Nuts & Bolts of Organizing for Contract Campaign: How the Chicago Teachers Did It

If you’ve ever wondered how good grassroots, community-oriented organizing around contracts happens, Labor Notes has a nice article by Norine Gutekanst, the Chicago Teachers Union. Because CTU didn’t have a recent history of doing this kind of mobilization – for example, it didn’t have a Director of Organizing! – they pretty much had to build it from the ground up.

The article doesn’t have a bunch of entertaining anecdotes and the story has been understandably airbrushed as you would expect from an article by an organizing director writing about a recent win; take her out for a few drinks and I’m sure you’d get a much more colorful story (albeit not one you’d want to tell publicly so soon after a victory). But it’s still definitely worth a read, both to give you a sense as to how it’s done and to give you an appreciation as to the insane amount of hard work on the part of an awful lot of folks that it takes to pull off an impressive organizing victory.

The 1% Stole Your Twinkies

Hostess just bit the dust, and the mainstream media is blaming it on unions. They were just too greedy – they wouldn’t accept enough cuts and they stopped the company from changing fast enough to keep up with the times.

Let’s start with those pay cuts about which the workers were being so unreasonable. When Hostess went into bankruptcy the first time in 2004,

the workforce agreed to massive pay and benefit cuts in an attempt to keep the company afloat. One 14-year veteran of the company describes the $150 million annual givebacks the union agreed to: “In 2005, before concessions I made $48,000, last year I made $34,000.” Pensions and healthcare were cut as well, with labor’s total loss equaling $110 million annually.

Imagine what it would mean to go from making $48,000 a year to $34,000 a year. Imagine the kind of sacrifices a family would have to make to survive with that big pay cut. And now? The proposal workers rejected by 92%

would have doubled insurance premiums, negated all pension obligations, and slashed pay by 27 to 32 percent. Again, the 14-year Hostess bakery veteran: “Remember how I said I made $48,000 in 2005 and $34,000 last year? I would make $25,000 in five years if I took their offer.”

At this point, why would any sane person take the deal? As a 14 year veteran put it,

It will be hard to replace the job I had, but it will be easy to replace the job they were trying to give me.

And that’s while management has asked

a bankruptcy judge permission to pay executives $1.75 million in bonuses to oversee the dissolution of the company (and 18,000-plus union jobs). And that’s after a round of executive pay raises earlier this year.

Union workers also weren’t responsible for the fact that Hostess never figure out a strategy to deal with fewer Americans eating Twinkies and Wonder Bread.

Being slow to respond to a changing market would’ve eventually tanked Hostess. But what pushed it over the cliff much sooner were the hedge funds. They loaded it up with massive amounts of debt, helping to push it into bankruptcy in 2004. And then they did it again as it emerged from bankruptcy – up to $1 billion by 2011. And although in 2011 the company made $2.5 billion in profit – down from what it had made in the past but still respectable – but lost a total of $341 million by the end of the year under the weight of the enormous interest payments on its debt.

So no, unions didn’t kill off Twinkies. The 1% did.

Climate Change and the 1%: The Enviros ' "Binder Full of Women" Problem

To get to a more powerful, more visceral way of talking about Climate Change, I’m going to use the next few posts to lay some groundwork. We’ll start with a recent exchange on Up with Chris Hayes.

Chris Hayes had a roundtable on coal and climate change with Mike Caputo, District 31 International VP of the United Mine Workers and Tyson Slocum, Director of Public Citizen’s energy program. Caputo made a half hearted defense that coal mining could be saved by “clean coal,” but his real focus was on whether coal miners’ families and their communities could possibly survive without coal. Hayes asked Slocum to respond:

Coal is in some ways the enemy. At the same time in some ways it’s easy for me in Brooklyn to talk about this. It’s not my livelihood on the line. So when we talk about this future we’re going to have, for example, what do you say to someone like Mike? What is the message here for folks whose lively had does depend on it and who are thinking about it as they go to the voting booth?

Slocum replied:

First it’s important to know that it’s the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Then he argued that when you talk to communities who live near coal fire plants, they don’t like these plants because of their effect on air quality. Finally, he said, clean coal technology is very expensive and nowhere close to working.

So if you look at where the United States needs to position itself for the future of energy production, it has to be in renewables

The only time when Slocum addressed Hayes question was when he said,

And I sympathize with the plight of coal miners and coal communities.

“I sympathize with the plight of coal miners”???

