renewing labor : a report from the field

Renewing Labor

WorkingUSA—Fall 2001 131

WorkingUSA, vol. 5, no. 2, Fall 2001, pp. 131–154.© 2001 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.ISSN 1089–7011 / 2001 $9.50 + 0.00.

Renewing LaborA Report from the Field

Mike Miller and Michael Eisenscher

This paper describes ORGANIZE Training Center’sapproach to transforming union locals. The Project forLabor Renewal worked intensely with two SanFrancisco Bay Area union locals. The article describesand analyzes the organization’s development process,successes, difficulties, and lessons from thisexperience, arguing for an extension of currentunderstanding of organizing to include a number ofcommunity-building activities.

FROM early 1997 to spring 2000, ORGANIZE! Training Cen-ter (OTC) worked with several local unions in the SanFrancisco Bay Area to assist them in a qualitative process

of change that would move them from a service-advocacy“model” to an internal community-building and organizing ap-proach. The project embodied AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s

MIKE MILLER has forty years of experience working with community, religious, and labor organi-zations, including five years on the staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In1972, he became founding executive director of ORGANIZE! Training Center (OTC). He has writ-ten and taught widely about his organizing experience and ideas. MICHAEL EISENSCHER isdirector of organizational development for the University of California Council of the American Fed-eration of Teachers. He is a thirty-year labor movement veteran, having also worked for the UnitedElectrical Workers (UE) and Communications Workers (CWA), and as a consultant and workshopleader for a many other unions.

Miller and Eisenscher

132 WorkingUSA—Fall 2001

call for an AFL-CIO that spoke “for working people every dayat every level of our economy . . . to transform the role of theunion from an organization that focuses on a member’s contractto one that gives workers a meaningful say in all the decisionsthat affect our working lives.”1

Key officials of Bay Area central labor and building tradescouncils, and regional officials of unions, endorsed OTC’s Projectfor Labor Renewal (PLR). When we visited a local union leader,there was little question about our legitimacy. After carefullylistening to principal officers describing the circumstances, hopes,frustrations, and joys of their work, we sought to connect theproject with their values and interests. If convinced, they wereinvited to attend a day-long workshop.

We imagined a renewed local as having at least the followingexternal features in addition to a qualitative change in the levelof member participation:

• At the worksite, affected workers would take direct groupaction to resolve issues before they went into the formal griev-ance procedure.

• There would be an ongoing contest for power at “the pointof production” over the scope of management prerogatives.

• Workers would seek increased control over how they do theirwork, as well as on issues having to do with the quality, ef-fectiveness, efficiency, and appropriateness of their productor service.

• In contract negotiations, unions would challenge and seek toencroach upon management prerogatives in all areas, includ-ing planning, research, investment, and environmental con-siderations.

• In the community, the local union would be a vehiclethrough which its members gained and exercised an orga-

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nized voice on all the issues facing them, their families,and their neighbors.

Mobilizing and Organizing

Organizing is composed of two elements: mobilizing for actionon issues and community building. Both members and unorga-nized potential members are mobilized to engage in a pre-arranged activity in which they have some degree of “input”(surveys, focus groups, hearings, card signings, petitions, etc.).Most organizers are familiar with the dimension of organizingin which leaders, activists, and staff “turn out the troops,” aneffort that is maximized by involving the widest number of mem-bers possible, including an ongoing direct and active role in ne-gotiating, organizing, and legislative and electoral activity.

Less familiar is the community-building dimension of orga-nizing, including an ongoing conversation among large num-bers of workers, and between workers, their leaders, and theirstaffs to develop the union’s program (discussion, deliberation,internal give-and-take, and compromise, out of which near orfull consensus is reached). Such conversation is increasingly dif-ficult to create and sustain because of the eclipse of working-class solidarity and of neighborhoods where people lived neartheir work, attended the same churches or synagogues, drankin the same bars, and were often members of the same clubs.The conversation’s additional elements are: interpretation (doneimmediately after activities to answer the question asked by skep-tics and often by participants, “What did you/we accomplish?”);reflection (connecting deeply held beliefs and values with im-mediate action) for building a culture of solidarity (includingthe use of the arts); celebration (recognizing the contributionsof all participants); social activities that include members andtheir families; mutual aid (buying clubs, credit unions, sup-



port groups, coops); and education (of a particular type to bediscussed later).

