Stewards Corner

Laying the Groundwork Before You Run

— Chris Kutalik

Your mother might have been right about that old “try-and-try-until-you-succeed” saw. That is certainly the case for the victory of Teamsters (IBT) reformers at Local 743 in Chicago.

Late last October, the New Leadership Slate swept to victory over the incumbents. It was the fourth election in over a decade’s time in which Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU)-affiliated reformers had tried to oust the old guard in the 12,000-member local.

Reformers pulled together the victorious slate after Local 743 officers were indicted by federal prosecutors last September (see Labor Notes October 2007).

Since first launching opposition efforts more than a decade and a half ago, dissidents in the local have been fired, beaten up, and forced to watch as previous officer election victories were tossed out. But supporters of the reformers don’t focus on making this a simple morality tale about keeping your chin up until you win. Instead, they talk about how building durable rank-and-file organization and leading workplace fights years before an election can pay off in the end.

ORGANIZATION THAT LASTS

Running for office, ironically enough, is not where budding reformers should start when running for office. Longtime reform group TDU counsels in its popular booklet Running for Local Union Office to look at elections as one moment in a long campaign to push bottom-up change in a union.

Defeats typically far outweigh victories for opposition activists. Success often hinges on growing a wide range of activist-leaders and keeping that organized core active for several years.

Richard Berg, the newly elected president of Local 743, started his long trip in the local in 1988 as a freshly hired janitor at the University of Chicago hospital.

“We tried to get the fighters together first,” Berg said. “A core of people at the local were inspired by [reform Teamster president] Ron Carey’s win in 1991. We began trying to organize against a union leadership we saw as collaborating with the boss and deeply involved with corruption.”

That initial core in the early 1990s was tiny, eight to 15 active participants, mostly from the university hospitals. But the fledgling group laid a foundation for long-term organization in those early years. Through careful outreach efforts they looked for leaders in isolated shopfloor fights and tried to bring them into the group.

They also plugged into national networks such as TDU, the Association for Union Democracy, and Labor Notes to both help bolster morale and to build an external base of support. Equally as important they looked to help train larger and larger groups of caucus members in the range of organizing skills they would need.

BUILDING OUTWARDS

A major challenge for any reform campaign in a large-sized local is gaining enough strength in enough of the local’s many worksites, units, and shifts that your group becomes truly representative of the union’s rank and file. Local 743 nimbly vaulted this particular hurdle.

Local 743’s reformers now face the hard test of actually having to lead from office. The outside critics are now firmly on the inside and members are expecting them to make good on their reform platform.

With upwards of 38,000 members until the 1980s, Local 743 was for years the largest local in the Teamsters. Though it has shrunk rapidly over the last decade, the local has retained a sprawling legacy. It covers more than 100 contracts spanning many small shops in a range of industries from nursing homes to light manufacturing plants to clerical staff in the IBT’s own Central States Pension Fund.

The reformers in their early years took the step of exploring their union. They collected information on the contracts, work conditions, and workers. They attended meetings, visited work sites, and got involved in individual grievances to develop a grounded sense of how the union was supposed to function—and how it was really functioning.

The approach helped gird them for other obstacles. Not only was the local spread out among a bewildering array of shops, but it also had a broad range of ethnic groups who spoke a number of languages. They recruited into their caucus fluent speakers who could create flyers and newsletters and speak in workers’ languages.

The reformers found that reaching out to workers took years of effort. Continuing corruption and decline in the union helped to push along their message.

Bob Simpson, Local 743’s president at the time, was removed in 1995 from office for corruption by the Carey-run International. During the trusteeship the small reformer caucus spread quickly. Three years later, the reformers decided to put up a slate of their own in local elections. The New Leadership Slate was forged out of this organizing. Though they lost the election hands down, it gave them a much higher level of visibility.

LEAD FROM THE WORKPLACE

The new visibility in turn helped them not only to reach out to more members; it also put them increasingly into the role as the “go-to” people when rank and filers needed to wage a fight, according to Berg.