In one phrase Slocum summed up one major reason why enviros are failing: a big chunk of the enviros movement doesn’t see working-class families and their communities as real people – as their brothers and sisters.

Imagine if a major environmental activist said, “I sympathize with the plight of whales but…” Or “I sympathize with the plight of polar bears but…” They’d be taken out and composted.

Sure, there’s plenty of talk about green jobs – and a few groups like the Apollo Alliance or environmental justice groups who mean it. But there is a large swath of the enviro movement that is far more passionate about saving trees or recycling plastic bags than they are over the fight many working families have every day just to keep their heads above water.

Put it another way. Suppose Slocum knew that if we stopped using coal, he, his wife, and most of their friends and relatives would be out of work – and that all but a lucky few would end up working at McDonald’s for the rest of their lives. That their kids would face the same “plight.” And that almost every place he loved where he lived – every café, every great little restaurant, every Apple Store, every REI, every boutique shop, every hiking trail – would disappear too.

Take how strongly liberals in New York City react to developers who propose allowing taller buildings in their neighborhood. Now imagine how they would react if getting rid of coal meant razing their neighborhood to the ground.

Folks like Slocum would still be in favor of getting rid of coal (you’d hope). But “Plight” is not the word he’d choose to describe its impact. Saving everything he and his community held dear wouldn’t be a throwaway concern, it would be front and center. And before they let a single coal plant be closed down, there’d better be a damn good plan in place to protect his community from ruin.

The issue here isn’t that Slocum is a bad guy. Clearly he’s not. If you listen to the rest of the interview, you’ll see that he is passionately committed to saving our planet. And I’m sure that if you asked him, he’d tell you that stopping climate change isn’t about just saving the environment – that millions of lives are at stake. He can see the millions of lives, he just can’t see the Mineworkers and their families.

You could argue that this problem is nothing new. Since at least the late 19th century Progressive era, the US has had movements dominated by the middle class that have trouble putting themselves in the shoes of working-class families. That may be part of it. But I think what we’re seeing now goes beyond that. It goes back to the rise of the 1% and the impact of its ideological victory.

More enviros are starting to make connections between their work and Occupy Wall Street’s attack on the 1%. To get where they want to go, they need to go after the 1% who run coal and oil and all the rest of it. But they’ll also need to understand the ideological trap the 1% has set for us that I believe leads us to the enviro equivalent of Romney’s “binders full of women” problem – and that points the way to moving beyond it.

Up next week: how we got here.

The Chicago Teachers Strike: Organizing Done Right

The Chicago teachers’ strike was an impressive victory at a time when teachers unions across the country are getting rolled. Professor Steven Ashby explains why it worked:

unionists across the country noted that the foundations for the teachers’ victory were laid over the past two years, as the CTU launched a “contract campaign” to educate, organize and mobilize its members. Every school established an organizing committee. Every member was talked to, their concerns discussed, their activism encouraged. In May the union put 6,000 teachers in the streets of downtown Chicago. In June the union overcame a unique anti-CTU law, Senate Bill 7, and turned out 92 percent of its members to nearly unanimously give the leadership strike authorization.

And during the strike, nearly all of the 26,000 teachers participated in enthusiastic, daily marches; picketed daily at schools; and met regularly to discuss strike issues and actions. They were joined by sizable numbers of supporters who came as a result of two years of the union building strong ties with community and parent organizations, and honing the message that the union fought first and foremost to defend a quality public education for every student.

It can’t be overstressed how critical this organizing was. An awful lot of unions don’t do this kind of organizing before a strike – and it’s not hard to understand why if you’ve ever been involved in it. It is lots and lots and lots of work. Endless meetings. Endless knocking on doors – including in Chicago winters. Endless meetings with community supporters. Not most folks’ idea of fun. But as the Chicago teachers’ experience showed, this kind of hard organizing can really pay off. The politicians who passed Senate Bill 7, which changed strike authorization votes from requiring a majority of members to 75% of members including absentees counting as no votes, thought they had made teachers’ strikes impossible. Because of CTU’s kick ass organizing, they blew right by it.

Another issue that was critical to success, which Ashby doesn’t talk about, is that the teachers’ union embraced what Stephen Lerner calls “connecting collective bargaining to the common good.” Micah Uetricht explains in a great new lefty rag, Jacobin:

The Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), a reform CTU leadership slate, took over the union in 2010, explicitly campaigning on taking a more militant and grassroots stance against neoliberal reform. The city has become ground zero for free market educational experiments—and for pushback from parent and teachers. Conditions were ripe for the rise of leadership that would push the union’s agenda to the left.