A Conversation About Power

We began our workshops with the idea that a conversation aboutpower had to take place between leaders and members. As thefollowing role-play illustrates, we had specific ideas about howsuch a conversation would take place.

Leader: A group of the local’s leaders have been taking stock ofwhere we are in relation to our employers, politicians, and thecommunity. We believe we can’t meet the challenges we face byrelying on past practices. I’d like to get some of your thoughtsabout this and invite you to be part of this internal discussion.Can I ask a few questions about what’s going on with you atwork and what kinds of pressures you and your family, friends,and neighbors might be experiencing in your communities?

(In the role-play, the leader had to get past resistance: “I’mbusy,” “I don’t go to meetings,” etc.)

Leader: Let’s start by looking at the pressures you’re facing atwork.

Member: Are you kidding? Doesn’t the leadership know whatthe hell’s going on here?

Leader: Yeah, of course, we’ve got an idea. But I’d like to hear itfrom you, how you see it.

(The members’ response would vary depending on the local,the nature of the work, whether it is a public- or private-sectorunion, specifics of recent contract negotiations, etc.)

Leader: And these things are pretty important to you?

Member: You bet! What would they mean to you?

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Leader: Yeah, they’d be important to me. But as I said before, Iwant to know what’s important to you.

(We then asked a similar question about the member’s com-munity and issues there.)

Member: Why the hell are you asking me about these things?What’s the union got to do with them?

Leader: There are two reasons: It’s a way to get to know you bet-ter. There was a time when union members knew each otherbetter and helped each other more. There’s another reason. If itmade sense to members like you, we could look at communitieswhere large numbers of our members live and see if they wantedto act together to tackle problems with support from their unionsisters and brothers and the resources that we could bring to bear.

(Different responses would be given, depending on the lifecircumstances of typical members of that union. A building tradeslocal with highly skilled and highly paid, mostly white, malemembers would be different from a predominantly African-American service-sector local whose members’ pay puts themin the category of “working poor.”)

Leader: If I hear similar concerns from other members I’m talk-ing with, would you be willing to come to a meeting and dis-cuss what we can do together about these things?

Member: I knew this was coming. I don’t have time for meetings.I pay my dues and expect you full-timers and the activists toprotect my interests. If you need me for a contract vote, a picketline, or to get out the vote on Election Day, I’ll give you that. ButI don’t want to waste time going to a meeting. They never ac-complish anything anyway.

Leader: What I told you at the beginning of this conversation wasthat the leaders and activists that I mentioned before started talkingabout how we’re doing as a union. We’ve heard the same things



you’ve been telling me from other members. We don’t think we cantake care of your interests in the old way anymore. The problemswe face are more difficult. We need more power to deal with them.

Member: Why is that?

(We then illustrated how a conversation about “people power”and its importance could take place. Despite this, the memberwould still refuse to come to the meeting.)

Leader: Wait a second. Just a few minutes ago, you gave me thislist of things you said you care a lot about—things at work andthings in your community. And now you’re telling me that youwon’t give a couple of hours on one evening or weekend to seewhat can be done about these things?

This is the crucial point in the conversation, when the leaderhas to challenge the member. In effect, the leader is calling themember a hypocrite—“You said these things are important, butyou won’t give a couple of hours to look at what can be doneabout them.” The member is used to telling leaders what he orshe wants and then sending the leaders off, expecting them to“deliver.” When the leaders fail to deliver, members get to com-plain about their competence or integrity or both. Leaders get tocomplain about members’ apathy, indifference, or ignorance. Thisritual of mutual complaining characterized every local we met.Here, the leader has to convince the member that this is some-thing we have to look at together. “I can’t do it for you; we haveto do it together.” The reason is that power is the ability of peopleto act effectively in the world. “People power” is more thanmembers showing up once in a while for work or politically re-lated issues. Members (and leaders) have often come to think ofwhat goes on “at the table” as determined by reason and skill.We don’t dispute their importance, but we told them that “90percent of the outcome at the table is determined by the power

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relationship between the members and the employer (or politi-cian); 10 percent is negotiating smarts and skills.”