Many opportunities arose. When retail giant Montgomery Ward shut its doors in 2001 after a prolonged financial crisis, Local 743’s biggest warehouse unit closed. Local leaders made no move to negotiate severance for workers, who turned to reformer activists to help them.

They organized large rallies and picketed the local’s offices after local leaders refused their demand to bring the International in to help pressure a settlement with the retailer.

The caucus also took a leading role in a 2004 fight at Silver Capital, a small mirror and frame manufacturer in Bedford Park, a suburb of Chicago. The company had announced that it would be closing the plant and offered 150 workers little to no severance. Local leaders again made no move to oppose the closure plan.

Reform activists with ties to workers in the shop did, however. They set up pickets and shut the factory down.

While neither fight produced immediate gains for workers, it helped them build for a third, more-successful workplace-closure fight at Fredrick Cooper’s lamp factory on the northwest side of Chicago in 2005. Tony Caldera, a worker at the plant and an early caucus supporter, helped battle for severance pay.

The workers tapped support from community organizers who brokered leverage from sympathetic city aldermen. Ultimately they raised the temperature enough to win hundreds of thousands of dollars in severance pay.

HARD TEST

Local 743’s reformers now face the hard test of actually having to lead from office. New Leadership Slate officers took office in January. Outside critics like Berg and Caldera are now firmly on the inside and members are expecting them to make good on their reform platform.

“In the short run, we need to clean up the local’s finances and sever all ties to the mob,” said Berg. “In the long run, we need to involve the members and go beyond the normal routine of collective bargaining behind closed doors. We’re committed to one-on-one member organizing.”

When asked how he expected their long journey to transform their union with the added pressure of local office, with a quick laugh he added: “Check back in with us in a few years to see how we are doing with that.”

A New Contract and a New Kind of Steward

— Hetty Rosenstein

More than two years ago, the Communications Workers (CWA), told New Jersey CWA locals that the union was beginning an organizing drive for the state’s 12,000 home childcare workers. The plan was to get assistance from ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) community organizers and knock on 12,000 doors.

The childcare workers were registered with the state to care for the children of families receiving subsidized childcare (mostly through Welfare to Work) and were considered to be independent contractors.

Organizing them involved visiting houses, identifying active workers, signing them up, and getting recognition from the state through an executive order. It was a tall order, and CWA locals were asked to lend assistance if they could.

The drive started much as it has in other states, but ended in a victory for a new kind of home care workers union that focuses on building active members. Local 1037 at first had no intention of becoming the childcare local for the state. The local was busy with other organizing, and agreed only to assist in the drive on an ad-hoc basis and to send out its organizers and stewards to knock on doors in a few counties.

Within a few weeks, however, the local built strong relationships with workers and felt that this new kind of organizing needed to be integrated with CWA’s worksite philosophy.

CONTRACTORS TO STEWARDS

Local 1037 leaders didn’t like the idea of contracting out organizing or organizing any workers without a real organizing committee. Research into how these units were organized elsewhere led the local to fear that the union was functioning like a customer service agency and relating to workers through the telephone.

Local 1037 now shares a bargaining unit of more than 6,000 home childcare workers with American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 1. The first contract was ratified November 17.

Stewards are the heart and soul of all of the work that Local 1037 does in its units. Stewards engage in contract enforcement, mobilization, organizing, political activity, community services, training, lobbying, and more.

If Local 1037 was going organize childcare workers, then childcare workers were going to become active and involved members of the union. They were going to define their own issues, and direct the campaign and contract negotiations.

But how do you organize thousands of independent contractors working in their homes throughout the state into a union? The local first turned to a cadre of stewards who attended the local’s own Shop Stewards Organizing Institute, two-day overnight trainings that prepare stewards to be involved in new member organizing.

During the training stewards learn how to engage in a member contact, talk about the union at their worksite, and express a vision of organizing that comes from their own experience.

Several Local 1037 stewards worked on the childcare drive and served on the organizing committee with childcare workers themselves. They visited houses and called other childcare workers, helping to collect more than 4,000 cards the union eventually submitted.