True to their campaign promises, CORE’s agenda has focused on much more than teachers’ salaries and benefits. Even now, when the CTU can only legally strike over wages, benefits, and some parts of teacher evaluations, union leadership continues to emphasize their fight is about a holistic vision for education that unequivocally opposes neoliberal reforms.

At the union’s press conference on Sunday night announcing the strike, reporters asked CTU President Karen Lewis what the primary two or three issues that had become sticking points in CPS negotiations were. She replied that all issues, from compensation to smaller class sizes to the increasing reliance upon standardized testing to understaffing of positions dealing with “wraparound services,” like social workers and clinicians, were causing the impasse.

This is huge – and it’s often hard to pull off. Striking is hard, scary, and exhausting, both physically, psychologically, and financially. And these days if you mess up a strike, it can cost you your union – not to mention your job if you were particularly active. So getting people to put their butts on the line for issues where there isn’t a direct payoff can be a good way for a local union president to get voted out of office unless they’ve done lots & lots of organizing of members to make sure enough folks are on board (and unlike politicians, when local union presidents lose their jobs they don’t get cushy lobbyist deals). In the long run, it’s the only way unions are going to survive let alone come back. But it’s a long hard road to take – and unfortunately an awful lot of local union presidents don’t know how to do it.

The last factor that really helped the teachers were the preceding corruptions of Wisconsin protests and Occupy – signs, Ashby argues, that we may be on the cusp of another social movement.

One key ingredient in the making of historical turning points is that people begin to view street protests as normal instead of weird. Instead of viewing a mass march on TV or the occupation of a building as strange and scary, many people watch those same events and think to themselves, “Good for them. That’s what it takes to get anything done in this country. Maybe I’ll join them.”

You could feel that if you picketed or marched with the Chicago teachers — the constant horn honking in solidarity, the waves and smiles of people from building windows or porch stoops, even the nods of approval from police officers.

Is this really a sign of things to come? I sure hope so.

J.P. Morgan: What's Good for GM Is Lousy for GM Workers

From a sobering Harold Meyerson article about the future of labor unions, a startling stat from J.P. Morgan about just how much corporations have been winning by taking it out of workers’ pockets:

Today, wages and benefits make up the lowest share of America’s gross domestic product since World War II. Wages have fallen from 53 percent of GDP in 1970 to 44 percent today. Profits have been growing at wages’ expense. Michael Cembalest, J.P. Morgan’s chief investment officer, has calculated that reductions in wages and benefits were responsible for about 75 percent of the increase in corporate profits between 2000 and 2007.

Why Aren't Chicago Teachers Negotiating for Broader Demands? Because It's Illegal

A useful reminder by Larry Mishel via Dean Baker about why Chicago teachers, who say that that the real issue is their students’ education, aren’t negotiating & striking over them:

I’ve heard many folks complain that Chicago’s teachers are only concerned about their wages and benefits and not over the education received by the children. As my friend Larry Mishel reminds me, there is an important reason that the teachers’ union is only talking about wages and benefits in the context of the strike: it’s the law.

These are mandatory topics for negotiation under U.S. labor law. Issues about how the schools are run fall under management prerogatives. While the union and management are free to discuss these issues, the union cannot legally strike over them. Therefore if the union were to explicitly put forward conditions that directly related to the quality of education as a reason for the strike, the city could pursue legal action against the union and its officers for conducting an illegal strike.

It’s not that Chicago teachers don’t have ideas about what could be done to improve the quality of education – check out this report for more details. But they have to be very careful about how they raise the issue of quality education if they don’t want to break the law. Mess up 20

Power in Coalition: Good Book on Building Union-Community Coalitions

If you’re interested in learning more about the nuts and bolts of what it takes to create a successful union-community coalition, you should definitely check out Power in Coalition. Written by Amanda Tattersall, the book is a detailed series of case studies of successful and unsuccessful union-community coalitions in Sydney Australia, Toronto, and Chicago. Tattersall has lots of real-world, on the ground experience in what it takes to build a union-community coalition, and it really shows in the book. Definitely worth a read.

If you want a sneak peek – or you’re feeling too lazy to read a whole book right now – you might also check out an interesting talk she gave that’s up on YouTube.