The Importance of Renewal

Two infrequently discussed but important reasons for organiza-tional renewal should be noted. A full organizing approach de-velops the skills and self-confidence of many workers whoassume leadership responsibilities in the union. It creates andstrengthens relationships that cut across lines of racial, ethnic,and gender division. It provides a democratic forum for discus-sion and debate in which workers themselves create the policiesfor which they want to struggle. It offers membership in an or-ganization that is an extension of the individual’s most deeplyheld values—one where the member becomes a conscious par-ticipant in making social change. In addition, the process em-powers union members. By their engagement in the civic culture,democracy in society is enriched.

We see the limits of mobilizing in the history of social democraticparties in Europe: They run for office on programs that are quicklyabandoned when they govern. Two important reasons for this are:First, capital threatens to “strike,” that is, move someplace else if itis hampered in what it thinks are its prerogatives. Second, govern-ment is seen as “the problem” because it can’t deliver on what waspromised by politicians when they were mobilizing electoral sup-port. On a large scale, this is the same problem faced by a unionleader who gets elected on a reform program and then is asked,“What’s the union going to do about ‘x’?”

In a workshop exercise on transformation, we helped leadersto clarify their own thinking about obstacles to greater memberinvolvement and to better understand the kind of organizationneeded if deeper member participation was to take place. Firstwe should note an important challenge we put before leaders.



Just as we often heard, “What’s the union going to do about__?” from rank-and-filers, so we often heard from leaders, “Themembers need to be educated.” It is hard to argue with the ideaof “education,” but we did.

The idea that members need to be educated is unionleadership’s version of “blaming the victim.” Local leaders weretypically reluctant to look at themselves, their practices, theirways of understanding the world and their roles within it. Onthe other hand, it was easy for them to see the problem as themembership’s. “The members just don’t understand.” Moreeducation, they reasoned, would help members understand—to see the world as the leaders see it.

What is education? And, in the context of democracy and build-ing powerful “people’s organizations,” what kind of educationis needed? For us, “education” is teaching that is deeply con-nected with people’s life experiences, particularly those under-mining a person’s values and important interests—using thoseexperiences and their current meaning to challenge how peoplethink. Inherently, the process is one of conversation, of back-and-forth, of careful listening combined with challenging peopleto act and thinking through with them solutions to their problems.Leaders returned again and again to their version of education:we—the knowers—put something into the heads of them—thelearners. This is education as instruction—a pedagogy practicedand learned in most schools. For those who become engaged intheir unions—for whatever reason—such education will be useful,sometimes marginally, sometimes profoundly. But it will notcontribute to moving the vast majority of the uninvolved.

Introducing Transformation

On the left side of an easel pad, we wrote: “family, team, congre-gation, community”; on the right side, “insurance company, law

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firm, social work agency.” (Sometimes we added “an old ethnicneighborhood”)

The first question, starting with the right column, was, “Whatare the characteristics of a good [insurance company, law firm,social work agency]?” We then asked the same question for eachof the categories on the left. Here are some typical responses:

Right side:

• A good insurance company has low-cost policies with goodbenefits, pays off quickly when you have a claim, has agentswho are accessible and helpful, is not bureaucratic with lotsof paperwork.

• A good law firm has lawyers who win in court, explain totheir clients what is going on, advocate effectively for theclient, are not expensive, are accessible when you call.

• A good social work agency provides quality service, caresabout, is sensitive to, and fights for the people it serves, doesnot have a lot of paperwork, is not too expensive (or is free).

Left side:

• A good family has lots of love, members who support andmentor each other, and sometimes challenge each other toshape up; does things together; is always there for you.

• A good team works together, has lots of mutual support andteam spirit; every player knows his/her job and does it well;there are no egos that think they are more important thanthe team. Consequently it wins more often than not.

• A good congregation has people who care about and watchout for one another, who respect privacy but are availableto help. It provides meaning for its members, respects andcherishes the diversity of its members, gets as many people



as possible involved in the life of the body, and involvesitself in its community.

We then asked if the groups on the right side of the boardhave the characteristics of the ones on the left, and the answerwas invariably “no.” Asked if the reverse was true of those in-stitutions on the left side, the answer was “yes.” Good families,teams, and congregations also incorporate the best attributes of goodlaw firms, insurance companies, and social work agencies—theyprovide benefits for members, have leaders who are accessible,advocate effectively in each other’s behalf, watch out for mem-bers’ interests, care about people, don’t have much paperwork.