WINNING A CONTRACT

On August 2, 2006, Governor Jon Corzine signed an executive order recognizing both CWA and AFSCME as the “Child Care Workers Union.” Now it was time for those leaders to become stewards. Local 1037 modified its structure. Instead of having worksite shop stewards, organizing committee members became “neighborhood shop stewards,” new member-leaders who could represent other childcare workers in their communities. Neighborhood stewards helped get bargaining surveys filled out, car-pooled childcare workers to meetings to elect a bargaining committee, and finally helped to turn out workers to ratify the contract.

Under the new contract, childcare workers are paid through vouchers that parents are given to subsidize their childcare. The union was able to increase the subsidy amounts by 25 percent in less than two years. Parents will now get seniority lists when they select a childcare worker, so they will know who is experienced and who just started. A new grievance procedure now also provides for arbitration of disputes.

FORGING NEW LEADERS

Local 1037 leaders don’t entirely know how the new steward system will work out in the end. In some neighborhoods there are dozens of childcare workers and in others there are only a few. But Local 1037 believes that its greatest strength is its structure, which permits the struggle for power to emanate from the workplace, led by a worksite leader.

If the labor movement is going to engage in new forms of organizing, it needs to not lose this critical level of union activism.

Nancy Jimenez, a childcare steward in Newark, said the collective approach to problem-solving transformed her work. “I was a little skeptical at first,” she said. “I thought the union was going to be one person coming in to take over. But we are this union.”

Setting Up No-Match Action Networks

— Jerry Mead-Lucero

When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced in August a policy that gave employers a freer hand to punish workers with mismatched social security numbers, a committee of unions, workers’ centers, and immigrant rights groups in Chicago swung into action.

The Chicago Committee Against No Match has organized hundreds of activists throughout the Chicagoland region to respond immediately to the firing and harassment of workers whose names come up on no-match letters.

The Social Security Administration has issued about 100,000 of these no-match letters to employers in recent years, despite a finding from the agency’s inspector general last December that 12.7 million of the 17.8 million discrepancies in SSA’s database belonged to native-born workers. The new DHS rule is now on hold following a federal judge’s injunction.

Led by the United Electrical Workers (UE) and the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative (CWC) workers’ center, advocates in Chicago are using the reprieve to ramp up their network.

The network’s goal is to put workers’ needs at the center of the immigration debate and raise the employer’s cost for abusing no-match letters, said Mark Meinster, a UE representative in Chicago.

“Since we launched the rapid-response network, we have saved 351 workers their jobs,” said Tim Bell, CWC’s executive director. “Those are 351 workers who would have probably gone from living-wage jobs to making less than minimum wage. This is a winning strategy that groups have to spread around the country.”

URGENT ACTION NETWORK

The network’s first move was to set up a hotline (1-888-DIGNIDAD) for workers to use when employers targeted them because of no-match letters. The hotline has fielded hundreds of calls since September and the network has stepped into 11 workplace disputes.

There are several responses deployed depending on the type of call, Meinster said. Legal residents are routed to the team of attorneys, which contacts the employer. The attorneys educate confused employers, explaining that no-match letters—because they’re not a reliable indication of legal status by themselves—should not be used as grounds for discipline or dismissal.

News about the hotline spread as the network distributed fliers at community events, worked English- and Spanish-language media, and convinced elected officials to refer cases to them. The network’s backbone comes from a dozen workshops, mostly within a 50-mile radius around Chicago, Bell said.

Drawing together religious leaders, immigrant rights activists, community group staffers, union members, attorneys, local politicians, and concerned residents, the trainings prepare activists to understand and quickly respond to no-match situations in their area. The goal for a full regional mobilization is to bring out 300-500 people on short notice for an action, Bell said.

When workers already fired because of a no-match letter call the hotline, the legal team looks for health and safety violations at their workplace, and reminds the employer that they could face a discrimination or labor-law violation lawsuit if they singled out particular workers.

