riot police, and in the first iconic incident of casual police violence against occupiers, a commander was filmed pepper-spraying women in the face who were standing on a public sidewalk.

The video of the women falling to the ground and screaming in agony went viral. When I visited Zuccotti Park on Monday, Sept. 26, it was bursting with occupiers and support. Unions started showing up, and I heard the same story from two reputable sources. A group of SEIU organizers with the gigantic healthcare workers Local 1199 stopped by to deliver blankets, ponchos, food and water. The labor organizers said that the previous Friday they had been barred by their union leadership from visiting the occupation, but now SEIU was on board.

DiSalvo says, “It was the police attacks that made them move. But it was also progressives in the unions who won the leadership over.” Over the next few months around 30 unions endorsed Occupy Wall Street including SEIU and the AFL-CIO executive board, whose president, Richard Trumka, traveled to New York to meet with the labor outreach committee. “Trumka felt that unions had been raising the point about the growing inequality and the seizure of power of the rich,” says DiSalvo. “Occupy Wall Street was the first time those issues received massive attention in the press. He felt we were creating a lot of support for labor that they were unable to generate because we broke through the media blackout.”

“Spillover effect”

There is widespread agreement that the Occupy movement has directly benefited labor.

In Chicago an organizer with SEIU who wished to remain anonymous called the Occupy movement “a game changer.” He said his union “recognized that it can no longer focus just on what happens in the workplace. Our members who work in a hospital go home to a community that is being devastated by foreclosures and school closures.”

The SEIU co-founded Stand Up! Chicago, which kicked off last June with a protest against a convention for CFOs of major corporations. When Occupy Chicago formed it coincided with Stand Up! Chicago’s week of actions last October in the financial district. Occupiers were maintaining an around-the-clock protest at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The organizer says, “We had this great synergy because we were doing actions in the financial district and Occupy Chicago was right there and would join us. They helped us get the attention of the press in a way we wouldn’t have otherwise.”

“Occupy is a true left expression and expansion of free speech,” Anne Gemmell of Fight for Philly says. “We are going to occupy this space until you pay attention to us. It has empowered the organizations that do the door knocking, phone calling and rally planning.” She explains that the occupation at Philadelphia City Hall helped workers in contract negotiations. Gemmell says about 1,000 support staff and stagehands “were in negotiations that were tense and confrontational with the Kimmel Center, a major arts center near the occupation.” A week after Occupy Philadelphia set up camp the workers won a contract on better-than-expected terms. Following that victory 2,500 office cleaners who were negotiating with the management of some 100 corporate high-rises around City Hall inked a contract with wage increases for three years in a row.

“Occupy has a positive spillover effect, even if it’s not directly involved in the organizing campaign,” says Gemmell. “There were very few office cleaners or stagehands … sleeping in tents at city hall, but they are all part of the 99 percent and benefited from the new political climate that occupations created.”

“Thrown together”

Steve Early, a former union organizer and author of ”The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor,” says, “I was encouraged by the positive interaction between Occupy Wall Street and the Communication Workers of America,” which staged a 15-day strike against Verizon last August. Early says after the CWA called off the strike with inconclusive results, “the union was struggling to find ways to take action against Verizon.” Because Zuccotti Park is close to the work locations of CWA Local 1101, which was involved with the strike, CWA workers were regulars at the occupation.

“Things have gotten so bad in the private state of Verizon that workers are much more open to different viewpoints,” says Early. “At Zuccotti, unemployed youth were being thrown together with workers who’ve been with Verizon for 20 years and are trying to hold on to their pay and benefits.”

The cross-pollination aided dissidents in Local 1101 who had been organizing for four years, Early says. “The reform slate swept out the incumbents in the Local 1101 election held in November. Their victory was positively impacted by their work with the Occupy movement as well as other organizations like Labor Notes and the Association for Union Democracy.” Early adds, “The synergy works best when there is an organized group within the unions. The Occupy movement needs someone to relate to within labor.”

Early claims Occupy’s ability to organize with labor is hamstrung by the tendency of many unions to undermine rank-and-file militancy and democracy. He says union attempts to mobilize the public against corporations – like SEIU’s Fight for a Fair Economy campaign – have not resonated as well as the more spontaneous and grass-roots activities of OWS.

A year ago the 2.1-million member union launched the Fight for a Fair Economy to mobilize low-income workers in urban areas against public sector cuts. The price tag for the campaign was in the millions of dollars, according to the Wall Street Journal. Early says, “The campaign looked good on paper, but was top-down, staff-driven and a consultant-shaped message that was boilerplate union rhetoric. The ground troops for Fight for a Fair Economy did not have much visibility.”

As for another campaign run by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United, which called for a financial transaction tax on Wall Street traders, Early says it was “much more savvy and programmatic but it framed the fight as ‘Main Street vs. Wall Street,’ without actually reaching many Main Streeters beside nurses themselves.”