“Who makes most of the decisions in each?” was another ques-tion. On the right, it is the professionals; on the left, it is the mem-bers—or at least the members who are significantly involved(as in a professional athletic team). We then pushed this point abit, developing the contrast between “consumers” and “co-cre-ators” of an enterprise.

Then the $64,000 question: “If we draw a line across the easelpad connecting the two sets of categories, where is your unionon that spectrum?” Invariably, the union was far to the right.Then we asked, “Where would you like your union to be?”Equally invariably, participants wanted it far on the left—espe-cially when it was clear that the groupings on the left can dothings that are done by those on the right, or can hire profes-sionals to do specific things that are beyond their capacity.

In our approach, leaders had to shift from the roles of lawyer,insurance agent, and social worker to become respected andtrusted members of their families, coaches, captains, cheerlead-ers, and trainers who develop other’s talents. This, we argued,is the way to build a powerful union local. The power is in therelationships of mutual confidence and trust that are created,nurtured, and maintained in what we call a “structure of ac-countability and support.”

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Following are stories from two locals that illustrate the poten-tial in this approach.

San Francisco School Bus Drivers

United Transportation Union (UTU) Local 1741 represents SanFrancisco Unified School District bus drivers and support per-sonnel. The local has about 250 members, and developed out ofa militant struggle in the 1960s and 1970s, from which an excel-lent contract was won for drivers, including a living wage, healthcare benefits, and decent working conditions. While the unionretained its progressive politics, over the years participation haddwindled. A baker’s dozen core of activists carried the local’sday-to-day work.

In its forthcoming round of contract bargaining, the unionsought to achieve pay parity for office and support workers andto restore income for drivers who lost income as a result of ma-jor rescheduling that had taken place two years earlier. Like mostgood unions, in the past Local 1741’s leadership had surveyedtheir members, held a series of meetings on major contract is-sues, and then proposed a package of bargaining demands totheir rank and file, who waited to see what their leaders would“deliver” when the company got serious at the negotiating table.

We introduced an alternative approach that we dubbed“people-first, problem-focused bargaining,” and proposed that,rather than hold the most important issues to the end of the sum-mer, they be put on the table at the beginning. Rather than focuson the details of contract language, our approach zeroed in onthe most urgent concerns of the members—what they said theywould be willing to fight for. Rather than a technical exercise,bargaining would be a mass participation process—an exercisein building and demonstrating power. “People-first, problem-focused” meant that through worker testimony, the union would



present the real problems faced by members and their familiesand invite management to join them to develop solutions to theseproblems. High-priority concerns would be first because stall-ing or rejection by management would lead to a summer buildupof what would become a major campaign involving workers,teachers, parents, and community and labor movement allies.

In one-to-one meetings, then in small workshops with cowork-

ers, members shared the impact on their lives of losing as muchas a quarter of their wages (because of rescheduling of runs)and other problems. As might be expected, there were dramaticpersonal effects which, for the most part, workers had never dis-cussed with one another out of shame, guilt, a feeling of inad-equacy, or simply because they felt it was a burden to be borneprivately. Out of these discussions came the realization that“we’re all in the same boat”—that while personal situations wereunique, there was a common pattern and a common source fortheir problems. From this grew righteous anger and a profoundsense of common fate and resolve to collectively remedy the in-justices each had experienced individually as a private personalburden.

In the first negotiation, ninety-seven workers greeted man-agement. When the thirteen-member bargaining team was in-troduced, Jim Harford, the union’s principal officer, insisted thatevery member introduce him/herself. After half a dozen haddone so, Laidlaw Bus Company’s lead negotiator irritably com-mented to an associate, “This is going to take all morning.” Su-

Rather than focus on the details of contractlanguage, our approach zeroed in on themost urgent concerns of the members—whatthey said they would be willing to fight for.

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san Moorehead, the local’s president, responded, “No, this isgoing to take all summer. Get used to it.” That set the tone forwhat unfolded over the next few months.

At the next negotiating session, attended by 110 workers, morethan twenty of the drivers, dispatchers, and yard and office work-ers told stories about what the cuts in pay and other inequitiesmeant to them and their families. The stories were powerful:

Either there would be a serious commitmentto resolve problems or, if not, the unionwould devote the whole summer to mountinga public campaign for a just settlement.