ESCALATING ACTION

If a no-match situation places a large group of employees at risk, organizers quickly reach into the community surrounding the workplace. Organizers call a meeting, and instruct workers about their rights. They distribute bilingual materials explaining legalities, such as the rule that prohibits employers from checking documents after three days from hiring.

The workers map out an action plan with the network’s activists, delivering petitions to the owner and inviting religious leaders and media to visit plant managers.

The organizers also help workers educate their co-workers—including those who are native-born—so they can prepare a coordinated response.

REAL-WORLD TESTS

The network reaches for confrontational tactics, like community rallies outside the plant, when an employer is unresponsive. In extreme cases, when all employees could be fired, organizers assist workers to prepare a strike and mobilize the full network.

The network moved quickly from theory to action. At Peacock Packaging, a food-container packaging company with four plants in Chicago’s northwest suburbs, management attempted to use no-match letters this fall to shed a majority of their permanent workforce—comprising several hundred employees—and replace them with temporary workers.

Pressure by the network’s legal team and internal organizing by the workers building up to a threatened walk-out convinced management to fold. The network also has uncovered cases where union locals unaware of the letters’ flaws have left their members undefended. Emanuel Castro, an employee of Utility Builders in Morris, Illinois, and a member of Laborers Local 25, turned to his union when he and fellow workers were threatened with dismissal because of no-match letters.

When union officials told him they were powerless, he contacted the hotline. Although Utility Builders workers were fired, Local 25 filed grievances after the network worked with the union to persuade them to fight cases of no-match among their members.

ORGANIZING INROADS

Creating the no-match network has required significant investments of time, money, and resources without the immediate promise of adding dues-paying members to union rolls. But for UE, the effort is seen as a down payment.

“We view this as a big-time organizing opportunity, because we think workers are going to be in motion on this issue [and] looking for assistance on fighting back,” Meinster said.

Their strategy looks to be paying off. No-match battles identify key worker leaders, who can move co-workers to sign union cards. Workers facing the threat of no-match firings at Food 4 Less, a local grocery store chain, have injected new life into a campaign by United Food and Commercial Workers Local 881.

“The workers who are now helping UFCW organize at Food 4 Less are the same workers who in months past were the least likely to contact the union,” said Moises Zavala, a Local 881 organizer. “The no-match situation and the efforts of the union to fight no-match letters says much more to immigrant workers what a union is all about than any union brochure or flyer.”

No-match letters may become the new plant-closing bogeyman—a tool to strike fear into workers who question low pay and poor working conditions. For forward-looking unions, joining with community groups to fight no-match letters can show immigrant workers anxious to challenge their employer that they have a home in labor.

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Jerry Mead-Lucero is the host/producer of Labor Express Radio in Chicago.

Using the Airwaves to Educate & Mobilize

— Tiffany Ten Eyck

If you happen to be scanning the radio dial near two unique towns in the United States, you could stumble across something unusual: FM radio run by and for farmworkers. In Woodburn, Oregon and south central Florida, farmworkers have added low-power community radio to their organizing arsenal.

To set up their radio stations, the two organizations—Oregon’s Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United (PCUN) and Florida’s Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW)—called on Prometheus Radio Project.

The non-profit helps low-wage communities set up radio stations and learn the technical aspects of keeping a radio station alive. Called “low-power” radio because the signal does not travel as far as commercial outlets, the stations target the communities they serve, with a range of five to seven miles.

POWERED BY WORKERS

Radio activists with Prometheus say the name can be a problem as the stations are hardly low on people power. Groups like PCUN and CIW use them to educate and mobilize farmworkers to fight for better wages, dignity on the job, and immigrant rights.

Radio Movimiento (Movement Radio) in Oregon and Radio Consciencia (Consciousness Radio) in Florida are built on these two namesake principles: building a stronger farmworker movement while raising the consciousness of farmworkers and the community that surrounds them. Dozens of recent immigrants and farmworkers have been trained as radio deejays and technicians.

