What About the Rank and File?

Labor leaders are still ignoring Labor's biggest asset: volunteer members

opinion by Brian King

part 2 (conclusion)

For part 1 of this article, see the Sept/Oct 2005 issue or www.wafreepress.org/77/whatAboutRank.shtml .

It was fall 2000, and I was a wreck, so my wife Paula drove as we headed to my hospital for the National Labor Relations Board union election. God Almighty, I was pretty sure of the head counts we had gone over and over at our organizing meetings, but you never know. As I got out of the car, Pete came up to me. "C'mon, Brian, let's take a walk." Pete was the UFCW organizer I had been closely working with for almost a year. He could sense that I was wound pretty tight. "They're not going to be ready for a while in there."

After walking around for a few minutes, we arrived at the conference room where the votes were to be counted, I noticed about a dozen managers from the hospital already there, seated on one side of the large table that occupied most of the room. Paula and I sat down in chairs on the other side of the table, together with some of our union buddies. Pete sat at the head of the table, next to the NLRB referee.

The management group was dressed for the occasion. Dark suits, ties etc, they definitely had us out-classed again! They were smiling and joking across the table, having a little too much fun.

I leaned over and whispered in Paula's ear. "They think they're going to win, don't they?"

Paula was, at the time, a union steward at the HMO where she worked. She'd already been part of scenes like the one we were in that night. "We'll see when she counts the votes," Paula sensibly answered.

"No!" the NLRB judge called out as she pulled the first vote from the box.

Uh-Oh, I thought.

"Yes, yes, no, yes, yes, yes..." The NLRB woman announced as she unfolded the paper ballots.

The jokes on the other side of the table stopped and the faces of the bosses lengthened, like they thought they had been going to a party and wound up at a funeral.

I formed my fingers into a signal to Paula: "3 to 1"

The manager sitting across from me saw my ratio of votes, got my attention, and shook her head. "Even more," she formed with her lips.

Final tally for the technical workers bargaining unit: 80 to 24 in favor of the union!

Friends of mine in the Labor Party were impressed. Most elections, I was told, end up with the union losing. How, they asked, did you get such a strong win?

In the years since our election, I've given a lot of thought to that very question. Here are some of my ideas, for what they're worth.

1. The main issue was that we, a group of experienced and reasonably well-paid workers with good benefits, wanted more of a voice where we worked. Everybody knew in our bones that forming a union would help us gain respect from our managers. And believe me, that's the way it turned out. They listened to us more after we went union.

2. That still doesn't explain everything. In order to succeed, I had to be willing to shepherd the union drive at my hospital from start to finish; more than four years. We could never have done it without Pete and UFCW, but we never could have done it without me, either. I had the incredible honor of having co-workers come up to me and say, "You did it, Brian."

What kept me going was a vision of a better country and a better world. I believed that things like a right to a job, a right to health care, and a right to education were possible if the unions and the Labor Party could become strong enough. We really could contribute to America being a more decent, fair, and equal place. That's what kept me going.

And it kept my friends in the bargaining unit going, too. No, they didn't all run out and join the Labor Party. But we had worked together for a long time, and they fed off my commitment. Maybe everybody didn't share my vision completely, but they did share my desire for a voice at work, and they relied on me to keep on keepin' on.

What I learned most from this experience was the immense potential power that volunteer labor organizers could have. In summer 2000, this was confirmed when my union, the UFCW, published the results of a poll taken of its 1.2 million members. Ten percent answered "yes" when asked if they would be willing to volunteer five hours per month to help organize new members into the union. If you run the numbers, you come out with the equivalent of 3750 full-time workers for the national union!

My local itself could have enjoyed the equivalent of 50 full-time volunteers. When I asked one of our union officers about all the help the union was thumbing its nose at, she replied, "Yeah, but you would have to organize those people." My goodness, what a waste!

Unorganized workers respond much more positively to unpaid volunteers who ask them to join a union than they do when a paid staffer approaches them. In our advertising-drenched culture, people who aren't being paid for what they say are just more credible. This has probably been true for a very long time, and it is certainly true today.

My personal belief--that volunteerism is the answer to Labor's woes--led me to attend the much-publicized 2005 AFL-CIO convention in Chicago. Amidst all the fluff and boredom on Navy Pier, there were a few moments of genuine interest at the convention itself. One came in the person of a slight, cantankerous, 92 year old Labor intellectual from New York.

Harry Kelber is quite a sight. He's a handsome 92, with a gleam in his eye that one normally associates with men a quarter his age. He gets around on his own pretty well, and speaks into a microphone with a force and coherence that John Sweeney could learn a lot from. He maintains a website where he publishes a couple of labor commentary pieces every week (laboreducator.org). Recently, Kelber announced on his website that he would run as a candidate for the Executive Council, the governing body of the AFL-CIO.

This was news, because standard procedure at the AFL-CIO convention is to hand the delegates a list of candidates for the executive council like a catechism sheet. Usually the delegates respond to this insult by applauding loudly, and then electing the bogus candidates by acclamation. The whole thing smells like something one would expect in Minsk, Russia in 1934. Not what I like to see happen in my Grandpa's labor movement, in my Grandpa's city, in 2005.