Some had lost their homes and had to move far away from ex-pensive San Francisco, commuting over an hour each way towork. Some had furniture or cars repossessed. Parents were nolonger able to enroll kids in music or other after-school programs,send them to summer camp, or take a family vacation. Otherswere unable to take care of elderly dependent parents.

After the first person testified, there was little reaction amongthe Local 1741 members who were present. By the third testimo-nial, there was a scattering of applause. By the end, speakerswere given a standing ovation. The private troubles of membershad become a public issue, something over which they couldcollectively struggle with their employer.

The strategy also called for clear responses from management:Either there would be a serious commitment to resolve prob-lems or, if not, the union would devote the whole summer tomounting a public campaign for a just settlement. This approachrequired the union negotiators to polarize the positions on issues,forcing either a “yes” (which would be a victory) or a “no” (whichwould mean a fight) from management. Negotiators would turn



any other response (what we called “mush”) into a “no.”“Draw-the-line” bargaining offers employers a clear opportu-

nity to indicate that they want to work with their workers or, onthe other hand, to demonstrate they are unwilling to work withthem. When an employer, by a “no,” indicates the latter, work-ers become angry—especially if they witness what happens atthe negotiating table, where management often exhibits arro-gance in addition to indifference. That anger can be turned intoenergy to mount a protracted campaign to bring the employerback to the table on different terms—for example, “good faithbargaining.” Drawing the line at a “no” clarifies (or polarizes)the situation. It also personalizes it, substituting actual mem-bers of management for the abstract Laidlaw Corporation. Po-larization and personalization are important ingredients inconflict tactics. In their absence, it is very difficult to generatethe energy necessary for a mass struggle.

For several reasons, the negotiating committee consistentlyfailed to engage in “draw-the-line” bargaining. Management anda federal mediator took advantage of this reluctance to shift thebargaining to a more traditional approach. With summer draw-ing to a close, no settlement had been reached, forcing membersto confront the challenge of whether to strike on the first day ofschool. In a series of conversations, in which we mostly askedquestions, members concluded that a strike could boomerangagainst them, as angry parents had to find alternative ways toget their children to school. Instead, members agreed to an inten-sive campaign to reach out to teachers, parents, and neighbors tobuild community support for their demands for justice. After a shortdrive, and with a thousand postcards indicating support in hand, alarge delegation of workers appeared before the school board, de-nounced management’s intransigence, and repeated the storiesof family pain they had told Laidlaw’s negotiators.

Rallies and informational picketing were launched. Workers

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reached out to religious and other community leaders who at-tended support rallies and expressed solidarity. The contractstruggle took place in the context of a bitterly fought local elec-tion between Labor Council–endorsed incumbent Mayor WillieBrown and Tom Ammiano, gay community leader, progressivepopulist, and president of the city/county board of supervisors.Among the union’s ranks, there was substantial support for both.Instead of endorsing one or the other, the union asked each tosupport its struggle.

In a “final offer,” the company sought to divide the middle-seniority workers from others by offering some groups somethingwhile giving nothing on the costly issue of lost hours. The union’snegotiating committee refused to recommend the contract to awell-attended membership meeting that shortly followed nego-tiations. But the union’s leaders feared that the divide-and-con-quer tactic would work. It did not. The sharing of stories that hadbegun the negotiating process, and active—even if limited—in-volvement of members throughout the summer created strongrelationships and deep bonds of solidarity between workers thatthe company could not break. Workers with eight-hour guaran-teed routes spoke up for their fellow members with lower senior-ity. Drivers also refused to abandon the relatively smaller numberof dispatchers and office and yard workers. By a vote of 147-10,the membership rejected the contract, began informational pick-eting of the bus yard, and authorized a one-day work stoppageshortly before the local mayoral election.

Faced with the prospect of a school bus driver strike on theeve of a hotly contested election, both candidates sought to dem-onstrate they were a true “friend of labor.” Ammiano attended aunion rally to express solidarity. Brown called both parties tohis office to mediate the dispute. He was in a position to putsubstantial pressure on management to settle the dispute be-cause he had the support of most of the business community



and organized labor, and had considerable influence over theschool board.