“Our radio station is led by a volunteer committee of farmworkers that keep the talk shows and call-in shows going,” said Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a member of the CIW who hosts shows on Radio Consciencia each evening. “People call in during breaks or when they aren’t able to find work in the fields, and they request their favorite songs.”

While Radio Consciencia prides itself on playing the norteñas, bachatas, and other popular Spanish or indigenous language music their listeners want to hear, the real goal is to educate the farmworker community about the organization’s work to raise wages and improve working conditions in Florida fields.

The CIW has already been successful in getting McDonald’s and Yum Brands, a conglomeration of restaurant chains that includes Taco Bell, to meet their demand for a penny more per pound paid to tomato pickers.

“We promote the campaign for fair food to the community, especially to the new immigrants, and share announcements about upcoming actions and protests and invite the community to sign up at the CIW office to join us,” Reyes said.

“There are different levels of consciousness in the community and the messages in the radio are seeds being planted in those that listen—they’re the first steps of consciousness,” Reyes said. “Our work on the ground is the next step, visiting people in their homes, inviting them to our weekly meetings and strategy meetings.”

MOBILIZING TOOL

Radio Movimiento started broadcasting in August 2006, becoming the first union in Oregon to have a radio station. PCUN, like many commercial radio stations that cater to Latino immigrants, used the radio to promote participation in this spring’s immigrant rights marches. PCUN reported that “the May 1 immigrants rights rally at the state capitol in Salem drew 5,000—twice what we expected—thanks to the radio.”

When workers run a radio station, their ability to update other workers of potential threats increases. When workers at Fresh Del Monte, a fruit and vegetable processing company in Portland, were faced with a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in June, Radio Movimiento broadcast call-in reports from the scene, and updated the community about false reports of other ICE activity in the area.

In Immokalee, workers are preparing for a large protest of Burger King’s headquarters in Miami November 30, where they’ll be asking the company to match the agreements they’ve won with Yum and McDonald’s.

“Every week, we go to the camps where farmworkers live with a sound system and broadcast live while passing out flyers encouraging our fellow workers to participate in the protest,” Reyes said.

RADIO THAT PAYS

“The radio has been really effective against many types of abuses, like non-payment,” Reyes said. “We use the radio station to talk about what to do when a boss or crew leader refuses to pay somebody.”

After Hurricane Charley in 2004, construction company Balance came to Immokalee and hired around 600 people to help in the cleaning and rebuilding effort. A group of workers came to the CIW’s office and told organizers they hadn’t received pay—some for a week, others for a month.

“We decided to make an announcement and put it on the radio that asked workers who had worked on the rebuilding after the hurricane but hadn’t been paid to come to the CIW office,” Reyes said. “We thought there would be a slow trickle in, but after only two hours 200 workers were standing outside the office. We realized the problem was bigger than we thought—and that people were listening to the radio.

“We contacted the company and they offered to sit down with us and work out a solution. About 300 workers total ended up receiving the pay that they were owed.”

RAPID RESPONSE

Radio in farmworker communities is an example of a good organizing strategy whose impact extends past the immediate campaign for workers’ rights. In communities that are under-resourced, workers at the helm of mass communication can provide resources and help that are otherwise absent.

When Hurricane Wilma was bearing down on Immokalee in October 2005, organizers with the CIW were concerned. The majority of farmworkers in the area live in trailers that would not withstand a hurricane. Workers responded to the threat by looping an emergency announcement on the radio informing the community where they could find safe shelter.

CIW organizers began transporting farmworkers, who don’t own cars. Reyes said that in a situation like this radio saved lives: “When we returned the next day, the roof of one of the housing complexes that we had helped evacuate had fallen in.”

PCUN and CIW have been successful with low-power radio not only because their members and supporters have become involved in the daily running of the stations, but also because the stations meet the needs of their members. “Not every person has a TV,” Reyes said. “But they have a radio.”

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More information: Prometheus Radio Project, PCUN, CIW.