If Harry could get himself nominated, then there would have to be a real election. That was enough for me! I made reservations to fly to Chicago on Tuesday of convention week. I wanted to help Kelber's campaign any way I could.

What really thrilled me about Harry Kelber's candidacy was the emphasis in his writings on the importance of the role of rank-and-file members of labor unions. Harry claims, like me, that if Labor is to be rebuilt, it will have to be done by "an army of member-volunteers."

On Wednesday night of the AFL-CIO convention, Harry Kelber was offered a deal by Sweeney: Give up the idea of running for the executive council and we'll give you three minutes at a microphone to say whatever you want.

Kelber took the deal.

I thought it was a mistake. To me, Harry was standing up for 13 million union members in the US when he insisted on having a contested election. If nobody ever stands up to the big guys, how is there ever going to be real change in the unions?

Besides, whom was he talking to in that hall? Not the rank and file: 99% of the delegates at the end of Navy Pier were either paid union staffers or staffer wannabees.

Sure, a lot of them are fine people, but there's no way to convince a roomful of guys to voluntarily give up some of their jobs and power to an "army of volunteers." No way, not without pressure from below.

Harry's speech was truthful and courageous. It was pithy and well received, and he got a standing ovation at the end by promising not to give up, even though he is 92. But, he soft-pedaled the idea of the need for truly democratic elections in the unions and he didn't bring up his idea about an army of volunteer union members to rebuild the labor movement.

I thought the "army" thing was particularly important to bring out because of the underlying reasons for the split between Stern and Sweeney--the withering of the labor movement and the need to organize new members. Both sides of the split talk about the need to put more money into organizing.

But money won't help much when it comes to getting union members involved in organizing. In order to have my union brothers and sisters really help with organizing it's going to be necessary for union executives and staffers to show us a little respect. We should have real elections at every level of the union movement. We need rank and file committees inside the locals that run themselves with help--but not dominance--from the staffers.

These days, working people want a genuine voice in groups where they participate. It just won't do to have everything decided behind closed doors by people who work for the union or are on its stipend roll.

Wednesday was Wal-Mart day at the AFL-CIO convention. Vice-President Richard Trumka, subbing for the president of the convention-boycotting UFCW, orchestrated a prolonged anti-Wal-Mart presentation which, for my money, placed far too much emphasis on how bad Wal-Mart is (true), and far too little emphasis on how we might get busy and organize Wal-Mart workers.

An example of this attitude was something that went unmentioned on Wal-Mart day.

Last year, the UFCW union was attempting to negotiate a contract at the Jonquiere, Quebec Wal-Mart store, where a successful unionizing drive had just taken place. Wal-Mart decided to set a draconian example. It closed the store and fired 150 employees, rather than enter into a union contract with its "associates."

One would think that the UFCW, together with the rest of the labor movement, would seize this grand opportunity to demonstrate their solidarity with these low-paid workers who had stood with the union. No, they couldn't force Wal-Mart to stay open in Jonquiere. And they certainly couldn't hire everybody who lost their job onto the union payroll. But they could have announced that they would do everything possible to help these good people get on with their lives.

Things like re-training and relocation assistance, childcare, help for mutual support groups, food banks, and emergency loans for people in danger of losing houses and cars; all would have been welcome. That kind of show of support would have reassured workers at other stores that the union was worth fighting for.

As far as I can determine, UFCW just walked away, muttering some nonsense about taking Wal-Mart to court to prevent the closure. And these are some of the same guys who are splitting the AFL-CIO because they think they're such crackerjack organizers!

Back at the convention, Trumka talked a lot about "corporate responsibility," paying for decent health benefits for Wal-Mart employees, and keeping Wal-Mart out of different locales. He told us about the current AFL-CIO campaign to encourage shoppers to avoid Wal-Mart when buying school supplies this fall. But, he didn't mention Jonquiere. You can bet that Wal-Mart workers everywhere, especially those who are considering forming a union, have heard about Jonquiere.

The rest of the convention was pretty ho-hum. I found it hard to concentrate on what was being discussed and took a lot of stretch breaks just outside the hall.

35 years ago, when I was a pup, "careerist" was a negative word for a member of the unions or progressive movements who placed her own interests ahead of the needs of the group she belonged to. This type of person would allow the desire for a job, or money, or promotion to interfere with her responsibility to "tell it like it is" when called upon to give an opinion or vote.

It has been a long time since I've heard this grand old description used. Sometimes, I think you never hear the term anymore because "careerists" are so common now that they have perhaps become the norm. If you're not a staffer, you aren't regarded as worthy to be considered for leadership, or to be an organizer. I think we suffer greatly from the lack of volunteer leaders in America today.

And that's what I was thinking as my plane ascended from Chicago's Midway airport, after the AFL-CIO meeting. We flew uplake a little, over the Miracle Mile, and then turned west. As the plane climbed, I was listening to the great old Sinatra tune about Chicago, "My Kind of Town."

When I looked out my window and saw Navy Pier and Lake Michigan disappearing behind us, what I thought was, "If we could get that army of volunteer members together with leaders that have a real vision for the labor movement and the country, man, Wal-Mart would be in the bag!"*