In “the yard,” incredible energy was created out of the emerg-ing solidarity among workers who clearly understood thatLaidlaw could either guarantee more hours or make a seriouscommitment to create more work—by securing more charterbusiness, for example. A settlement was reached shortly afterBrown won the mayoral election.

The contract dramatically exceeded the union leadership’sexpectations at the start of negotiations. Members were deeplyinvolved in the entire process. Even at its nadir, rank-and-filemember participation in negotiations never declined to less thana dozen, with the vast majority involved in some part of thestruggle. The resulting contract restored some hours to workersand made significant gains in key problems identified by work-ers at the start of negotiations.

In July 1999, Local 1741 Chairman Jim Harford wrote,

Had you asked me three or four months ago if we would have morethan 80 percent of our summer driver membership attending our firsttwo negotiating sessions with our employer, Laidlaw Inc., I wouldhave thought you were wrong if not a little crazy. Had you asked methen if our local would be on the road to substantially increasing mem-ber participation and overcoming internal divisions based on race/ethnicity, years of driving (and therefore income), age, and other inter-nal sources of conflict, I would have said, “You are wrong.” But that ishappening as well.

Speaking of the Renewal Project’s impact, Harford said:

Concepts presented by PLR have made it possible for me to betterunderstand why we haven’t been able to get participation on the partof our membership in our union. My juices are stirring because I seehope for rebuilding our local. . . . We’ve got higher morale in our coreleadership. There is more unity among our leaders. Active leaders areexcited.

And of the impact on his local’s members, “They are partici-

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pating in new ways, excited and gaining a new sense of pride intheir union and stepping forward to take greater responsibilityfor the local. New leadership is beginning to emerge from themembership.”2

Despite this testimony, at the end of the contract campaign itwas decided by Local 1741’s leadership not to continue with therenewal process. Jim Harford had moved on to an assignmentwith his national union. Other leaders thanked us for our workwith them, but did not want to continue. Later in this article wewill discuss why.

Office and Professional Employees

Like most unions with dedicated and militant leadership, Officeand Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local3’s paid staff and leadership work sixty and more hours a week“servicing” members and negotiating contracts. With a smallactivist base within the union, nearly all responsibility for day-to-day work fell to office staff and the three elected full-timeofficers. While a greater activist base would have alleviated someof the pressure, such activists merely replicate at the “shop” levelthe “service-advocacy-mobilization” approach we identifiedearlier. We sought to do more.

At some of the larger work sites, there was a steward who handledon-site grievances, in many cases doing little more than calling theunion office to request staff involvement. At most there were nomore than a handful of members on whom the union leadershipcould depend to carry the work of the organization, and sometimesthere was no one. With a hundred separate contracts to negotiate in2000, the three full-time officers and staff were barely able to keepup, unable to plan ahead, and without time to think or act strategi-cally. They were always dealing with crises (we called them“firefighters” putting out fires), and they, in turn, were burning out.



The union’s leadership wanted to change but was caught in awhirlpool, responding to expectations it had created, unable tobreak free. The better a union’s leadership is at providing ser-vice, advocating in behalf of members and mobilizing them toshow support, the harder it is to bring about more fundamentalchange. Members come to expect a high level of service. To beasked to become involved themselves seemed akin to a lawyerasking a client to write the brief. In the face of powerful eco-nomic and political adversaries, members remained mired in aculture of dependency and feelings of personal impotence.

The local’s top officials wanted to develop leadership groupsat large workplaces. We trained existing local leaders to reachout to workplaces, identify potential site leaders, and engage inone-to-one meetings with them to draw out their concerns andengage them in the life of the union. At one of these larger sites,a single union contact became the organizer of a group of nearlya dozen workers who volunteered to attend a PLR workshop.When they found out there was a real opportunity to learn them-selves how to become “the union” at their workplace, they re-quested a second workshop, giving up precious weekend timeto attend. By the end of an intensive year’s work, Local 3 hadactive committees at several of its larger work sites and was de-veloping internal volunteer-led organizing committees at sitesit wanted to organize.

One of the full-time staff successfully organized a women’s crisisand intervention agency without issuing a single flyer or mailing asingle letter. She used techniques for effective one-to-one contactshe learned in PLR to build a workplace committee that organizedthe other workers, entirely using one-to-one conversations.