Youth Committees Involve Young Members

— Tiffany Ten Eyck

When Cami Automotive in Ingersoll, Ontario hired 500 new employees, Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) Local 88 wanted to make sure it had a plan to get the new hires, many of them under 30 and starting their first union jobs, involved in the union.

Local 88 leaders came up with an inspired answer: start a youth committee. According to Local 88 President and Labor Notes Policy Committee member Cathy Austin, “The original concept was to get a youth committee started and if that was successful, to get a youth member-at-large on the union’s executive board.”

WINNING THE UNION OVER

Not everyone in the union was enthusiastic about the idea at first. “There was a lot of debate in the union and quite the debate on the floor,” said Austin. “In the beginning people asked, ‘Why do they need a special committee? I never had a youth committee.”

Austin continued, “Eventually everyone recognized the energy the youth had and the elections won people over. Four to five people ran for the youth position on the board and they were so bright, articulate, and enthusiastic they won people over when campaigning.”

Once the union agreed to the committee and a young person took a seat on the executive board, some union members voiced concerns about promoting young workers into leadership in a two-tier work environment. Said Austin, “One of the first things that was said was, ‘Why send them to conferences—they’re going to be gone at first layoff?’ But that’s just asinine. If they do get laid off or leave, they’re going into the workforce with all that union knowledge.”

John Bridges, co-chair of the youth committee, said the logic behind supporting the committee was clear: “The importance of a youth committee is to engage younger members in the union. We all know that the working world is getting a lot older. If we don’t fully engage the youth who’s going to protect the older workers’ pensions?”

GETTING INVOLVED

Said Austin, “The youth wanted to know, ‘What we can work on?’ I said, ‘You’re the youth and if you want to do it, do it. If you’re interested in doing something, talk over it with the committee,’” said Austin.

The youth committee took on several projects that strengthened its networking capacity, while also supporting progressive causes.

Many new hires worked the midnight shift (or “C shift”) and lacked access to the union hall for socializing and interaction with the union.

Bridges said they combated this by hosting an annual C shift breakfast “to get midnight people out to the hall. We got donations to support CanFar, a youth AIDS awareness organization. We also had a yard sale and all the money went to WarChild, an organization supporting children in war-torn areas.”

Austin said that through the committee’s organizing, solidarity was built between the youth committee and the retiree chapter. She explained, “Retirees were looking for volunteers to help for picnic and the youth committee volunteered. Ever since, the retirees and youth committee do things together. Young folks like to hear the stories of the retirees, like our strike of 1992, and the older folks like the energy of the youth.”

MAKING IT HAPPEN

Austin was clear about the role she thinks unions should have in helping committees like this one flourish in other locals. “I don’t think it happens if you don’t help to make it happen,” she said. “You need to give support and space to get it started and give young members wide latitude to decide what they’re interested in doing. There’s a 1,000 ways to get involved in the union—let them find their way.”

To get new ideas, the youth committee links up with similar committees across the CAW and compares notes. Austin said this can lead to action, explaining, “It was the youth committee that went to the protest [in support of Delphi workers] at the [Detroit] Auto Show. It’s easier for them to pick up and go.”

Bridges said that to get other young people involved in the union, they had to lead by example: “I attend our membership meetings regularly. Two and a half years ago the company hired a lot of new hires that haven’t worked in a union environment before. They were afraid to get involved, but after seeing us going to meetings they want to get involved. We explain what’s going to happen and they might go to the next meeting.”

STRENGTHENING THE UNION

Austin reported that the youth committee has helped keep young people engaged in the union in ways they weren’t able to before: “There’s a different way of communicating with young people and they’re more technically astute. Without the youth committee, we wouldn’t know how to reach the young people in the local.

“The best reason [to support a youth committee] is because they have a stake in the union. It’s an interesting and scary time in the union right now. Some unions are extending the amount of time needed to grow into full wages, and with two-tier wages, two-tier benefits, and two-tier pensions, they have a lot at stake right now. Without their voice in the union, it’s a lose/lose situation for them and for us.”