Transit Union: Building A Serious Union-Community Coalition

Lots of unions have built union-community coalitions – sometimes as part of organizing campaigns, other times as a temporary alliances to pass or stop particular bills. Most of these union-community coalitions haven’t lasted long as genuine coalitions. It’s not too hard to understand why: it’s pretty hard for an organization where its leaders are elected by the members & they have a real budget to consistently spend a serious amount of resources on other folks’ needs.

But in the last year, there’ve been signs that this may be changing. Caring Across Generations is bringing together home care workers and the people they care for, tying together the issues of healthcare reform, homecare workers’ rights, and immigration. And according to In These Times, the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) is also stepping up to the plate.

A year and a half ago, ATU began shifting resources into organizing coalitions with transit riders to support public transit. With the policy resource center Good Jobs First, ATU has held two rider organizing “boot camps” for activists and union leaders from 95 cities. Last month, those efforts entered a new phase with the launch of Americans for Transit, a new national organization backed by ATU and [Good Jobs First]. [ATU Pres. Larry] Hanley chairs Americans for Transit’s Board; GJF Executive Director Greg LeRoy is its secretary-treasurer. They tapped Andrew Austin, the former field director of Washington State’s Transportation Choices Coalition, as the organization’s founding executive director.

You might not find this that surprising. Considering the nonstop onslaught against unions with members who work for the public, its hard to imagine how they would survive without public support.

“No matter how much money we put into electoral politics,” said Hanley, “if we can’t change the attitudes of people…we’ll lose. It’s just a matter of when and how hard.”

What’s unique about this to approach is that ATU is making it a priority.

ATU’s new focus comes with a cost: a shift of resources away from organizing more drivers—public sector or private—into the union. While ATU has continued to do some new worker organizing, Hanley says, “I could go out and organize 100,000 people and spend a fortune trying to get them contracts, but what am I doing to change the overall picture by doing that? Not enough…we’re on a trajectory that has to be turned around too quickly.”

That’s not something you hear out of a union president very often.

Already, they’ve had some small victories.

Austin highlights his group’s success in getting a King County, WA Republican councilmember to back a tax increase in order to stave off a 20% service cut. He says aggressive turnout efforts, including leafleting on buses, paid off when riders formed a line “almost a mile out the door” to attend the first hearing on the issue. “The story in all the major media switched from about King County Council wants to raise your $20 car tabs to pissed-off bus riders angry about losing service…the story never went back.

It’ll be interesting to see if they can sustain this focus – and ensure that bus and other mass transit riders’ needs are taken as seriously as union member’ needs. It’s a hard balance to pull off, especially for an organization where if members don’t feel like their needs are being taken seriously, they can boot out their local president (I sometimes wonder what some of my progressive brethren who complain bitterly about union failings here would do if they faced the same pressure from the folks who write their checks). Here’s hoping for success on their new journey.

Lerner, Piven on where Occupy Wall Street Might Go Next

Interesting conversation on Democracy Now with Frances Fox Piven and Stephen Lerner on where Occupy Wall Street might go next. Lerner has a recent Nation article making some of the same points:

What combination of forces has the potential to drive Wall Street and big banks to negotiate with homeowners, students and workers? Can we find the places, moments and issues where the horizontal world of Occupy meets the vertical, more established world of community-based groups and unions?

We get a taste of what this might look like in the work that is already happening in Occupy Our Homes, which works with community groups across the country to nonviolently resist foreclosures. Many of the same groups are also working to win $300 billion from the banks by reducing mortgage principals to fair market value. In the weeks ahead there will be a growing call to divest taxpayer money from big banks, a dramatic increase in home occupations, the beginnings of a real investigation of bank wrongdoing—the combination of which could force real negotiations between homeowners and the banks.

There is growing interest in Occupy and student groups in a student debt strike. The banks can’t foreclose on a brain or a degree. If a critical mass of student debtors—a million or more—pledged to refuse to pay, it would create a collection crisis that could force negotiations about reducing student debt.

Starting with GE on April 25 in Detroit and moving on to Wells Fargo, Bank of America and dozens of other corporations in May and June, tens of thousands of people from Occupy, community organizations, unions and environmental groups will show up at the annual shareholder meetings of major corporations. Some people will be on the inside with proxies, and others will be massed in the streets, all delivering the message that it is no longer acceptable for giant, unaccountable corporations to decide the political and economic fate of the country.

Looks like it could be an interesting spring and summer!