Of her experience with PLR, Local 3’s secretary-treasurer andbusiness manager (and a national leader in the AFL-CIO gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender caucus Pride At Work) NancyWohlforth said,

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I have had the opportunity to attend many trainings and seminarsaimed at changing our unions. To date, the PLR’s approach is the onlyone that provides a concrete way to achieve this goal. Already in Local3, we have seen new members become involved, new people gettingexcited about the Union, and with the PLR’s assistance, we are begin-ning to chart a new course for our union. . . . I really believe in theProject for Labor Renewal, not only for the labor movement as a wholebut, more selfishly, because of how it has revitalized me personally.Instead of lamenting in the dark, I can finally see a real way our Unioncan change.3

PLR’s Demise and Lessons Learned

After an intensive year of work with each of these unions, PLR ranout of funds. While the locals paid a substantial fee for our services,it wasn’t sufficient to fully cover staff costs. What did we learn?

At the outset we should say that time is an incredibly scarcecommodity among the people with whom we worked. Thesewere honest, dedicated, smart labor union leaders spending asmuch as sixty to eighty hours a week, week in and week out, ontheir unions. To make the transition we were talking about—which in the long run would have spread the work to othersand created more time for those now doing almost everything—would have meant either more time for at least a year or drop-ping activities to which leaders were then committed. Leaderswere not prepared to do the latter.

We had lots of problems trying to “fit” into the incredibly pres-sured existence of these labor leaders. They go from primariesto elections to contract negotiations to arbitrations to internalunion elections. Daily grievances and complaints follow themwherever they go. Someone else is almost always dictating thedirection and creating deadlines—they are reacting rather thanproactive. The challenge we confronted was to create the orga-nizational space for a new process to emerge while at the sametime the organization took care of its normal business.

Unions are inherently political organizations in which officers



must face reelection. There are often multiple and competingconstituencies and interests. PLR was faced with this circum-stance in a number of locals. Several didn’t participate, despiteinitial enthusiasm from their principal officers, because rivals orpotential rivals, or even allies who were skeptical, didn’t wantto. Some larger unions felt they could achieve renewal withoutoutside help—relying on renewal efforts sponsored by their in-

Perhaps the biggest problem was that wewere talking about something that radicallychallenged existing organizational culture.

ternational unions, which see “external organizing” primarilyas a process to recruit new members and “internal organizing”as an extension of service and advocacy from paid staff and lead-ers to volunteer members.

Local 1741 was especially disappointing. We thought our ap-proach would have helped them wage the campaign they haveto mount to survive the forthcoming end of court-ordered bus-ing and to revitalize their union. Our most important supporteramong the top officers left. Freed from the pressure of getting acontract, those within the local who had reservations about whatwe were doing spoke more forcefully about ending the relation-ship. Some said, “We’ve learned from ORGANIZE! TrainingCenter, now it’s time to implement these ideas ourselves.” Somemembers and much of the leadership were exhausted by thestress of the lengthy contract campaign they had waged. Theprotracted contract fight had reduced the local’s financial re-serves, making the financial consideration persuasive as well.

Perhaps the biggest problem was that we were talking aboutsomething that radically challenged existing organizational cul-ture. Not only did we challenge the so-called “service model,”

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something relatively common these days, but we added newelements to the current “organizing model.” That meant thateven in progressive unions we were “pushing the envelope.”Only a very secure local risk-taker could afford to get on boardwith what we were talking about.

Had we done everything exactly right and had no time pres-sures (because of external funding), we might have been able toovercome these obstacles. But we made mistakes and were un-der the gun to “produce” something within the two-year initialfoundation-funding period. What were our mistakes?

Our Mistakes

Briefly, the following were mistakes we made along the way:

• We bit off more than we could chew. Our original idea wasthat we could do this work in as many as twelve to fifteenlocals. We couldn’t have. Six or eight would have been plenty.

• We were too anxious to get things going in locals so that wecould point to something. As a result, we failed to build agroup of local principal officers who had pledged to oneanother that they were going to try to make this work intheir own locals.

• Another difficulty was to get leaders to listen to other keypeople in their locals before trying to “sell” the project. Theytypically wanted to defend, explain, justify, persuade, or oth-erwise do things that were premature in the process ratherthan developing relationships rooted in shared values (de-mocracy and justice being the keys) and self-interest (work-place and community pressures faced by members, families,friends, and neighbors), then agreeing that “We’re in thismess together and we’ve got to get together to figure outhow we’re going to get out of it.”