Early says contrast that with the Occupy movement. “It is bottom up, decentralized, has much better framing and uses direct action creatively. These unions and others have glommed onto it and have adopted the 99 percent versus the 1 percent rhetoric.”

Like many, Early sees potential for occupiers and unions to learn from each other, but he puts the emphasis on the workers themselves. He says, “Hopefully, rank-and-filers will realize they don’t need to wait for grand plans and official orders from union headquarters. As Wisconsin workers demonstrated a year ago, they can take their own creative initiatives and have much more impact. Plus, exposure to Occupy will hopefully foster more Madison-style cross-union activity and bottom-up decision making. By continuing to organize, agitate and educate around labor issues – while learning from union members in the process – occupiers can help spread an anti-capitalist message that is relevant to day-to-day workplace struggles but very different from the much fuzzier official messaging of organized labor.”

The Occupy movement’s 99 percent message could prove troublesome for labor leaders. Ari Paul argues. “There is a limit to how much union leaders will fight the 1 percent because they do depend on the 1 percent.” By way of example he points to the issue of healthcare: “One of the reasons unions don’t call for universal healthcare is because it is more politically expedient to get companies to fund good healthcare plans for union members who will keep voting you into office.”

DiSalvo echoes this sentiment. “The labor movement has fairly narrow orientation of just fighting for their own members’ contract demands to the point they don’t fight for their own members when they become unemployed. They should have set up an unemployed workers council by now.”

That is a big question on many people’s minds. While organized labor is potentially a powerful force with 17 million Americans in unions, it’s dwarfed by the more than 25 million people who are unemployed or can’t get full-time work.

“The labor movement has so far missed an opportunity in organizing the unemployed and underemployed,” admits Maguire of We Are Oregon. He says there are parallels with the Great Depression when unemployed councils were pivotal to securing relief and jobs programs as well as eviction defense on a mind-boggling scale. (Some historians claim that councils in New York City moved 77,000 evicted families back into their homes.) Maguire maintains, however, that there “are also big differences today in terms of the political climate and class consciousness. It’s fair to say there is an opportunity in organizing the unemployed, and no one including the labor movement has figured out how to do that.”

Unions are trying to think more creatively. On Nov. 17, as thousands of occupiers were trying to actually shut down Wall Street, unions organized actions in three dozen cities, focusing on shutting down bridges to highlight the crumbling infrastructure across the United States and the jobs that could be created by funding repair and rebuilding. Nearly 1,000 people were arrested in the peaceful sit-down protests and some bridges shut down for hours, but the unions seem afraid to escape the confines of the very system responsible for their demise.

The aim was to put pressure on Congress to pass the Obama administration’s jobs bill that could be most charitably described as inadequate. Paul, the labor reporter, notes that many unions back corporations in the hopes of getting union jobs: Carpenters and electricians unions in New York City side with the real estate industry in support of mega-construction projects and the United Steel Workers has been pushing for World Trade Organization sanctions against China over allegations of “unfair trade practices.”

More broadly, Steve Early has taken SEIU to task for collaborating with the healthcare industry against the interests of its union members. And Paul notes that leaders of New York’s Transit Workers Union Local 100, which was one of the first unions to endorse Occupy Wall Street, has not actively challenged the investment banks that make hundreds of millions of dollars in profit on the bonds New York State relies on to fund mass transit. Paul says while Occupy Wall Street has been calling for the public transit debt to be canceled, TWU leaders “do not publicly criticize the Wall Street banks too much because the same banks are managing the workers’ pensions.”

Many union organizers counter that labor is in a different position than the Occupy movement, but they can still work together. An SEIU organizer in Chicago, who asked not to be identified by name, says, “When you are a labor leader you have to be very pragmatic because you are making decisions about contracts, wages and healthcare that affect your members. What’s exciting about Occupy is that it doesn’t have those contradictions. Occupy doesn’t have to have a million conversations to mobilize its members. They just do it.”

Anne Gemmell seconds that. She sees Occupy benefiting labor in part because it doesn’t have any issues of potential liability that a union with resources, members and paid staff do. “There are no leashes holding Occupy’s energy back.”

That energy will intensify this year. Occupy Los Angeles has put out a call for a general strike on May Day. There are plans for a month-long occupation of Chicago in May when the rulers of the world come to town in the form of the G-8 and NATO, and it seems likely that many occupiers will flock to the Democratic and Republican national conventions next summer.

Next fall the presidential election could see both sides at odds as occupiers will be decrying both parties as hopelessly corrupted by corporate dollars, even as organized labor mobilizes tens of thousands of union members to get out the vote for the Democrats and Obama.

The Chicago organizer says, “The revolution is not going to come through the labor movement.” And that is true, at least in its current configuration. But the revolution that many occupiers dream about can’t happen without workers either. If the Occupy movement keeps growing, then organized labor will have to decide which side it is really on.

Arun Gupta, a New York writer and co-founder of Occupy the Wall Street Journal, covers the Occupy movement for Salon, from which this article has been reposted.

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