• Too often key officers saw themselves as the people whohad to have solutions to every problem rather than thosewho could lead a collaborative process that would find so-lutions. Some wanted to control almost everything, downto the smallest details.

• We anticipated fear among local leaders that “the process”would encourage or strengthen an oppositional force whoseleaders would challenge the very officers who initiated therenewal process. We made the case, “If there’s opposition inyour local, it will surface and grow sooner or later if you con-tinue doing what you are now doing. If you are worried aboutbeing run over, get out front and lead the parade for a change.”

• The quality of our one-to-one visits ranged widely. Weworked a lot on this and steadily improved over the courseof our work together, but in some of our early visits withprincipal officers we learned little about their deepest hopes,vision, frustrations, and concerns—something essential toour ongoing work with them. To have a ghost of a chancewith a union leader, we had to speak to his or her deepestconcerns, which means getting at things unlikely to be sharedother than as a result of penetrating one-to-one conversa-tions. Such talks require a high degree of trust and confi-dence, something we weren’t able to achieve in all ourrelationships with union leaders.

• There were many breakdowns in the early commitment byprincipal officers to personally set up meetings for us withkey leaders of their local whose agreement was needed toproceed. Rather than insisting on beginning right, we ac-cepted starting on the wrong foot and tried to correct as wewent along. We should have begun over again.

• We failed to spend sufficient time with principal officers to con-vince them to do what we were asking, and make clear why.

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• We presented the project as a “step-by-step” process—aftertaking any given step, the local could decide not to continue.A number of locals went through all of the steps up to theone at which they had to commit resources and make a long-term commitment to participate. We should have had ear-lier benchmarks of serious commitment.

• We made it too easy for locals to bail out. The exploratoryphase (prior to the decision to commit a year with us) was“all free,” so the only “cost” was an investment of some timeand some credibility. Were we to do this again, we wouldinsist that locals pay some modest but significant amountfor participation in the preliminary workshops as they ex-plored whether to commit to a long-term relationship

The changes we are talking about are most likely to come withmembers for whom their union becomes a community—a sourceof deep meaning and a cause for which they will make sacri-fices. Short of that, we do not think they will build the powerthat labor needs to realize its deepest values, create a better soci-ety, and defend the interests of working people. These require afully revitalized and independent labor movement, one capableof involving millions of people in organizing, collective bargain-ing, lobbying, voting, demonstrating, boycotting, and otherwiseexpressing itself, and influencing the culture of families in waysthat produce future generations of union-oriented workers. Sucha labor movement is essential to expanding the democratic spacein our society as a whole.

The Future?

We hope islands of qualitative change that now exist in orga-nized labor will have a significant enough impact to make oth-ers who are now pushing current approaches to their limits to



reflect and evaluate whether what they are doing is enough andwhat else might be possible to make a significant difference. Weoffer our experience as one example of what can be done, whatwasn’t done, and why. We encourage those who are now goingbeyond a mobilizing approach to meet, share their experiences,and learn from one another. We encourage successful renewalefforts to invite interested unions to place organizers from out-side their union locals within their organizing efforts for six-month to one-year internships so they can absorb what it takesto create a transformational approach to union renewal. We areinsistent that this work cannot be learned in a weekend (or, forthat matter, week-long) workshop or conference. Nor can it betaught in articles or manuals. We do not believe that “models”can be created or “replication” can be accomplished without thisintense exposure by experienced organizers, who can glean guid-ing principles and lessons to apply to the unique circumstancesfacing their own union locals. We invite others to communicatewith us so that this kind of exchange might begin. We make noclaim to having “the” solution to all that ails organized labor.But our experience tells us that PLR pointed in the right direc-tion. We hope others will note this path, take it, and build uponit.

Notes

1. Letter from President John Sweeney to AFL-CIO affiliates, January 15, 1997.2. Letter from Jim Harford, president, ATU Local 1741, to Mike Miller, July 8,

1999.3. Letter from Nancy Wohlforth, secretary-treasurer and business manager, OPEIU

Local 3, to Mike Miller, July 12, 1999.

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renewing labor : a report from the field

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